Mysterious noises keep waking up the Wimbledon family. ‘That’s very odd,’ says Mr Wimbledon each time, but when he returns from checking on the sounds, he’s always reassuring: ‘It’s only Stanley; he’s fixing the oil tank.’ ‘It’s only Stanley; he’s clearing the bathtub drain.’ But what Stanley the dog is actually doing while his oblivious family goes back to bed is deliciously absurd: he’s turning the house into a rocket ship to zoom himself and his family to another planet for an alien encounter.