‘Purple Pangalin!’ exclaimed The Journalist. ‘What sort of a transportation system d’you call this? The more popular it is the slower it goes! What genius worked this out?!’ He was really quite indignant.
‘Well it’s inevitable isn’t it?’ Nettie found herself being surprisingly defensive of her planet’s right to have traffic jams.
‘Of course it isn’t!’ exploded The Journalist. ‘You have to devise a system that goes faster the more popular it is, so it can cope! It’s perfectly obvious!’
Nettie was drumming her fingers on the dashboard of the landing craft, and smiling at anyone who happened to give them an odd look. Smiling was always the best way to make them look away. She was also glancing increasingly frequently at her watch. Time was running out.
The jam moved an inch nearer London.
‘I mean a transportation system with an average speed of just above stationary is not really a transportation system at all!’ The Journalist was raving by now. ‘It’s more like a storage system!’
‘OK! Let’s do it!’ Nettie suddenly sounded decisive. ‘I’ve always fantasized about this!’
‘What?’
‘Take her up! Nobody’s watching!’
And sure enough, when The Journalist gunned the spacecraft up into the air and sped over the heads of the preceding traffic, nobody seemed to notice. He set the craft down again in an open space on the other side of the jam. The driver of the car they landed in front of was not a happily married man. He had been mulling over what would happen if his wife never returned from the skiing holiday she was currently enjoying. Perhaps she would run off with the instructor and breed Alpine sheep and serve English teas to walkers in the summer. But then there were the children. He’d have to get them to school every day on his own and he wouldn’t be able to stay at the office after hours to chat up that new secretary… At this moment a sporty-looking car suddenly appeared in front of him. Jesus!’ he exclaimed, swerving involuntarily, ‘I didn’t even notice it overtaking! God! The speed some people drive at!’
It was only as the sporty car sped away in the fast lane that he noticed it didn’t seem to have any wheels. ‘Concentrate!’ he told himself. ‘Otherwise you start seeing things.’
Another jam brought them to a resounding halt just as they reached the Westway fly-over.
‘Oh no!’ groaned Nettie,
‘We used to have traffic problems like this on Blerontin,’ observed The Journalist ‘Several million years ago, before intelligent life developed.’
‘Oh shut up!’ said Nettie. She couldn’t bear self-satisfied aliens who couldn’t see any of the good things about Earth. ‘This is hopeless. We’ve only got nine hours left!’
‘Where have we got to get to?’
‘The Earl’s Court Road,’ Nettie replied.
‘Shall we take the shortcut?’
Nettie looked around, There were no police cars as far as she could see, and the woman in the car behind was picking her fingernails.
‘Go for it!’ she said, and the craft left the fly-over to the amazement of a couple of small children who were on their way to school.
‘Look, Mum! That car’s flying!’
‘Well I never, dear,’ said their mother, without taking her eyes off the Hello magazine she was reading. ‘Whatever will we see next!’
Nettie and The Journalist swooped low over Notting Hill and effected a landing on the south side of Holland Park. Here they waited for their moment, hopped over a closed gate and filtered into the one-way system around Earl’s Court.
‘Eight-thirty!’ said Nettie, leaping out of the ‘car’. ‘You stay here! If I know that scumbag Nigel, he’ll still be in bed!’
She used her door key to get in, and was soon racing up the stairs to Nigel’s flat. She let herself in and immediately fell over a broken ironing board that was lying across the doorway.
‘Who’s that?’ called a voice from the bedroom.
‘It’s me!’ yelled Nettie, picking herself up and striding into the bedroom.
The young girl with whom Nigel was currently in congress tried to pretend she was merely sitting astride a pile of old laundry.
‘Shit! Nettie!’ exclaimed Nigel, making an effort to disguise himself as the pile of old laundry in question by pulling all the sheets around himself. ‘I thought you’d been abducted by aliens!’