by Adam Roberts
His gut-pain was relentless. With enormous effort Robert lifted his left hand to his tummy; everything there was wet and warm. He rested his hand and his middle finger flopped into a cavity. It was the bullet hole. It didn’t hurt Robert to put his finger into his own wound – at least, it didn’t hurt him any more than he was hurting anyway; since he was hurting an immense amount. But it was weird to feel his finger waggling inside his stomach, to feel the thickly ragged rim around this unnatural addition to his body’s holes. He could feel on his finger the pulsing wash of blood coming out of his body. He was crying. Real, hot baby tears were coming out his eyes. It was so unfair! The pain just kept on and on. He kept expecting it to diminish, for the edge to go off it, even if only a little bit. But it just ground away and ground away. There was no appeasing it. Please, he begged, although he was not sure whom he was begging. Please just let me pass out.
He passed out once again.
26
But it didn’t do him much good though, because he came-to again. Although he had been unconscious for fifteen minutes, it felt to him as if there had been no passage of time.
The pain was still intense, agonising, and the thirst was worse. He felt dizzier, more distant. This was no good at all. This was not in the slightest bit good. He tried to contract his muscles, to drag himself across the floor – with no clear idea at all where he was going – but his muscles flat refused to obey him. The whole cosmos had shrunken to the radiating, pulsing agony of his gut. his gut.
More voices. It took him longer to work out who was speaking. The female voice was Sophie. He knew that. There was a male voice as well. It sounded familiar, but he could not place it at once. Then it clicked, in between throbs of agony. The policeman! What was he called? Tash – Tash – that was it. The police had come!
Robert felt a surge of hope in his shuddering heart. They police would arrest Sophie. They would get him medical attention – blood transfusion – morphine.
He tried to tune in to what was being said.
‘. . . don’t know where the priest came from,’ Sophie was saying. ‘The last thing I knew he was unconscious in Teabag’s house.’
‘He regained consciousness in the ambulance,’ came Tash’s voice. ‘According to the report we heard. He insisted they stop, that he get out. Then he came straight here.’
‘I had to shoot him, I’m afraid,’ said Sophie.
‘Of course.’
‘I apologise.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Tash. Both the voices were much closer to Robert’s location now. ‘This one here – he might just as well have shot two men as one.’
Somebody was taking Robert’s hand, lifting it and curling the fingers around a cold, hard, angular object. A gun! Somebody was putting a gun in his hand!
He struggled to lift the gun and fire, but his muscles felt nerveless, dead. The hand was laid down on the floor.
‘We’ve the fingerprint evidence, and the shooter,’ Tash was saying. ‘Our wild goose chase with the bug exterminator gave you enough time to extract the secret of the code from these three. So we located Sauna-Lurker’s secret stash.’
‘Am I to be included in the investigation?’ Sophie’s voice asked. She sounded closer. As if she and Tash were now standing over Robert’s body.
‘No, I don’t think there’s any need for that. You’d better get this Mona Eda painting out of the country. Diplomatic bag. We’ll pick up the loose ends, my dear, don’t worry about that. I returned to Gallery – I heard shots downstairs – I came down to find that Donglan had killed Teabag and Hook, but that Teabag got him with one shot before dying.’
‘And the ballistics . . . ?’
‘The ballistics people are Conspiratus too. Most of the City of London Police are. It’s like the Masons. This, after all, is the ancient City of the Fish. If people would only look at the map of the City they’d realise that!’ He chuckled to himself. ‘No, Mademoiselle Nudivue, I wouldn’t worry about that. The report that comes out of ballistics will match any story we choose to make up.’
‘Then we’re done here,’ said Sophie.
‘I think we are.’
‘Poor fellow,’ said Sophie, after a slight pause. ‘He really had no idea.’
‘How close did he come to the secret?’ Tash asked. ‘Did he divine the location of the Holy Grail?’
‘The Fram Trench? The deepest portion of the Arctic ocean, over seven thousand meters deep and almost wholly unexplored by man? No,’ said Sophie. ‘Teabag and he were still thinking only in metaphorical terms. “The Madonna is the grail”, “the female principle is the grail”, that sort of thing. It really didn’t occur to them to think not only literally but on the largest scale . . . a container for fluid, yes – one that contains a whole sea! A container in which God lives . . . literally so, for the city of the Holy Cod is located there, thousands of square miles of underwater city, in which the greater pressures of the deepest ocean is moderated by advanced Cod technology to allow the civilisation of the Master Species to live their comfortable, transcendent lives. The true Holy City! The incomprehensible urbus! Humans will continue to look either for a cup, or something symbolic. The grail-shaped ocean depression in the Oceanus Hyperboreus is too obvious for them.’ She sighed. ‘I almost feel sorry for them.’
‘No need to feel sorry for them,’ said Tash. ‘They’re all dead.’
Sophie laughed at this, and Tash joined her. Most unpleasant, really. Uncalled for.
It was the laugher that did it. Waves of almost overwhelming exhaustion, pain and nausea coursed through Robert’s agonised body; but he felt his willpower condense into a sparky point in his breast.
There was a tingling in the otherwise paralysed muscle of his arm. The two of them were still talking.
‘Have you had a chance to explore this little cache of hidden items?’ the man was asking.
‘Yes. In the quarter of an hour that it took you to arrive I had a good look around.’
‘Is there any other incriminating material? Anything else we ought to remove to the Conspiratus head-quarters in Avignon?’
‘Not really. Apart from the Mona Eda itself. And a notebook in which Eda Vinci seems to have spelled out the true nature of the Conspiratus itself . . . very rash of her. But nothing else apart from those two things. And once we’ve removed those two items there will be no evidence here of the true nature of the C.O.D.’
Robert was exerting himself as he had never exerted himself before. Although almost no part of his body moved, it took every scrap of willpower he possessed. He strained. His right forearm contracted minutely. The pain in his gut continued to rage.
‘And where are those two items?’
‘I put them over by the door. I’ll get them in a minute. Or do you want to get your Sergeant to transport them to a safe house for the rest of the night?’
‘No, the Sergeant is a regular policeman. Not a part of the Conspiratus. I told him to wait in the car, to call for backup. We don’t want him to see any of this material.’
Robert heaved again, and his forearm muscle contracted a little more. The weight of the gun increased in his hand as he lifted it millimetres off the floor.
‘Then I shall take those two items myself,’ said Sophie, her voice close by Robert’s right. ‘It would certainly not do for them to become generally known.’
‘Yes, take them away,’ said the policeman. ‘We must at all costs ensure that non-Conspiratus people do not stumble upon them.’
There was the slightest scraping noise, as the stock of the pistol dragged gently against the floor. Robert had managed to swivel the gun in his hand through ninety-degrees, so that it was now pointing upwards.
‘I say, Sophie,’ said Tash, putting in his own personal entry for inconsequential last words. ‘Are you sure he’s actually d—?’
The pistol fired once, twice, three times. The recoil snapped painfully back against Robert’s angled wrist, but he hardly felt it. His grip on the gun wobbled a
nd he almost let it slip, but he was just able to recover it and fire again a fourth, a fifth, a sixth time. With each shot the gun jolted and repositioned itself, effectively spraying the space above him with six different trajectories.
There was a pause.
Then there were two thuds, one to Robert’s left and one to his right, such as might be made by two bodies hitting a stone floor.
Robert let the gun go. The urge to fall asleep was impossible to resist. As he slipped into unconsciousness, uncertain whether the thudding he could hear was the sound of footsteps coming down the staircase or a migraine-like banging inside his own skull, he thought he could smell – impossibly – the smell of something . . . fishlike . . .
1 [Publishers note: we wish to inform the public that we urged the author, Don Brine, to remove the phrase ‘ejaculated Teabag’ from his manuscript and replace it with ‘said the Baronet in a wholesome manner entirely free from surreally obscene overtones’. Mr Brine declined to follow our advice, and in the subsequent long-drawn out lawsuit the Judge found in his favour. The text of the famous ‘ejaculated Teabag judgment’ is available at www.ejaculatedteabag.com]
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter Twelve - THE END
Chapter Two - THE DIMENSIONS OF THE TARDY
Chapter One - THE INTERVIEW
Chapter Four - THE DOOM OF THE ICETANIC
PROLOGUE
Chapter Seven - THE DR RE-UN-DEGENERATES
Chapter Three - THE TIME GENTLEMEN’S CONVENANCE
Chapter Six - THE SLUTTYTEENS
Chapter Nine - BETRAYAL !
Chapter Five - THE NEAR MAGICAL DISAPPEARANCE OF THE WATER INTO THE TARDY TOWELS
Chapter Eight - THE DOOM OF THE HELL-MET WOMAN
Chapter Ten - THE GENESIS, DEUTERONOMY AND BOOK OF TOBIT OF THE GARLEKS
Chapter Eleven - ‘MEET ME— ET!
SPECIAL OFFER! SPECIAL OFFER! SPECIAL OFFER!
THE MONSTERS OF DR WHOM
PREAMBLE
The extraterrestrial pointed his oddly-shaped weapon at the Dr. ‘This is the end,’ he said. ‘This is goodbye forever, Doctor! No longer shall your kind oppress the Galaxy with your terrible grammatical correctitude—’
‘—ness,’ corrected the Dr, in a small voice. Even though he had his arms up, and a gun pressed against his chest, he couldn’t help it.
‘You die now!’ screeched the infuriated ET.
‘Don’t be so sure!’ said the Dr, defiantly. ‘You’ll find I’m harder to kill than you might assume . . .’
‘Not this time, Doctor. Do you see what I’m holding in my hand? It’s a TGV. Oh yes.’
‘No!’ gasped the Dr, his face paling. By which I mean, becoming more like a paling. You know: thinning, and acquiring the metallic sheen of terror. ‘A Time Gentleman Violator? But those weapons are outlawed by the convention of—’
‘Outlawed, yes,’ agreed the ET. ‘Despised and condemned by all civilised people in the Galaxy. And why? Because they are deadly to Time Gentlemen! The only weapon that bypasses your infuriating ability to re-un-degenerate yourselves at the moment of death!’ The ET laughed. It would be a cliché to say he laughed maniacally. A cliché, but nevertheless true. He laughed like a maniac; a little green spacealien maniac. His laughter was mainy. Maniac-like. Manicalesque. Then he spoke: ‘Oh the adventures I had! The money I have spent! The crosses I have doubled! And all to obtain this little weapon - and to arrange matters such that I could be here, now, able to point it at you, Doctor, and pull—this—trigger.’
‘I still don’t see,’ said the Dr, ‘how you were able to trace me here?’
‘You don’t see?’ said the ET. ‘Why, you have a traitor aboard your TARDY, dear Doctor! One of your companions has betrayed you!’
‘No!’ the Dr gasped, spinning about to stare at the two of us. ‘One of you two? But I trusted you! I showed you the galaxy! And you betrayed me . . .?’
We were too shocked to reply.
‘Only one of them betrayed you, Doctor,’ said the ET. ‘Now I could tell you which one . . . but, you know what? I think I prefer to kill you without letting you know! I like the idea of you going to your ultimate death with that little irritant nagging in your brain.’
‘Wait—’ the Dr cried, starting forward, his hands raised before him. ‘You mustn’t—you couldn’t—you daren’t—’
The ET pressed the muzzle of his weapon close up against the Dr’s chest, so as to be quite sure there was no chance of the shot going wide.
He pulled the trigger and the hideous weapon discharged. Its explosive bolt of time-energy crashed catastrophically into the Dr’s torso.
‘You dared!’ the Dr gasped, staggered back. ‘You could!’
‘I musted,’ said the ET, triumphfully. ‘I did must.’
‘I’m dying,’ the Dr rasped. ‘Quick . . . loosen my tie . . .’
‘No!’ cried Linn, rushing to the supine form of the Dr. ‘It cannot be!’
‘It can, it are,’ said the ET. ‘And now, after I am shot you in the body, I shall be off. The blow has been struck! We can stick our temporal apostrophes - or indeed, apostrophe’s - where-ever the Punc we like! The tyranny of grammar is at an end! I is leaving.’ And so the ET, having fatally injured the Dr, walked back to his unconventionally shaped time-and-space ship, stepped inside and closed the door behind itself. A moment later the craft shimmered and faded from existence.
And we were stranded with a dead Dr.
Behind us, in the recesses of the room, strange monstrous forms of life writhed and seethed in their green-lit tanks.
Well.
Or maybe it didn’t happen quite like that. But I think I’ve captured the gist of it.
Oh, I’m sorry? Did you want more than the gist?
Chapter Twelve
THE END
‘Well,’ said the Dr, standing at the control panel. ‘Everything seems to have worked out alright in the end. Again!’
I snuggled into the arms of my new love; and she snuggled into mine. Not to put too fine a point on it, we snuggled into one another’s arms. It was snug. ‘I never thought I’d see this day, Doctor,’ I said. ‘I truly believed that my happiness boat had sailed. That my happiness rocket had blasted off into orbit without me in the cockpit. That the happiness tortoise has crawled off just out of my reach.’
‘Can I drop you two lovebirds anywhere?’ the Dr asked. ‘It’s on my way.’
‘How do you know it’s on your way,’ my beautiful partner asked, from the cradle of my arms, ‘if you don’t know where we want to go?’
‘Everywhere’s on my way,’ said the Dr. ‘That’s the beauty of a craft like the TARDY.’
‘It almost feels,’ I said, ‘too good to be true! It’s almost as if it’s too good for me to believe it.’
‘Tush,’ said the Dr. ‘Don’t say that.’
Oh it seemed like the happiest of happy endings! But in my heart, inside that heart, in the heart inside my heart, I knew that it wasn’t. I knew that it was something the reverse. ‘There’s the outstanding matter of the hydrogen atom . . .’ I said, prompted by my nagging conscience.
‘The hydrogen atom,’ repeated the Dr nodding sagely.
‘The hydrogen atom?’ asked my love. ‘Singular case?’
‘Yes. There’s only one, apparently,’ I said.
‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,’ said the Dr. ‘Don’t worry about it. As we stand, we’ve ridden the cosmos of an unspeakable evil. We’ve sorted out your love life. We’ve averted what seemed like inevitable destruction. I think we can afford to cut ourselves a little slack.’
‘Take us to the star Thpops,’ I said; ‘and the world Tapov, where the dancing never ends. Take us both there so that we can get on with the rest of our lives!’
The Dr touched the panel. ‘With the greatest of pleasure. ’
And so we hurtled through time and space. But like I said; appearances can be deceptive, and a happy ending n
eed not, perhaps, be so happy as all that.
Chapter Two
THE DIMENSIONS OF THE TARDY
The TARDYis bigger on the inside than on the out. That is, of course, the fact that anybody who has seen the Dr’s craft remembers about it. But few people think through the implications of this state of affairs.
For example: toilets. The smallest room in a TARDY is actually, of course, the biggest room. Going to the loo involves sitting on a porcelain pan in the middle of an empty aircraft hangar. Breezes moan and whisper in the rafters. The toilet paper chitters and flaps in the holder at your side. It is intensely cold.
Very hard to concentrate on the job in hand, I can tell you.
The converse is also true. The engine-room of the TARDY contains Matter-Dolorosa Spacetime Converter Generators, vast machines that wrench the very sub-material of space and time about itself, plaiting great ropes of superstring into cat’s-cradles shapes. These are the largest and most powerful motors in the cosmos.
The engine room is the size and shape of a small cigar box.
The TARDY was designed with enormous cargo-holds, such that the Dr could transport millions of metric tonnes of cargo from world to world, should he need so to do. But, although the design was faithfully followed the fact remains that, stepping through the door of the device, you discover that the cargo holds on the inside are the exact size and dimensions of the ashtray on the Ford Cortina Mark III.
The control room presented a similar dilemma. It was designed to be spacious, with a large viewscreen and many padded and swivelly chairs, arranged carefully on a split-level effect, with various complicated-looking consoles and podiums between them. But when he took possession of his craft the Dr discovered that the bridge was the size of a glove-compartment. Luckily the design for the bridge had also included a glove compartment, which (stepping inside the TARDY) turned out to be the size of a middle-sized TV studio. The Dr had cleared it out: throwing away the half-eaten packet of Werther’s Originals, the single left-hand glove, a one-inch-to-alight-year galactic road atlas with the cover missing and the page for ‘Earth’s solar system’ all creased and scuffy, the half a dozen paperclips and the old biro with the ink clotted at the wrong end. He had then been able to reroute the control surfaces to a panel in the new room. He took to calling this space ‘the bridge’, but it was really the glove-compartment.