by Ian Hutson
‘Won’t be any decent skiing for quite a while if this little “Extermination Level Event” gets past us. We must do something. I feel so responsible – and it won’t just be the pink bits on the map that get knocked about a bit of that thing lands. There’ll be foreigners too. Abroad will be damaged, and that will mean Overseas Aid bills.’
Maj gave him a swift hug and led him by the elbow back towards the pedestrian passenger exit deck.
‘Alright then – but we’ll get receipts for everything. You will be paid back, I promise you. Even if we have to sell something else to the Chinese. Wales or something –Beijing were asking about Wales only last year. I’m sure we could do a good deal there that might cover sixty gallons of BP’s finest. Why do they still call it “BP” when it’s plainly no longer anything of the sort?’ Boris, for the life of him, didn’t know either.
The two of them queued patiently with the other passengers for the burly brutes of crewmen who would fling them over the side of the ship onto the quay with their luggage. Maj tipped them a shiny thruppence each and pointed out roughly where she’d like to land. Oh how her bruised and now a bit black as well as royal blue buttocks rued the day she had been born into a universe entirely parallel to yours, dear reader, except for the fact that no-one had ever invented the gangplank. Infinite diversity in infinite combination has some devilishly interesting implications in the detail, ne c’est pas?
A while later – roughly about a week - the Cabinet Office was, as it had been for roughly about the past week, a blur of very practical chaps in white coats expounding theories. Demur ladies in barely-sensible patent heels wielded industrial typewriters and professional carbon-paper and some really quite good tea. A deferential Biscuitelier approached the new The Secretary of State for Cataclysmic Events and offered him a small sample from a box of the nineteen thirty-four Fig Rolls du Grand Cru mettre dans la boîte en la ferme fig. He sniffed, nibbled, rolled the crumbs around his tongue and then nodded to the waiter for them to be served to everyone else. ‘An unpretentious little fig’ he said ‘but I think you’ll be amused by the overtones of Mexican vanilla, fresh wild parrot-poop and the “essence of burning car tyre smoke” in the pastry.’ Oh how all of the Assistant Secretaries present giggled and tittered. The Biscuitelier was quite busy tearing the cellophane on fresh boxes for a few minutes after that.
‘Look here – if Cholmondeley says that it will work then I’m quite inclined to believe him. He used to make the most marvellous Airfix models in dorm at school and I don’t remember him once having any pieces left over. I trust his judgement in these matters implicitly.’
The Chancellor of the Exchequer looked as though he was chewing on refectory broccoli. ‘I don’t doubt Chummy’s abilities and I am certain that he would be the right man to lead any such expedition – but what I cannot countenance is such profligate issue of petrol coupons. It would send quite the wrong message to the public – ye gods, man, we’ve only just got them over the ruddy Suez crisis and used to a short gallon a month per private vehicle. This would smack of favouritism and re-ignite journalistic nonsense about the old-boy network.’
Archie (Lord Sir Archibald Cunningham OBE, CBI, BBC, BOC, BP, DDT, KBE, KC, KCVO, KCMG, K.C. & The Sunshine Band) knew Dennis, the Chancellor, very well after their sharing of rooms at Cambridge, and he could tell that the protest was a token one spoken for the record. ‘My dear chap, I’ll have a word with Rupes – he owes me a favour after that dreadful business with the petting zoo animals. We’ll get him to write this up to war-time standards, stiffened upper lips, there may not always be an England if we don’t do this, all pull together, that sort of thing. We’ll have the public sending in eggcup donations siphoned out of every unlocked car fuel tank from here to Carlisle before you know it. Get Maj to offer him a gong of some sort as a sweetener – he’s awfully keen on that sort of honours nonsense, cough cough.’
Dennis, The Record satisfied, sighed and turned to the Prime Minister. ‘Boris. Putative postal donations aside, you’re sure that you can cover the cost – sixty gallons, maybe more, at one shilling and sixpence ha’penny a gallon?’
The PM said nothing but simply put his Post Office Savings Account book on the table and pushed it across to Dennis who opened it, turned to the last ink-stamped figure and whistled through his teeth. ‘So the rumours are true then – Prudence really is your middle name!’ There was some ill-muffled tittering from among the assembled scientists, at least among the ones who could understand and speak everyday ordinary real-person English. Dennis slipped the book back to Boris. ‘Very well – gentlemen, in the light of information very recently received, this Treasury has no objections to the proposal.’
Boris stood. ‘A final vote then gentlemen? All those in favour wave your expenses forms in the air and wait for them to be collected.’
There was a general fluttering of A4 originals and triple carbon copies, and Miss Copious Tippexe whipped around the room to collect them on behalf of a surely already-grateful nation.
‘Motion carried. England will launch an expeditionary force to Comet LooksLikeABigBuggerToMeCyril with the express intention of not getting in the way of anyone else’s emergency measures or of otherwise making a fuss. Once there the situation will be re-assessed with a view to possible implementation of some sort of solution or other situational amelioration in re the more technical aspects, viz the economical but wholly successful avoidance of the rude and summary premature extinction of the species, to wit, our own, eh?’
He turned to where Professor Hawking was scratching “Hawking woz 'ere” and an outline of an implausibly-sized penis with highly stylised testicles and dragster wheelchair wheels into the Cabinet Office table.
‘Er – we’ll leave the details entirely in your hands, Professor, naturally. I don’t think that any of us are exactly qualified to act in matters of quite such, um, advanced rocket surgery.’
With that the Cabinet bulldogs left the room in a stately procession, followed by the Ministerial kennel-maids, followed by the ministers and then by the secretarial staff (the latter in very strict order of Civil Service seniority, of course). The scientists were left alone, holding a fairly loose brief to save the world. Miss Tippexe dived in with a stapler to firm up the brief before anyone dropped it and the pages got out of order. The scientists then all dived onto the remains of the plates of biscuits and began shaking the thermos jugs to see which still contained free tea and coffee. It was very strong tea and coffee compared to their usual fare, which was usually mostly milk and never served so close to nap-time.
After an indulgent interval of ten minutes or so the science chaps’ keepers came into the room to collect them and to return them to their various academic and mental institutions. Some progressive few of them were to be returned to the new “comprehensive” combined academic and mental institutions; those few, those lucky, lucky non-streamed few. Special buses were waiting at the back door to Number Ten, some of them with ramps, some of them with child-locks on the doors and bars on the windows. The party looked as though two dozen or more curious and enthusiastic PG Tips chimpanzees in white coats were being led through the building – as they passed, everyone else ducked back through doors or flattened themselves against wall panelling. Science is such a funny thing really isn’t it, and not at all like the real world!
As Hawking was driven away he turned towards the other science chaps’ buses and mental ambulances and held up a hastily-scribbled missive, written on a big pad of graph paper that he’d bought in Woolworths on a socialisation field-trip. The note read simply “I’ll be on science-chaps-internet-hangout-chatroom-for-clever-exchange-of-datum-and-ideas.co.england.uk immediately after tea this evening – we’ll get together and plan the technicalities then by judicious use of real-time coincident discrete information exchange protocols (later to become “online chat”). Remember to enable secretive peer to peer-only interchange using I-Spy Code 23 on page 12 of the Ladybird Series (Reprint 1953). Cheerio.�
� He waved and turned back around to look over the driver’s shoulder at the long and winding road ahead – a road that he hoped led to planetary safety and the continued existence of England, of cricket, of fruit-salad sweeties at eight for a penny and of glossy magazines with naked ladies in them.
As the bus turned out onto Whitehall he offered his first “Are we there yet?” of the return trip to his driver, Cyril, and to his minder, Doris. Doris, resplendent in her crisp, dark blue uniform with one of those upside down watches pinned to her lady-boobies, tapped the switch that closed the partition between rear-seat passengers and the driver. It slid up with barely a whisper from the portable electrical motor mechanism (they had asked Hawking to design it himself and then make it in Meccano). As they pulled out into traffic she disconnected the speakers in the front cab, adjusted the volume that only Hawking would hear and popped an eight-track cartridge in to loop around some of his favourite classics. The rear compartment rocked to such soothing melodic giants as Einstein A-go-go, Atomic by Blondie, Tesla Girls by OMD and I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper performed by a very young Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip.
About a week later at a very secret army base hidden just to one side of the A1 motorway near Catterick all of these clever science chaps had been collected together again and delivered to the main gate in a convoy of gaily-coloured buses and Chipperfield-designed containment vans. During the unloading phase there were a few mismatches of travel-crate to reception cage, and the delivery became subject to the immutable circus law that what can get loose will get loose. A few of the scientists broke away and meandered off at not some little intellectual velocity. Some big soldiers and some big Alsatian doggie-woggies were sent running across the otherwise very tidy and well-swept parade ground to round them up. It was rather like watching sheep that had a deep individual and collective understanding of chaos and queuing theories being worked by less intelligent but more disciplined shepherds; shepherds with guns and with a Sergeant Major who shouted awfully well and knew lots of very rude words. The Alsatian dogs thought it all great sport, although several of them took the opportunity afforded by the confusion to mate with things that they wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to mate with.
The whole situation nearly went very terribly wrong when one of these escaped scientist chaps spotted a dark green Bedford Seven Ton Lorry towing a field gun and wanted to make some muzzle adjustments to extend the range – had the driver not been able to reverse a trailer as well as he could they might have lost the entire cook-house instead of just the chimney. There were tears of course, but in the end an advanced chemistry set with proper working Bunsen burner was exchanged for the remaining live shells and Doctor “Tubby” Tubberson was returned to the main group, happily distracted with his new toy. England knows how to treat her technical and engineering types, and she treats them well. For the others who were brave about things and didn’t cry there were Super-Spirograph sets and even Meccano.
Practical soldiers trained in crowd control and using velvet ropes and a couple of satin-finished rope-stands herded the scientists into the centre of a vast corrugated tin Nissen hut, where they were to tell the top brass what they had got planned to save the world. There was a short interval during which they were all encouraged to go wee-wee to save interruptions later. Then a kindly Psychiatric Liaison Officer encouraged one of them to volunteer and step up to the blackboard or, if he preferred, to the magnetic whiteboard with colourful letters and shapes to use. Professor Iain Stewart thus stood in front of the gathered brass, embarrassed, giggling and kicking his feet. The liaison gently poked him from the sidelines with a hurry-up stick and gesticulated to him to speak. Once he got going he was awfully good.
To be perfectly honest, the plan he outlined was amazing. Even the lady-officers were impressed and they, naturally, had understood little of it, having tuned out at the first mention of wet-steam ergs and double-panel cast-iron thermal exchangers. The little Quartermaster fellow lifted his cap and scratched his forehead as he scribbled down what they would probably need. Two Morris Space-Travellers with roof-racks; twenty-three miles of ½ inch copper pipe, several tons of other plumbing supplies, fifty-nine gallons of five star leaded petrol, forty tons of coal and a specially-engineered dog bed.
That is to say, of course, a specially engineered bed for a dog, not a bed for a specially-engineered dog. It was to be forged from a single roll of the new “Velcro” material and pre-treated against fleas and mild canine incontinence.
‘Single or double?’ the Quartermaster asked, seeking clarity.
‘Are dog beds available in doubles these days? That seems overly romantic, even if we are a nation of dog-lovers’ replied the A.C. to the D.C.D.T.D., without even wondering whether it was his place to raise the matter or whether he was speaking out of rank and turn.
‘No, no – the canine incontinence. Are we talking single incontinence or double incontinence?’
After a brief discussion and the hammering out of a helpful Venn-diagram it was decided to prepare for double incontinence, since the dog in question had not previously been in space.
At the end of the presentation there was a stunned silence. Awkward chaps came in and led the scientists away for a rewarding feast of the sort of things that scientists eat, like cake and jelly and tinned salmon sandwiches with those funny little bones with the holes right through and orange squash or fizzy red pop. There was a distant chorus of “ugh” and the sound of buttery cucumber slices being removed and thrown down. The top brass did what they do best. One or two of them wept openly, some went to the toilets for a fag and a few carried on sleeping loudly.
The Brigadier stood and put a gloss on it for those in the know. ‘Gentlemen, there you have it. Our best minds have come up with the solution. I expect everything to be ready for launch within forty-seven hours. Moreover, gentlemen, I rather think that England expects that every man will do his duty.’
‘Forty-seven Sir? Wouldn’t forty-eight hours be neater?’
‘It would be, soldier, but you’re forgetting the mandatory change-over to Daylight Saving Time. Or from it, or something. B.S.T. to the G.M.T., or some such nonsense. It’s all controlled by the G.P.O. and there’s no talking to them, even with the species threatened. Whatever they call it when the clocks go forward and we all lose an hour in bed. That is to say that an hour is lost that might otherwise have been spent in sleeping, not that we all waste an hour between the sheets.’
‘Oh. Yes Sir. But, I wonder - couldn’t we postpone that Sir – to give us the extra hour?’
‘I’m afraid not, son – you can’t argue with the immutable laws of time and space and Greenwich. Fortunately that is now a problem for the English Space Agency. Is he here?’
‘Who Sir?’
‘The English Space Agency. I was told that he’d be at this meeting.’
Cholmondeley walked out of the Gents, still trying to do up the cunningly buttoned flies on a suit he hadn’t worn since his last appearance before a magistrate on a charge of “probably drunk and quite plainly disagreeable”. He appeared to be leaving a trail of mothballs from a moth-damage hole in the jacket pocket.
‘Ah – Cholmondeley, there you are. Spot of a mission for you.’
Cholmondeley was not entirely surprised. Cometh the hour; cometh the man eh? ‘Come-ing!’ He settled quickly back into his seat.
The Brigadier tucked his swagger-stick under his arm and looked Cholmondeley up and down, ratcheting back and forth like a stiff human pantograph as he reacted to Cholmondeley’s seated contours. ‘Mothballs. Why do I sense mothballs?’
‘Mothballs. Yes sir, but a lot has happened since puberty. They don’t affect the way I ride a bicycle.’
‘Excellent. Now, we... what?’
‘Mothballs. It was my nickname at school Sir. I had malaria of the testicles as a child, things took longer than usual to sort themselves out. There was some... medical manipulation involved. Everything’s fine now though Sir. All sorted. Would
you like to see?’
The Brigadier considered Cholmondeley’s trousers and sniffed. Not the trousers of course, he just sniffed as a sort of social punctuation mark before continuing. ‘Yes. Splendid. No! Thank you, no! Now look, old chap, we sort of need you to save England and, er, possibly the rest of the planet too if you can... You, er, well – you have washed your hands, I suppose?’
‘Yes Sir. I used soap as well.’ Cholmondeley put his hands out and showed the Brigadier both sides.
‘Splendid. Now look, this is the plan...’
The Brigadier then outlined what was obviously, to all present and sober, a quite brilliant but fairly desperate measure and an exercise from which a chap could have little serious hope of returning. He ended with the exuberant encouragement ‘...and I won’t beat about the bush, quite frankly, there is little hope of your making any kind of safe return. However, do your duty and succeed and you will have saved England and earned the gratitude of Her Majesty and of Her Majesty’s government. Your name will be passed down through the anal of history.’
‘Which one?’
‘What? There is only one isn’t there? The anal of the winning side, surely?’
An aide to the Brigadier-ranks leaned in and whispered about pig-Latin and the dangers of making up words if you only went to provincial schools and a technical college. The Brigadier queried a couple of whispered things about when to use “ii” at the end to form a plural and how there were two hens Sir in annals and only one in the other thing, then he blushed to a shade of mortified pink and corrected himself.
‘Annals – passed down through the annals of history.’ The Brigadier leaned over to the aide to the Brigadier-ranks and whispered again, still not convinced. ‘Look – if there is only one why is it called the annals of history – plural?’ The aide indicated that he had not the ruddy foggiest idea and cared even less. He retired to sit on his anus and let senior officers make a prat of themselves if they wanted.