‘Don’t forget this,’ Mungo plucked up the sprout and tossed it after them.
The boardroom door sealed and Mungo rubbed his palms together. ‘I think that went remarkably well.’
Fergus Shaman shook his head doubtfully. ‘I really must protest. You are going about this all the wrong way. It will end in disaster.’
‘You would rather make the trip yourself, then?’
Fergus shifted uneasily. ‘I’m not saying that. But blowing him up ... something might go wrong.’
‘The thing that worries me,’ said Lavinius Wisten, ‘is the fact that he never asked once whether the mission was dangerous.’
‘He trusts us.’
‘It will end in tears,’ said Fergus.
‘And another thing,’ Wisten continued, ‘that sprout, he cottoned on to what was on the go a bit fast. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could kick him.’
Mungo nodded vigorously. ‘Now on that we are both agreed. I think we will have a little surprise waiting for friend sprout when he gets back.’ He made knife and fork motions with his fingers. Fergus leapt to his feet. ‘You can’t do that. The Time Sprout is a marvel of horticultural science. It will open up new vistas, whole new worlds.’
‘It is a loose end,’ said Mungo Madoc in no uncertain tone, ‘and it will go down a treat, lightly boiled with just a dash of melted butter.’
Fergus Shaman buried his head in his hands and wept bitterly
As the lift slithered obscenely down the yielding membrane tube, Jovil Jspht made little clicking sounds with his tongue and popped his fingers. It was true that he hadn’t touched upon the possible dangers of the mission. But this was simply because he hadn’t even given them a moment’s thought. Far greater issues were at stake here. And anyway, how could anything possibly go wrong? He had become the Chosen One. The Saviour of the Series. The Man with the Mission!
And Jovil already had the whole thing planned out. He would return to the 1950s and sort out this Presley character, put him on the right track. There was no real problem there surely. And even if there was, he could always bung Presley the little black box, let him go and see for himself the mess he’d got everyone into. No problem. After all, he had no intention of using the black box himself. Once the Presley business was out of the way, he meant to get down to the real task at hand. The revitalization of the series! His own personal rewrite of the script!
Jovil did a big ear-to-ear job. And all set in the 1950s, it couldn’t have worked out better if he had planned it himself. His very favourite period in Earth history. The golden age of science fiction. Forbidden Planet, Them, The Quatermass Experiment. Those were the days. The skies were full of UFOs, and every secret research establishment had a radioactive mutant skeleton in its cupboard. It was just perfect.
He’d give the Phnaargian viewing public something they would long remember. The rating topper to end all rating toppers. He could already see the blurbs.
Mankind faces its greatest ever threat.
Spawn of the nuclear age . . . Born of
the Bottomless Pit ... can nothing
stop . . .
THE KILLER MAGGOTS
FROM THE EARTH’S CORE???
This was no accident of fate, no mere chance or coincidence. He had been singled out for this. It was Divine intervention.
‘Thank you, thank you, God of all the Phnaargs,’ chirruped Jovil Jspht, pressing his thumb and forefinger to his nose and making the sacred squeeze. ‘Thank you very much.’
Above and beyond all this, the deity in question examined the spot on the tip of his holy hooter in a shaving mirror the size of a billion galaxies. ‘You’re a ripe-looking little blighter,’ he said.
7
All the world is just a stage and all the men and women merely players.
Elvis Presley
Rex Mundi peeped out of the discarded bio-hazard drum where he had taken up temporary residence. He saw Rambo Bloodaxe kick the rear of the in-town runabout. He saw Rambo Bloodaxe kick the rear of Deathblade Eric and finally he saw Rambo Bloodaxe kick at the rear of a six-legged moggy, miss and fall heavily to the oily sod. Rex stifled a snigger and felt himself for probable fractures. He appeared to be in remarkably fine fettle, all things considered. His radiation suit was somewhat charred, but its heat-resistant inner lining had spared him a roasting. His weather-dome was badly cracked, though, and the rancid stench of the outside world was all too apparent to his recently-rooted nostrils.
Through the dome’s blackened glass Rex watched Eric help his chum up from the dirt. The two Devianti gazed bitterly up and down the ruined highway. Threw up their arms, cursed profusely and slouched into the Hotel California. Breathing as shallowly as possible, the lad in the toxic drum considered his lot. It wasn’t much of a lot. He had a rough idea as to which ‘major redevelopment area’ he was in, and it was a long hike from Nemesis Bunker. And although he was hidden, he was still inside the grounds of the Devianti headquarters, which was no cause for immediate merriment. The area might well be guarded by any number of fiendish devices. Sonic wave press-pads that could shake a man’s brains down his nostrils before he even realized that he had been rumbled. Invisible laser-mesh fencing, one step forward and you were diced meat. Rex’s imagination rose to new heights of improbability. He was in deep trouble here and no mistake. He gave his chronometer a bit of perusal. It was jammed at two-thirty p.m. which meant that at the very most he had an hour before darkness fell and the night rains began. And God knows what came out to feed. He was in an unholy mess and no mistake about it.
Rex had never had a lot of truck with religion. The pre-packaged theology beaming endlessly from the terminal screens seemed to him just a trifle unconvincing. Whether he was alone in this or whether the entire viewing public shared his doubts, Rex had no idea. Perhaps he was the last atheist. If so, then God was about to be well chuffed.
‘Dear old God,’ prayed Rex Mundi. ‘Please get me out of here.’
It had been considered essential by Mungo Madoc that Jovil’s departure towards the 1950s be accompanied by the correct amount of fuss and bother. Or the least as much as could be inexpensively mustered up during the few short hours it took to copy the archive footage of Elvis’s sorry last years and program them into a portable monitor. Thus the board hobbled together certain new orders of merit and scrolls of honour from what immediately came to hand. These were solemnly presented to the would-be time traveller with much due reverence and many a hearty hand-clap.
The actual send-off was a somewhat private affair, Jovil’s offer to have the entire event broadcast live across Phnaargos being politely, yet firmly, declined. Amidst thunderous applause he climbed on to the boardroom table, sprout in one hand, black box in the other, portable monitor and packed lunch in a jaunty knapsack slung across his shoulders.
‘In order that this momentous occasion be long remembered,’ quoth the young buffoon. ‘I have prepared a short speech.’ Beneath their smiles the executive board ground its collective teeth. ‘For such a cause I go fearlessly backwards.’ Jovil gestured with his box-bearing hand, which had the board clutching at their failing hearts. ‘Mere words cannot express my gratitude for your having chosen me to go upon this mission. Thus I will let my deeds speak for themselves.’
The dangerous ambiguity of this escaped the board, who sought successfully to drown out the remainder of his speech with further thunderous applause.
‘Then I go.’ Jovil raised the Time Sprout above his head and stuck a noble pose.
‘You do indeed, chief,’ the sprout added. And indeed he did.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Mungo Madoc, tapping his trowel of office upon the table top, ‘gentlemen, we are in big schtuck here.’ Executive heads bobbed up and down in agreement. At the far end of the table Diogenes ‘Dermot’ Darbo said, ‘Yes, indeedy.’
‘Viewing figures have now sunk to a point beneath which the . . .’ Fergus Shaman turned the first page of his minutes and viewed with great interest the words
he had but minutes before penned upon them. They came as something of a revelation to him.
It had been his conviction at the time, now amply proven, that upon the sprout’s departure into the past all memories of it here in present would be instantly erased. After all, if the sprout was in the 1950s then the year 2050 had yet to occur, or something like that. It was all extremely complicated and Fergus didn’t pretend to understand the most part of it. This was only an initial experiment and its full potential had yet to be realized. But so far he appeared to be correct. He scanned the pages of notes and nodded in silent satisfaction.
Mungo for his part, continued with the speech, which unknown even to himself, he had previously made several hours before. Fergus listened to it with interest. But the more the speech unfolded the more an un-comforting thought began to nag Fergus. And the more it nagged the more Fergus tried to reason with it. But the more he reasoned with it, the louder and clearer did it nag. ‘If the mission to 1958 had been a success,’ nagged the thought, ‘and the series successfully revived, then this meeting shouldn’t be taking place and Mungo shouldn’t be saying all the things he is still saying. So therefore the mission can’t have been a success. In fact something must have gone disastrously wrong.’
‘Oh dear,’ thought Fergus Shaman, ‘oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’
A cold bead of lime green perspiration crept from his hairline across his forehead and down to the end of his nose. Here it captured the light of Rupert and shone like a rare jewel. What on Earth had happened?
Elvis Aron Presley, the man and the legend, looked upon all that he had made and found it good. The King of Rock and Roll raked his manicured fingers through his magnificently greased coiffure and adjusted his quiff. Just so. ‘Uh, huh,’ said he, winking lewdly into the rhinestoned shaving mirror. ‘Mighty fine.’
The time was a little after nine of the evening clock. The evening in question being that of the twenty-third of March, the year being 1958. Just twelve hours before Elvis would take the draft, join the army, chuck away his credibility and take that first big step towards a terrible end. But for now he was young, snake-hipped, gifted and sublimely rich. Elvis smiled crookedly in the manner that had weakened the knees of an entire generation of American girldom. Not a dry seat in the house, as one wag most tastefully put it. Curled his lip and confirmed that everything was, ‘Mighty fine.’
But then it happened. The impossible, the unthinkable . . . the noble brow crumpled with anguish, the handsome features were clouded, the sensual mouth gaped in horror. It couldn’t be ... it couldn’t . . . The King’s eyes focused, blinked, refocused. He leant forward, gazed with undisguised fear and loathing at the terrible sight made flesh before him.
There was a zit on his chin!
Elvis fell back from the mirror and sank blubbering into a gold lame guitar-shaped lounger. Twelve hours away from the cameras of the world’s press and this. He’d have to cancel. He couldn’t face his public with a hideous pus-filled bubo hanging off his famous face. He groped for the house phone, there was still time for surgery; his personal skin specialist was downstairs in the medical wing.
There was a bang. It was small by many standards but quite to the point. Elvis was blasted backwards from his lounger, his monogrammed slippers spiralling away upon separate trajectories. Horrid garish fixtures and fittings, all of which will remain undescribed to spare the reader, rocked and tumbled, many mercifully breaking beyond all hope of repair. Several unopened sacks of fan-mail burst asunder to fill the room with a papery snowstorm. You’d better not mess with the US mail, my friend.
Jovil Jspht rose to his feet, coughing and spluttering. ‘Hello there,’ he called. ‘Mister Paisley, I bring you greetings from a distant star. Mister Paisley, are you there? Hello?’
The board meeting at Earthers Inc. finally broke up amidst the usual turmoil of accusation, recrimination, acrimony and general beastliness. Suggestions had been forthcoming from the board but Mungo wasn’t impressed. He gave them a single day to come up with something positive, or avail themselves of a pair of heavy boots and a manure shovel.
Fergus edged away down the corridor and made for the archives. He had to know what had happened. If anything actually had. It was possible that the sprout hadn’t made it back to 1958. It was possible that the whole thing was a delusion. It was possible that he was going out of his mind.
Fergus pressed his palm to the security panel, the door retracted and merged with the living wall. Fergus passed into the wonder world which constituted the beating heart of Earthers Inc. and indeed the very planet. The complex was vast. Even though Phnaargian horticology sought ever towards the miniaturization of data storage, the task of reseeding millions of previous episodes was one too costly and gargantuan even to contemplate. The cellular pods, housing the countless centuries of human history, down to the most personal detail, spread away into hazy perspective. Rising to every side in shimmering spires. Billions of brightly shining globes blossoming one upon another. Pulsing gently, maintained at a constant temperature and lovingly tended by numerous minions, trained from birth to know no other life. Organic walk-ways flowed between the spires merging into one another.
Fergus rode down the central throughway. Here and there he passed the minions, long of beard and wild of eye. Each was dedicated to some particular year, month, day or hour, dependent upon their grade. They never conversed with one another and they paid not the slightest heed to Fergus. As he drifted downstream towards 1958, Fergus pondered upon the wonder of it all. But as that soon gave him a headache he pondered no more.
The year in question rose up before him and Fergus stepped from the throughway to enter its core. Light flowed into it in many coloured shafts, knifing down between the shimmering globes. Ridley Scott would have been very much at home. Ahead, seated before his console with his back to Fergus and the coming and going amidst the light show, was the year’s custodian.
‘Good day.’ Fergus affected a cheery smile. Getting anything out of these lads was always a serious struggle. ‘I really must apologize to you for this rude interruption. But something of a most serious nature has come up.’ The custodian ignored him. ‘Hmm.’ Fergus crept slowly forward and lightly tapped the gent upon his padded shoulder. ‘If I might just trouble you for a moment.’
The custodian turned slightly in his chair and then slid gracefully from it to assume an uncomfortable twisted posture upon the floor. His eyes looked up at Fergus but they saw nothing. The custodian was quite dead. A feeling of terrible panic welled up within Fergus as he knelt to examine the corpse. Its fingers were charred and the hair stood up upon the crown of its head. Electrocuted? Circuit malfunction? Static overload? Fergus rose to view the console screen. To his horror the graphics spelt out the very date he had come to review. And across the centre of the screen big red letters flashed on and off. They read:
ACCESS DENIED.
ALL FURTHER 20TH CENTURY DATA IS NOW BEING ERASED.
FAILSAFE IN OPERATION.
DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL.
8
A good performance is more important than life itself.
Iggy Pop
‘Surely you can get something.’ Ms Vrillium’s hatchet nose sliced the air. ‘Those air cars cost a packet. What was the last report he made before he went off-screen?’
Maurice Webb, who was quite new to this kind of thing and who had only got the job because word of his remarkably large willy had reached the ear of the female operations manager, scratched at his groin and looked worried.
‘We had his final report at-’ he tapped at his terminal ‘-two o’clock, the name of Rogan Josh and a request that twenty-seven credits be placed in his account. He called in from the car park of the Tomorrowman Tavern.’
‘And then?’
‘And then he flew north for about five kilometres and apparently struck some overhead powerlines.’
‘Which weren’t logged into the in-car computer.’
‘Apparently not.?
??
‘And why might that be, do you think?’
Maurice cringed. ‘Lack of interdepartmental co-operation perhaps. I haven’t been able to identify the culprits as yet.’ Ms Vrillium cracked her knuckles meaningfully. ‘But,’ Maurice went on, ‘I wasted no time. I immediately dispatched two search vehicles to seek out the wreckage and any possible survivors.’
‘Very good.’ Ms Vrillium patted the young man on the shoulders. ‘Very fast thinking.’ ‘Yes,’ Maurice agreed. ‘I thought so.’
Ms Vrillium smiled. The effect upon Maurice was very much what it had been upon Rex. ‘And these search vehicles, they have the location of the powerlines programmed into their guidance systems, I trust.’
‘Ah,’ groaned Maurice, Webb. ‘Now that you come to mention it. . .’
Rex heard the sounds of the approaching craft. He peeped from his toxic hideyhole and saluted the murky heavens. ‘Bravo God.’ called Rex. ‘You don’t waste a lot of time, do you?’
The two explosions came fast upon one another. A double mushroom cloud rose beyond the Hotel California. Rex Mundi, the noted atheist, took to his heels. He climbed into the cab of the Deviantis’ in-town run-about, jiggled the joystick, thrummed the controls and made a very well orchestrated getaway.
Deathblade Eric and Rambo Bloodaxe, galvanized into action by the sounds of more falling fodder, issued from the hotel just in time to see Rex making off with their car. Rambo kicked himself in the ankle.
‘Fair gets a fellow’s dander up, does this,’ he observed as he hopped about.
‘It surely do,’ his companion agreed, ‘it surely do.’
Merrily he rolled along. Rex whistled station ditties as he steered his way between this and that, and around the other. Luck, if not God, seemed for once to be actually on his side. The two approaching craft, he rightly surmised, had been sent out by the station in search of his remains. As they had met with a fate similar to his own, it seemed reasonable to assume that the crash hadn’t been his fault. He wasn’t going to get the blame for blowing up one of their precious air cars. In fact he would probably be able to claim some kind of compensation. The situation held all manner of engaging possibilities. Once he was safe back at Nemesis, of course.