Stark

by Ben Elton

  ‘Maybe he’s got another reason for wanting us out,’ said his wife.

  ‘But there can’t be anything. I mean, what could it be? The place has been surveyed. Like he said, if there was anything here they would never have given it to us. No, I reckon this is just his way of warning us not to think about raising the price.’

  As it happened, the community had already taken the decision to accept Sly’s offer. It was, after all, a great deal of money and there was nothing particularly wonderful about the hole they were living in.

  Sly had made a big hit with the rednecks of Bullens Creek on his first visit. He would not be so popular the next time not once it was realized that it was him who had provided the cash for a bunch of Abs to move to town and put down mortgages on some fairly decent properties.

  Mr Culboon would have phoned Sly earlier but, as often happened, the fragile telephone link that existed between their community and the outside world, was knackered. Therefore, late in the afternoon, Mr Culboon set off for Bullens Creek to make the call.

  He arrived in town at about the same time as Gordon and his legion. In the gathering dusk Mr Culboon did not notice the hired mini-bus full of unpleasant young men, and had he done, he would have avoided it. Mr Culboon had encountered enough racist thugs in his time not to wish to seek their company.

  Gordon sat in the front seat of the van, resplendent in a combat jacket, camouflage trousers and tightly laced-up Doc Martens, sixteen holes, red laces, just like proper British skinheads wore. He was briefing his legions on the details of the operation. ‘Storm-troopers, we are undertaking this operation in defence of race, culture and…uhm…well race and culture are good enough reasons to undertake an operation, in my opinion,’ he said decisively.

  The assembled storm-troopers agreed with this, although they would not have recognized culture if it sat on their faces and wiggled.

  ‘Australia is a white man’s continent, it is ours by right of conquest and we intend to have it all, which is what tonight’s battle is all about.’

  Gordon cut a ridiculous figure. A stupid, dull thug attempting to look like the leader of a crack fighting unit. On the other hand, he was no more ridiculous than the little gang he was addressing; stupid, dull thugs attempting to look like a crack fighting unit.

  Unfortunately for the people of the little Bullens Creek community, they may have been a pretty pathetic bunch but they were a pretty pathetic bunch who had clubs, knives, petrol, darkness and cowardice on their side.

  Mr Culboon got through to Sly.

  ‘Listen, you bastard, Moorcock. You can have the place OK? I don’t know what you want with our land and I don’t care. It’s yours, so you can call off your stupid plane, all right?’

  ‘What plane?’ said Sly, slightly surprised at Mr Culboon’s aggressive tone. He did not deceive himself that he and Mr Culboon would ever be soul mates or bosom buddies but he felt naked abuse was unnecessary and said so.

  ‘Oh yeah, mate. I suppose your fellah’s just spending his day trying to piss us off for the fun of it,’ Mr Culboon replied. Sly was mystified but clearly Mr Culboon did not want to discuss it. ‘Just get us the money, mate, all right? Then we’ll be gone and I won’t need to talk to you again.’ Mr Culboon slammed down the phone and went to get himself a beer. The community may have been dry but he was in town now and it wasn’t every day that a fellow and his wife got ten grand each for a useless bit of dirt.

  As he entered the pub, Gordon and his gang were leaving, having consumed a certain degree of courage. They pushed past him contemptuously, forcing him to flatten himself against the wall or get trampled underfoot.

  ‘Sorry about them, Mr Culboon,’ said the bar person, who was a mate. ‘Never seen such a bunch of wankers in my life.’

  The bunch of wankers had spent their time in the pub being just loud enough to make everyone else in the pub feel uncomfortable. Mr Culboon was not surprised. If there was one thing he could not stand it was groups of young men. They didn’t have to be as horrible as the lot that had just left. Any gang of young men made Mr Culboon want to spit. In his opinion, there should be a law stating that no more than three men between the ages of fifteen and thirty should be allowed to assemble together in a public place.

  There is something strange and horrid which happens to even the most reasonable blokes when they go out with the ‘the lads’. They rejoice in their collective strength. No longer are they scared, farty little sad acts who don’t know who they are or what they are doing on earth. Suddenly they are cocks of the roost, they are unassailable, they have power and influence. On a train, in a pub, there they are, loud and arrogant. Lads. Confident in their numbers. Noisily flexing their muscles, making everyone around them feel small and impotent, causing normally liberal-minded people to bitterly wish a policeman would come along and put them all in the army for a hundred years.

  Gordon, and his fellow members of the White Supremacy People’s Fair Deal Party, got back into their van. They studied the map. There was only one road between Bullens Creek and the Aboriginal community, so even they were able to plan the route.

  ‘Now all of you, watch it! All right?’ said Gordon. ‘We’re going in to scare them, don’t get carried away and do the business properly, OK? There’ll be a right time for that when…uhm when the time is right…Yes…‘ he continued, well pleased with this powerful and stirring phrase, ‘when the time is right. When will there be a right time for that!!’ He shouted into the darkened mini-bus and his fellow crusaders dutifully and slightly drunkenly shouted back:

  ‘When the time is right!’

  ‘Exactly, mates, exactly.’ Gordon did not really like referring to party members as ‘mates’. It lent nothing to a speech and was scarcely calculated to inspire martial ardour but he had long been stuck for a suitable effective collective noun. The usual ones were ‘comrades’ or ‘brothers’ but they were both out. ‘Comrades’ sounded too fucking commie, and if there was one thing Gordon hated more than blacks it was commies. It will be remembered that Gordon considered himself a fair-minded soul and he realized that a black could not help being black. But a commie, well, a commie was a traitor to his race. The other option, ‘brothers’, Gordon had been forced to disregard as well. It sounded too fucking queer and if there was one thing Gordon hated more than commies, it was queers. The upshot of this linguistic puzzler was that he was obliged to try to stir his troops by addressing them as ‘mates.’

  In fact there was no need to stir the assembled gang, they were quite stirred enough already. The prospect of a quick, safe, vicious bit of brutality was really making their pulses race. This, plus a gutful of lager would have stirred a concrete cuppa.

  82: SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT

  The bus pulled into the centre of the little cluster of buildings and the heralds of a new dawn all piled out and attacked a group of total strangers for no reason whatsoever.

  They threw two petrol bombs at the general store and when the first people ran out to check out the commotion, they hit them with baseball bats. They shouted some things about killing niggers and they threw some anonymous leaflets about that said ‘slavery or death, it’s your choice.’

  There were about three minutes of horrible shouting and screaming, running feet, calls for arms and torches, scurrying silhouettes in the flickering light of the burning store — then it was all over. Having managed to give one man a serious kicking, and before the people they were attacking could get organized, the Nordic knights all rushed back to their van and drove away.

  ‘We did it! We did it!’ shouted a jubilant Gordon Gordon. ‘We really did the business.’ He did not know it, but they had been doing the business of Stark.

  83: A STEP TOWARDS EXTINCTION

  84: UNLOADING THE EMPIRE

  That same night, Sly was also labouring over the business of Stark. It had been soul-destroying work, dismantling even relatively small sections of all that he had worked so hard to create and make secure. But, he had no choice, h
e had his part to play in the big scheme, like all the others. Quite apart from acquiring the land, he had been charged with getting hold of large quantities of uranium. This required a lot of money — and a lot of money by Sly’s standards was plenty.

  The uranium was definitely a problem. He couldn’t just take it out of his own mines. His entire output was strictly monitored. If the government got one whiff that he was creaming any off they’d take him apart bit by bit and the game would be up, for sure. It was so ridiculous, he was allowed by law to flog the stuff to the French, yes, that was fine, no problem there. And what did the French do with it? Blow it up in the Pacific, that’s what! Thus causing the Federal Government endless embarrassment from cancer-ridden environmentalists and luminous Aboriginals. It was so frustrating, the Labour Party seemed to have no objection at all to Sly putting the naughty bit in Froggy Exocets and yet he wasn’t allowed to hang on to a few tons of his own uranium for his own personal use. The world was going mad.

  All it meant was that Sly, who personally dug good, top- grade Australian uranium, would have all the trouble of acquiring the stuff on the world black market — probably buying his own stuff back at ten times the price. Still, at least by getting the stuff off some shady character whose address was a portable fax machine, Sly was guaranteed discretion. The dealer Sly was using wanted ten million dollars in two dollar bills, this was not the kind of fellow likely to publish his memoirs. Anyway, the guy wasn’t likely to live long, he positively glowed in the dark.

  Sitting in front of a video screen as the dawn came up, unloading cash assets into the market, had been a strange experience. Some of the stuff he sold he didn’t even know he had. Who would have thought he had a shit-dumping operation in the North Sea?

  A couple of blips on the screen and he didn’t anymore. Captain Robertson got himself a new invisible boss. It didn’t make any difference, he still hated his job.

  He was looking for smallish, easy to dispose of assets, stuff to chip away at. He did not want to unload any major conglomerates, it would be bound to attract attention. Stark had been very clear on that score. In fact he had been trying to discreetly break up his empire into more manageable chunks ever since he got back from the dinner in LA. His people had been pretty surprised.

  ‘Sly,’ his whole upper-management team had wailed, as if they were but one upper manager, ‘you’re laying us wide open. Putting out the cream and waiting for the cats. We’re gonna get picked off bit by bit.’ Of course they were right. According to every accepted business practice, Sly was inviting major losses. But he wasn’t fighting for profits any more, he was fighting for his life. Unfortunately he could not confide this knowledge to his upper-management team and so he had to allow his upper-management team to think he was losing his grip.

  One advantage of this piecemeal sell-off was that it made it much easier to unload assets discreetly. After all, if even Sly did not know that he owned half the stuff he was now selling, no one else would.

  85: CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

  Actually, somebody else did. As a matter of fact somebody knew Sly’s business better than he did; poor, dullish Linda Reeve of the London Financial Telegraph.

  She had long been researching a book called AN ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL ROOTS AND FINANCIAL STRATEGIES PERTAINING TO THE MOST PROMINENT FIFTY BUSINESS EMPIRES CONSTRUCTED SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR or MEGABUCK: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF THE TOP HALF HUNDRED, as her publishers wished to call the book.

  It had been the detailed knowledge that this research afforded her that had enabled Linda to make the connections she had made regarding Nagasyu’s diverse sell-offs and Slampacker’s and the others that she had noticed.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening in London and she was working late, nibbling a chocolate, staring with a puzzled frown at her VDU. It had been luck that she caught the first of Sly’s dumps. The Prince of Wales had recently made a series of major speeches on the state of the North Sea. The death of Mrs Pastel from viral gastroenteritis, after eating a dodgy mussel, had given him the springboard he needed to try, yet again, to force environmental action on pollution. It was beginning to look as if local councils were going to have to pay far more to waste disposal contractors.

  Clearly it was a situation from which an unscrupulous but legal killing could be made by any shit-dumper who wanted to double his prices for a 10 per cent improvement in the service he offered.

  Hence the Financial Telegraph presumed that trading in waste companies would be fairly fierce. It was while putting together a small piece based on this assumption that a colleague of Linda’s had remarked with surprise that a big player like Silvester Moorcock had elected to buck the trend and pull out of the business altogether. That very evening he had dumped every single share of the Belgian waste disposal conglomerate that he had been so heavily into.

  Linda nearly missed it when her colleague made the observation — her mind had been elsewhere. Linda had just been given a small box of chocolates by a cleaner whom Linda had helped with her accounts. It was the end of the day choccy time so to speak — and there were four people in the room. The problem with chocolates is that they operate on a loss curve of massively diminishing returns. The first one out of the box, the strawberry cream say, is of far greater value than the last few left, the despised cracknels and nougats and such like. In fact, these chocolate lepers are often never eaten at all and are left forever, unable to be thrown away because they’re still there, and yet never eaten because they’re so horrid. Linda knew if she offered the chocs around the loss of the four best ones would halve the value of her box.

  Of course she knew what she had to do, but she didn’t like it. As Linda’s colleague was telling her about Sly’s sell-offs, Linda was watching both strawberry creams, a turkish delight and a soft caramel disappear. Luckily, neither of the lime barrels were touched or Linda seriously wouldn’t have heard the momentous snippet. But, she did hear it and, still pursuing the half-formed theories that her editor had rejected so dismissively, Linda decided to take a little look at Sly. She rummaged through the huge mounds of books and papers that habitually covered her desk, finally locating her tiny Nagasyu keyboard.

  Now, of course, there are tens of thousands of transactions going on at any one moment in the world markets and Sly’s interests were so diverse that normally trying to pick up his trail would take months of painstaking research just to get a clear view of a single half-hour period. But, Linda had already done the research for her book. She had a computer program that detailed over 80 per cent of known Moorcock investments. She knew where most of his money was hiding. All she had to do was to instruct the computer to keep scanning the ever-shifting market until anything connected with Moorcock made a move.

  She did not have to wait long. It was extraordinary. Moorcock was undressing like a born again naturist, selling off anything from ouija boards to weapons systems. All for ready cash too. Linda searched in vain for any corresponding reinvestment but found nothing.

  She told herself not to get excited. She realized that the fact that she had gone looking for this, and had found it, would make her all the more anxious to prove that there was something in it. But there must be something in it. So much money was leaving the market but only through the big individual players. Middle-range investors, pension schemes, banks, etc., were not moving.

  Something had to be going on amongst the big men but Linda did not believe that it was co-ordinated. Above all else, she knew that people like Slampacker, Moorcock, Tyron and Nagasyu would die before they would co-operate with each other.

  But something was definitely going on, she thought, trying to clean her great big green glasses and getting chocolate on them. Had all the big men got the willies together? Had they all seen something coming that most people were too small to spot? Were we heading for the biggest crash ever and were the rats deserting the sinking ship? leaving small investors, pension funds and governments holding soon-to-be-worthless stock?

  Se
lecting a horrid hard centre, she attempted to bite the chocolate off without eating the bit in the middle. No chance of course, she soon had half a Brazil nut in her mouth, which she hated.

  Hero fantasies flicked across Linda’s mind. Would she be the woman to predict the great crash? Would she ring the warning bell that cushioned the little fellow from the worst of it? She pictured silver-haired grannies thanking her brokenly for rescuing at least part of their pathetic savings and honest young lovers who would still be able to send the tots to good schools because of her prompt action. An MBE!…If she was right…But of course she wasn’t. Linda pulled herself together. She had an interesting little anomaly that was all. There would be, without a doubt, some perfectly ordinary explanation. Still, she might as well ask. Linda reached for the phone.

  The telephones in Sly’s office complex did not trill, they rang. His whole body had jerked, he had nearly hit buy rather than sell mid-deal. He’d been trying to unload a plant that produced condensers for fridges and driers, instead he near as damn it purchased half a million ex-U S Army condoms. Sly could think of literally nothing more revolting than a secondhand condom.

  Sly, of course, never answered the phone in his office but at that time of night he was the only person there and the thing kept ringing. Eventually he walked through about three secretaries’ offices to where incoming calls were intercepted and picked up the phone.

  ‘Sly Moorcock speaking.’

  He was pretty surprised to find himself doing this but not half as surprised as Linda Reeve was to find herself speaking to the billionaire himself. She had known that somebody would be about because of the heavy trading, but she was astonished to find Sly running his own market stall.

  ‘Uhm…Oh, right, Mr Moorcock, ahem, excuse me phoning like this…’