TODDLERS! CHAPTER TWO
"This is Mark Spencer on Radio K.K.P., bringing you the latest chart sounds! I'll be right here...so you stay right there....This is the latest single by Captain Winscale...called..."Donald Where's Your Underpants!"
The D.J. of the small radio station nodded at the Engineer through the glass partition of the control room next door. He sat back in the easy chair and removed the headphones. As the record played he gave a sigh and sipped at his luke warm coffee.
Mark Spencer had worked at Radio K.K.P for fifteen years. In that time he'd done the Top Twenty Show, the Gardening Spot, the Breakfast Feast, the Rap Show and...well everything. He'd done every show, at every time of day, on every subject. He could change his voice from loud and chirpy to deep and sincere in a fraction of a second. And he hated it. He hated and loathed his job now, to the point where the only way he could keep it interesting was to do the Mark Spencer Phone-In Show and be incredibly rude to people.
Mark was only thirty two, but looked older. His black hair was untidy and stuck out at irregular angles. His jeans were baggy at the knee because he hadn't changed them for two weeks and his T-shirt had tomato sauce stains down the front from the hot dog he'd eaten two days ago.
He looked at the large clock above the door. It was only three thirty in the morning. The show went out from three until six in the morning and already he was feeling tired and depressed. The only people who phoned him were those who couldn't sleep and for some reason, people who couldn't sleep were very very boring.
The building was virtually deserted just now. There were only five people at Radio K.K.P. at that time of night. Mark worked the D.J. desk. Pete, next door in the control booth, monitored the phone calls and put them through to Mark. In an office downstairs was Sandra, who did the hourly news. And then there was Glenda on the reception desk and Clive, the security guard who sat by the front door all night.
"This is Mark Spencer on K.K.P. Who is on line five?"
"Hello?"
"Hello?" Mark turned from the microphone and breathed a resigned sigh. It was an elderly lady. He could tell, just from the 'hello' that this caller was going to be another bore. "Who am I speaking to?"
"Hello? Is that Mark Spencer?"
"Who did you expect it to be?" he said with an over cheerful laugh. "You rang the Mark Spencer phone in programme."
"Hello. This is Edna. I'd like to talk about the terrible litter problem."
"Fine.....So, go ahead."
"Well I think that young people are being set a bad example by people who throw litter out of cars."
"I see. So...what do you suggest?"
"Well...I don't really know. I just think it's a disgrace..."
Mark Spencer leaned right back in his seat, put his arms in the air and shook them about as if trying to get the circulation going. He took a deep breath and leaned forward in his seat so that he could speak into the microphone using his 'deep and sincere' voice.
"I hear what you're saying Edna? I think that it's a disgrace too. So why are you phoning me to tell me? I don't want to sit here all night listening to someone whining on! Get out there and do something instead of wasting my time."
"Well I don't really..."
"Good for you Edna! Bye now.!"
He flicked the switch on the D.J. desk, cutting her off. He looked though the glass partition at Pete. Pete was sitting back in his chair and laughing loudly and Mark could tell that he was putting the boring callers through on purpose. Mark pulled a face at him and flicked the switch on the D.J. desk.
"And who do we have on line three?"
At the edge of the road, just outside Radio K.K.P.'s car park, two men were getting ready to go home. The two men were sewer workers and had been doing an emergency inspection of the old Victorian sewer line that ran under the High Street, because there'd been an unusual build up of methane gas. The gas which was given off by raw sewage, normally disbursed itself harmlessly throughout the sewer system. But tonight, a special underground sensor had beeped and indicated at headquarters that there was a dangerous situation.
The access cover in the road, was open, but was hidden by a small red and white striped service tent. Their van was parked only two metres away.
Paul, the younger of the two men was the last to clamber out of the hole back to street level. He climbed into the back of the van and stripped off his gas mask and overalls as he talked to his partner.
"I think it's O.K. now Steve. With the vent cover open at junction three, the air should blow through and get rid of the build up."
Steve was sitting in the front seat, holding a cup of tea in one hand and a sandwich in the other. He looked back over his shoulder and nodded.
"Yeah. Fancy calling us out at this stupid time of night? A lot of fuss about nothing if you ask me."
"Let's get the cover down and the tent on the van."
"Give it five minutes. Just let me finish my grub. You want a tea?"
"Go on then." Paul looked at his watch. "Half three! I'm looking forward to getting home."
Flying at five hundred metres above the radio station was a small space craft, using its invisible cloaking device. In the Operations room of the space craft there was a lot of excited activity.
"Check weapons communications!" Officer Vibrak shouted.
"Communications systems checked!" Officer Neel shouted back.
"Transmission controls active?" Officer Vibrak said.
"Transmission controls active!" Officer Karren yelled.
"Ready to deploy weapon systems!" Vibrak said.
"Weapon systems ready for deployment," Engineer Neel shouted.
"Activate dribble mechanisms!"
"Dribble mechanisms activated!" Officer Neel shouted.
"Officer Neel!"
"Sir!"
"Will you stop shouting! I'm not deaf!"
Officer Neel looked at Officer Karren and then back to Vibrak.
"You started it sir."
"Just get on with it. Are the weapons ready for deployment or not?"
"Yes sir!"
"Good."
In the centre of the cargo bay, above the trapdoors, twenty robotic toddlers were ready to go. They were all dressed appropriately for their age and were smiling cutely. Each one had a small parachute which opened automatically when they fell and the harness would unfasten itself when they landed on anything solid.
"Drop weapons!" Vibrak shouted.
"What? Now?"
"Yes! Now!"
The loading bay doors opened underneath the space craft and the twenty toddlers plummeted out of the ship and began to fall to Earth. Their parachutes fluttered open in the night sky and they drifted gently down.
Toddler one and toddler two were the first to reach the flat roof of Radio K.K.P. As soon as they landed their parachute harnesses gave a 'pop' and dropped away, leaving the toddlers free to roam around the roof.
There were ten boys and ten girls and very soon the entire squad was milling about the roof, sucking things, falling down, bumping into things and trying to stick their fingers into things. A smear of chewed biscuit, snot and dribble followed in their wake like slime follows a slug.
They had been dressed in clothes that the aliens thought would cause the least suspicion amongst humans. The boys were dressed in T-shirts and dungarees, or shorts and pullovers and grey socks. The girls were dressed in an assortment of cute party dresses, white ankle socks and shiny red shoes and had their hair in bunches or plaits, and the number of each toddler was embroidered on their chests for easy identification.
The primitive speech synthesiser enabled them to repeat simple words or sentences, such as 'Why' or 'What's that for?' and some just gabbled like babies to confuse any humans they might come across. So as the twenty little robots tottered around the roof, there was a constant babble, like the noise from a busy toddlers' playgroup.
"Why?"
"Gabba gabba babba."
"What's that for? What's that for? What's that for?"
"Why?"
The small group took some time to get going in their destructive quest, because toddler nine had found a puddle to sit in. The others wanted to investigate this further and soon all twenty of them were walking, stamping, or sitting in the puddle. But this interest soon wore off and they started to split up and wander about the roof looking for other things to probe and test.
Toddler fifteen and toddler twelve were the first ones to discover the huge rectangular air vent in the centre of the roof. After a pause to chew it and dribble on it, they found that it was an interesting thing to climb inside. Small heads disappeared into the dark hole, followed by tiny feet, kicking in the air for a while before falling into the roof space beneath. Their little voices echoed eerily in the darkness as they stumbled around in Radio K.K.P's loft space, looking for things to stick their fingers in.
"Why? Why? Why?"
"What's that for? What's that for?"
"Gaga baba."
The others soon followed and tumbled down the air vent, but three of the toddlers didn't make it. Before the air vent had even been discovered, toddlers five, six, and seven, had accidentally walked off the roof, fallen three stories and crashed onto the bonnet of Mark Spencer's car in the car park.
Toddler five was blond haired like the others, but wore distinctive red shorts and a T-shirt that said "Kids are people too". The virtually indestructable toddler, picked himself up, fell off the car, looked around for a moment and then wandered off, looking for things to dribble on. He walked beneath the car park barrier and reached the road.
At that time in the morning the place was deserted. There was a row of large houses across the road from the radio station, but all their lights were off and there was no-one about. Toddler five looked right and left, not because he was looking out for cars, but because he was programmed to move, probe, and test, and he was looking for something to explore. And then he saw something that caught his interest.
He crossed the road, walked straight into a red and white striped tent and fell four metres down an open manhole into the sewers below.
Toddler number six, a cute little girl in a pink party dress, was also undamaged by the fall from the roof, so as soon as she tumbled off the car, she toddled out of the car park. When she reached the road outside Radio K.K.P. she stopped and looked about her, trying to find something interesting to investigate. The red and white tent across the road went unnoticed, but what did catch her attention were some pretty coloured lights, blinking in the distance.
She headed towards them, mumbling to herself.
"What's that for? Why? Why? What's that for?"
The other escaped toddler - toddler number seven - crossed the road without incident. He walked past the service tent, right down a garden path on the other side of the street, down the side of the house and into someone's garden shed, where he spent the next few minutes chewing on a lawn mower.
"What's that for?" he said. "Why?" he mumbled as he gummed the mower. "What's that for?.......Why?"
Inside the van, the two sewer workers were ready to go home.
"You all set then?" Paul asked.
"Yeah. Come on. Let's get off home," Steve said as he screwed the top onto his thermos flask.
Paul jumped from the van and heaved the cast iron cover into place. He stamped down on it firmly while Steve dismantled the service tent and threw it into the back of the van.
They slammed the rear doors and both stood still.
"Did you hear that?" Paul asked.
"What?"
"I don't know. Like a babbling sound?"
"What sound?"
"I thought I heard someone say, 'What's that for?'."
They both listened but there was no sound.
Steve shrugged and walked to the front of the van.
"I didn't hear anything. Come on. Let's go home."
A moment later they drove away, leaving toddler five to explore the sewers.
The rest of the toddler team, meanwhile, had tumbled down the air duct and found themselves in a long aluminium tube that supplied the air conditioning to the Radio K.K.P. building. They crawled along it in single file like a small convoy, leaving dribble and half chewed biscuit in their wake until they came to a wire mesh grill. Seconds later the grill was pushed open and they fell out onto the floor, tumbling on top of each other like apples falling from a broken carrier bag.
"Bababab," toddler eleven said.
"What's that for?" toddler fifteen said as he picked himself up and toddled down a corridor. "What's that for? What's that for? Why?"
The toddlers had found themselves in the deserted upper floors of Radio K.K.P. They split up into small groups and began to stumble, crawl, fumble and toddle down the many corridors and into whatever rooms they found along the way.
Toddlers eleven and eighteen found a storage room containing hundreds of file folders. They clambered onto a desk and began to dribble their way around K.K.P's filing system until toddler eleven stumbled off the edge, upturned a waste bin and began walking around the room with the waste bin on his head.
Out in the corridor, toddler number one tripped on the carpet, tilted forwards and stumbled down the corridor trying to keep his balance. He only went three metres before he crashed into a door and disappeared down a stairwell in several bouncing somersaults.
Toddler two, accompanied by toddlers three, seven and twenty, had found an interesting door which was easy to open. They were now beginning to investigate a large cabinet with flashing lights. This was the computer that serviced the radio station. The many screens attached to it were from the various offices that supplied programming, advertising, and record scheduling. It didn't take long before a sticky little finger found that one of the doors opened. This revealed even more flashing lights and row upon row of circuit boards. Toddler twelve immediately began licking a circuit board and was rewarded by a blue flash of light, a small fizzling explosion and being blasted across the room.
"This is Mark Spencer on Radio......"
The lights in the room suddenly dipped. The screen on Mark Spencer's computer collapsed to a single line across the screen and then bounced back again. He reached for the microphone to talk to Pete in the control room next door.
"Pete? What was that? My screens gone funny."
Pete looked around at his own electronic equipment and shrugged.
"Don't know. Power surge of some sort."
The lights suddenly dipped and came back up again.
"Is it lightning outside?" Mark asked.
"Don't think so," Pete said. "Must be the mains supply."
"Are we still on the air?"
"Yep!"
Mark switched his microphone back on.
"Hi! This is Mark Spencer on Radio K.K.P. Who's calling?"
"Hello Mark. It's about those new supermarket trolleys," an old lady said.
"You're calling me about supermarket trolleys?"
"Yes. I think it's disgusting that....."
The lights dipped again and came back up.
A mile above Radio K.K.P, Supreme Officer Vibrak was in the Operations room frowning at the monitor screens. One wall of the room was taken up by a bank of television screens which were showing what each individual toddler was doing and Vibrak was standing right up to it.
"What's going on here?" he asked Officer Kae as he tapped a screen with a scaly finger. "I don't understand."
"We lost three of them on the initial landing," Officer Kae said. "All the others are in the building, but numbers five, six and seven have sort of.....wandered off."
"Off? Off what?"
"Off the roof, sir."
Officer Vibrak watched television screen number five closely and then shuddered.
"Yuk! What is he doing! That's disgusting!"
Toddler five, the sewer explorer, was having a great time. He couldn't see very well, with it being a pitch black sewer system, but so far he'd waded through some lovely sticky stuff, fallen into some interesting sludgy stuff and was now slobbering on a warm hairy thing which he'd found along the way. The large hairy thing was a rather surprised rat who was desperately struggling to get away. He was covered in soggy biscuit and snot and was now being gummed enthusiastically by a tiny mouth that was dribbling all over him. But, as much as he struggled, the two little hands that were clutching him were remarkably strong and he couldn't escape.
Toddler five was trying to push the warm hairy thing in his mouth when he was distracted by the sound of running water somewhere in the distance. He hugged the rat to his chest and set off towards it. After five minutes of stumbling in the dark and falling down twice in something even sticker than his own hands, he found that he was under a small grill that had light coming through it. Dirty water was cascading through the grill, down onto him as he looked up.
He let the rat go so that he could reach up and push at the grill. As soon as the rat was released it shot down the tunnel and hid in a very dark corner, trembling in fear. It had spent all its life in darkness and sewage. It was an expert on sticky yukky things, but in all his life he had never been picked up, dribbled on, chewed on and smeared with soggy biscuit.
Toddler five pushed at the grill and found that it moved. He made an attempt to crawl up a small slope towards it, but slid back in the goo and slime four times before managing to open the grill with the top of his head and crawl out onto the floor above.
He found himself in an underground car park. The place was badly lit and empty of any cars so he headed for the nearest thing that could be dribbled on. It was a huge industrial dustbin with a small metal ladder welded to the side. After several attempts to climb it he finally succeeded and tumbled head first into the mulch of old food and waste that had been dumped into it from a shoot on the wall.
After rummaging amongst the rubbish and eating enough germs to kill the population of a large city, he noticed the waste shoot. It looked interesting. He crawled over to it, chewed the end of it for a while before clambered inside.
Three minutes later he came out in a nice warm kitchen in the middle of a brightly lit building.
He toddled off looking for things to dribble on.
Back at Radio K.K.P., Mark Spencer and Pete were beginning to realise that there was something very wrong. The computer screens kept collapsing. The lights on all the consoles flickered erratically and when Pete nipped out to the coffee machine he found that it was smoking and had a thin smear of snot and soggy biscuit all over it. It looked as if it had been sabotaged and yet there was no-one to be seen. The building was as deserted and empty as it usually was at this time in the morning.
He looked at the smoking machine, banged his hand flat against it in annoyance and walked back to the control room.
"Stupid coffee machine's broken now," he shouted through the glass to Mark as he sat down. He looked at his hand and pulled a face. "Yeagh! What's that?" He wiped some soggy biscuit onto the edge of the desk and called though on the intercom to Mark. "Mark. I'm going to give the engineer a call," he said. "There's an electrical fault somewhere." The lights flickered again and they looked at each other. "See?" Pete said. "There's something....."
Mark raised his hand to silence Pete as the record came to an end.
"O.K.!" Mark said in his cheerful D.J. voice. "That was Jackie Groove with Take Me Home. So who do we have on line...."
There was an explosion from somewhere in the basement where the central heating boiler was located. Mark and Pete looked at each other and stared around wide eyed.
Mark quickly put another record on, but in his excitement he forgot to turn the microphone off.
"What was that!" Mark said.
"Dunno mate," Pete said. "I'd better have a look."
Pete went out into the corridor. A black cloud of smoke was drifting up from the lower floor. In the distance he thought he heard some one say "Gaga babba."
He rushed back into the control room.
"Fire! Mark! We've got a fire in the basement!"
"Fire?" Mark shouted. "Ring the alarm!"
Pete rushed to the small red box on the wall. He smashed the glass with his elbow and the fire alarm started ringing. The five people in the building all responded swiftly after an initial moment of shock and surprise.
"Is that the fire alarm?" Glenda asked Clive.
Clive, the security guard, looked up from his magazine and then at the red fire bell above his head, which was making so much noise it was deafening.
"I think so," he shouted.
"Aren't we supposed to do something?"
"You can suit yourself," Clive said. "I'm getting out of here!"
He rushed to the front door and ran out into the car park with Glenda close behind. Thirty seconds later they were joined by Sandra, the news reader.
"What's happening?" she said.
"Fire," Glenda said.
"I know that. Where?"
Glenda looked left and right as if she was expecting to see the fire in the car park. When this failed to be the case, she pointed to the building.
"In there, I suppose."
"Where's Mark and Pete?" Clive asked. As security guard, he was worried that he might have to do something heroic, like rushing into a burning building. So far he'd managed to avoid anything more demanding in his job than sitting by the door all night reading a magazine.
He gave a silent sigh of relief when Mark Spencer and Pete charged through the door. They came to a gasping halt next to Glenda and Sandra.
"Everyone here?" Mark said. They looked at each other and quickly verified that no-one was missing.
"Who rang the alarm? Where's the fire?" Clive asked.
"In the basement," Pete said. "There's thick black smoke piling up the stairs. I think the central heating boiler must have caught fire or something. We didn't hang about to check."
"So who called the fire brigade?" Sandra asked." You did call them didn't you?"
Mark looked at Pete. Pete looked at Mark.
"I thought you did," Mark said.
"Me? I thought you did."
Sandra gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes and pulled a mobile phone from her handbag. She quickly dialled nine nine nine and asked for the fire brigade.
Mrs Edna Hepplethwaite couldn't sleep. She had tried all the usual remedies, of hot milk, counting sheep and listening to the incredibly stupid programme on radio K.K.P. She had even phoned Mark Spencer himself, to pass the time, but the horrible man had been very rude to her and that just made her angry.
But she continue to listen to the show anyway and so around four o'clock, she was lying in bed with the radio playing softly on the bedside table. She was just dropping off to sleep when she was woken by Mark Spencer shouting, "What was that! ....Fire!.....Ring the alarm!"
Edna opened her eyes, fully awake now, and looked at the radio. A song was still playing as if nothing had happened, but after a moment there was a strange sound as if Mark Spencer had put the whole microphone in his mouth.
"GNNNNNOOOM! GEEEEERGH!"
There was a strange rumbling noise and then she could have sworn that she heard a little voice saying, "What's that for?".
This was followed by the sound of someone, possibly falling off a chair.
And then it all went dead.
Down in the boiler room of K.K.P. radio station, sixteen toddlers were staggering around in the smoke. They were soon joined by toddler number twelve, who'd been chewing on the microphone and done her first ever radio broadcast, so there was now seventeen of them milling about in the gloom.
A mile above them, Vibrak was smiling broadly.
"Excellent! Good work people! Activate the homing signal Officer Kae. Let's get them back to the pick-up point."
Officer Kae reached out and pressed a button on the control panel. Below her, the toddlers immediately stopped what they were doing and responded to the signal.
Because the toddlers didn't actually breath they were not effected by the black acrid cloud spewing from the remains of the boiler. What they did, instead, was find a small opening that had once been a coal delivery shoot. Toddler eleven pioneered the way and was soon followed by the others. They toddled and staggered and fell down in single file, up the coal shoot, round the back of the Radio K.K.P. building and out through a gap in the security fence before heading for the woods.
Dawn was just breaking as the small troop blundered through the bracken and undergrowth, heading for the pick-up point in the back yard of a deserted factory.
"Gabba babba."
"Why? Why? Why?"
"What does that do? What's that for?"