by Ben Elton
It would have taken about sixteen ref s to shift the sleeping beauty, but it wasn’t necessary because Zimmerman’s speech had succeeded where Walter’s had failed. Nobody felt like picking up Zimmerman’s challenge and so Walter started to pick up the winnings.
Back in the car, as the traffic started to move, Walter announced that they now had over a thousand dollars. They crawled past the stricken double tanker which someone had driven to the side of the road. The still unconscious form of the driver had been propped up in the cab. He woke up in the middle of the night and started trying to think up a story that would cover the facts as he remembered them. How do you explain being beaten up by a hippy in front of a hundred of your peers?
116: MISSILE FUEL
As they drove slowly towards town, Zimmerman was in a reflective mood.
‘It just goes to show,’ he remarked, ‘that sometimes it ain’t worth trying to do a guy a good turn.’
‘You were trying to do him a good turn?’ enquired CD, who remembered the whole thing rather differently.
‘Sure, I was trying to tell him that I reckon one of the tubes he’s hauling is carrying high octane rocket or missile fuel. You know, military grade stuff.’ Zimmerman was rolling a cigarette and he was talking like he smelt missile fuel most days.
‘Missile fuel?’ asked CD, trying to adopt the same casual tone. ‘You mean, the stuff they fuel missiles with?’
‘Yeah.’ Zimmerman borrowed CD’s Zippo and lit his cigarette with one hand, producing that casual snap of the fingers which CD practised so diligently and which had so far eluded him. Zimmerman was sensing adventure and it was almost as if he was changing himself in order to meet it.
‘What the hell is Silvester Moorcock doing shipping in missile fuel?’ said Rachel, feeling a little scared.
‘Well,’ said Walter. ‘You know, like it could be this, and like, it could be that, but I guess we have to entertain at least the possibility that you know man, it’s…to fuel missiles.’
‘It ain’t to fill his lighter, man,’ said Zimmerman, handing back CD his Zippo. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, you know,’ he continued, ‘I haven’t smelt it since ‘Nam, but if that stuffs what I think it is, man, it burns like the sun. About a thimbleful would put this car into fucking orbit.’ There was a nervous pause.
‘And it says petrol on the tank?’ Rachel asked, breaking the silence. ‘I mean, it doesn’t say, ‘missile fuel for entirely innocent purposes’ or anything like that?’
‘It says petrol. And it isn’t petrol,’ said Zimmerman. And they drove on in silence.
117: BOOM TOWN
Walter had already arranged for somewhere for them to stay in Bullens Creek. This was fortunate because absolutely everywhere was packed to the gunnels. It was a boom town. Excited, lively and full of pricks. Money was coming in fast and nobody was asking any questions. People didn’t seem to mind if Moorcock blasted and dug their little part of the world to fuck and beyond. It is strange, but no matter how many millions of times in human history hindsight has revealed the most terminally appalling human errors, we still refuse to even attempt to develop foresight.
Walter had arranged for them to stay at Mr and Mrs Culboon’s little place which they had bought a month previously for eight and half thousand, and was already worth fifty.
There was no way they could find a park so they left the Holden on the edge of town, along with the thousands of Toyota Nissan Landcruiser wankmobiles, and walked in.
It was like a gold rush town must have been back in the days of the old West. Everybody out on the street, half of them very very drunk.
‘Maybe they’re drinking the missile fuel,’ remarked CD.
‘I think we should maybe keep, like, kind of quiet about the missile fuel,’ suggested Walter. And everybody agreed that this would be a sensible thing to do.
It was night now and on the horizon, towards what had recently been a tiny Aboriginal village, there was a tremendous ghostly glow that lit up the whole of the sky. Work on Oasis went on day and night. At present Moorcock’s builders were working off huge mobile generators flown in bit by bit. However, work was already under way to install enough cabling to buy in power from the eastern states.
Moorcock had been able to negotiate considerable federal co-operation. He was creating jobs and, like the people of Bullens, the legislature was anxious to see no evil. In fact, Australia was very proud that while the whole world staggered under the impact of a huge depression, her own home-grown entrepreneurs were rising to the challenge and risking their all instituting massive new projects.
The little self-appointed EcoAction team went into a pub, to get a better gauge of local opinion. It was just like outside in the streets, everybody was apeshit about the whole thing.
‘It certainly is going to be a very big hotel,’ remarked Rachel thoughtfully to the barperson, who was enthusing about the present and future prospects of the town.
‘Bet it will still take an hour to get anything on room service,’ said CD coolly, even though he had personally never ordered anything on room service in his life.
‘Aw, c’mon, this ain’t just a hotel! This is ultimate leisure,’ the barman quoted. ‘Like Disneyland times fifty plus the Gold Coast, this town is on the map. Yeah, we Sure showed ‘em. For a hundred years we were just a piss-poor bit of outback and now we’re the only town in the world that ain’t depressed.’
118: HOSPITALITY
Mrs Culboon answered the door and invited them in. ‘Nice to see you, Walt,’ she said and clearly meant it. ‘We’ve gone up in the world since you last came visiting.’
‘Lovely, Maud,’ replied Walter, looking around the sparsely furnished little duplex. ‘All thanks to that bastard Moorcock, mate,’ Mr Culboon entered with the beers. ‘I still think building a bunch of hotels here is one of the dumbest ideas anybody ever had, but there you go. It’s his funeral,’ he added philosophically.
‘We think maybe he isn’t building hotels, Johnny,’ Walter replied, quietly sucking his beer. He then proceeded to explain to the Culboons the whole process of how their suspicions had grown, from lunch at Facefulls to the business with the suspected rocket fuel. When he had finished Mrs Culboon burst out laughing.
‘By Christ, he nearly had even us believing in his Hotel Dingo piss, didn’t he, Johnny? Don’t it just go to show there’s none so blind as those who will not see.’ She wiped tears of amusement from her eyes. Nobody could really see what she found so funny. Mrs Culboon liked a good laugh.
‘Walt don’t know for sure it ain’t hotels, he just reckons,’ said Mr Culboon. ‘Could be this way, could be that. Zimm hasn’t smelt this fuel stuff in nearly God knows how many years. I mean, Christ, what else would the Moorcock bastard be doing in the desert? Fixing to start World War Three?’
‘Well, we don’t know, do we, Mr Culboon?’ said Rachel. ‘We just think that maybe we should try and check it out.’
‘Ain’t no harm I suppose,’ Mr Culboon concluded after a pause for thought. ‘Can only get done for trespassing I suppose. But I still say that the hotel business is the most likely explanation.’
Mrs Culboon shrieked again. CD wished she wouldn’t do that.
‘Johnny, what are you babbling about, you old fool. I guess the hotel business is the least likely explanation. Let me ask you this. Suppose we sold up and went travelling? Where would we go? I guess we ain’t too likely to stretch and say to ourselves ‘my my, what I need is a few weeks relaxing in a huge hole in the ground in the middle of the desert’. I guess that would really recharge our batteries, wouldn’t it just.’ Sarcasm was one of the principal weapons in Mrs Culboon’s armoury, she liked it heavy. On the other hand, she undeniably made a strong case. Mr Culboon looked positively deflated. And so, the next night, they all piled into the Culboon’s pickup to drive out to the old community and take a closer look at what was going down.
119: THE HEAT IS ON
The little EcoAction Direct Intervention/Urban Terrorist/ Gr
een Commando/Whatthefuckarewedoinghere Unit, headed out into a velvet night. A night that was for all the world like an upturned pint of Guinness, with the creamy glow of Moorcock’s floodlights hovering eerily on the horizon and the darkness above.
The sun was long gone and yet it was still hot. It had been hot for days, months, in fact the weather was second only to the crash as main news topic. The two combined made for a strange feeling that something was coming to an end. There had been a lot more religious nuts hanging out than usual. People’s minds were turning to Apocalypse. The weather has always been a source of endless conversation but now the mantra had changed. The song did not remain the same. Whereas previously the comment had always been along the lines of ‘bloody awful weather…’
Now people constantly moaned that it was ‘funny’ weather; it was not like it had been when they were young; it was no longer ‘proper’ weather. The strange thing was that even teenagers spoke in this manner.
In the Culboon’s old pick-up they were sweating, the heat was making them nervous. ‘Christ it’s hot,’ observed Mrs Culboon, without sarcasm.
120: HOT HOUSE HUMANS
Professor Durf felt the same way. He and the Domesday Group had been watching the weather with increasing alarm, for some months. The speed of the deterioration had shocked them all. The greenhouse effect, as every politician knows, is caused by the build-up of pollutants, which are held, floating at the top of the atmosphere, with no reason to disperse. This airborne shit slick provides no shade from the sun. The clear, pure, short-wave, solar rays pour through without a moment’s pause. But once these rays have done their thing, heating up the earth’s surface, the trouble starts, because the heat that then radiates upwards from the surface has changed. It is long-wave and it cannot, for some sad reason, get through the shit slick.
‘The earth had a pretty good central heating system,’ was the conclusion of the head of the Domesday Group, when he met Durf in New York. He was there in order to present Durf with yet more revised predictions as to the time the world had left to put its house in order. ‘But we had to close the damn windows.’
‘You’re telling me what I already know,’ snapped Durf. ‘Jesus, kids in school know about the greenhouse effect. We’ve had heat waves before too. Maybe this is just a natural thing.’
‘Yes, maybe,’ the scientist replied, ‘we can’t be sure exactly what’s going on but it’s very hot isn’t it, Professor Durf.’
‘Listen. I know it’s hot, tell me what’s going to happen. Is this it? Are the damn ice-caps going to melt!’ Durf was a planner, an organizer, he needed hard information, and he wasn’t getting it.
‘Yes, they’re going to melt. Damn it they’ve been melting for years. I’ve been telling your people for years. I don’t know how quickly but if something isn’t done they’ll go, Professor Durf, by God they’ll go, like the ice in your damn drink!’
He was a worried and frustrated man, the head of the Domesday Group. He, like all those involved in Armageddon scenario research, was under the impression that the world’s industrialists employed him that they might act upon the information that he gave them. And yet he saw no action; he saw no efforts at change. He might as well not have said a word. Actually, of course, action was being taken on his grim warnings, but not the kind of action that would have made him happy. He did not know about the divine pre-eminence of the profit motive. He did not know that a moral decision had been taken that market forces must come before the safety of the earth, no matter what the cost. He did not know about the grim rocket silos that were under construction ten thousand miles away in the deserts of Western Australia.
He tried again to impress upon Durf the urgency with which somebody had to start the process of depollution.
‘Listen, Durf, you have influence, God knows I’ve written papers screaming blue murder, but it’s the producers that count. The consumers just want their car and their cooker and their cheap fuel, they’re sheep. We must influence those in power, the people that profit from the disinterest that the general population seem to be showing in their future. Professor Durf, the pig-headedness of the human race is on a collision course with the laws of physics. An irresistible force is about to meet an immovable object and we will not survive.’
‘How long?’ asked Durf again.
‘I don’t know!’ the poor little scientist stressed yet again. Durf was being like the usual idiots, the people who acted as if science was a series of definite facts and scientists benign, all- seeing, all-knowing teachers. The truth was that every door that science opened revealed a corridor full of them, all barred and bolted.
This type of blind faith in science probably stems from popular science programmes on the telly when some utter smughead in a polo neck will explain the riddles of existence with a milk bottle, a ping pong ball and a lot of extremely expensive trips to foreign locations.
‘It could be a decade or two, it could be tomorrow. I don’t know,’ continued the frustrated scientist. ‘But I think very soon now. Very very soon.’ There was real anguish and fear in his usually dispassionate voice. ‘When are you people going to do something?’ SHOTS IN
121: THE DARK
Of course they were doing something and somebody else was taking a look at it. Or at least taking a look at an eight foot fence with six strands of razor wire running along the top of it. The EcoAction team had been driving cross-country, parallel to the wire for about half an hour and had come to the conclusion that the fence ran right the way around an enormous property, far bigger than the Aboriginal community spread. From where they stood, the glow of the working lights remained far away. There was no way they could discover anything at that distance.
‘Oh man, this is beginning to look kind of sinister, you know? Like, this is a big fence just to guard a building site,’ commented Walter, voicing their common thoughts.
‘It does seem kind of heavy security for a holiday camp,’ added CD.
‘They ain’t building no holiday camp here, mate,’ said Mr Culboon. His wife shrieked with laughter, breaking the tension somewhat.
They had all been feeling rather thoughtful and solemn, but then Mrs Culboon always laughed at odd times.
‘Of course they ain’t you old fool! We knew that the first time the bloke came with his money, ha! Ten grand a head for a dingo’s toilet, ha!’ Dingos had clearly made a big impression on Mrs Culboon during her time of living at the Bullens Creek community.
‘I reckon if he is building hotels, this bloody fence is to keep the guests in!!’ And Mrs Culboon roared anew. She was not a woman who was easily frightened and the atmosphere had not got to her in the way that it had affected all of the others, except Zimmerman. She did not even flinch when they saw the lights of the car racing towards them.
‘Oh my, oh lord!’ she said cheerily, ‘I reckon here comes the entertainments officer to inform us that there will be a dinner dance in the nuclear fall-out shelter.’
Her good humour was infectious and they watched the approaching lights with interest. The ToyaNiski Bigdick Wankmobile pulled up with its lights on full beam, pointed straight at them. Its occupants stayed inside, someone spoke through a megaphone.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The voice was that of a man who liked playing at being a policeman.
Zimmerman did not like the vulnerability of the situation, the truck had not positioned itself in a friendly way. They were blinded, and exposed. ‘Rachel and CD go right, Culboons go left,’ he said quietly. ‘Walter stay in the light and talk to them.’
Zimmerman knew that if they all deserted the light, whoever was in the truck would be spooked and who knew how they’d react. By keeping someone in the light Zimm had left their interrogators with a clear course of action.
‘Stay in the light, all of you!’ the amplified voice barked.
‘Get into the darkness,’ Zimmerman urged, and they all did, leaving Walter alone and blinking.
‘Hey man, what’s with all this g
iving orders scene, you know?’ he asked sounding a little hurt. ‘I mean, if like a bunch of peaceable people such as me and my compadres, can’t even take in a moonlit drive without, well, being blinded and shouted at. Eventually we have to ask ourselves the vital question, like, what is the point? No, but really, I’m serious, I mean, what is the point?’ Walter clearly felt he had put his case quite clearly.
‘Everybody get back in the light, this is private property, you’re all trespassers, we want to know why,’ the voice insisted.
‘No man, no way…that is private property, Fort Knox in there, this here’s the desert and it belongs to the stars,’ said Walter.
‘You are almost three miles inside Moorcock/Ark Leisure Properties, this fence is just a dingo obstruction. You are all coming with us.’ The voice was getting harder, more threatening. This was partly because its owner and his companion were peering about wondering where the hell the others had gone. They soon found out about one of them. ‘Dingos!’ shrieked Mrs Culboon. ‘An eight foot fence for dingos, ha, ha, ha. Bionic dingos, maybe, with jet packs and pogo sticks and trampolines!!’ The voice rang out of the darkness with delighted sarcasm. ‘What do you reckon, mate? That the dogs have been rooting the kangaroos? That’s the only way they’re going to get over that fence. Unless, of course, they got some ropes and grappling hooks and stuff.’ Mrs Culboon clearly felt that she had hit a rich vein of humour here and intended to milk it. ‘Yeah, and after they’ve done that mate, they can mount a Dingo expedition to have a go at Everest or something, ha, ha, ha!…’
‘Shut up you old bag!!’ the voice was shaky now. ‘Get in the light all of you or we shoot the guy with the beard!!’
This was a big surprise. Everyone knew that something was going on and that the people behind the lights were not just going to wave them on their way. But nobody had expected the stakes to rise quite so quickly.