by Ben Elton
No, there was no doubt about it, she was alone, alone and mystified; starting at shadows and expecting every waitress to stab her with a poisoned plastic fork.
Chrissy tried to hypothesize what advantages the world’s biggest producers could gain by starting some kind of war. It felt distinctly foolish even to be considering the possibility, but what else could she work on?
Collecting her thoughts, Chrissy made a concerted effort to dedramatize the situation; to come up with a slightly less catastrophic theory to fit the information that she had. After all, the murders meant nothing, people killed for money, it didn’t mean that they were trying to change world history.
Putting aside the strange purchases that some of the people who had been at the LA dinner party had made since the crash, it seemed possible to Chrissy that they might be trying to set up some kind of illegal investment bank to buy out or out-produce competition and create some kind of hybrid giant multinational; a world super-company without a nationality. If this were the case, secrecy would obviously be essential because it would, of course, ride rough-shod over trade and monopoly legislation worldwide. Besides this, it would take the competition out of capitalism; it would be a kind of communism for billionaires. Try as she might, Chrissy could not bring herself to see much in this theory. And there was the rocket fuel and the guidance systems…Australia…were they going to hold the Japanese to ransom? Blow them up? The Japanese dominated so completely in almost all the new industries, their removal would be a huge new profit stimulus to everyone else. But she knew there were Japanese businessmen at the Los Angeles dinner…Of course that didn’t necessarily matter, capital knew no patriotism; that was for workers, to keep them working. Chrissy had lost count of the number of millionaires who lived in tax exile, or had even changed citizenship in order to get over local investment laws. That famous citizen of the world, Rupert Murdoch — a man who owns newspapers that preach arch patriotic xenophobia in their individual countries — had taken US citizenship with the drop of a hat in order to penetrate the US media.
Chrissy’s head was spinning, she could no longer get bombs off her mind. Maybe it was the apocalyptic nature of the newspapers she bought in her long long wait. The French power station disaster dominated for the day but the sea-level thing was still big news. It was getting higher and what’s more, the floating scum slick had reappeared. That one wasn’t going away either, the record high temperatures of the previous Northern summer had wiped out half the US cereal crop and now it looked like European agriculture was going to be contaminated as far as the wheat bowl in the Ukraine for years to come. What arable land remained in the world was going to have to be farmed more intensely; which would mean more chemical fertilizers; which meant more nutrients getting swept into the sea, thus feeding the microscopic algae, who multiply into the floating glob and suffocate the sea. There was a huge picture in one of the papers of the mid-Atlantic, and poking out of the slime that covered it were the fins and tails and noses of a huge school of dead dolphins. The caption noted that under the slime were literally millions of dead fish and various sea creatures.
It being such a long wait, Chrissy finally got around to buying the English papers that were stocked at the airport. She was relieved to discover that The Princess of Wales had been shopping and that lovely Mandy, seventeen, thought feminists were silly killjoys and she was flattered if men admired her body.
Contemplating the accumulating natural disasters, Chrissy again found herself wondering whether the sick old world would last long enough for whoever it was, to do whatever it was, they were going to do. But that was silly. ‘They’ would think of something and the world would be OK — ‘they’ of course were scientists. At that moment, all over the world, scientists were waking up and wondering what they were going to do. They were looking at a snowball. It seemed like only yesterday that they had held that snowball in their fists; they could crush it, shape it, control it. They turned away for a minute and suddenly the fucker was the size of a house, hurtling towards them, too big to hold and too big to control.
But Chrissy herself had more pressing problems to occupy her mind as the hours crawled by in the coffee lounge at JFK. Maybe they would try to hold the world to ransom; maybe Slampacker was going to demand of the world that they either ate more of his Chicken Slammers or he would nuke them?
What with trying to study every approaching face to see if it looked like an assassin, by the time Chrissy got up from the hard plastic chair to finally go and buy her ticket, her head hurt almost as much as her backside.
133: BACK IN BULLENS
As Chrissy sat, scared out of her wits, high up in the upper atmosphere, Zimmerman was also preparing to make the trip to Bullens Creek airport. He had to pick up his delivery of comics. Zimmerman was a total comic nut, and he had expended quite a large portion of his meagre resources ensuring that his regular supply followed him up to Bullens.
‘Get my comic books tomorrow, I love it when I get my books,’ he said as they sat around at the Culboons’ house the afternoon after they got back from their exciting trip out to Moorcock’s fence.
‘Zimm,’ said Rachel in disbelief, ‘you’ve just done a whole Superman thing yourself, you took care of those guys as if it was a film, and you’re thinking about your comics!’
‘That’s the whole point, Rachel,’ replied Zimmerman. ‘I can forget things with my comic books, you know, relax. Kind of lose myself in them, you know?’
The others understood fully. Zimm was, in many ways, a wonderful person, but he was also definitely weird, weird and intimidating. The others sometimes found it rather disconcerting just being around Zimmerman. He actually had to live with himself; it was scarcely surprising that he occasionally wanted to lose himself.
‘I dig my comics,’ Zimmerman continued. Like all adult comic readers he felt the need to do a big number about it not being childish. ‘There’s a lot more in them than you think, right? They’re really wry, you know, cynical. Like, man, you know, the Phantom and Judge Dread are kind of philosophers.’
Zimm was very big for the whole sub-gothic justice fantasy thing. He played a nationwide game, favoured by hippies and also science students who didn’t like rugby, called Dungeons and Dragons. In the game you go through various semi- guided adventures, playing a character that you have invented yourself. Most of the farties who played the game assumed immensely macho characters calling themselves things like Wotan Skulcrusher, Spearman the Axe Bringer and Goblin Trollthrash. They imagined themselves as Thor-like figures, straight out of Tolkien. Zimm’s character, on the other hand, was a tiny stooping old wizard; a gentle, peaceful wizard who knew nothing of pain or death; a wizard whose greatest joy was to invent ever more beautiful types of flowers for the children to pick — but a wizard who happened to have an enormous dick and a scrotum that he had to drag behind him on a trolley.
Everybody got their own thing out of the game.
Anyway, on the subject of his comics, Zimmerman was adamant: ‘Whatever we do next it will have to be when I get back from the airport man. I’ve got to have my comics, you know?’
‘Well, take your time, Zimmerman mate,’ Mr Culboon commented drily. ‘I can’t see us coming up with our next move for a while. I mean, what the hell do we do?’
Rachel was very wound up, as was CD. Getting shot at in the darkness was a new experience for them both. The Culboons were more relaxed, it had happened to them before, although not in quite a while. For Zimm, of course, it was like old times, in fact for years he hadn’t been able to sleep at night unless Walter popped his head around the door occasionally and shouted ‘bang’. Walter himself, like CD and Rachel, had never experienced being shot at but he remarked afterwards that he had been surprised at how lacking in heaviness the whole situation had been. Zimmerman assured him that it was worse when you got hit.
Rachel’s frustration was growing. ‘We’ve certainly got to do something,’ she exploded. ‘I mean, Christ, if we needed proof that
something was going on, we’ve got it. You don’t guard innocent projects with gunmen. What is that bastard Moorcock up to?’
‘Those bastards, Tyron’s in on this too remember,’ said CD, secretly wanting to remind Rachel that it was his detective work that had brought them this far.
‘And we don’t know who else besides.’
‘Oh, man, like it’s obvious like, what we’ve got to do, you know?’ said Walter in what, for him, was an urgent manner. It was like a snail trying to dial 999. ‘Either one, or all of us people, has got to get over that wire and take a look, you know? But seeing as some of us are not exactly built like commandoes, maybe just Zimmerman should go.’
‘I’m bloody going,’ said Rachel, ‘this is where it starts to get exciting.’
This was too much for Mrs Culboon, who shrieked goodnaturedly. ‘Oh, darling, if you get excited being shot at and beaten up, just come and live with us Abs for a while, love.’
‘Whatever we do, we should leave it at least forty-eight hours,’ said Zimm. ‘They’re sure to be on their guard for a while, but after that I reckon they’ll become cool and think we were just a casual hassle.’
Walter looked at Zimm with awe and affection. ‘Man, you are becoming so straight and together that I will have to buy you a tie and get you a job in a bank,’ he said.
134: SURVIVAL OF THE STRAIGHTEST
Walter was right, they had all noticed it. Zimmerman was becoming very together indeed. Certainly he did it in his own very untogether way but, none the less, he was a changed man.
Zimmerman had a theory about staying alive and being alive. He had developed his theory during combat and it was a theory shared by many of his colleagues. Life for a soldier in any war is pretty gruesome to say the least; in Vietnam it was worse because no one in the Australian or US Armies had the faintest idea for what or for whom they were fighting. Whereas their opponents knew exactly what they were fighting for; their country and their families, and had been doing so for thirty years. Faced with this unpleasant imbalance in job motivation, the best thing any allied soldier could do really was to try and relax about it. Unfortunately, if you happen to be spending month after month sat in a sweltering swamp, getting eaten alive by insects and shot to bits by highly motivated and extremely skilled guerilla soldiers, relaxing is easier said than done. One of the quickest and easiest ways to get around this problem was to escape the real world in a false, drug induced reality: i.e., get out of your brain.
Unfortunately, soldiers who are staring at the trees claiming that the colours are dancing and that Jesus is a can of corned beef, don’t tend to live very long. Saying ‘hey man you’re beautiful’ at approaching Vietcong cut no ice with them at all, they shot you whether you found them attractive or not. Hence it was absolutely essential to be ready to be straight, or at least functional, when there was danger about. Zimmerman learnt to take his recreation when it was safe to do so and to put up with reality when he needed to be able to rely on himself.
Now although Zimm was never again to be the chemical dustbin he had been when he truly did live in hell (in fact after Vietnam he had given up everything but the odd toot on a bong), the basis of his theory had stayed with Zimmerman ever since. Life was mainly a bummer, so it was best to keep your head somewhere else; invent your own more palatable reality. For Zimm this needed to be nothing more complex than a glass of home-brew, a little grass and a good comic. It didn’t matter how often he had read it.
None the less, he never forgot what he had learnt in war: the time to get it together was when there was trouble. Now there was clearly trouble and Zimmerman had returned to earth to meet it.
135: NO CHOICE
Listen,’ said CD, who was getting nervous. He didn’t really like the idea of heroics but if Rachel was going, he was going. ‘Maybe we should do some research in the town, ask the workers, that sort of thing?’
‘I tried all morning, man,’ answered Walter. ‘Like, most of them stay behind the wire, half of them don’t even speak English and they’re all paid serious money, man, you know, top whack. You ask them once, they say they’re building a hotel; you ask them twice, they tell you to fuck off.’
It was clear to all of them that the only way they were going to find out anything more about the great mystery that they had stumbled upon, was to take another look.
CD wished he’d fallen in love with a coward.
136: HUNTED
As Chrissy’s National Australian jumbo began its descent into Perth International, she knew for sure that they would be waiting for her, having doubtless traced her destination through her use of a credit card. Chrissy knew also that if she walked out into them they would kill her. And yet, somehow, she had to get past them and over to the internal airport to pick up and pay for her ticket to Bullens, which she had reserved in a false name at JFK.
She presumed that she was safe enough through passport control and that the danger would appear after customs. She could not lose her passport because they would simply turn her around and put her on a plane back to the USA, Chrissy thanked her lucky stars that as a journo she travelled constantly and had an Australian multiple entrance visa in her passport that was good for another year. But it was no good being allowed in so that they could carry her straight out again in a box. She needed a plan. Luckily for Chrissy, she was a journo, and journos are born schemers and natural liars.
After some thought she got up and walked down the aisle. She asked everybody the same thing: ‘Excuse me, I have a salt and sugar deficiency, if you’ve finished would you mind awfully…?’
It was such a strange request that people just concurred instantly and handed over the little plastic envelopes. Then Chrissy disappeared to the toilet. She did not re-emerge until the stewardess knocked on the door to inform her that the plane was landing.
After clearing passport control, Chrissy prepared herself carefully to go through customs. She put on her dark glasses, she wet her brow, and she lit up a cigarette…then she ran through green. If the plan had failed she intended to trip and allow the bag to burst open, she had already opened it and held it closed with her fingers. As it happened, there was no need because, as she’d hoped, the sight of a sweating, smoking girl trying to run through green with fear in her eyes, fear which of course was very real, was enough to make a young customs officer take a punt on her.
Of course, when she opened her bag and he idly sifted through it, he thought all his Christmasses had come at once because there was the salt and the sugar taped up in a sheet of clear plastic that had once been a bath hat.
The discreet looking murderer stood waiting, as person after person emerged from the US flight, many being immediately and noisily scooped up by tearful families. He could not see Chrissy. He waited and waited, but he could not see her. He waited until long after another flight had flooded the arrivals hall with still more happy huggers, and still there was no Chrissy.
137: SALT RUNNING
This, of course, was because she was in a customs lock-up.
‘What’s this,’ they had asked.
‘Salt and sugar,’ she replied. The last thing she wanted was to be delayed for ever for deceiving the police. She wanted a nice two or three hours while they tried to figure her out.
‘Why’s it wrapped up like drugs?’
‘Is it? That’s the way I like my salt and sugar.’
‘Mixed up?’
‘You never heard of sweet and sour?’
The customs people were a little surprised at her coolness so, instead of whisking her away, they had a look at the package that the young officer had plucked so triumphantly from Chrissy’s bag.
‘It’s salt and sugar,’ said the lad. ‘Get the Prof to have a look at it, every grain,’ said his boss. After about an hour they decided that what they had found was salt and sugar.
‘All right, Miss, what’s your game? Trying to make it look like you had a bagful of smack, are you a sicko or what?’ The officer was exasperated and d
isappointed; he didn’t like Chrissy at all; he didn’t understand her, but he knew that he didn’t like her.
‘Listen, Buster!’ snapped Chrissy, who was beginning to feel that it was time to leave. ‘This is Australia, right, not the Soviet Union. So, I got a bagful of condiments? What is that, a federal case? You saying you can’t bring salt into this country any more? Is that it? Get this, Mister, if you’re so damn paranoid you see drugs wherever you look that’s your problem, OK? See an analyst, personally I’m outta here.’
‘No you aren’t, Miss, you aren’t out of here by a long shot.’ The officer was very puzzled. Puzzled and annoyed. He could see only two explanations for the taped up plastic bag they had found. Either this woman was a weirdo, or he was being subjected to an incredibly elaborate double bluff. The latter was certainly possible. Any drug-runner ran the risk of being stopped and searched by customs, in which case, obviously there was a good chance their goods would be discovered. Perhaps this woman had conceived the audacious plan of leaving something so confusing on display that by the time it had been fully investigated, and found to be perplexingly innocent, no one would think of searching further.
‘Fine toothcomb job, boys,’ he spat the words at Chrissy. ‘Unpick every fucking stitch in her jumper. Wanda, bung her on the slab.’
138: CLEAN GLOVES AND WARM TONGS
And so it was that poor Chrissy took a short break out from being chased across the world by shadowy murderers, in order to have an Australian customs officer stuff a long probe up her important little places. No one is at their freshest after a twenty-hour flight, especially in the terrifying circumstances that Chrissy had endured, so the job wasn’t much fun for Wanda either. But she was a philosophical woman and had resigned herself to making the best of what had definitely turned out to be a slightly less glamorous job than she had expected. Probing the bottoms of hippies and wicked old grannies was not absorbing detective work, but she put a brave face on it.