Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘What was your part in this crime?’ he demanded, kicking at Charlie’s chair with a heavy, armour-plated boot.

  ‘None! I had nothing to do with it!’ The chair capsized, spilling him to the floor where he crawled around on his hands and knees, searching for a place to hide.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, you miserable ape!’

  ‘I did nothing!’ Charlie yelled, trying unsuccessfully to shelter under a little table. ‘You were there with me. You saw what happened.’

  Geraldine woke up with a squawk and frowned at her scuttling son. She was stupid with sleep. She had been dreaming of new curtains. She yawned and combed her fingers through her dusty, wind-blown hair.

  ‘I didn’t know they were breeding monsters,’ Charlie insisted, seeking the dubious sanctuary of his mother’s phantasmagorical skirt. Geraldine, fearing another fall, tried to whisk him away with her hand.

  ‘But you were involved,’ the Mariner growled, pacing the room. ‘You were told of these things by the dwarf ape Pangloss and yet you did nothing to hinder him.’

  ‘What could I do against him? I was in no position to change anything. I wasn’t to blame for it.’

  A cactus exploded, firing its bristles at the window. Einstein barked and scratched at the door.

  ‘You’re all to blame!’ the Deep Time Mariner thundered, snatching up Charlie’s abandoned chair and punching it into splinters with a blow from his mighty fist. He still needed to take the dog to the ark and he knew that Einstein would go nowhere without his ape and this gangling ape was quite incapable of providing one scrap of evidence that he, alone of the species, might be worth the considerable risk of preserving.

  ‘How many of these horrors were created in your laboratories?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. I think there were two hundred.'

  The Mariner stroked his huge green head. Something else now troubled him. No reports had been received of these pitiful four-legged freaks. Since the creature was an aberration, a nightmare fermented from a swollen brain, there would be no place reserved for it on the voyage of the Deep Time Ark when she slipped anchor and set sail from Mars. Was there time to file a report and send down a snatch-squad to search for it? What would happen if they failed to retrieve it? Would he have to make a declaration? Would it spoil his prospects of promotion? And the paper-work. Imagine the paper-work!

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked Charlie impatiently. ‘What happened to these wretched birds?’

  36.

  The development of the Pangloss four-legged chicken became the doubtful privilege of the Future Forecasts department. Charlie was asked to report for work on the first day of the month.

  The Pangloss Building was an ugly office tower planted in a square of windswept concrete to set it apart from the narrow street. He approached the building across a walkway spanning a moat that was choked with rubbish. On that first morning he paused on the bridge to catch his breath after the walk from the station, and stared down through the steel railings at the mounds of polythene and paper, drifts of polystyrene beakers, beer cans, bottles and dirty hamburger trays. Torn newspaper floated, suspended, in the draught from the air-conditioning vents.

  As he lingered at the railings he saw something moving far beneath him. It was an old man wearing a knitted balaclava and a greasy dressing gown. He was bent like a sickle and clutched a bottle against his chest as he talked to a man in a cardboard box. The moat contained its own shanty town. There were people living down there in the filth, sleeping in packing crates, scavenging for scraps in the rubbish. Charlie started to walk again. He knew if he wasn’t careful that he might be forced to join them. His first morning at work and already he was learning to fear the threat of redundancy, the plunge into unemployment, the spiral of poverty.

  At the far end of the bridge he was stopped by a young security guard wearing leather gloves and a Polaroid portrait of himself clipped to his uniform. The guard checked Charlie’s identity, made him sign the visitors’ book and escorted him through an entrance hall containing enough white marble to dress a Roman palace. Huge chandeliers of sparkling, cut-glass eggs hung from massive ceiling chains and a gold frieze of galloping chickens ran the length of the polished walls.

  ‘Third floor,’ he said, when Charlie asked him for directions. On his previous visits he’d been treated like a celebrity and taken straight to the penthouse in the presidential lift. From this day forward he’d be expected to work his way to the top.

  Charlie found his way to the third floor but was soon lost in a maze of identical corridors that ran between Global Marketing and Regional Accounts.

  Baxter, despite her misgivings, had wished him good luck and sent him out that morning equipped with a plastic attache case with real leather trim and combination security locks. She admired his determination to prove himself as a husband. It wasn’t so bad. They’d have weekends and evenings together. He’d still have plenty of time for painting. And she wouldn’t waste her days alone in the house. She planned to find her portfolio in search of ideas to develop. She’d always been rather pleased with the haddock.

  Charlie had bought himself a dark business suit and a pair of sturdy black brogues. He already regretted the choice of shoe. They pinched his feet and made him hobble. When he finally found Future Forecasts he was sweating and out of breath.

  He squeezed himself into a small reception cubicle, dominated by a large glass desk. A blonde girl with green eyes and a crimson lacquered mouth sat at the desk reading Chinwag Weekly. Her name was Lorraine. There was a low leather sofa placed directly before her where visitors might sit to admire her legs.

  Lorraine was proud of her legs. They’d been shaved and polished to perfection. She wanted to be a swimwear model and have famous fashion photographers fighting to take her to the Caribbean. Charlie gave her the letter of introduction that she opened while he sat on the sofa, panting and staring at her knees.

  The department, when he finally made his entrance, was a large room bleached by the glare of a ceiling made from spluttering fluorescent tubes and divided into a number of work stations by frosted glass screens. The receptionist walked him as far as the nearest empty work station and sat him down at the desk. He placed his briefcase on the desk, untied his shoe laces and waited for something to happen.

  On the first day he was given a red ballpoint pen, a black ballpoint pen, a doodle pad, a box of paperclips, a copy of his contract of employment a leaflet about the healthcare scheme and a blue plastic feather with instructions for new recruits on how to attach the quill to a shirt or jacket lapel. Congratulations—you’ve just been made a Pangloss Chicken Crusader!

  On the second day he was given a telephone, another box of paperclips, a security password for his computer, a copy of the fire regulations and an application to join the Pangloss Pension scheme.

  On the third day he was given a dozen empty document folders, another doodle pad a green ballpoint pen, a blue ballpoint pen and a box of staples.

  On the fourth day he was given a roll of Scotch tape, a packet of envelopes, a staple remover and a laundry marker.

  On the fifth day he was given a small wire tray, a pencil sharpener, a leaflet explaining the leaflet about the health care scheme, a calendar and a desk diary.

  On the sixth and seventh days he rested.

  ‘What do you do at work?’ Baxter said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said.

  The following week he was taught to use the coffee machine and introduced to the forecasting team. They were a queer and suspicious group of men who liked to keep to their cubicles. They had all been working in Future Forecasts for a long time and seemed to be riding a carousel of little grudges and grievances.

  The first forecaster had not spoken to the third forecaster for more than two years after a nasty incident involving a handy desk organiser moulded from green and yellow plastic. The desk organiser had been the personal property of the first forecaster and he’d scratched his secret mark on the
base to guard against theft. The gadget had disappeared from his desk to be found, a few days later, in the third forecaster’s cubicle but when he went to retrieve it he was challenged by its new owner and discovered the secret identity mark had been scratched away by a pair of scissors. There were angry words and threats of violence. The first forecaster had taken revenge by staying late one evening and stealing a Scotch tape dispenser. That would teach the bastard a lesson!

  The sixth forecaster would not talk to the second forecaster because of some bitter dispute involving the coffee machine and a number of poisonous messages found on the conference room drywipe board. The messages threw doubts on the forecaster’s parentage, the sanity of his children and the personal hygiene of his wife.

  The fourth forecaster would not speak to the fifth forecaster because of a drunken argument involving some rather blurred images that Lorraine the receptionist had produced by sitting aboard the photocopy machine at the end of a drunken office party. The results looked like startled sea urchins pressed under glass and were worth a small fortune to her admirers.

  Lorraine had tried to recover the prints but the forecasters would not surrender them. The fourth and fifth forecasters fought for possession. The scuffle had turned to a brawl. There had never been such excitement. The terrors and triumphs of office life.

  The fifth forecaster would not talk to the first forecaster because of his quarrel with the third forecaster, the second forecaster would not speak to the fourth forecaster because of his quarrel with the fifth forecaster and the third forecaster would not talk to the sixth forecaster because of his quarrel with the second forecaster, it was a very confusing situation.

  At last the first forecaster asked the sixth forecaster to tell the fourth forecaster to ask Charlie to read a pile of reports on what the world would be like in the future.

  Charlie sat in his cubicle and worked his way through a hundred fabulous descriptions of a master race who wore sparkling nylon leisure suits and lived in floating cities.

  The authors were paid to believe that, despite the evidence all around them, they would live to witness the dawn of a golden age. In this world of the future there would be no famine, no plague and no war to disturb the fun and games. There would be no Nature. There would be no wilderness. It would be a world of monorails, heliports and transparent cities in the sea. There would be no pain. There would be no labour. The landscape would be designed by teams of prize-winning architects, creating tranquil outlooks to be viewed through rose-tinted glass.

  Perfect, happy men and women would sit around all day, smiling like people smile in commercials and watching two hundred channels of wrap-around hologram TV quiz shows with chances to win unearthly prizes like luxury weekend trips to the Moon. They would sit around all day and be entertained. They would do nothing for themselves. They would live in blissful bubbles of artificial sunshine and have cute little robots to wash and feed them.

  The department’s task was to find a way to make these little robots serve nothing but Pangloss four-legged chicken dinners. They were asked to speculate on the strength of potential consumer resistance, cosmetic enhancement of the product, the lower nutritional expectations of second and third generation consumers and a lot of other things that made Charlie wake up at night with a shudder.

  They had barely finished planning their document when all the novelty poultry died. The birds had been engineered to grow extra legs but with the new legs came new diseases, tumours, fevers and blood disorders. They yielded no meat. The carcasses were destroyed and the scheme abandoned. It was a shame but even freaks were required to exist within suitable profit margins.

  The forecasters heard the rumours but they thought it a pity to waste their hard work. So they carried on with it. The document was going to take them years and when it was finally complete, Ambrose Pangloss would have it weighed and dumped in the company shredder.

  37.

  The failure of the chicken experiment did not mark the end of Charlie’s career in the Pangloss Chicken Empire. He thought he might be allowed to go home but Ambrose called him upstairs, by way of the presidential lift, and contrived to get him involved in another of his schemes. Each job of work was treated as a personal favour, a trivial chore but one, nonetheless, that required Charlie’s very special talents. Ambrose Pangloss had a gift for flummery. Whenever Charlie looked doubtful, Ambrose would mention the beautiful Baxter, the dream home and the cost of living until Charlie felt he couldn’t refuse the requests of this genial gnome. The salary was large—although Charlie never thought of it as more than monotony money—the standard company benefits were widely regarded as generous and there were a hundred ambitious young men who would gladly have sold their grandmothers’ teeth for a chance to be in his position. He was a lucky man. Everyone agreed that he was a very lucky man. He would have been mad to have thrown it away.

  ‘Do you know what they found when they dug the foundations for this building, Charlie?’ Ambrose asked him, leaning forward in his chair, propping his elbows on the desk and making a spire from his fingertips.

  Charlie considered for a moment. The biggest plague pit in London. The rope and bell from the gates of Hell. The lost city of Atlantis. He shook his head.

  ‘The remains of a Roman temple,’ Ambrose said.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Ambrose said, in surprise. ‘It’s still there.’

  ‘It should be safe under concrete.’ Charlie said.

  ‘Nothing lasts forever.’ Ambrose said, looking around the room as if he expected cracks to appear in the plasterwork.

  Charlie had his doubts but said nothing.

  ‘Do you know what they’re going to find when they excavate this site in another thousand years, Charlie?’ He grinned like a schoolboy stuffed with secrets. He had plans to insert a time capsule into the building’s foundations. The time capsule would have a locking device that could not be opened for a thousand years. He didn’t know that the world wouldn’t last that long. If he’d known that the world was about to end he would probably have arranged for the capsule to be fired into space to take his story to the stars. The time capsule was intended to carry his glory into the future and show the people of tomorrow what a genius they had lost.

  Charlie was told to work on the scheme, designing some jolly cartoon roosters to decorate a polythene pouch containing a freeze dried chicken dinner.

  38.

  ‘You did nothing to stop this butcher?’ the Mariner said. He sounded astonished, as if he’d expected Charlie to raise an army and bring down the walls of the Pangloss Empire.

  ‘I needed the work,’ Charlie said. ‘And what could I do against the system? It’s too late. Someone flushed the lavatory and we’re swimming in the vortex. Whenever we try to break the surface we find ourselves covered in shit.’

  ‘You did nothing.’

  ‘I wasn’t big enough to make a difference. We live in an age without heroes.’

  ‘Look at him!’ Einstein scoffed. ‘He’s not Jean-Claude Van Damme!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He was a film star,’ Einstein said. ‘Famous for his polished bodywork and failure to master the language. He spent his entire adult life pretending to fight mutant robots or save the people of Earth from plague-ridden meteor showers. But you won’t have heard of him. He’s what we have instead of heroes.’

  The Mariner snorted and turned away.

  ‘What happens now?’ Charlie said. He had pleaded for his life and merely succeeded in proving, even to himself, that his life was not worth saving. How had it gone so wrong? Why hadn’t he seen the mistakes? What had happened to all those early dreams and ambitions? How could he have wasted so many precious years?

  He remembered himself as a child, sitting in that distant classroom, painting bananas and oranges, and his life had stretched endlessly before him, an empty road of perpetual summer. He’d thought he would travel this road, innocent, brown as a gypsy, with no more luggage to
hinder him than a picnic basket and painting box. He’d thought it was simple. He’d thought he would always be glad to be living.

  Where had he lost his way on this road? How had he found himself trapped in an office, slumped at a desk, sick with boredom, drawing jolly cartoon roosters or making future forecasts into the marketing opportunities of chicken neck savoury spread?

  The years squandered, watching the clock eat away his life, counting the hours, the days, the weeks, in paperclips and plastic cups of instant coffee. Now the world was at an end and all the clocks were about to explode and the Mariner was talking urgently to Einstein, begging him to leave while there was still time for them to make their escape.

  ‘It’s a long journey and we’re late.’

  ‘Give me a few more minutes.’

  ‘Forget your monkey! You have other responsibilities. You have to follow your destiny. You are the future of your kind.’

  ‘But the monkey saved my life,’ Einstein protested. ‘I can’t run out on him. I can’t leave him here.’

  ‘No more nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it!’ the Deep Time Mariner shouted.

  ‘It’s true,’ Einstein insisted. ‘If it hadn’t been for Charlie I would have been dead in a ditch. I was lost and starving. He found me and nursed me back to health.’

  ‘You saved the life of this dog?’ the Deep Time Mariner asked, scowling at Charlie. He suspected another fantastic web of vanity and deceit but he had to check the facts.

  ‘I found him in the garden,’ Charlie said. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more, but nothing came into his head.

  ‘And nursed me back to health,’ Einstein prompted, as if Charlie were a half-wit who had lost his memory. What he lacked in intelligence, he certainly made up for in stupidity.

  ‘It’s true he was looking rather scraggy,’ Charlie admitted.