'There's no aliens, right?'

'Yes!'

'Probably something built into the game. You can dothat, you know. A kind of time bomb thing. Maybe it'sprogrammed to make all the aliens vanish on a certaindate.'

'What for?'

'Make things more interesting, I expect. ProbablyGobi Software will be putting adverts in the computerpapers about it. You all right? Your voice sounds a bitsqueaky.'

'No problem.'

'You coming down to the mall tomorrow?'

'Yeah.'

'See you, then. Chow.'

Johnny stared at the dead phone. Of course, therewere things like that on computers. There'd been some-thing in the papers about it. A Friday the 13th virus,or something. Something in the program kept an eyeon the date, and when it was Friday the 13th it was sup-posed to do something nasty to computers all over thecountry.

There had been stories about Evil Computer HackersMenacing Society, and Wobbler had come to school inhome-made dark glasses for a week.

Johnny went back and watched the screen for awhile. Stars occasionally went past.

Wobbler had written an actual computer game likethis once. It was called Journey to Alpha Centauri. It wasa screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, ithappened in real time, which no-one had ever heard ofuntil computers. He'd seen on TV that it took threethousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had writ-ten it so that if anyone kept their computer on for threethousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dotappearing in the middle of the screen, and then amessage saying. 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now gohome.'

Johnny watched the screen for a bit longer. Once ortwice he nudged the joystick, to go on a differentcourse. It didn't make much difference. Space lookedthe same from every direction.

'Hello? Anybody there?' he whispered.

He watched some television before he went to bed.There were some more missiles, and someone going on