The missiles arrived

The whole cockpit went blinding white.

He was aware, just for a moment, of cold spacearound him, with things in it

A bookcase. A chair. A bed.

He was sitting in front of the computer. The screenwas blank. He was holding the joystick so hard that hehad to concentrate to let go of it.

The clock by his bed said 6:3=, because it wasbroken. But it meant he'd have to get up in anotherhour or so.

He sat with his quilt around him watching the televisionuntil the alarm went off.

There were some more pictures of missiles and bulletsstreaking over a city. They looked pretty much thesame as the ones he'd seen last night, but were probablyback by popular demand.

He felt sick.

Yo-less could help, Johnny decided.

He normally hung out with Wobbler and Bigmac onthe bit of wall behind thi school library. They weren'texactly a gang. If you take a big bag of crisps and shakethem up, all the little bits end up in one corner.

Yo-less was called Yo-less because he never said 'Yo'.He'd given up objecting to the name by now. At leastit was better than Nearly Crucial, which was the lastnickname, and MC Spanner, which was the one beforethat. Johnny was the official nickname generator.

Yo-less said he'd never said 'crucial', either. Hepointed out that Johnny was white and never said,'YerWhat? YerWhat? YerWhat?' or 'Ars-nal! Ars-nal!' and anyway, you shouldn't makejokes about racialstereotyping.

Johnny didn't go into too much detail. He just talkedabout the dream, and not about the messages on thescreen. Yo-less listened carefully. Yo-less listened toeverything carefully. It woried teachers, the way helistened carefully to everything they said. They alwayssuspected he was trying to catch them out.

He said, 'What you've got here is a projection ofa psychological conflict. That's all. Want a cheese