Music played loudly from the dining-room next door, where the carpets had been rolled back so that people could dance. Most of the people in the front room were sitting on couches or beanbags. Martin Hunter's own paintings, large gaudy canvases which looked like close-ups of minestrone soup seen under the effects of a powerful hallucinatory drug, adorned the walls.

"Just listen. There's this lot of weird aliens called the Sproati and they decide to invade Earth -"

"I think this has been done before," Graham said, taking a drink. Slater looked exasperated.

"You won't let me finish," he said. He wore a pair of grey shoes, baggy white trousers and what appeared to be a red tuxedo. He took a drink and went on, "Okay, so they're invading Earth, but they're doing it as a tax dodge so that -"

"A tax dodge?" Graham said, leaning forward and looking Slater in the eye. Slater giggled.

"Yeah, they have to spend so much of the galactic year out of the Milky Way or the galactic tax federation hammers them for gigacredits, but instead of paying for expensive inter-galactic travel they camp out on some backwater planet still in the galaxy and just hide, see? But: something goes wrong. They're coming in on a starship disguised as a Boeing 747 so that the locals won't suspect until it's too late, but when they land at London Heathrow their baggage gets lost; all their heavy weaponry ends up in Miami and gets mixed up with the luggage of some psychiatrists attending an international symposium on anal-fixation after death, and: Freudians take over the world with the captured high-tech, arms. The Sproati all get interned by the British immigration authorities; thanks to a false reading on a spectograph when they were planning the operation they've all taken too many tannin pills and they're almost black. Usually they're light blue. One -"