‘I thought they were grobes,’ Charlie said. ‘Those oozy-woozy grobes you were telling the President about.’
‘Oh, no, I just made those up to scare the White House,’ Mr Wonka answered. ‘But there is nothing made up about Vermicious Knids, believe you me. They live, as everybody knows, on the planet Vermes, which is eighteen thousand four hundred and twenty-seven million miles away and they are very, very clever brutes indeed. The Vermicious Knid can turn itself into any shape it wants. It has no bones. Its body is really one huge muscle, enormously strong, but very stretchy and squishy, like a mixture of rubber and putty with steel wires inside. Normally it is egg-shaped, but it can just as easily give itself two legs like a human or four legs like a horse. It can become as round as a ball or as long as a kite-string. From fifty yards away, a fully grown Vermicious Knid could stretch out its neck and bite your head off without even getting up!’
‘Bite off your head with what?’ said Grandma Georgina. ‘I didn’t see any mouth.’
‘They have other things to bite with,’ said Mr Wonka darkly.
‘Such as what?’ said Grandma Georgina.
‘Ring off,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Your time’s up. But listen, everybody. I’ve just had a funny thought. There I was fooling around with the President and pretending we were creatures from some other planet and, by golly, there actually were creatures from some other planet on board!’
‘Do you think there were many?’ Charlie asked. ‘More than the five we saw?’
‘Thousands!’ said Mr Wonka. ‘There are five hundred rooms in that Space Hotel and there’s probably a family of them in every room!’
‘Somebody’s going to get a nasty shock when they go on board!’ said Grandpa Joe.
They’ll be eaten like peanuts,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘Every one of them.’
‘You don’t really mean that, do you, Mr Wonka?’ Charlie said.
‘Of course I mean it,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘These Vermicious Knids are the terror of the Universe. They travel through space in great swarms, landing on other stars and planets and destroying everything they find. There used to be some rather nice creatures living on the moon a long time ago. They were called Poozas. But the Vermicious Knids ate the lot. They did the same on Venus and Mars and many other planets.’
‘Why haven’t they come down to our Earth and eaten us?’ Charlie asked.
‘They’ve tried to, Charlie, many times, but they’ve never made it. You see, all around our Earth there is a vast envelope of air and gas, and anything hitting that at high speed gets red hot. Space capsules are made of special heat-proof metal, and when they make a re-entry, their speeds are reduced right down to about two thousand miles an hour, first by retro-rockets and then by something called “friction”. But even so, they get badly scorched. Knids, which are not heat-proof at all, and don’t have any retro-rockets, get sizzled up completely before they’re halfway through. Have you ever seen a shooting star?’
‘Lots of them,’ Charlie said.
‘Actually, they’re not shooting stars at all,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘They’re Shooting Knids. They’re Knids trying to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and going up in flames.’
‘What rubbish,’ said Grandma Georgina.
‘You wait,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘You may see it happening before the day is done.’
‘But if they’re so fierce and dangerous,’ Charlie said, ‘why didn’t they eat us up right away in the Space Hotel? Why did they waste time twisting their bodies into letters and writing SCRAM?’
‘Because they’re show-offs,’ Mr Wonka replied. ‘They’re tremendously proud of being able to write like that.’
‘But why say scram when they wanted to catch us and eat us?’
‘It’s the only word they know,’ Mr Wonka said.
‘Look!’ screamed Grandma Josephine, pointing through the glass. ‘Over there!’
Before he even looked, Charlie knew exactly what he was going to see. So did the others. They could tell by the high hysterical note in the old lady’s voice.
And there it was, cruising effortlessly alongside them, a simply colossal Vermicious Knid, as thick as a whale, as long as a lorry, with the most brutal vermicious look in its eye! It was no more than a dozen yards away, egg-shaped, slimy, greenish-brown, with one malevolent red eye (the only one visible) fixed intently upon the people floating inside the Great Glass Elevator!