“I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said, in the voice of one who felt he truly hadn’t.

“If you haven’t yet, then you will.” Mr Timms stared deeper still into my eyes. Right through my eyes, it seemed, and into my very brain.

I got the uncanny feeling that this man could somehow, not read, but see my thoughts. And not just my thoughts at this moment, but the thoughts that I would have at some time in the future. See things that I would do in the future. But how could anybody do that? It was impossible, surely? But it seemed to me that this man was doing it. That he really did know. Well, that’s how if felt. It was not just an uncanny feeling, it was a terrible feeling. A feeling of inner violation. It put the wind up me something terrible. And I was a very brave boy.

“You’ll hang,” said Mr Timms. “I know it.”

“No, I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.”

Mr Timms gazed down at me with his penetrating eyes. His long head went nod, nod, nod, and his voice said, “Yes, you will.”

I held my ground and stared right back at him and then, because I felt so absolutely sure that he could see my thoughts through my eyeballs, I turned those eyeballs down to the floor and studied the pattern on the carpet.

A number of options lay open to me and I pondered on which one to take.

I could run straight out of the door. That one was obvious, but that one would be to accept defeat.

I could burst into tears and tell my daddy what Mr Timms had said to me, in the hope that my daddy would smite him on the nose. But my daddy might well take Mr Timms’s side and smite me instead.

Or I could burst into tears and shout, “Get off me, you homo.” I’d seen Dave do this once to the owner of the sweetie shop who had caught him nicking Blackjacks. A crowd of young men had closed in about the shopkeeper and Dave had managed to make good his escape, taking the Black Jacks and a Mars Bar as well.

So I burst into tears, kicked Mr Timms in the ankle, shouted, “Get your hands off me, you homo. Help me, Daddy, please,” and ran straight out of the door.

Dave was in hiding across the street, behind a hedge in someone’s front garden. As I ran out of the front door he called me over and I joined him there.

“You’re crying,” said Dave.

So I told him what happened.

Dave put his arm around my shoulder. “You did brilliantly,” he said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it.”

“You ran off and left me behind, you coward.”

“I wasn’t scared,” said Dave. “But I have a gyppy tummy and had to come outside to use the toilet. It’s this touch of Black Death I’ve got.”

“Don’t breathe on me, then,” I said. “I don’t want to catch it.”

Dave slid his arm from my shoulder and took to picking his nose.

“I suppose we might as well go home,” I said. “We’re not going to get back inside now, are we? This has all been a waste of time.”

“Seems a shame,” said Dave. “It would be so much easier to bring Mr Penrose back to life now, rather than go to all the trouble of digging him up later.”

I shrugged. “So you think we should wait some more?” I asked.

“It would be good practice,” said Dave.

“Practice for what?”

“For the future. It seems to me that adults spend most of their time waiting for something or other. A bus or a train or, for those who have a telephone, a telephone call. Or waiting for the postman or the milkman or the man to fix the broken pipe or their girlfriend to arrive. Or …”

“Stop it,” I said. “There must be more to being an adult than that. You can get into pubs and drink beer.”

“Waiting at the bar to get served,” said Dave. “Waiting for the cubical in the gents to be free so you can be sick in it. Waiting—”

“Stop!” I put my hands over my ears.

“Adults spend most of their time waiting,” said Dave, in a voice that was loud enough for me to hear. “Because all they’re really waiting for is death.”

“You paint a rosy picture of the future.” I took my hands away from my ears and took to picking my own nose. “According to Mr Timms, my death waits for me at the end of the hangman’s rope.”

“I hate adults,” said Dave. “And adults secretly hate children. Because children have more life left to them than they do. Adults are jealous. And they think they know more about everything than children do.”

“That’s because they do,” I observed.

“There’s some truth in that, I suppose,” said Dave. “And I get well peeved because there are so many things that I don’t understand yet. But I would be able to understand them if adults answered my questions. But they don’t. The reason children don’t understand as much as adults is because adults don’t tell them everything they know. They keep secrets from children. Adults complicate the world to death, but children see the world as it really is. They see it as simple. For some reason, adults don’t like ‘simple’, they like ‘complicated’. So adults screw up the world and children suffer for it.”

“You really are wise beyond your years,” said I.

“How dare you,” said Dave. “I’m wise because I’m wise. Right now, as I am. And you’re wise too. You know how to raise the dead. How many adults know that?”

“It was an adult who thought up the formula and the rituals and everything.”

“Only because stuff like that takes years to work out. If you started from scratch now, it might take you twenty years before you got it right. But once you had got it right, you could pass the information straight to your ten-year-old son and he’d know it too. Or you could keep it a secret to yourself. Which is what adults do about practically everything. They’re all a lot of homos, adults.”

All? I puzzled over this. I felt that one day I was bound to find out what a homo was, but it probably wouldn’t be before I was an adult. And then it might be too late: I might actually be a homo myself. The thought didn’t bear thinking about, so I didn’t think any more about it.

“I have this theory,” said Dave. “About Life, the Universe and Everything.”

“Sounds like a good title for a book,” I said.

“Don’t talk silly,” said Dave. “But I’ve thought hard about this theory. It’s in the form of a parable. Do you know what a parable is?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s a bird that a pirate has on his shoulder.”

Dave shook his head.

“I was only joking,” I said.

“Oh,” said Dave. “I still haven’t worked out the one about the man with the huge green head. But a parable is a moral story, like in the Bible. Would you like to hear mine?”

“Are there any spaceships in it?” I asked, for I greatly loved spaceships. Although not all spaceships. I didn’t, for instance, like the spaceships in P.P. Penrose’s Adam Earth books. They were rubbish, those spaceships.

“Of course there are spaceships in it. I only know parables that have spaceships in them.”

“Go on, then,” I said.

“All right,” said Dave. “This parable is called ‘The Parable of the Spaceships.’”

“Good title,” I said. “I—”

“Shut up,” said Dave. And I shut up.

And this is how it went.

Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth. And it was the future and people had cars that flew in the air and telephones that didn’t need wires and wore televisions on their wrists and had futuristic haircuts and big wing shoulders on their plastic jackets and lived in huge tower blocks that reached up into the clouds.

And they had spaceships. But the spaceships could only go fast enough for people to commute between the planets in this solar system, which they did all the time, for going to work and stuff like that. Mostly mining emeralds on Saturn.

Everybody was not doing OK in the future. Because there were so many people and all the planets in the solar system were getting completely overcrowded. So the scientists worked really hard on developing this spaceship that could travel at the speed of light and they built a special chamber in it where the pilot could be frozen up and stay in suspended animation until he got to his final destination, which would be the nearest planet capable of sustaining human life. They programmed the computer in the spaceship to search out the nearest planet that would comfortably support human life and then they looked for a volunteer. They wanted someone a bit special, because he would be the first man ever to set foot on this planet, which would mean that his name would go down in history and everyone would remember him for ever more (after his mission had been successful, of course, and later people had gone out to colonize this new world).