The Elephant’s Trump

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Quickly, the three children got to their feet and set off to follow the squirrel-chasing robot dog. The chase took them in and out of the hedge maze, through the ornamental garden and around the boating lake. At one point they nearly ran into the park keeper, but when he saw that the children running towards him included Jack and Oscar, the uniformed man turned tail and hid in his equipment shed.

Finally the trail led out of the park completely. Jack was beginning to run out of breath. Oscar ran ahead and called back, “He’s heading for the canal!”

Ruby had stopped to make sure Jack was all right. “Come on,” she said encouragingly, “he can’t get too far.” Jack instantly realised that she was right. The canal disappeared into an industrial park a few hundred metres from the park, and the public access towpath terminated in a dead end. Gathering himself for one last effort he started jogging again. Oscar was already on the towpath when he got there.

“Where…where’d he go?” gasped Jack, feeling very unfit and not at all like a top agent of GUNGE. First he’d lost his contact and now it looked like he was going to lose his robot dog. Things were not going well.

Oscar shrugged, and looked embarrassed.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “He went that way…” Oscar pointed off towards the dead end of the towpath. “…but now I can’t see him!”

Ruby joined them. “What about up there?” She was looking towards a footbridge which led over the canal and into a housing estate. “He must have gone that way.”

She led the way up the metal steps and across the bridge and on the other side they found themselves in a narrow alley. The alley twisted and turned and eventually they exited into a street of modern houses. And there, sitting beneath a red pillar box, was Snivel.

His exhaustion forgotten in his relief, Jack ran up to Snivel and gave him a hug.

“At last,” boomed a familiar voice. “I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”

The voice was coming from the postbox. And it belonged to Bob! After greeting the three young agents, Bob explained that for security reasons he had to move his base of operations around.

“Are you really inside there?” asked Ruby. She hadn’t spoken to Bob last time around – she’d only ended up joining Jack and Oscar because she followed them at the pool, and helped them to catch the Squillibloat.

“Of course I am,” replied Bob, “and I keep getting letters landing on my head to prove it. But it’s an improvement on being hidden in a rubbish bin, I can tell you.”

showered with empty crisp packets and cans of pop all the time in his last base.

“What was wrong with Snivel just then?” asked Jack, remembering the strange look that had been in the robot dog’s eyes back in the park. “He saw this weird squirrel thing and then he went running off.”

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Bob told them,”he’s just been downloaded with all the necessary data for your next mission.”

“You’ve got another alien for us to find?” asked Oscar keenly.

“Yes,” said Bob. “Your next target has been identified. And you must remember to get hold of the Blower segment that the alien is carrying. The three remaining bits can still be made to work together if the aliens manage to meet up.”

“So who are we after?” asked Jack, adjusting his glasses.

“Snivel has all the material for a full briefing,” Bob told them, “he’ll tell you everything you need to knoW.”

Half an hour later Jack and his friends were in the tree house that he and Oscar shared. It was a magnificent tree house, basically a converted shed that Oscar’s dad had won and had then installed in the massive oak tree that grew at the end of their garden. Oscar’s garden backed onto Jack’s, making the tree house a great meeting place between their homes. It was used as a base for all their adventures and housed Jack’s workshop, where he developed and made many of his brilliant inventions.