This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  Career decision.

  Unfortunately for Rosalie, by now, the second of the muscular types had descended the mountain. He charged after her, covering the entire desert in four strides before bringing her down with a flying tackle. The man was an Aikido master and, despite Rosalie’s formidable fighting skills, he was easily able to fix her in a body-lock. Crushed as she was by a large martial arts expert, Rosalie knew that the game was up.

  Max had to make a career decision. This woman had just tried to murder the most powerful producer in the world, a producer for whom Max very much wanted to work. On the other hand, this same woman was very attractive indeed, and her announcement of execution had contained some extremely valid points. What to do? Max usually left difficult decisions to his agent but he knew that she would have been in no doubt. There was no point even calling her to ask. Max knew what her answer would be, ‘Stand back and let the girl be taken,’ Geraldine would have said, ‘and just pray Tolstoy forgets you were the one who brought her here.’

  Yes, that is certainly what Geraldine would have said. Then, again, Geraldine was not in full possession of the facts. For one thing, she did not fancy the girl. In fact, to the best of Max’s knowledge, Geraldine had not even met her, and had she done, Max doubted that she would have found something wild and compelling about the girl’s behaviour. Max certainly did. Everything about Rosalie spoke to Max’s very soul. She seemed to throw his own pointless and dissolute existence into shameful contrast. Max was by nature both romantic and a bit mad. It was these two factors which led him to decide to lay professional considerations aside and be romantic and a bit mad now. Except that he did not really decide; he just did it, because, as has already been pointed out, he was a bit mad. Running over, he took a huge kick at the Aikido master’s head. Rosalie rolled the unconscious man off her and leapt to her feet.

  ‘Here,’ said Max and threw her his car keys.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rosalie.

  Max would love to have believed that there was a poignant glance, a meeting of eyes, an unmistakable moment of understanding, and perhaps even affection between them. But there wasn’t. She just grabbed the keys and fucked off.

  ‘See you sometime,’ he murmured as Rosalie flipped the switch on the BioLock and disappeared into the tube which led to the car-port.

  Max turned to face Plastic, who was staggering to his feet in some considerable pain. Plastic had, of course, witnessed Max’s craven disloyalty. What is more, that disloyalty was not over yet. As the BioLock closed behind Rosalie, Max marched over to Plastic.

  ‘I don’t want you to call your security people, Plastic. I want you to let the girl go.’

  Max gulped, Nathan gulped, even Tolstoy gurgled slightly. None of them could quite believe that Max was aiding and abetting the escape of someone who had just kicked the most powerful person in Hollywood in the balls. Everyone knew that Max was a bit mad, but this was insane.

  ‘You want me to let her go?’ Plastic inquired.

  ‘Yes,’ said Max.

  Plastic could see that Max was clearly determined. He also knew that Max was young, fit and very strong. He shrugged.

  ‘Looks like she’s going to get away then.’

  There was a pause in which nobody made a sound except the numerous mutant animals which were still voicing their protest at the sudden disturbance.

  ‘Uhm… listen, Plastic … Mr Tolstoy,’ Max mumbled, reason returning to its throne, ‘I hope this incident won’t affect our working relationship.’

  ‘You hope it won’t affect our working relationship?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You take sides with a woman who tries to execute me and you hope it won’t affect our working relationship?’

  ‘If that’s OK by you.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Plastic, ever the pragmatist. ‘I don’t know what we would have done with her if we’d caught her anyway. The last thing I need is to be seen dragging some cute little greenie through the courts. You can bet your best dollar she’d get all the sympathy. Just as a matter of interest, though, may I inquire why you brought this homicidal lunatic along to a creative meeting?’

  ‘I just met her at DigiMac… I thought you might be interested. I didn’t know she was going to try and execute you.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s nice to know. Are you porking her?’

  ‘Well, I . .

  ‘Good, because it’s a connection we can use. Nathan here is going to write me a movie for you to star in. A movie about the battle between Mother Earth and Claustrosphere. He’s going to write about how those decent but misguided souls in the Green Movement learn that, far from threatening the survival of the human race, Claustrosphere is in fact ensuring it. Isn’t that right, Nathan?’

  ‘That’s exactly the type of plot I had in mind,’ Nathan said hastily.

  ‘Good.’

  Broadening the campaign.

  After Max and Nathan had left, Plastic returned to his communications room in the house. A marketing strategy has to be many-levelled. You can’t just make a decent ad. A well-designed packet alone is not enough. A marketing strategy has to set the agenda for consumption. A perfect marketing strategy not only provides the product, it also identifies and promotes the need. All his life Plastic Tolstoy had known that the easiest market to exploit is the one which you create yourself.

  Chapter Twelve

  The paranoid conspiracy theorist

  Trapped nerd.

  Judy was cornered and he knew it. There were two of them outside the cubicle. What is more, they were armed, and Judy was not. Normally in these circumstances, when an agent is trapped in a toilet cubicle, there is a convenient back window through which to make an escape. This time, however, there was no window and probably a good thing too, considering that the lavatory was on the 190th floor.

  ‘Come on out, man.’ The tone was violent, with the hint of a sneer. ‘Unless you want them to find you with your pants down.

  It was a point, thought the terrified Judy. If one has to fight, best not to have to do it with your trousers round your ankles. He pulled them up and readied himself for the inevitable. Outside they were laughing; they had their man and they knew it. Judy desperately tried to recall his training. It was a while since he had found himself in a combat situation and, in truth, he had never been very good at it anyway.

  ‘Make a plan,’ he said to himself. That was what he had been taught. If your opponent is confident, then he is at his most vulnerable. The idea being that an assailant who thinks he has the attack in the bag will move sloppily, he will make mistakes. This is the point where clear thinking and properly planned actions can turn the tables.

  OK, thought Judy, there are two men outside the door, which is my only exit. They are bigger and tougher than I am, they are also armed. Clearly they are going to be feeling confident. Hence, according to combat training, they are at their most vulnerable.

  Judy’s plan was simple. He knew from the voices that one of his assailants was standing directly outside the cubicle door and that the other was slightly off to one side. What Judy would do was kick the door open with all his might, slamming it into the face of the first of his enemies. He must then follow through instantly. He must be out of the cubicle before the first man’s nose had even started to bleed. Having emerged from the cubicle, he must immediately stick his fingers in the eyes of the second man, the one who was off to the side. He would have to move fast enough to give the second man no time to raise his guard. Then, with both assailants briefly disabled, he would run out of the toilet. He would not pause, he would make no witty cracks, he would simply run, for his foes would surely not take long to revive. So that then was the plan. One: kick the door open. Two: emerge and stab eyes with fingers. Three: run away. In this manner, Judy, a weedy man of five-foot-five with one leg slightly longer than the other, would get the better of two enormous, armed thugs.

  Very gently he edged open the lock of the door, a necessary prerequisite for kicking
it open. It was a tense moment. If they heard the bolt slip, he was dead. They didn’t and Judy had the door unlocked. Holding on to the toilet paper dispenser, he drew his foot back against the lavatory bowl, getting ready for the mighty kick.

  ‘Are you still out there?’ he inquired, attempting a casual tone.

  ‘That’s right, and now we’re coming in to get you,’ the thug replied, thus establishing to Judy’s satisfaction that the first assailant was still in the same position.

  ‘Good,’ said Judy, and with all the force that fear and loathing could summon up in his small body, he drove his boot against the cubicle door.

  Sadly, the door was an inward opener. The whole cubicle shook with the impact, and pain shot up all the way from the tip of Judy’s toes to deep within his bollocks. From there, the pain proceeded upwards through his agonised body, finally coming to rest at the back of his head and making his eyeballs rattle. Judy sank back on to the toilet seat as the two thugs burst in and started to beat him with rolled up magazines.

  ‘Please, please, guys!’ Judy screamed as the blows fell about his head and shoulders.

  ‘Repeat after me,’ said Cruise, beating Judy all the while, ‘I am a stupid little queer and a disgrace to the Bureau.’

  Agent Cruise had been nursing a deep resentment for Judy ever since Rosalie had cut his arm open in the desert. The humiliation of being cut up by some freaky little green chick had weighed heavily on him in the weeks since his return and he had come, irrationally, to blame Judy for the failure of his mission. Somehow he felt there must have been something in the environmental briefing he had been given that had been inadequate. Cruise concluded that Schwartz had stitched him up. Therefore, when Judy returned from his adventure on the stricken oil tanker, he found Cruise waiting for him and looking for trouble.

  ‘I am a stupid little queer and a disgrace to the Bureau,’ Judy shouted.

  ‘And don’t you forget it,’ said Cruise, administering a final swipe with the magazine.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cruise’s companion. ‘It’s nearly noon, we’d better get into the meeting, you know what Klaw’s like if you’re late.’

  The man was referring to the monthly meeting of the FBI’s Environmental Department, which all three of them had been on their way to when the ambush had occurred.

  ‘OK,’ said Cruise. ‘Looks like you’re off the hook for now, Schwartz, but you’ll be back next month and I’m going to get you all over again.’

  But by now Judy had had a moment’s breathing space to size up his opponent and prepare a counter-attack.

  ‘No you aren’t,’ Judy replied, ‘because in the meantime I’m going to devote my life to hacking my way into your file and compiling a comprehensive list of every single bar-tab, taxi ride and hotel room you have ever claimed on expenses. Then if you hit me with a rolled-up magazine again, I will send that list to one of the numerous congressmen who got elected by promising to cut waste in government, so they can use your name in their personal crusade to haul in big spending federal agencies like the FBI.’

  It was a complicated plan, but Cruise for one could see how effective it might be.

  ‘Yes, well…‘ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘Just watch it, that’s all,’ he added rather weakly, and with that they all went into the meeting.

  Dark suspicions.

  The departmental meeting was not going very much better for Judy than the meeting in the toilet.

  ‘You’re saying you don’t think the captain of the stricken tanker killed himself.’ The voice of Judy’s boss, Bill Klaw, was heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘That is correct, sir,’ said Judy, trying to sound firm.

  ‘You find the guy, a known drunk, I might add, dead in his sinking ship, a bottle in one hand, a smoking gun in the other, his brains in the trash basket and you don’t think he killed himself?’

  ‘I’ve looked into his background, sir. I’ve found nothing that suggests a suicidal personality.’

  ‘Oh, I see. In that case, of course there’s no way he could have killed himself,’ Klaw said, showing his exasperation to the whole room, in which thirty or so equally exasperated field officers were assembled. It was nearly lunchtime and nobody was interested in Schwartz’s paranoid investigations

  ‘Brilliant deduction work, Schwartz.’ Klaw continued in this withering vein. ‘The captain never tried to kill himself before, so why should he now? Did you by any chance discover whether the guy had ever lost a billion-dollar tanker and destroyed three hundred miles of coastline before!! And if not, did it not occur to you that this might have been a factor in dampening his normally sunny disposition!’

  ‘I don’t think he killed himself, sir. I believe his ship was sabotaged and that the captain was murdered to prevent the discovery of that sabotage. I inspected the hold of the tanker, sir, accompanied by the ship’s number two, a woman named Jackson. I have her testimony here …‘ Judy could see that Maw was losing patience. He pressed on quickly … ‘The condition of the ruptures in the walls of the ship were not conducive to the reasons given by the coastguard for the wreck, sir. I noted that the lip of the tears were predominately curling outwards, sir, which, you will agree, is very strange. A ship holed externally by treacherous rocks would have shown damage caving inwards, which it did, to a certain extent, but not entirely. Some of the damage distinctly suggested pressure from within. The kind of pressure which could only have been caused by an internal explosion.’

  ‘What is this, Schwartz? The coastguard are satisfied that the ship got caught in a rocky channel. Are you moonlighting for the insurance company or something?’

  ‘Insurance is not an issue, sir. There is no claim because the captain is presumed to have been drunk.’

  ‘In that case, there’s no possible motive for anybody wanting to sink the damn thing now.

  ‘What about the close proximity of the Natura ship, sir?’

  ‘What about it? They’re always there, aren’t they? The little cockroaches.’

  ‘Exactly, sir. In every case we’ve heard today, the Natura people were on the spot before even the emergency services. I’ve been studying the files, sir. It’s happened numerous times; nuclear meltdowns, toxic leaks, Dodo syndromes, conveniently placed disasters occurring where no one could have predicted them, and with no one left to say what happened —‘

  ‘Schwartz, that’s what happens with disasters, they pop up and they kill the people who are around.’

  ‘And every time Natura are there to extract the maximum propa —

  ‘Are you saying these people are being tipped off? That these well-meaning and highly-respected greenies are somehow being used by nastier, more sinister, less principled people?’

  ‘I think it’s possible, sir.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mother Earth, sir,’ said Judy firmly. ‘They were definitely present on the Natura ship that approached the stricken tanker. I know, I encountered an activist on board. We’ve heard today from other agents who have detected a covert presence at similar disaster scenes. Agent Thompson,’ Judy addressed a colleague sitting behind him, ‘is it not true that Mother Earth were present at the scene of the most recent Five Mile Island meltdown?’

  ‘Of course they were, it’s in my report,’ said Thompson testily. ‘It was they who first alerted us to the leakage. They discovered it.’

  ‘Oh, they “discovered” it, did they? Isn’t that rather convenient?’ said Judy. ‘Sir, I believe we may be facing the nastiest piece of black propaganda in history.’

  ‘OK, that’s lunch,’ said Maw, closing his file.

  As people began to leave the room, Judy approached his boss. ‘Something strange is happening, I swear it. If I could just infiltrate them, get inside the organisation. Please. I’ve made numerous requests.’

  ‘I know that, Schwartz, it’s me that keeps knocking them back Listen, Judy,’ said Maw, for a moment trying to be nice.

  ‘You’re keen, I like that, but you’re not a cool, glamo
rous spy and you never will be. You’re a shitty little assessment officer whose job is to compile shitty little assessments. That’s it, no more. Now in words of one syllable, get the fuck out of my face.’

  Despite his best intentions, Maw just simply was not very good at being nice.

  LFS.

  The next day, Judy’s luck changed. He was summoned to Maw’s office and shown a series of photos of the recent Mother

  Earth raid on the roof of the DigiMac Studios.

  ‘Yes, I read about that,’ Judy admitted. ‘Pretty audacious stuff, eh? The leader escaped via a birthday cake, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ Maw replied. ‘And we’re getting a lot of heat to make an arrest. The studio wants blood. It’s getting sued by just about everybody who was at the damn restaurant. There’s a full LFS developing.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Judy was impressed.

  LFS or Litigation Frenzy Syndrome could leave families and communities divided, it could destroy vast corporations, it could leave grand and respected institutions broken in the dust. Studies had suggested that, left unchecked, LFS could eventually develop into civil war. LFS was, however, always checked eventually, due to the first law of legal dynamics. The first law of legal dynamics states that litigation will expand to absorb the amount of money available; a corollary of this law clearly being that all litigation will cease when the money runs out.

  The LFS which was consuming the DigiMac Studio, and hence causing so much concern to Maw, was a textbook example. A potentially dangerous situation of some kind had occurred, in this case, exposure to sunlight. Medically a very simple problem, legally a potential minefield. The moment the first rays of light had fallen on the beautiful people in the DigiMac commissary the anguished cry had gone up, ‘For God’s sake, somebody phone a lawyer.’