Only You Can Save Mankind Read Free Page B

around him watching the television until the alarm went off.
    There were some more pictures of missiles and bullets streaking over a city. They looked pretty much the same as the ones he’d seen last night, but were probably back by popular demand.
    He felt sick.
     
     
    Yo-less could help, Johnny decided.
    He normally hung out with Wobbler and Bigmac on the bit of wall behind the school library. They weren’t exactly a gang. If you take a big bag of potato chips and shake them 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 least it was better than Nearly Massive, which was the last nickname, and O. J. Bottle, which was the one before that. Johnny was the official nickname generator.
    Yo-less said he’d never said “massive,” either. He pointed out that Johnny was white and never said, “YerWhat? YerWhat? YerWhat?” or “God save the Queen” and anyway, you shouldn’t make jokes about racial stereotyping.
    Johnny didn’t go into too much detail. He just talked about the dream, and not about the messages on the screen. Yo-less listened carefully. Yo-less listened to everything carefully. It worried teachers, the way he listened carefully to everything they said. They always suspected he was trying to catch them out.
    He said, “What you’ve got here is a projection of a psychological conflict. That’s all. Want a cheese ring?”
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s just crunchy cheesy-flavored—”
    “I mean the other thing you said.”
    Yo-less passed the bag on to Bigmac.
    “Well…your mum and dad are splitting up, right? Well-known fact.”
    “Could be. It’s a bit of a trying time,” said Johnny.
    “O-kay. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
    “Shouldn’t think so,” said Johnny.
    “And this definitely affects you,” said Yo-less.
    “I suppose so,” said Johnny cautiously. “I know I have to do a lot of my own cooking.”
    “Right. So you project your…um…suppressed emotions onto a computer game. Happens all the time,” said Yo-less, whose mother was a nurse, and who wanted to be a doctor if he grew up. “You can’t solve the real problems, so you turn them into problems you can solve. Like…if this was thirty years ago, you’d probably dream about fighting dragons or something. It’s a projected fantasy.”
    “Saving hundreds of intelligent newts doesn’t sound very easy to solve,” said Johnny.
    “Dunno,” said Bigmac happily. “Ratatatat-blam! No more problem.” Bigmac wore large boots and camouflage trousers all the time. You could spot him a mile off by his camouflage trousers.
    “The thing is,” said Yo-less, “it’s not real. Real’s real. But stuff on a screen isn’t.”
    “I’ve cracked Stellar Smashers,” said Wobbler. “You can have that if you want. Everyone says it’s a lot better.”
    “No-oo,” said Johnny. “I think I’ll stick with this one for a while. See if I can get to level twenty-one.”
    “If you get to level twenty-one and blow up the whole fleet, you get a special number on the screen, and if you write off to Gobi Software, you get a five-pound token,” said Wobbler. “It was in Computer Weekly.”
    Johnny thought about the Captain.
    “A whole five pounds?” he said. “Gosh.”
    It was Gym in the afternoon. Bigmac was the only one who played. He’d never been keen until they’d introduced hockey. You got a club to hit people, he said.
    Yo-less didn’t do sports because of intellectual incompatibility. Wobbler didn’t do sports because the sports coach had asked him not to. Johnny didn’t do sports because he had a permanent note, and no one cared much anyway, so he went home early and spent the afternoon reading the manual.
    He didn’t touch the computer before tea.
    There was an extended news, which meant that Cobbers was postponed. There were the same pictures of missiles streaking across a city that he’d