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Johnny’s house.
    “There’s no sense in getting excited about Mrs. Tachyon,” said Kasandra. “If she’s really been a bag lady here for years and years, then there’s a whole range of perfectly acceptable explanations without having to resort to far-fetched ones.”
    “What’s an acceptable explanation?” said Johnny. He was still wrapped up in the puzzle of the newspaper.
    “She’s an alien, possibly.”
    “That’s acceptable?”
    “Or she could be an Atlantean. From Atlantis. You know? The continent that sank under the sea thousands of years ago. The inhabitants were said to be very longlived.”
    “They could breathe underwater?”
    “Don’t be silly. They sailed away just before it sank, and built Stonehenge and the pyramids and so on. They were scientifically very advanced, actually.”
    Johnny looked at her with his mouth open. You expected this sort of thing from Bigmac and the others, but not from Ki—Kasandra, who was already taking AP courses at fourteen years old.
    “I didn’t know that,” he said.
    “It was hushed up by the government.”
    “Ah.”
    Kasandra was good at knowing things that were hushed up by the government, especially considering that they had been, well, hushed up. They were always slightly occult. When giant footprints had appeared around the town center during some snow last year, there had been two theories. There was Kir—Kasandra’s, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny’s, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two “Giant Rubber Feet, a Wow at Parties!!!!” from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki—Kasandra’s theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she’d read that it practically outweighed Johnny’s, which was merely based on watching him do it.
    Johnny thought about the Atlanteans, who’d all be six feet tall in Greek togas and golden hair, leaving the sinking continent in their amazing golden ships. And on the deck of one of them, Mrs. Tachyon, ferociously wheeling her cart.
    Or you could imagine Attila the Hun’s barbarians galloping across the plain and, in the middle of the line of horsemen, Mrs. Tachyon on her cart. Off her rocker, too.
    “What happens,” said Kasandra, “is that if you see a UFO or a yeti or something like that, you get a visit from the Men in Black. They drive around in big black cars and menace people who’ve seen strange things. They say they’re working for the government, but they’re really working for the secret society that runs everything.”
    “How d’you know all this?”
    “Everyone knows. It’s a well-known fact. I’ve been waiting for something like this ever since the mysterious rain of fish we had in September,” said Kasandra.
    “You mean when there was that gas leak under the tropical fish shop?”
    “Yes, we were told it was a leak under the tropical fish shop,” said Kasandra darkly.
    “What? Of course it was the gas leak! They found the shopkeeper’s wig in the telephone wires in the High Street! Everyone had guppies in their gutters!”
    “The two might have been coincidentally connected,” said Kasandra reluctantly.
    “And you still believe that those crop circles last year weren’t made by Bigmac even though he swears they were?”
    “All right, perhaps some of them might have been made by Bigmac, but who made the first ones, eh?”
    “Bazza and Skazz, of course. They read about ’em in the paper and decided we should have some too.”
    “They didn’t necessarily make all of them.”
    Johnny sighed. As if life wasn’t complicated enough, people had to set out to make it worse. It had been difficult enough before he’d heard about spontaneous combustion. You could be sitting peacefully in your chair, minding your own business, and next minute, whoosh, you were just a pair of shoes with smoke coming out. He’d taken to keeping a bucket of water in his bedroom for some weeks after reading about that.
    And then there were all these programs