3:10 to Ingoldmells, Chapter One

When Mini-Flash Juniper announced that morning she’d decided to spend the day with Pat, it was the first of what turned out to be quite a long line of glitches in Flashsatsumas’s plan.

The said scheme had hinged on Flashsatsumas having Pat to himself. He needed someone who knew about boys’ toys, and it hadn’t even occurred to him that Juniper would defer otherwise than to a fellow representative of the second gender. He’d pictured her and Maureen contentedly smelling at each other, or whatever girls did when they were alone. Instead of this, however, it was Flashsatsumas who found himself lumped with the little sister and the five twinkly red and green lights she always wore on her forehead, as together they broached the camp’s largest store on what was turning out to be the hottest day yet.

“How come I never see you at the theatre?” demanded Maureen as they swept inside through the glass doors. “And that Jenny just the once?”

“Because she clamps me into a special harness to recharge me and we go to bed at half-past six,” Flashsatsumas explained. It was steadily emerging meanwhile that the retail establishment they’d chosen didn’t boast departments as such, for the toys were located in what was better described as a poky little corner. Flashsatsumas had brought his comic, and it didn’t take much cross-referencing between this and the sparse stock for him to be disappointed.

“They don’t have any of the ones in these pictures,” he complained.

Maureen, in her own parlance, looked at him gone out.

“Did you think they would?” she cried. “You’d have to go into town for them proper ones. Might be a place or two there, or anyway you wouldn’t have to settle for this rubbish.”

Flashsatsumas was vexed. Nothing seemed to be going right. If Maureen was correct, then it would have been counterproductive for him to attempt to bring any of these wares to life. As with the confectionery and the comics, anything that was only to be found on the camp would serve the creatures in charge. In desperation he scanned again the small volume of shelves.

“There’s got to be something that came from outside,” muttered Flashsatsumas.

“Like I’d know,” Maureen exclaimed. “Never guessed it was going to be this much fun.”

Flashsatsumas’s eye lighted on an item which somehow seemed to him the most hopeful, at least in a selection as unpromising as this. A cheap plastic robot, affixed to a card, on which was a shoddily-done painting of the product striking what was supposed to be a dramatic attitude, although it looked more like it was falling over backwards. “New changeable robots,” Flashsatsumas read from the packaging. “It transforms, Maureen, just like the ones in my comic.”

“Into a steam train,” she concurred.

Knowing what you called that Earth-vehicle there was a photo of made it easier for Flashsatsumas to convince himself this was starting to go well. “Come on then, ZY-29,” he declared, spying the robot’s designation as he slid it from the rack. “You’ll do for a test-run, at least. But let me know about town too, Maureen, because from the sounds of it I’d better plan a shopping trip.”

“Hark at Moneybags,” commented Maureen, and they set off for the tills.

Mini-Flash Juniper was looking at an object she’d found in the shop where she and Pat were. He’d told her it sold things called jokes and novelties, so she guessed it was one or the other. It consisted of a big elastic loop with frilly lace on, which the illustrations indicated was meant to go around the top of her leg where it would be hidden under her skirts. Attached to it was a tiny holster, containing a tiny replica of a terrestrial firearm.

“Never met a girl who needs one more than you,” grinned Pat beside her.

“Do I?” asked Juniper very seriously.

“Well,” Pat elucidated, “I mean, all the grabby lads. Only thing better’d be a real one.”

Juniper still didn’t understand, but it sounded to her safest she buy the thing all the same. She told Pat so, and they took it to the counter.

“Ah, yeah,” heaved Pat happily, on sight of the candy-sticks and colourful pellets arrayed there in little packs. He began at once to furnish himself with a large supply.

Mini-Flash Juniper remembered why she was here. “Pat, do you always have to eat those things?” she inquired.

“What’s the matter, don’t you like them?” he returned, still busy.

“Not even the smell,” was Juniper’s reply. “Please, Pat. If you’re going to fill up with them tonight at the theatre anyway, can’t you at least leave off while I’m with you?”

Pat looked doubtful, as though he wanted to do it for her sake, but wasn’t sure if he could. Juniper knew she was dealing not with greed but a dangerous addiction.

What she wanted to buy was still in her hand.

“I’ll let you put it on me if you do.”

The words were out before Mini-Flash Juniper realised she’d spoken them, but no sooner had she done so than Pat was grinning as never before.

They seemed suddenly to have taken a step.

Nor was Mini-Flash Juniper at all sure it hadn’t carried them both a little outside the bounds of her mission, but as long as it remained in the same general area, she decided it would suffice. From the look of Pat meanwhile her offer seemed to have been received with considerable interest, on the one proviso it was genuine, yet there was also about him a tendency more towards concluding it wasn’t than it was.

If Juniper’s mind hadn’t already been made up, this last detail would have done the trick.

“I don’t tease, Pat,” she told him in a clear voice. “Despite what the love-testers say.”

Then Mini-Flash Juniper secretly glowed to see Pat make up his mind and replace the tainted sweets, sacrificing them for the prospect of something sweeter.

Flashsatsumas and Maureen were out on the forecourt of the store. He unpackaged ZY-29 and stood him up on the hot paving-stones, then sat cross-legged in his cumbersome containment-suit and indicated she do the same. The baking street sizzled on the backs of their bare legs.

After drawing a deep breath, Flashsatsumas pushed both hands fingers-first at the robot and concentrated. Several seconds elapsed.

“Nothing,” he sighed, once they’d done so.

“Not sure I know this game,” Maureen confessed.

All in a flurry, Flashsatsumas began to rotate the inflatable orange pneumatobladders on his wrists as far as they’d go anticlockwise. “I can afford more,” he assured Maureen.

“You keep saying,” she replied. “That why you’re always kitted out in the latest fashions?”

Flashsatsumas, ignoring her, continued opening his apertures to full.

END OF CHAPTER ONE