by Ben Elton
Sad to say, by the time Zimm got back to Australia, his brain was fried. One thought was clear in his head though. One thought had sustained him throughout the long years since ‘Nam. Zimmerman was going to save the world. That was what he spent his time doing, saving the world. That was what he was doing when he scaled the conning tower of the USS Enormous and unfurled his banner. He was saving the world.
He had been saving the world when he had broken into the tobacco company’s laboratories and set all the dogs free. Certainly, the net result had been a bunch of Beagles wandering around half-starved and desperate for a ciggie but Zimm never thought his actions through very clearly. He just wanted to save the world, which seemed simple enough to him.
57: WALTER
It was lucky then that Zimm’s constant companion was Walter, a very together guy indeed. Extraordinarily together considering he was a hippy and hippies are not on the whole known for their togetherness. It was Walter who was with Zimm on the U S S Enormous telling Zimm to cool it as they were led away by the military police. Walter always knew when Zimm was in danger of flying off the handle and exercising some of those terrible skills that the army had taken such pains to teach him. There were little tell-tale signs like veins bulging on his forehead, tiny codes in the things Zimm would say, like, ‘I’m going to kill the dickhead in the white uniform.’ Walter knew to pick up these hints and act on them.
Walter had a genuinely calming presence. When talking to him one really did get the impression that things were all right.
‘Tell me things are all right, Walter.’
‘They’re all right.’
And, somehow, for a little while at least, they were. Of course, after a while Walter’s cool could begin to irritate because there are times in every person’s life when they want to fly off the handle. If the car explodes for instance, or you turn out to have an uncanny resemblance to an escaped psychopath and get wrongly sent to prison for a thousand years. Walter’s response to disasters like that would be to say:
‘It’s OK, it’s cool, try not to become uptight about it.’
This obviously could be pretty aggravating. But often Walter’s calm, almost spiritual demeanour was a comfort to those who met him. Not the judges and police officers and representatives of chemical waste disposal firms, obviously. Nor the hire-purchase people to whom Walter would patiently explain that money exists only in their heads. But most people…well some people, found him calming — for a while anyway.
You needed to be calm to do the sort of things Walter was in the habit of doing. When you’ve sat in a tiny motorized dinghy with a shit scared Blue whale on one side of you, a seriously pissed off whaling fleet on the other side, ten foot waves underneath you and an explosive harpoon sailing over your head, you either learn to be cool or you go through a lot of pairs of trousers.
For Walter was green. He was as green as the contents of an Eskimo’s hanky. He loved animals and plants and everything. (There was one plant that Walter particularly loved, although rolling it up and setting it on fire and sucking it to death was a funny way of showing it.) Walter also had a selfish motive for his green-ness, he firmly believed that peaceful co-existence with other life forms on the planet was the only way that the human race itself would survive.
A lot of people took the piss out of the sort of things Walter did. ‘Oh wow, man,’ they would say, ‘Save the whale, yeah, and black lesbian disabled dwarfs for a nuclear free health food shop.’ In fact, both Rachel and CD had been guilty of this type of comment in their time. But Walter knew that these people were wankers. Whales are the largest creatures left living on earth, the heart of a Blue whale is higher than a tall man and it weighs half a ton. The creature itself grows to a hundred feet and weighs a hundred and sixty tons. Everything pales in comparison to a creation of this awesome magnitude. What is the Taj Mahal or the Golden Gate Bridge to a living force with arteries so huge a child could crawl along them? Yet they were being wiped off the face of the earth to make soap.
‘Listen, man, would you unpick the Bayeux Tapestry to get a reel of cotton?’ Walter said at his trial. He got a thousand dollar fine.
58: WALTER AND ZIMMERMAN
It was Walter who turned Zimmerman on to Eco stuff. He suggested to Zimm that he needed to channel his energies.
‘Listen, man,’ Walter would say, ‘like, one day you’re freeing Beagles, the next you’re riding the bus all night defending old ladies…I mean, cool, don’t get me wrong, very cool. I just feel, like, we should, like…you know, formalize our avenues of protest, right…? Or does that sound a bit too much like heavy fascist mind control, and, like, pretty soon we’ll be as bad as the people we’re protesting against?’
‘Well, it does a bit, man,’ Zimmerman would reply.
None the less, despite the organizational pitfall of not wishing to get into any kind of fascist mind control thing, Walter and Zimmerman had sort of come to a conclusion as to what they were. They were Green Commandos. When they bothered to get up, and were straight, Zimm’s horrifying military skills combined with Walter’s ability to keep them in check, made them quite a team. They had saved animals, destroyed logging equipment, blocked up chemical waste pipes. Once they even burnt down a factory full of polystyrene packing bobbles. The little action of flying the peace banner over the ship was just a minor diversion for them.
Not so for Lieutenant Kowalski. He was a crazy man. He had never felt so insulted in his life. After all, here was the US Navy extending the hand of friendship and these two hippies had put a turd in it.
In fact, as the police escorted Walter and Zimm from the ship, a lot of people involved with the peace protest shook their heads critically. They strongly disapproved of confrontation, especially if it involved law-breaking.
‘That’s just silly,’ they said, ‘making people angry won’t help.’ But Rachel felt it might help more than painting CND symbols on children’s faces.
59: BULLENS CREEK
Sly was flying much further north than Kalgoorkatta. He was heading up over the Great Sandy Desert. It was in this vast area of almost empty wilderness that he had been asked to secure the land required for the astonishing and immoral project that he was now a part of. He felt then, as he had felt on the jumbo the morning after his dinner, that this was going to be a lot more difficult than his fellow conspirators thought. The land requirements for the project were very specific, unfortunately they were also very contradictory. The two main points, ranking above all other considerations, were firstly that it had to be utterly remote and secondly, that good communications were essential. Great, thought Sly, a most ingenious paradox.
60: STARK REQUIREMENTS
The need for isolation was obvious. The less people knew about what was going on the better. Mineral exploration and leisure development were to be the cover story and they would do at a casual glance. However, if someone started delving deeper and the real purpose of the site was discovered, well, Sly just hoped he had a convenient top-floor window to jump out of. Secrecy was the key, therefore, not only did the place have to be remote, but a contoured landscape was also considered essential — it is easier to undertake massive construction projects discreetly if you can hide behind a few hills. Also, an uneven terrain made electronic surveillance more difficult. Luckily most of the US spy satellites were pointing at the Soviet Union. The Americans were unlikely to bother the team Sly was now a member of. After all, Americans like multimillionaires. Their whole scene was hassling commies. Sly hoped so anyway because if some over zealous under-dog at the CIA or in the Pentagon did get on to them, no politico on earth would, or could, defend their actions. For the first time they would not be able to buy themselves out of trouble.
It was a salutary thought. Despite the enormous political clout that multimillionaires wielded, especially when organized in groups, so dark was their present purpose that were it to be revealed, even the most bent politicians in the world would be forced to turn and bite the hand that had f
ed it for so long. This was why privacy was essential. As has been said though, unfortunately, so were communications. The leisure cover story would not last long once things really got going. When the consortium moved it would have to move very fast indeed. Surprise would be the essence of success. If the world had more than a moment’s warning, all might be lost. Hence they had to be able to assemble the personnel, the technology and the huge mass of hardware quickly. This could not be achieved with restricted access.
Anyway, the upshot of it all was that they were not actually spoilt for choice as to locations. The optimum spot seemed to be an area west of a place called Bullens Creek. It was hilly- ish, which is about as hilly as it gets in Western Australia, and it was utterly isolated apart from one road to Bullens. Bullens Creek itself, on the other hand, had just about sufficient communications for Stark’s purposes. It had been fully integrated into the Telecom system five years previously. It was on the interstate highway and it had an airstrip. Also, it was only about five hundred miles north-west of Perth so what lines of communication there were would not be too stretched.
61: DULLSVILLE WA
After a long dull flight, Sly landed at Bullens Creek airport. Topol Bullen had been the first white man to find the creek, back in 1867. If at the time he had entertained any hopes that one day a thriving metropolis would grow up about the place, thus ensuring him and his name a kind of immortality, he had had it. Bullens Creek had started off tiny and tedious and gone downhill from there. Being the person after whom Bullens Creek was named is actually a slightly more anonymous thing than not having a place named after you at all. Even the people who live there have only half heard of it.
‘Bullens Creek? Oh yeah, I think it’s a little tiny town somewhere up towards the Territory. Come to think of it, buggered if I don’t live there myself.’
Bullen himself never lived to discover that his name was to become a place that almost everybody in Australia had never heard of. He was killed by a camel whilst looking for his shorts, having had a dip in the creek he had just found. He had ridden the camel all the way from the coast and was under the impression that they had become friends. So had the camel, who was, therefore, rather surprised that on arriving at their first water for weeks, a meagre puddle dried almost completely in the appalling heat, Bullen had tethered it to a gum tree in order to get first slurp. Bullen’s reasons for doing this were actually very sound. Camels can suck up literally gallons of water in a matter of seconds and Bullen, understandably, wanted to get in quick before the camel drained the puddle. The camel did not realize this however, and, thinking itself betrayed, broke its bindings in an anger of thirst and kicked Bullen out of the way, killing him in the process.
In fact, for quite a while, the place was called Camel Kick Creek, but eventually Bullens Creek prevailed — which is a shame because Camel Kick Creek is a much better name. The reason the name got changed was that there was a rather boring habit amongst the early white settlers of Australia. They liked to name places after very dull Victorians. During the same period, people in the USA were giving places terrifically exciting names like Tombstone, Deadwood, Hangman’s Tree and Death Gulch, but the old Aussies preferred things less colourful. For instance, there lies, almost bang in the middle of Australia, one of the largest monoliths in the world. An unfractured mass of glorious red sandstone that rises one and a half kilometres up from the flat desert floor and descends four kilometres beneath it. It has an astonishing, almost symmetrical shape and, according to the light, it changes colour from burning orange through fierce red to deep, cool purple. It is, of course, regarded with mystical awe by all who see it. The early Australians chose to call this wonder of the world ‘Ayers Rock’ after a dull Victorian administrator in a stupid hat — who happened to be chief secretary of South Australia.
It is, of course, a little unfair to make a comparison between Ayers Rock and Bullens Creek. In fact, the name of Bullens Creek was really rather apt because Bullens Creek is very boring and Bullen had been a very boring man. This was actually why he set out to stride across the Great Gibson and the Great Sandy Desert in the first place, he had got sick of people yawning at him when he talked about his theory. All the other explorers who set off on similar quests had great theories that people loved to listen to. Fascinating stuff about vast inland seas or a continent-sized oasis full of lush vegetation, fabulous rivers and endless free sex. Bullen’s theory on the other hand was very dull indeed. He claimed that the vast hinterland of Australia was nothing but a dry, hot, flat desert with some dingos and a few broken bits of rock. He was right of course, but it was still a very boring theory. Had he ever made it back, people would have still yawned at him. After all, the only thing more boring than being dull is being dull and right.
Even the camel that got him was bored. ‘What a dull drink,’ it thought, and sauntered off, becoming one of the earliest of the domestic camels imported into Australia to return to the wild. Today, of course, there are herds of wild camels in the deserts of Oz but then it was quite a novelty — certainly more interesting than Bullen’s Creek, anyway. It was well over a hundred years since the camel had killed Bullen and that still ranked as the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the area.
What people do for diversion in isolated country towns is a bit of a mystery all over the world, although the physical similarities, hair-lips, low foreheads and high instance of mental disorder may go some way to solving the mystery. It used to be said that the best way to stop a girl getting pregnant in Bullens Creek was to castrate her brother.
Things definitely improved after they put in the airstrip and metalled the roads but once you’ve looked at the war memorial and said, ‘Christ it’s hot’ a couple of times, you’re still a bit stuck for raucous amusement.
One of the things they do in places like Bullens Creek is form dinner clubs. Sly was aware of this country habit and was relying on it to provide him with a medium whereby to ingratiate himself with the white locals. He felt that this would be a sensible preliminary to trying to negotiate with the aboriginal community.
Having parked his little plane, he strolled into the old shed, grandly titled the Airport Terminal, to get his paperwork sorted. Here, as he expected, he found a sign announcing the regular events which the town was looking forward to.
Royal Rotary Mouse — 2nd and 4th Mondays, venue — Queen Victoria Pub. Grand Order Mason Sheep Shearers — Wednesday, venue — Queen Victoria Pub. Lion Club Elks — 1st and 3rd Thursdays, venue — Queen Victoria…etc.
The fun went on and on. Scanning the lists of officers, Sly was struck by the number of times each name occurred, but in a different post. For instance, John Timpkiss might be the treasurer of the Elks and the secretary of the Mouses, whilst Phil Barcle was the opposite. Either lots of people in Bullens Creek had the same name, or else all the clubs had the same members. The latter was, of course, the case. They could have just formed one big club but of course that wouldn’t have been any fun. The variety provided endless diversion. It was a job sometimes for a bloke to figure out which stupid hat he was supposed to be wearing that night. Sly knew that since he was probably the most prominent visitor to Bullens Creek since the camel that got Bullen, he would be approached to address one of these institutions. That was fine by him. The sooner he started getting his story straight, the better.
62: THE NERVE CENTRE OF ECOACTION
The place was real dark. Rachel wasn’t scared of the dark, no, it wasn’t the dark that she was scared of. It was not being able to see anything that she hated. She had already gone arseover- tit twice, tripping on some form of creeper. The garden of Zimm and Walter’s place definitely needed tending.
‘We should tend that garden sometime,’ Walter would observe.
‘Man, it would take a Napalm strike to even make a dent in it,’ Zimm replied. ‘Doctor Livingstone is still in there looking for the source of the Nile.’
And so they let it go. It was getting increasingly difficult to
get to the front door, as Rachel was discovering.
Country music was drifting through the darkness, whining, mournful music, straight-forward music. That was the great thing about country music, it did not mince words. The word ‘obscure’ is not in the country dictionary, foot-notes are not required. For instance, the country ballad writer wishing to suggest that he is low and blue because his baby is gone, would probably write something like. ‘I’m low and blue because my baby is gone.’
This was how Zimm liked his music. Plain speaking was important to him, he hated hypocrisy. ‘I want you out of my head and back in my bed before the morning comes’, sang Lorreta Lynn as Rachel struggled up the path in the blackness, vegetation brushing her cheeks and deeply suspect substances underfoot. Just about every cat in Carlo shat in Walt and Zimm’s garden. Walter thought it was OK because cats are clean shitters. They are always very careful to dig a shallow toilet and fill it in again afterwards. The problem obviously comes when the land has been so overcrapped that the surface is 100 per cent cat crap, which means the cat digs a hole in the crap, craps in it and then carefully pushes crap on top of it. A soul-destroying activity and one calculated to make any cat lower its personal standards.
There was no light inside the shack save the glow of a cigarette brightening with every draw and then dulling almost back into the blackness.
‘Whoever you’re looking for, they don’t live here,’ said a voice located just behind the cigarette.
‘I’m looking for eighty-two King Edward the Seventh Empire Terrace. Have I got the right address?’
Whoever did the road naming in Australia was a serious empire freak. You’d be walking down some street in Sydney, half-Greek, half-Italian, half God knows what and the place is named after Queen Victoria. Zimm and Walter tried to get their street renamed Dead Abo Terrace and the local Freedom Association pushed a burning rag through their letter-box.