Skymaze Read online

  When he looked closely at them they seemed to be unconnected to anything else, but when he glanced away again, with his peripheral vision he could see the faintest of lines running like a web between them. He pressed the fire button again, and a small figure came on to the screen. He studied it closely. It had a very familiar look about it, and after a few seconds it dawned on him who it was. It was himself, a perfect tiny image of Andrew Hayford.

  He exhaled sharply. Seeing his own image moving on the screen, controlled by the joystick, not only made him identify totally with it, but also promised something much more, something really extraordinary. With the strong sensation that anything, but anything, might be about to happen, Andrew moved the image to the edge of the cliff and then made it jump up on to one of the web lines. The first couple of times it missed and landed back on the cliff again, but the third time it connected with the strand and stayed there. The next time Andrew moved the joystick, the screen changed. The figure moved into the Skymaze.

  At the same time, numbers appeared at the sides of the screen. There were two sets. On the left the numbers started at 600 and began to count down. On the right they started at 1 and went up with each screen change.

  The background lightened until it was the colour of the dawn sky. With every new screen its hue changed, but always the colours were sky colours, predominantly grey and blue, but occasionally the yellow of sunrise or the pink and green of a stormy sunset. The game seemed to consist of exploring the different levels of the maze. It spiralled away both vertically and horizontally, and every time the screen changed, the score went up. There were ladders to climb that looked as if they were made of delicate steel, and swayed dangerously as though high-altitude winds howled through them; there were ropes that he could jump and cling to, swing sideways on or clamber up; tunnels to slide down or crawl through; bridges across deep chasms; cliffs and walkways that crumbled as he traversed them. There were also a number of other hazards that looked innocent but turned out to be lethal when he touched them, like some flowers at the end of a bridge, and some beautiful drops that fell like rain and zapped him when he swung through them.

  Andrew marvelled at the complexity of the game, the stunningly realistic graphics and the inventiveness of the different screens. He had lost a couple of lives and been through twenty different levels when the numbers on the left-hand side of the screen came to zero, and the game returned to the original image of the cliff top beneath the starry sky.

  ‘Time limit,’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder if you can extend it in any way. I wonder if there’s anything to collect.’

  He set out again, entering the Skymaze through another strand. It was a little harder, and his score was only 15 when he lost his third life by falling too far off a crumbling cliff, and the game ended. He made a mental note of the number of lives, wondered if there was anything he could do to extend them, and started again.

  The third route he tried was the most difficult. This time he lost three lives, and the game came to an end with only twelve levels on the score. Yet this route was the most fascinating, with seemingly impossible screens that he was sure could be solved if he practised enough. The game was totally addictive, even at this level, and always at the back of his mind was the spine-tingling thought that at any moment reality might alter and he might find himself actually in the game, playing it from the inside, as he had in Space Demons.

  ‘Unreal!’ he thought. ‘It’s so brilliant! But I mustn’t be impatient. I must take it slowly. I must learn as much as I can first. That way there won’t be any danger. I’m not going to let it get out of hand, like Space Demons nearly did.’

  All the same, he was confident he could handle it. After all, he had mastered Space Demons.

  He was so completely absorbed in the game that he did not hear his mother coming down the passage. She opened the door and came in, making him jump, and making the little figure on the screen miss the rope it was leaping for and plunge downwards through some very realistic clouds. He frowned as he realised that the long fall had killed it.

  ‘Andrew!’ Marjorie exclaimed. ‘I’ve been looking all over the house for you. Didn’t you hear me calling?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ he said, not looking at her, starting the game again.

  A concerned expression came into her face. ‘Is that a new game?’ she demanded anxiously, putting her hand on his shoulder and leaning over the screen.

  Andrew gave a deep sigh, removed the disc, and turned the computer off. There was no point risking disappearing under his mother’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll stop for a bit now,’ he said.

  Marjorie looked relieved. ‘Good! It’s just as well not to get too obsessed with these games. I got quite worried about you last year, do you remember? You wouldn’t stop playing that one your father brought back from Japan. What was it called?’

  ‘Space Demons,’ Andrew said after a pause.

  ‘That’s right! I knew it was something dreadful like that.’ Then she put two and two together, as Andrew had feared she would. ‘I suppose this one’s from your father too, is it?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Andrew said. He did not like the way she always now said ‘your father’, as though his father was nothing to do with her any more. His father often did send him things, postcards from wherever he happened to be at the time, and unexpected parcels. But the address was always written by Rose, his girlfriend, and Andrew often privately wondered if his father thought about him much any more at all.

  ‘Is that what was in that parcel from Japan?’

  ‘Yes.’ Why didn’t everybody mind their own business in this house!

  ‘Oh dear!’ Marjorie didn’t seem to like the sound of it too much. ‘What’s this one called?’

  ‘Skymaze,’ Andrew replied reluctantly.

  ‘I thought you’d gone off them,’ Marjorie said. ‘You’ve hardly played at all lately.’

  ‘No,’ Andrew thought. ‘After Space Demons your average computer game seems pretty tame.’

  ‘I’ve been too busy adjusting to circumstances,’ he said ironically. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to play any more for now.’

  ‘I hope you’ll share it with Paul,’ Marjorie said. There was a pleading note in her voice.

  ‘She’s heard about the fight,’ Andrew thought. ‘She thinks this would be a good way to make it up, if I offer to let Paul have a shot at the game. But I can’t let him, and anyway, I don’t want her to keep thinking she’s got to pull the strings all the time. If we aren’t going to get on, she’s not going to be able to make us pretend we are.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said in disappointment. ‘You mustn’t be selfish with your things.’

  ‘I don’t mind with anything else,’ Andrew said, trying to sound generous and reasonable, ‘but he mustn’t play Skymaze.’

  He was adamant about it over the next few days. It didn’t go down very well. His mother and stepfather thought he was being childish and unreasonable, and Paul made an issue of it. The relationship between the two boys worsened dramatically from mutual dislike into overt hostility. It made things very unpleasant for everyone at home, and it made school for Andrew nearly unbearable. And all the time his irritation was exacerbated by his intense desire to play Skymaze again. He was obsessed by it, but he was not going to risk playing it when Paul was around.

  ‘I think it’s time to seek asylum,’ he thought one afternoon. ‘I’d better escape to Ben’s place. I’ll phone him up and invite myself over, and with any luck I can get to play the game on their computer. I’ll never get a chance here!’

  He had stayed close to home all week, waiting for the opportunity to get on the computer, but Paul had stayed close to home too, determined either to play the new game as well, or to prevent Andrew playing it. By the end of the week both Keith and Marjorie had ceased to feel so
rry for the boys and were simply fed up with them. They thought it was a very good idea when Andrew asked if he could go to Ben’s, and Keith suggested that Paul could find a friend to stay with too while he and Marjorie had a weekend away together in the Hills.

  Andrew’s parents dropped him off outside Ben’s house on Saturday morning, and he watched them get back into the car after saying goodbye to him and telling him they would pick him up on Sunday afternoon. He frowned a little in annoyance as his stepfather kissed his mother before starting up the Lancia and driving away. He felt as if they were shutting him out of something, leaving him behind as they escaped to a life in which he had no part. He didn’t like to think of them being two separate adult people who were married. It was discomforting and almost embarrassing.

  ‘But I’ve got Skymaze!’ he consoled himself. ‘And with any luck today I’m going to be able to get into it.’

  As soon as they were in Ben’s room, Andrew took Skymaze out of his overnight bag. ‘I brought the new game with me,’ he said, showing it to Ben. ‘Can we play it on your computer? I never get a chance to use ours any more.’

  ‘Now you know what it’s like to have an older brother,’ Ben said, not very sympathetically. ‘That’s been my problem all these years. You’d think that now Darren’s doing Matric he wouldn’t have time to go on the computer.’

  ‘Or play dumb games with me,’ he added to himself, but he did not mention the games of Hunter aloud. He had never told anyone else about them, as though he was in some way ashamed of them.

  Obsessed with the game, Andrew did not notice his silence. ‘We’ll be able to play this, though, won’t we? After all, that’s the main reason I came.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to come and see me?’

  ‘Well, sure, but … you know!’ Andrew gave Ben a disarming grin.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Ben asked suspiciously, taking the game from Andrew and studying the case.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Andrew said. ‘And quite harmless. You could be right, you know. It could be just an ordinary game. I mean, I haven’t had a lot of time to play it, but so far nothing peculiar’s happened. It’s just what it says, a skymaze. You see how much of it you can get through before your time runs out. Nothing very special, but the graphics are great and it’s kind of addictive.’

  They went to Ben’s parents’ study, which was where the computer was kept, and Ben put the game in. He frowned as he read the warning message: WELCOME TO THE HYPERGAME SKYMAZE. YOU ARE WARNED NOT TO ATTEMPT THIS GAME IF YOU HAVE NOT MASTERED THE PREVIOUS GAME IN THE SERIES, SPACE DEMONS.

  ‘Why not?’ he questioned uneasily. ‘What do you think would happen? And how would they know anyway?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Andrew replied, moving the joystick. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t apply to us. Both of us did play Space Demons, and we all mastered it together. But that’s why I can’t play it at home. Paul shouldn’t play it, you see—but try and tell him that.’

  Ben was peering at the screen. The sight of the cliff top aroused alarming memories that he was trying hard to forget. His feeling of unease deepened when the tiny figure appeared and jumped into the Skymaze.

  ‘Andrew,’ he whispered, ‘that looks just like you!’

  ‘I know!’ Andrew replied. ‘It makes it seem so much more real. Clever, aren’t I?’ he added with pride, as his tiny screen self swung nimbly up a rope and on to the next screen.

  ‘You have a go,’ he suggested to Ben when the game was over. The two boys changed places. As Ben took the joystick and brought the figure up on to the screen, he gave an inarticulate cry of surprise, and Andrew exclaimed, ‘It’s you!’

  Ben dropped the joystick as though it was red hot. ‘That is creepy!’ he said.

  ‘It’s not creepy,’ Andrew replied. ‘It’s brilliant! Isn’t it fun? You can really imagine it is you in the game. Go on, have a go. Nothing bad happens, I promise you.’

  As Ben nervously picked up the joystick again, Andrew added, ‘Anyway, you did say Space Demons was all my imagination. So what have you got to be scared about?’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose,’ Ben conceded as he jumped himself into the Skymaze.

  It seemed that Andrew was right. Ben finished his turn, and then Andrew played again, and then they took it in turns for the next hour, and apart from seeing their own images in the game they encountered nothing sinister.

  Although they explored screen after screen, they did not come to the end of the Skymaze. Their highest score was 76, and Ben was drawing up a map, when Andrew had a brilliant idea.

  ‘Plug the second joystick in,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s see if we can play together.’

  They could. They could each take one path, and the screen split in half so they could each follow separate ways. Occasionally they met, and then the screen became single again. With two people playing, the score rose more swiftly, and because they learned from each other’s mistakes, they found they could get through places that had seemed impassable before.

  Ben broke the tense silence to make a comment. ‘One thing about this game is that you’re unarmed. You can’t defend yourself. You can only dodge.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d thought about that,’ Andrew said, dodging what looked like a waterfall. He knew from past experience that it was poisonous. ‘Perhaps that comes in a later stage. But it’s a different sort of game from Space Demons, isn’t it? It’s got more of a sense of fun about it. You can’t imagine it ever getting too lethal.’

  ‘I wish there was something that gave you more time, though,’ Ben said with a groan of frustration as the time ran out.

  They started again. They were getting the timing of the early screens down to the split second now, moving and evading faster and faster, and climbing higher and higher. Eventually they met on a single screen where they had never been before. It was like a grotto in a mountain, with stalactites and stalagmites, and it looked so icy and remote and mysterious that both boys shivered involuntarily. The score stood at 123.

  Then they almost jumped out of their skins as the computer spoke to them. It was not the voice they had heard in Space Demons, and which had haunted their dreams ever since; it sounded lighter, more neutral, and it gave no threats, only information.

  This is the resource centre, it said. Here you may choose one object to help you through the Skymaze. At this moment the choices are three: unlimited time, the gift of flight, and the power to defend yourself by force. Choose wisely. The Skymaze will respond to your choice.

  Andrew stole a quick look at Ben. His face was pale and he was frowning. But he still moved his figure forward.

  The screen altered. Now they were more deeply inside the grotto. In front of them, hanging from the stalagmites, were three objects: a watch, a pair of winged boots, and a black cylindrical object that they both recognised immediately as the gun from the Space Demons game.

  Andrew laughed in relief. ‘That’s easy! We can handle that! Don’t you see, it’s a sort of test? We know you have to give up the gun to get out of Space Demons. There’s no way we’d pick it up again!’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Ben muttered. ‘Suppose the other objects do something weird that we don’t know about? Suppose it’s some kind of trick?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Andrew begged him. ‘Let’s go on with it. We can’t stop now. You said you wanted more time—you take the watch and I’ll take the boots.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Ben said. He moved the joystick. ‘But if it all goes wrong, Andrew, I’ll never forgive you!’

  His figure took the watch. Andrew’s took the boots. There was a kind of pause in the game, a hush, into which the computer spoke gently, almost apologetically.

  You have now activated the Skymaze.

  ‘Oh migosh,’ Ben groaned. ‘What on earth do you think that means?’

  ‘Only one way to find out!’ Andrew laughed, and moved the joystick to play on.
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  But there was no response from the screen. Instead the images slowly faded, and over the original scene of cliff and stars ran a message.

  STATE OF PLAY: LEVEL 2: SKYMAZE ACTIVATED. CONTROL PLAY IMPOSSIBLE.

  No matter what they did, they could not get the program to run again.

  3

  On the same Saturday morning Elaine Taylor was sitting nervously on the floor in Studio A of the Contemporary Movement Group, watching a rehearsal and biting her knuckles as she always did when she was apprehensive. Her emotions were going up and down like an elevator: one moment she was wondering what on earth she was doing there, and if it would be all right to run away; and the next she was caught up in watching the class, half envious of the dancers, and half excited because of an inner, secret conviction that she was really one of them.

  She might have run away if it had not been for the fact that her friend Linda Schulz was sitting next to her. Elaine had persuaded Linda with great difficulty to come with her. They were supposed to be doing some shopping—that was what Elaine had told her foster mother, Mrs Fields; and they had done some shopping, at least Linda had, so it wasn’t totally untrue—but the real reason Elaine had come into the city that Saturday morning was to see Shaz Christie.

  Shaz Christie herself was taking the dance class. She was so thin she looked two-dimensional, and so flexible she seemed liquid rather than solid, except that there was a taut, whippy strength about her. She looked like someone from the future, Elaine thought, with her thick black hair that stood straight up from her huge bony forehead and was streaked with glittering silver over each ear. The silver was echoed by a glistening stud in her nose. She was quite tall, as tall as some of the men in the class, and she radiated a kind of ferocious energy that Elaine found both attractive and alarming.

  Elaine knew, from talking to her on the phone, that her voice was energetic too, and abrupt, as though she had no time to waste. Everything she did was quick and sudden. Elaine had nervously started to explain that she had heard that Shaz was looking for young people with circus skills to work on a new production with her, but Shaz had interrupted her.