‘7,845,689,654,324,567,008,472,373,289,567,827.9,’ I replied.
‘I’m impressed!’ the Zamonium exclaimed. ‘I solved that problem by the power of thought alone, but I failed to come up with the 9 after the decimal point.’
‘Diabolic Elves are fissile organisms,’ I pontificated. ‘For instance, one elf can if necessary divide into ten little elves.’
‘Aha, interesting. Fifth question, subject Nightingalian macro-physics: What does the Septimal Theory state?’
‘The Septimal Theory states that the universe is comprehensible only in terms of the number seven, and only by those possessing seven brains. There are seven elements: fire, water, earth, air, Perponium, Zamonium, and Domesticated Darkness. The universe consists of seven regions: north, south, east, west, before, after, and home. These regions are divisible, in their turn, by the seven elements. If one takes the astral weight of the individual elements and divides them by the septimal mass of the planets and stars present in the seven regions, one arrives at a figure in which sevens alone occur. The Nocturnomathic brain recognizes seven sensations: inquisitiveness, love of darkness, scientific curiosity, the urge to communicate, intrepidity, hunger, and thirst. If one adds together the emanative frequency values recorded by those sensations on the Nightingalian auracardiogram and divides the total by the figure containing all the sevens, the result will be seven.’
‘Correct. Sixth question, subject Nocturnomathic philosophysics.’
Ugh! Nocturnomathic philosophysics! That was not only the most difficult branch of knowledge in the entire universe but the only one in which I was not overly proficient. A speculative mixture of philosophy and physics, it was really a subject for someone possessing more than one brain.
‘What is knowledge?’
‘Knowledge is night!’ The answer burst from me like a bullet from a gun. Man, oh man! It was the only principle of Nocturnomathic philosophysics that had stuck in my mind. Nightingale had bellowed it often enough in class.
‘Most impressive, most impressive. Nightingale left nothing out, it seems. In that case, my final poser shouldn’t present you with much of a problem. Question seven, subject dimensional hiatuses: What exactly is … genff?’
Hm, genff. I knew what it smelt like. I knew that it occurred at the entrance to dimensional hiatuses, too, but I didn’t know what it was.
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘Come on!’ cried Weeny. ‘You always know everything.’
Encyclopedia? Genff?
Nothing.
Genff?
Nothing.
Genffgenffgenff?
Still nothing. The same old story, just when I needed the confounded thing.
‘Don’t let it worry you, youngster,’ the Zamonium said consolingly. ‘I’d have made you all walk the plank in any case. I’m the Zamonium. I’ve no heart, no soul. I’ve even less of a conscience than the Troglotroll.’
‘I doubt that,’ the Troglotroll said in a low voice, but I heard him quite distinctly.
‘So why should I be bound by sentimental obligations that are detrimental to me? Did you think I had whole ships to give away? How very naive of you!’
I couldn’t repress the thought that the Zamonium was the most abominable creature I’d encountered anywhere in Zamonia in the course of a life that had brought me face to face with plenty of abominable life forms.
‘Thanks very much,’ said the Zamonium. ‘A touching farewell speech.’ And, to the others: ‘Bring them on deck. Sentence will be carried out forthwith.’
The Moloch was not, for once, swathed in her usual pall of smoke. The Zamonium had stopped all the engines and summoned his minions on deck, intending the entire crew to witness punishment in good visibility. Two Yetis appeared with the pillar that bore the Zamonium and set it up in a prominent position. A Yeti choir launched into the Zamonian national anthem, except that ‘Zamonium’ was substituted for ‘Zamonia’ and sundry other changes had been made to the original words:
All hail to thee, Zamonium,
all-powerful element.
However loathsome thy commands,
we never dare dissent.
The rest of the verses were even worse.
The Yetis removed the tarpaulin covers from some gigantic cannon and fired several pointless salvos in the air.
Then a black plank was manhandled over the rail.
‘This may strike you as a bit cheap,’ the Zamonium telepathized in our heads, ‘but I’m sentimental by nature. We could simply toss you overboard, but I find this more romantic.’
Knio was the first to be hustled out on to the plank. He showed no fear, I’ll give him that. Although I couldn’t see it from where I stood, I was only too familiar with the sight of the mass of snapping sharks that always seethed around the Moloch. To preserve one’s composure in the face of that threat was admirable in itself.
‘I’ll deal with the sharks, by Neptune’s trident!’ cried Knio. ‘And then I’ll come back and get you, Zamonium!’
I warmed to Knio for the first time.
‘Where are the Voltigorkian Vibrobassists?’ grumbled the Zamonium. ‘Every execution needs music!’
Three Voltigorks, each of them carrying a vibrobass, were thrust to the fore by Yetis and proceeded to tune their instruments. Weeny gave me a despairing glance. It seemed to be dawning on him that this was a predicament from which no amount of blathering could extricate him. But I was just as short of ideas.
‘When I give the word …’ snarled the Zamonium.
The Voltigorks struck up a monotonous military march on their vibrobasses.
‘… over the side with him!’
Two Yetis prodded Knio to the end of the plank with long, pointed boathooks. He drew a deep breath. A dog barked.
There weren’t any dogs on board the Moloch, only Vulpheads or other cross-breeds that had dogs or foxes in their ancestry but were too civilized to bark.
But a dog was definitely barking. A second dog uttered heart-rending howls, a third growled menacingly.
The Yetis looked around, thoroughly disconcerted.
Horses started whinnying, baboons screeching, lions roaring. And still the dogs continued to bark, hundreds of them. The sound was very muffled, as if all these animals were imprisoned in a large sack.
‘What’s wrong?’ demanded the Zamonium. Although unable to hear anything, it had registered the general bewilderment. A Yeti went up to the pillar, bent over the glass case, and telepathically informed the Zamonium of what was happening.
A wind sprang up and chased away the last wisps of smoke. The sky had grown dark, and the ship was hemmed in by fat-bellied storm clouds. We all looked up, for that was where the animal sounds were coming from, far louder even than before. Trumpeting elephants. Bellowing buffalo.
Howling wolves.
Hissing crocodiles.
Looming over the Moloch was a big, black cloud. No ordinary cloud – at least, not one that kept its due distance from the ship as such meteorological phenomena usually did. No, this one hovered barely fifty feet above the deck. It wasn’t condensed rainwater, being too dark and turbulent for that, nor was it smoke, because it maintained its position too steadfastly. Long black streaks seemed to be trying to escape from the vaporous mass and lash out in all directions. As they did so, they divided into ever thinner threads that writhed through the air like snakes. There was an endless succession of sharp reports as if hundreds of heavy rawhide whips were being cracked.
The air itself crackled with pent-up electricity. We could also hear a voice issuing what sounded like a peculiar series of orders. ‘Hey! Whoa! Giddy-up! Down you go!’
Everyone on board stared upwards as if hynotized. All interest in the execution had evaporated. The Zamonium was kept informed of developments by the Yeti bending over its glass case.
‘Hey! Down you go, I said!’
Slowly, by fits and starts, the black apparition sank still lower. I had never before seen anything as dark except
in Professor Nightingale’s laboratory.
It consisted, of that I was quite sure, of domesticated, concentrated darkness.
The cloud, which was now lying to starboard, sank so low that one could see its wavering surface.
The Nightingalator
Situated on top of the billowing black cloud was an intricate structure; more precisely, a little, miniaturized factory of bizarre design such as I had seen once before, but not in daylight: only a Nightingalator looked like that. And above it, strapped to a chair, sat Professor Abdullah Nightingale.
He was clearly finding it extremely difficult to keep the thing under control. The cloud bucked like a bronco, bouncing him around in his seat as he desperately manipulated various levers.
‘Zamonium!’ he yelled. ‘You’re surrounded! Give up!’
The cloud beneath him reared so violently, it would have thrown him had he not been strapped to his seat.
‘Nightingale!’ hissed the Zamonium. ‘So you actually dare to –’
‘It’s quite simple,’ Nightingale shouted above the din from inside the cloud of darkness. ‘Here are my terms. Surrender, and in return I’ll destroy you. Refuse, and it’ll be all the worse for you. Whoa there!’
He wrenched at the levers and turned a kind of steering wheel. The cloud quietened down a little.
The Zamonium gave a nervous laugh. ‘Huh, now you’re really scaring me! What is that contraption, one of your unperfected patents?’
‘I did it!’ Nightingale cried triumphantly. ‘Domesticated darkness! I owe you a debt of gratitude, my boy!’ He was now addressing me.
‘You were right that time in my laboratory, do you remember? You wondered whether the darkness was still unaccustomed to its new environment, and you hit the nail on the head. It became more and more tractable as time went by. It isn’t entirely docile even now, but after all, it is the most powerful form of energy in the universe. It needs running in a little more, that’s all.’
The cloud neighed and lashed out.
‘The animal voices were my idea,’ Nightingale explained. ‘The noises darkness really makes are utterly intolerable. I’ve controlled them with the aid of this Nightingalian transformer and converted them into animal cries. Classical music would be another possibility, but I always find it so depressing.’
‘I’m still the most powerful form of energy in the universe!’ the Zamonium insisted defiantly.
‘You’re nothing at all!’ yelled Nightingale. ‘You’re alchemically passé – just a conjuring trick gone wrong. I’ve come to consign you to the trash can of history.’
The Zamonium caught on. ‘So that’s what you’re after. You and I, brain against brain.’
‘Seven brains against one,’ Nightingale amended. ‘You go first.’
(Incidental remark. The following events cannot, unfortunately, be recounted by traditional narrative means. Nightingale and the Zamonium duelled with thoughts. They were no ordinary thoughts, of course, nor were they merely extraordinary. To call them brilliant or unique would be a disrespectful understatement. They were the most incredible shafts of wit ever hurled by the shrewdest and most powerful intellects on our planet. The ideas were so complex and abstract, so revolutionary, profound and earth-shaking, that a normal brain would at once have become unhinged if compelled to entertain a single one of them.
Nearly all those present on board the Moloch were shielded from them. The crew were still under the Zamonium’s hypnotic spell and could only think what suited it. Knio and Weeny were immune for well-known reasons. I alone had to withstand the full force of those ideas. That I didn’t go insane I attribute to having been infected with Nightingale’s intelligence bacteria, which had probably created a natural immune system.
To protect my readers I shall reproduce the two adversaries’ thoughts in a heavily encrypted form. I advise anyone unwilling to spend the rest of his days in a padded cell not to try to decipher them! I shall disclose this much and no more: they not only posed ultimate questions about the universe but answered them.)
Heavily encrypted version of the telepathic duel fought by Professor Nightingale and the Zamonium:
The Zamonium opened the proceedings.
The Zamonium was unimpressed.
My brain was smoking by now. The duellists’ ideas were almost unendurably profound, wide-ranging, and sublime.
I was just wondering how much longer I could stand it when I heard Nightingale’s encyclopedia voice in my head.
‘Listen, my lad,’ it whispered. ‘Walk slowly over to the Zamonium, then grab it and hurl it into the midst of the cloud of darkness. Being the most powerful source of strength in the universe, darkness will dispose of the confounded thing. The only trouble is, you mustn’t think of what you intend or what you’re doing. The Zamonium can’t see you, but it can hear you think. I can temporarily distract its attention, but I don’t know for how long.’
I don’t know what’s harder: to think the opposite of what you’re doing or do the opposite of what you’re thinking. It’s particularly hard when the opposite of what you’re doing is nothing, or when what you’re doing is the opposite of what you ought to be doing. I’ll try to rephrase that:
I had to spend the whole time thinking of standing still and doing nothing when I was really sneaking up on the Zamonium.
The Yeti guards were temporarily out of action. The Zamonium was too preoccupied with Nightingale to devote any attention to them, so they stood around like deactivated robots, gazing at the cloud of darkness.
Step by step, I drew nearer the Zamonium. I’d had a bright idea: I pictured a little drop of sweat running slowly down my spine while I (in theory) stood still and watched the duel. I positively became that drop of sweat, a tiny, salty globule of water threading its way through the fur on my back.
(One little step.)
I trickled over my neck muscles, negotiated two big tufts of fur, and reached the top of my spine.
(Another little step.)
Along the spinal column and down my back.
(Another little step.)
Uh-uh, a hair in the way. I rolled down it but left half my liquid content behind. Bisected, I trickled on.
(Another little step. Almost there now.)
Trickle-trickle … I’m a bead of sweat … just a bead of sweat …
(Another little step. Only a yard to go.)
A bead of sweat … A bead of sweat … A bead of sweat … My brain seized up. I was too agitated to think of a better idea.
(The last little step. I was there at last.)
‘Now!’ whispered Nightingale. ‘Now!’
‘Got you, you goddamned Zamonium!’
The thought that flashed through my mind was as big and bold as that – I couldn’t help it. The suppressed desire to convey my sense of triumph to the Zamonium proved too strong for me. It wouldn’t have happened if Nightingale hadn’t butted in. He’d spoiled my concentration.
The Zamonium reacted promptly. ‘Yetis, seize him!’
The element had analysed our plan like lightning and acted accordingly. ‘All ahead full!’
But I was too close already. I grabbed the glass dome, only to find that it was stuck fast. Simultaneously, five Yetis hurled themselves at me.
At that moment the engines restarted. Dense smoke belched from the funnels. The whole ship gave a violent lurch. The Yetis staggered a little but recovered at once and lunged at me again.
But they’d reckoned without Knio. There was going to be a fight – his Barbaric Hog’s brain had grasped that, and he didn’t want to stand around in idleness. He leapt off the plank and drove his thick skull into the first Yeti’s stomach.
‘Give it to him, Knio!’ Weeny yelled encouragingly.
Knio caught the Yeti by the foot and whirled him around like a club.
The other Yetis shrank back.
‘Wolpertingers!’ commanded the Zamonium. ‘Seize the bluebear!’
The Wolpertingers on deck awoke from their tran
ce, but the dense smoke made it hard for them at first to get their bearings.
‘Professor Nightingale!’ I shouted. ‘The glass case! I can’t get it off!’ ‘Stand aside!’ Nightingale called in his real voice.
I stood aside. The professor’s brains snapped and crackled as they had when he opened a can of sardines by willpower alone. The sound was clearly audible above the general commotion, chilling the blood of all who heard it. The glass dome started to vibrate and display hairline fissures. It gave a last, sharp crack, then broke in two.
I seized the Zamonium. It was cold as ice.
‘Nooooo!’ it bellowed in my head. ‘I command you to …’
I drew back my arm and hurled the element into the flickering darkness. It is almost impossible, in our inadequate linguistic medium, to describe what happened next. I’ll try, but I doubt if I’ll do it justice.
Inadequate description of an indescribable occurrence
The Zamonium disappeared into the pall of darkness like sugar into a cup of strong black coffee. At the same time, the voice in my head rose to a scream of such intensity that I feared my eyes might burst from their sockets. I clamped my forepaws over my ears, but that, of course, was futile.
All the other creatures on board were also stopping their ears. The cloud contracted with a sound like a truckload of bricks falling from the sky.
Then it expanded to ten times its original width, howling like a thousand watchdogs. For a while it retained that shape, a flattened black ball with shafts of lightning flickering over its surface.
At length it abruptly regained its original size and shape. There was a moment’s complete silence. The cloud seemed even to absorb the pounding of the Moloch’s engines. Then, rolling across the sea, came a cosmic belch such as not even a Megabollogg could have produced.
The scream in our heads died away.
The Zamonium had vanished.
The Moloch’s crew staggered around in bewilderment.
The Zamonium’s spell was broken.
The professor was riding his Nightingalator like a cowboy on a wild steer. The cloud of darkness was bucking and lashing out in all directions, even more violently and unpredictably than before. Nightingale excitedly manipulated his levers and controls but seemed almost incapable of influencing what was going on beneath him.