Clyde Langer loved being a student. Absolutely adored it, it was two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon and he was lying on the couch in his boxers watching TV, engineering textbook propped up in such a way that it didn't obscure his view of the repeat of Top Gear he was watching.
Luke arrived back from his trip to the library weighed down with books. He sat on the arm of the couch. "I've found an alien," he announced.
"In the library?" Clyde hadn't been in the library since fresher's week, as far as he knew there could be an entire invasion fleet hiding in the psychology stacks.
"No. I was in a third year English lecture-" Clyde frowned, he was sure they'd been first years when he'd woken up this morning, and Luke had been studying maths. "-about Chaucer, and the lecturer is an alien."
Clyde had been befriending and fighting aliens since he was fourteen, aliens were a dime a dozen, the important question was, "Why were you in an English lecture?"
"I thought it would be interesting."
"And was it?" Clyde asked and immediately regretted it. He was quite happy not knowing anything about Chaucer and he could probably live without hearing the Luke Smith version of what sounded like the worlds dullest lecture. "Hang on; better tell me about the alien first."
000
The next morning Luke and Clyde snuck into the back of a third year English lecture. Clyde was unimpressed for a couple of reasons. One, he hadn't had lunch yet and so wasn't properly awake. And two, he was supposed to be in an electrical engineering lecture, he'd even been considering actually going to it.
They found seats near the back and Luke took out paper and a pen ready to take notes. Clyde couldn't help smiling, that was so like Luke. Clyde lounged back in his seat and waited for the lecture to start. A small man scurried into the lecture hall and up to the lectern. Immediately Clyde could tell that Luke had been right about him being an alien. The lecturer was orange, and not unfortunate-accident-with-a-sunbed orange, no, this guy was tangerine-orange. Also, he had a tail.
And they weren't the only ones to have noticed, all around the hall students were pointing and whispering. Then the lecturer started speaking.
On some level Clyde was aware that the lecture was about Chaucer, but buried between the words, burrowing its way directly into Clyde's subconscious was another message.
'Don't pay any attention to me. Chaucer won't be on the exam. You're not even taking an English class. You're not even a student at this university. There's really no point paying me any heed.'
People stopped pointing and started staring into the middle distance. Mobile phones and mp3 players were produced from bags. The girl sitting in front of Clyde started doodling a picture of a cat, it was a good doodle of a cat.
'And I am most certainly not an alien. Any inclination you may have had that I am an alien is simply a figment of your hungover imagination. Being a student is awfully tiring, isn't it? You should all go for a little nap.'
Around the lecture hall people folded their arms and rested their heads on their desks. Clyde felt his eyes getting heavy. God, he was knackered, he closed his eyes and let his head slip down onto Luke's shoulder.
Luke elbowed him sharply in the ribs. "Hey!" Clyde objected. Luke grabbed him by the arm and hustled him out past rows of slumbering and distracted students. Up the stairs and out of the building, out in the sunshine Clyde started to wake up, he blinked and shook his head trying to clear it.
"That was weird," he said.
"So you think he's an alien too?"
"Definitely an alien."
"What do we do now?"
Clyde looked at his watch. "We should have lunch."
000
"The weird thing is," Clyde said round a mouthful of cheese sandwich in the refectory, "that we've met aliens who wear people's skin and aliens who use holograms to look human. But this is the first time I've ever heard of an alien that bores you into not noticing it."
"I could ask mum about it," Luke suggested.
"No," Clyde had no doubt that Sarah Jane would be able to help but that wasn't the point. "This is the reason we came away to university Luke, to be independent."
Luke nodded, and then looked puzzled. "Then why do you take your washing home every weekend for your mum to do?"
"That's different."
"How's it different?"
"It just is," said Clyde sagely.
000
After some deliberations, a long lunch, a cup of tea, a trip to the campus shop to pick up a pint of milk for the flat then some more deliberations they decided that the first thing they needed to do was find out if any of the alien professors students were missing or had gone weird and tried to take over the world.
This meant a trip to the main office. Unfortunately at the start of the year Clyde and the woman in charge of the office had had a disagreement involving some unpaid tuition fees. Clyde's fees had actually been paid, UNIT was bankrolling his engineering degree on the condition that he joined after graduation. The thing was that when a cheque had arrived from a semi-secret military organisation some in the admin department had doubted that it was genuine. As a result the office manager wasn't Clyde's biggest fan and his attempts at charm went unheeded.
Even Luke's wide eyed naive charm didn't crack her stony heart so it was time for plan B, getting Luke to hack into the university computers using his laptop. Everyone on the third year English course was accounted for and none of them had done anything noticeably evil.
Clyde sighed and looked around the empty classroom where Luke had set up his laptop. "That was a dead end."
"What will we do now?"
"Let's go to the union for a pint."
"You want to go to go for a drink?" Clyde watched Luke frown as his amazing brain tried and failed to make the connection between an alien English lecturer and drinking in the student bar.
"I think the barman's an alien."
000
Clyde managed to keep the barman as a suspected extra terrestrial ruse up till halfway through his second pint. The trouble was that Luke had fallen for it a bit too successfully and kept asking the barman what planet he was from. And it would have been pretty funny had the barman not thought that Luke just had an unusual way of chatting people up and was flirting with him.
Clyde downed the rest of pint and headed determinedly over to the bar with the intention of suggesting to Luke that the two of them head to the cinema in town.
It wasn't, let's be clear, because he was jealous. It was just that Clyde was protective and Luke still didn't always understand the way of the world so the last thing he needed was the unwanted attentions of a barman with stupid hair and a nice bum.
As they left the bar Clyde glared at the barman. Out of protectiveness, he told himself, certainly not jealousy.
000
Clyde was making his way to the library to start an essay that could no longer be put off, mainly because it had to be handed in tomorrow, when his mobile rang. He glanced at the name on screen and flipped the phone open.
"Hi, Maria."
"One of my lecturers is an alien."
"Small world, so is one here."
"Does yours have tentacles and a penchant for eating the cleaning staff?"
"Em, no."
"Lucky you."
"Do you want me and Luke to come up and help?"
"That's okay. Sarah Jane is arriving this afternoon, we can handle it. What's your alien like?"
"Bright orange and he talks about Chaucer a lot."
"What does he lecture in?"
"Chaucer."
"Handy. And you and Luke, you haven't been chucked out of your flat yet?"
"Why would we have been chucked out?"
"You got chucked out of the student halls of residence during your first week."
"It wasn't out fault those aliens impersonated us and tried to eat the director of student housing!"
"Listen Clyde I'd better go, the battery in my phone's dying. Good luck with your alien lecturer, my love to Luke."
"Good luck with yours, say hello to Sarah Jane for me."
000
Luke was flicking casually through a textbook while Clyde corrected his coursework. This was a habit they'd gotten into after Luke had nearly been kicked out of school for cheating when he was the only person in the history of the school to get one hundred percent on the A-level physics exam. Now Clyde went through most of his coursework adding the odd convincing seeming mistake.
"I've been thinking," said Clyde, scribbling out some of Luke's genius and replacing it with something more realistic, "about that alien lecturer."
"Oh, I've been keeping an eye on him. No one who takes his course has gone missing and everyone who goes to his lectures comes out looking very well rested. I don't think he's dangerous."
"Of course he's not dangerous. If he was dangerous he'd be lecturing in something like Nuclear Physics or How to Rule the World by Hypnosis, not English. I still think we should go and have a word."
"Okay. Why?"
"Just so he knows that if he ever does try something fishy then team Langer and Smith are onto him."
000
The next morning Clyde drank three cups of coffee and two cans of red bull and was polishing off his third as he jittered along beside Luke on their way to the English department.
"I thought you didn't like the taste of red bull?"
"I don't," Clyde winced as he took a final swig from the can, scrunched it up and tossed it into a nearby bin. "But last time I heard this guy talk I didn't feel properly awake for hours. Which actually reminds me, how come you were only person awake in that lecture hall?"
"I found it interesting."
"You find everything interesting," Clyde somehow managed to make it sound like an insult.
The office they were looking for wasn't easy to find, it was at the very end of a seldom used corridor past several stationary cupboards, the student finance office and the janitors storage room.
They finally found the right office, Clyde knocked and the door was swiftly pulled open. The little orange professor looked at them, his tail wagged, that was weird.
"Students! Are you lost?"
"No, we're-"
His little orange face scrunched up in confusion, "are you students of mine?"
"No, I'm Clyde, I'm an engineering student. And Luke here is a student of, well, whatever he can get his hands on."
"We also catch aliens," Luke chimed in helpfully.
"Oh," the professor deflated, "you'd better come into the office."
The office consisted mainly of books. Books were stacked on shelves made of other books. There was a desk and chair but they also seemed comprised mainly of books.
"How did you know?" the professor asked.
"We're professionals," said Clyde.
"And you have a tail," said Luke.
"Ah, still I'm impressed. I've been on your planet for many years…"
That little subconscious voice was back, while the professor talked Clyde was aware of it at the back of his mind.
'Don't listen to me. I have nothing of interest to say. Don't listen to me, don't look at me. Oh, look, there's a bird outside the window.'
Clyde's distracted gaze landed on the offices lone window. Oh, there was a pigeon, two pigeons, two pigeons sitting in a tree. Luke elbowed him in the ribs interrupting Clyde's doze.
The professor was vigorously shaking his hand, then Luke's. "Oh, thank you, thank you," then they were hustled out of the office and the door was closed behind them.
Clyde turned to Luke, "I bet I stopped listening before you did."
000
"He's a refugee," Luke explained, while Clyde drank strong black coffee to try and wake himself up. "There was a war on his planet a century ago and he's been working here ever since."
"And no one's noticed that he's been here that long?"
"No one really notices him at all."
"Yeah, that's because he puts everyone to sleep," said Clyde.
"The vocal patterns of his species induce sleep in humans. That's interesting, isn't it?"
Clyde yawned in response.
"That combined with some low level telepathy to encourage people not to notice his appearance and he could hide here forever."
"He seems happy enough and it's not as though he's hurting anyone, I don't suppose there's any harm in it."
"I should go, I've got a lecture."
Clyde caught Luke's arm just as he was getting up to leave. "Let's go for a pint first, celebrate a job well done?"
000
Clyde's life had gone suddenly downhill and it was all the fault of exams, now he actually had to study, it wasn't fair, it wasn't what university was for. He couldn't even distract himself with TV because the telly in the flat had been stuck on the twenty four hour news channel ever since he and Luke had had to demolish the remote to deal with those robot librarians last week.
Something on the screen caught his attention, an explosion at a university up in Scotland. He was already reaching for his mobile when it rang, he didn't have to look at the screen to know who it was.
"Maria, you and Sarah Jane have just been on the news."
"That wasn't as much our fault as it might look like it was."
"So, I'm guessing there are no more aliens trying to take over your university."
"That's all taken care of."
"No one got hurt, did they?"
"Only the aliens who were snacking on the uni staff."
"Cool."
"How's it going with your alien lecturer?"
"Great, Luke's having lunch with him now." Both Clyde and Luke felt sorry for the professor, a hundred years with no one to talk to, and as Luke was the only person on campus who could sustain a conversation with him without falling asleep they'd been spending some time together.
"Having lunch?"
"Oh, yeah, he's really nice, and handy to have around if you're an insomniac. I'll introduce you when you come back down after exams."
"I haven't got exams this year, the library was the building that blew up."
"That's not fair. The library here hasn't blown up."
"I'll let you get back to studying for your exams. See you in a couple of weeks."
"See you then."
000
Clyde stuffed his textbooks into his bag, because carrying them around was practically the same as reading them and headed over to the union where Luke was supposed to meet him after his lunch with the professor.
Luke was already there when Clyde arrived and he'd got the drinks in. Clyde pulled his chair as close to Luke's as it would go and slung his arm around his shoulders.
"Luke Smith, my best mate, I have a favour to ask you."
"Yes."
"You know how you've been going to the lectures for courses you're not on?"
"Yes, you make fun of me for it."
"Yeah, about that, there's no chance you've gone to any of the first year engineering lectures is there?"