stood quietly assessing the three in front of her, but mostly Bb – then, deciding her best course of action was to listen rather than crush Bb in her rather short but very powerful looking arms. 'So, how might you be able to help me – and don't tell me you've broken all of this machinery to sell me a repair contract!'
'Oh, that's a good idea,' Bb replied, perking up at the sound of clear profits, then calming down again when he saw Change flex her biceps. 'Then again, maybe we should focus on how to have you re-instated in your old job.'
'My old job,' laughed Change. 'Why on Earth – pardon the pun, would I want that back again. No-one appreciated me in Wilderment. There was no time for Change – literally, so why would I want such a useless position back again?'
'Because we intend to bring Time back out of retirement and Wilderment will need Change again,' explained Permission.
'Ah, now that's an interesting proposal. How do you intend to do that then?' asked Change, tugging on one clump of particularly long straggly hair hanging down the side of her face.
'Well, that's where you come in,' said Shylock. 'You're going to help up clear up the balance of payments, return Wilderment to profit and restart Time, and you're also going to build up a whole pile of money.'
War averted
The development of their plan took a lot of negotiation back at Change's office – which was a disconcertingly flux-like environment, constantly changing in all manner of ways simultaneously - but eventually the details were agreed. Change already had the ants collecting coins from all over the world, and tr-ant-sporting (a slight stretch) them by ship from every contin-ant (alright so that's a bigger stretch) in huge container ships adapted for their use.
(So you don't understand how ships can be run by ants?
First they had to ant-icipate design problems which predomin-ant-ly related to the oper-ants themselves. Although superabund-ant in numbers, and able to lift many times their own weight, their lack of physical size me-ant that they had to use eleph-ants (the elephants didn't shrink as well as all other life forms – didn't fit in the reducers) and g-ant-ries for the heavy lifting. They worked so well together that it warr-ant-ed f-ant-astic celebrations every time a ship left the dry dock. The ships were so brilli-ant-ly reliable that they were warr-ant-eed for life. They of course used nuclear fuel as a propell-ant, as opposed to ant-imatter drives, which on Earth had not yet been invented. These vast ships steered their way round the globe using sext-ants of course.
Hope that helps.)
These ships were presently being used to gather the coinage of the world and to then create an arsenal in order to annihilate the Human race – after all, every decent story has an arch-criminal focussed entirely on world domination. In this particular case an Ant-isocial human dism-ant-ler – well, a few billion billion of them actually.
Now, the plan was for Change to continue collecting the coins – back taxes if you were from the Creator's office – but use the ants building skills to build a column high into the sky, one coin on top of another, higher and higher towards Lucy's diamonds in the sky.
Bb returned on the yellow and grey ethereal vessel to Wilderment, where he was to meet with Infinite resources Inc. and arrange for another portal – garden gate, probably the white one which had disappeared from the beach if you are still following the story. This gate was then to be constructed between Get Lucky and Lucy's diamonds - they would have gone for building towards somewhere closer to Earth but as the existing Gate on Earth had originally owned the majority of the coins, they considered avoiding him to be the way to go – you never know, he might have some plan to melt them down, produce miniature coins and then redistribute them to needy people or some such thing.
However, a quick calculation from Bb - who wished Jonathon were around at the time - had convinced everyone that if they kept building their coin-column upwards, there would be enough coins to do the trick.
The tricky part of the negotiation had been handled by Shylock in answer to the ants question – 'what's in it for us?'
After building the coin-column, and connecting it to Get Lucky through the portal, the ants were to head for Wilderment by climbing up the coin-column, with the last ant always lifting the last coin and passing it forwards to the ant in front. In this way they would eventually deliver all the Earth's coins to Get Lucky, clearing the back debt and returning Wilderment to a positive cash balance.
Permission returned to the department of Null Order and arranged a blanket immigration visa for the ants offering them permanent resident status – although this was not going to be popular with many of the left-wingers who believed that this would further exacerbate the financial crisis and increase the number of Wilderment inhabitants who were already unemployed. Others on the contrary thought that more people – ants in this case – would create more opportunity and taxes and so would be welcomed.
Shylock and Change initially remained on Earth helping the ants with their construction program. Together they also went back underground and extended the immigration offer to the amazonian ants who were more than willing to join in the building of the coin-column – very helpful as they were larger and altogether much stronger, although of course not as strong as the eleph-ants.
The elephants themselves were at first depressed with the thought that they would exist entirely on their own, until shylock explained the main advantage - no more building machinery and the whole Earth as their playground – no work and all play!
The column building only suffered one minor crisis when a few of the ants at the base of the growing coin-column had decided to start playing Jenga – quickly whipping out coins one at time while avoiding the column falling down. The first to knock down the coin-column being the loser. After being caught by Change, these very same ants were on the next ship to Cov-ant-ry! (with apologies to anyone from Coventry – yes, I do know how to spell it.)
Dr Roberts said that he would try to open a new dialogue within the World council and inform everyone that a World war had been averted – he doubted that anyone would pay any attention though – they were too busy debating democracy.
Back to the Beach
Rather than wait a fairly long time - actually an impossibly long time - for the coin-column to reach Lucy's diamonds, Shylock and Change returned on the next half-yellow transport to Wilderment and convinced Lizzy to take a detour, dropping them off at Get Lucky.
As they disembarked they were surprised to see Dilemma wandering around on the beach, and called to him asking what he was doing.
'Well,' he explained. 'When you have eliminated the possible, no matter whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
'So you know why there is no door in Get Lucky?' asked Shylock.
'Most definitely,' he replied confidently. 'You see, the door you came through was definitely there, after all, you came through it – but, it was an entrance. You've been looking for an exit, and that's an altogether different kettle of fish.'
'What have fish to do with it?' asked Change.
Shylock couldn't resist the opportunity and replied Dilemma could. 'Well let's not Skate around the issue, the exit would have to be some Plaice around here.'
Change only looked at him, but what a look it was.
'No need to get Crabby,' said Shylock, repressing a smile – only just again realising how worryingly influential Bb had been on him.
'So,' continued Dilemma. 'The answer to why there is no 'exit', is that there never was one in the first place.'
Shylock scratched the top of his head while considering this astounding insight from Dilemma. Change seemed quite happy with the answer and began humming, clearly not surprised in the slightest, which Shylock picked up on immediately.
'So, it was deliberate?' he accused.
'You just don't understand marketing, do you' replied Change. 'Rather excellent marketing. You really should talk to Bb.'
Tying the knots
Humans would no longer be threatened with extinc
tion, at least not by the ants anyway although they will surely come up with another method, they always do.
In the office of Null Order, Permission chaired a meeting with Time, Chaos, Birth and Death. New budgets were agreed, organisation charts drawn up – as opposed to drawn on, which could perhaps have been more fun - Time was reinstated and a messenger was dispatched to the Creator's office with the news.
Permission was given a new job title, befitting her new found usefulness – she became Permission and Safe Keeper, much as Nilrem had forecast. Fortunately for Permission, safe keeper didn't involve responsibility for the safe keeping of Wilderment's new found hard cash, it simply meant that she was responsible for keeping all safes, safe – a much less arduous task given the turn of events when they started discussion about cash flow.
It was clearly going to take some considerable time for the ants to deliver Earth's back taxes via the coin-column, and Change in the short term still needed to be funded, so a new department was created – some considerable debate took place to choose the most appropriate name – a Special Operations body (S.O.B), or the Intra-Regulatory Authority (IRA, but discounted as already in use), or possibly Financial Internal Budgetary Services (FIBS), eventually settling on the Department-of-no-kash-yet (DONKY). A nice honest name suggested by the Inequitable Revenue Services Department, and if the