There were two things that Tracy Beacham hated about her work and both of them were Gordon Harkin. She didn’t hate the mindless repetition at the checkout counter. She wasn’t bothered by the awkward customers. She did find the continual bleeping of the tills as they clocked the barcode irritating but that was nothing to the pure hate she felt for Gordon.

She stared malevolently at him.

“You’re doing it again, Trace.” Stephanie threw a stale blueberry muffin at Tracy to distract her.

“ Beednell, that hurt, Steph. I just can’t help it. He drives me mad. He’s the reason none of the locals shop here. You can’t move in the aisles for all the heaps of stuff”

Stephanie leaned over, ignoring the woman waiting next in her queue,  “ He gives me the creeps too but you gotta stop staring, you’ll get the sack”.

“So?  Mr Preston has promised me a job behind the bar at the Rabid Ox anytime I want”.

“You can’t be a barmaid you got no experience”.Tracy put a ‘Till Closed’ notice on the belt and stared down the woman who had just moved over from Stephanie’s till. With a resigned sigh the woman dragged her trolley away.

“Well he said I had the relevant qualities, so there”.

“Right!, we all know what qualities he was talking about!”

Stephanie bristled, “Cheeky cow. He meant I’m used to dealing with people. I’ll get tips and I won’t be driven mad with these tills, and best of all I’ll get away from the grim heaper”. She threw a look at Gordon.

“Well as my ‘relevant qualities’ only fill a 34B I’m stuck here, and I don’t want to get sacked. He’s looking over here. Just stop staring, Trace.”

“She’s staring at you again, Mr Harkin.” Darryl was helping Gordon with a stack of baked beans, “ and she’s already on a warning”

“As manager you have to exercise judgement,Darryl. I accept that in my position I attract a certain attention. The poor girl is just infatuated with me. I’ve seen it happen before.”

“She doesn’t look infatuated, Mr Harkin,” Darryl looked over at Tracy, “she looks more like she’s trodden in some dog poo”

“Darryl if you aspire to be a manager too, you need to be a people person. I can’t recommend you if you can’t read people. Look again at her, what do you see?”

“Infatuation, Mr Harkin, definitely infatuation”.

“You’ll get there, Darryl, just watch and learn”

  Gordon glowed with smug self-satisfaction. He wasn’t bothered by local antipathy.He got his custom from the affluent suburbs. This was his world. To him the beauty of a field of bright daffodils was nothing compared to the exquisite symmetry of a well-stocked shelf of sliced bread. The melodic genius of Mozart couldn’t compare to the chirpy bleeping of the tills. That was the sound of his future. He felt he was the only one who knew what they were saying.

Unknown to him, somebody else was listening just as intently to those bleeps, but unlike Gordon he was not at all pleased with what he heard.

 From his distant out-post on the planet Pilandortler, Xarig the Adequate adjusted the volume on his ear-piece and scowled, which made him feel a bit better. He always enjoyed scowling. In fact it was the best bit about the job. Pilandortlians believe it makes them look more attractive. It was the rest of the job he didn’t like. It was dreary and mind numbingly boring. He knew he was one of many, stuck in remote early warning outposts, listening for signs of enemy encroachment.

This was no job for a man of his ability; until recently he had been  Xarig the Mighty with all the privileges that it entailed.

 Ignoring the insistent bleeping he, once again, tried to make sense the series of events that resulted in him being marooned in this deadly outpost.

 Everything had been going so well for him. He had been engaged to the Emperor’s daughter, Effluenca.

No-one who knew them said it was a love match, mainly because they don’t have a word for love in their language. The word they use is ‘si-bileep’, which roughly translates as ‘lust and ambition’. Everyone agreed he had chosen well; she was powerful, rich and had cutest scowl. It was all spoilt by a moment’s inattention; as far as he could remember it involved Effluenca and a miniature time displacement machine, which he had, in a state of extreme si-bileep, mistaken for a sex aid, with the result that the Emperor had become his illegitimate son. The resulting anomaly was found to be irreversible. The Emperor had considered killing Xarig but patricide is regarded as taboo on Pilandortler, so after making the use of the machines illegal he sent Xarig to the most remote place on the planet and hoped everyone would forget.

Most did, except Xarig. Still distracted and thoroughly pissed off he turned his earpiece back on and there it was again, loud and clear. Those beeps and squeaks were unmistakable. He couldn’t believe it. It was a message in the Pilandortlian language; admittedly it didn’t make much sense. It was something about an aunt having a pencil in the living room; all the same he was shocked.  He knew the likelihood of picking up any message was negligible. In fact this was the first decipherable message ever to be picked up in any of the hundreds of listening out-posts.

Most life forms have some characteristic jointly shared by the whole species, something that marks them out. On Pilandortler the characteristic that has marked them out for millennia is paranoia. It is this that has resulted in centuries of planet hopping.

In order to get away from all the other species who were ‘out to get them’ as they believed they moved, en masse, to more and more remote planets. However, with the twisted logic of the truly paranoid, they also built ever more powerful listening devices in order to find out what was being said about them. The flaw in this scheme was that their isolation had prevented them from learning any other language so they couldn’t understand anything they picked up, which only served to fuel their paranoia to greater heights. This heightened state, combined with the fact that they had run out of places to go, resulted in their developing powerful weapons of destruction that were fast, deadly and pin-point accurate.

It was one on those very weapons that Xarig was priming as he continued to listen to the bleeping. He’d been dying to use it ever since he got here. It was the new generation QX series, with optional audio blast to let the enemy know you’d arrived. The QX series has a quark laser, which superheats its target instantly and makes little noise. It’s very effective but it does take the drama out of warfare, so the audio option was added for making the grand gesture. Xarig decided this situation called for the grand gesture. The bastards weren’t fooling him with talk of aunts and living rooms. It was obviously a code for an all out attack. And he, Xarig, would be the hero of the hour and save the planet from the deadly, pencil, threat, which was obviously some murderous weapon. They would have to reinstate him after this.

The locals in the Rabid Ox were startled to hear an unusually loud noise for a Tuesday afternoon, some were even curious enough to drag their attention away from Tracy’s bust to look out the window.

Tracy felt she had found her spiritual home here; appreciative customers and no Gordon Harkin. The only drawback was she still hadn’t mastered the till.

“Here, Tracy,” said Mr Preston. “You know that supermarket you used to work in?”

 Tracy looked up, hastily throwing a tea towel over the till which was flashing a warning.

“Well it’s not there any more”. Tracy looked out the window and had to admit he was right. The supermarket had gone. There was just a black, smoking supermarket shaped stain on the ground.

“’Kin-ell, the whole thing’s vanished” she said, “it’s just disappeared.

“That would account for that bang, then” said old Bert Copthorne.

It was a measure of how much the place was disliked by the locals that they took its passing with such sang froid.

“Hey you can see the bus station now” said Tracy, trying to distract Mr Preston from looking at the till.

“Lucky you came to work here, Tracy. That could have been you” said Mr Preston.

“Yeah, spose so”, she thought for a bit and smiled.  “Blimey, lucky escape, eh?”

Tracy’s relief at her lucky escape was mixed with concern. She would soon have to tell Mr Preston about the till which was now making a series of loud warning beeps. It was an irritating reminder of her time at the supermarket.