Muddle and Win by John Dickinson Page A

in many ways. But Pure Truth, pure one hundred per cent distilled Truth, is very rare. And it is very, very explosive.
    With rock-steady hands, Windleberry clipped one tube to either side of the primer. He used the short, bright lengths of Swiftness to link the primer to the batteries and the sheet of silver, and teased the sheet and the wire into position so that if anyone tried to lift the trap door from below the sheet would make contact with the wire and the circuit would be complete.
    You couldn’t block the trap door. Not for ever. Windleberry knew that. You
could
stand over it with a fiery sword and guard it for an eternity, but in Windleberry’s experience that wasn’t very productive either. On the other hand, a couple of tubes of Truth would give anyone coming up from below something to think about. Assuming, that is, that they left that person any head to think with.
    Windleberry tiptoed back into the main chamber. Gently he pushed the door not quite closed – just as it had been when he’d first seen it. He looked at it for a moment. But there was nothing to give his little device away. He let out his breath. He looked around the chamber, at the statues in their hippy guises. He studied the deliberate misspellings. He smiled, tolerantly.
    He happened to be looking in exactly the wrong direction when Muddlespot waddled smugly round from behind the statue of Trufe.
    Muddlespot was looking the wrong way too.
    So neither of them saw each other.
    For about one-sixth of a second.

    ‘Hold it,’ said Sally.
    She had appeared between them. Like lightning, she stuffed a handful of socks down the mouth of the tenor sax and plonked two more pairs of rolled-up socks on the tines of Muddlespot’s trident. And she caught both of them in an armlock. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, you guys,’ she said. ‘If you’re staying, you don’t fight. And no shouting either.’
    Windleberry winced. For a top-flight celestial agent to be given a Chinese burn by a fourteen-year-old was a new experience. Not to say painful and humiliating. But that was how it was when you were an idea in someone’s head. They could do anything they liked to you. They could twist you, shut you up, or take you apart to see what you were made of. The one thing they couldn’t do was stop you coming back.
    Ouch. He hoped the watchtowers were not watching too closely. The tips of Muddlespot’s trident wavered before his eyes. The one un-socked spike still looked very sharp.
    ‘Uh  . . . Do you mind  . . .?’ he gasped.
    ‘Oh. Sorry.’ Sally jammed another pair of socks onto the trident.
    ‘Where did the socks come from?’ said Muddlespot dazedly. He was rubbing his elbow where Sally had released him.
    ‘I know where my socks are,’ said Sally flatly. ‘
And
I keep them in pairs. All of them. Not that I wear them much any more. I’ll take these. No weapons. And
I
choose the music here, mister.’ She frisked them both, removing the sax, the trident, Windleberry’s shoulder-holstered harmonica and a couple of tar bombs that Muddlespot hadn’t even known he still had.
    ‘Now, I’m off to bed  . . .’ she said, carting it all off in an armful.
    ‘Oh, and one more thing,’ she added. ‘No one gets to whisper to me after the lights go out. I want to sleep with a clear conscience.’
    ‘Glad to hear it,’ said Windleberry, also rubbing his elbow and glowering at his rival.
    ‘I said clear, not clean, mister.’
    ‘So what do we do until morning?’ said Muddlespot.
    ‘Take a break,’ said Sally over her shoulder. ‘Like someone said, there’ll be a room for you somewhere. There may even be a bed.’
    Muddlespot looked at Windleberry. Windleberry looked at Muddlespot.
    ‘You can decide between you who gets it,’ said Sally.

DARLINGTON HIGH IS a school like any other school. It’s a battleground.
    It’s the sort of battleground where there are lots of battles all going on at once. And most of the people in them