by Ben Elton
Tolstoy had readily agreed to the meeting and invited Max up to his house. Busy though Plastic Tolstoy was, Max was one of the most popular stars in the industry and even as exalted a figure as Tolstoy still understood the value of ‘the money’.
They were talking in Plastic’s office, Max having declined an invitation to go through to the Claustrosphere. He was carrying a tiny transmitter and he knew that nothing, not even radio waves, escaped from a closed Claustrosphere.
‘I’ve just spent nearly a month in mine,’ Max said by way of explanation. ‘A guy can get too much fresh air and sunshine. I hate to feel that healthy.’
‘You’ve been in your Claustrosphere for a month? How come?’
‘As a matter of fact I’ve been working on the first fermentation from my vineyard. I brought a bottle with me, I’d appreciate your opinion.’
Max had brought along a half bottle of red wine labelled ‘Wine to the Max’.
‘You brewed this inside your Claustrosphere? Wow! I don’t have a vineyard in mine.’
‘Hey, you have to have a vineyard, Plastic. What can you do with a rain forest? Nothing, hunt iguanas maybe. A vineyard will keep you occupied as many years as you have to be in there. Try it.’
‘Nice. Very nice,’ said Plastic, taking a delicate little sip. ‘Lotta nose. I like a wine with a big schnozzle … So this is what you’ve been up to then? I heard you’d gone to ground.’
Max wondered whether Tolstoy knew that he had been at Nathan’s house on the night of Nathan’s murder. Had the killers recognised him in his VR helmet? Had they reported it to Tolstoy? Max had to presume the worst, so he confessed.
‘Yeah, I did hide out for a while there. To tell you the truth, Plastic, I was kind of shaken by something … You know Nathan Hoddy? The guy who was going to write our film?’
‘Yeah, I know, he died,’ said Plastic with apparent indifference.
‘I was there the night he got it,’ said Max.
‘No kidding? You were there?’ Tolstoy certainly seemed genuinely surprised. ‘So who bumped the poor guy off, then?’
‘That’s the stupid point,’ Max replied. ‘I was there, but I don’t know who did it. We were playing a Virtual Reality game and we were both inside the helmets when they killed him. I didn’t see him die. Believe it or not, what I saw was his thoughts while he died, although of course I didn’t know that was what they were until afterwards. It was extremely weird.’
‘You saw his dying mind? Wow! Did you get a tape? I could sell something like that.’
‘No way, man. When I found him, I just ran. That’s why I kind of disappeared, you know? Like, I didn’t feel that was the wrong thing to do… I had no information that could help the cops or anything. .
‘And you didn’t want to get involved.’
‘In a murder investigation? No way! Would you? That kind of shit sticks. I can just hear what they’d say about me. Wild, tough Max Maximus… hear about him? He was in the room when his pal got wasted and he didn’t lift a finger. Says he was playing a game and didn’t notice!’
‘Well, I guess it’s all blown over now, huh? The cops have got about another thousand unsolved murders to deal with since then,’ Plastic Tolstoy assured Max with a kindly slap on the shoulder. Max could not help but feel a tiny shiver at the man’s touch. He hoped Plastic did not notice.
‘Yeah,’ said Max, ‘I reckon that’s history now, and so I was wondering what was happening about the film, you know? I mean, it’s too bad about Nathan, obviously, but like, you know, the town’s full of writers. You hear what I’m saying?’
‘I certainly do, Max,’ said Plastic. ‘And let me tell you, I am still very interested in putting you into a picture about those Mother Earth assholes.’
‘Well, that’s great, Plastic,’ Max said, and he knew that he could prevaricate no longer. If the drug was going to work, it would have worked by now; it took only the tiniest amount and its effects were virtually instantaneous. It was time to put it to the test.
‘So Plastic,’ Max said casually, ‘I hear you like to watch girls go to the toilet, is that right?’
‘Yeah, I like to do that,’ Plastic replied, without batting an eyelid.
Max’s whole body relaxed. The drug was working; it had to be working. Emboldened, he gave it another test.
‘So how the hell do you manage it? I mean, do you get them to bend over you or what?’
‘I lie under that glass table and they squat on top of it.’
Tolstoy nodded towards the coffee table upon which Max’s drink was standing. Max decided that he was no longer thirsty. He wanted to get the job over with, and get out. Very casually he asked his last and most dangerous test question.
‘So, I guess you knew that Nathan would have to die the minute he worked out that you’re the guy who pays for the green terrorists.’
Baby’s mouth.
Max was smiling his gentlest, friendliest smile. Baby’s Mouth was a subtle drug and it worked better if the recipient was relaxed and unaware that it had been administered. It had been originally developed by psychoanalysts after their profession had been reduced to a laughing stock by day-time chat shows. These were the daily confessionals in which every possible type of sad-act was encouraged and indeed cajoled into describing in the most lurid detail just exactly how completely and utterly screwed up they were. The sad-acts would then be confronted with other sad-acts, who either had similar problems, had caused the problems, were the victims of the problems, or, as became increasingly common, were hoping to develop the problem. An expert psychiatrist would then tell the whole lot of them that they were not to worry because the thing was far more common than they imagined, and the studio audience gave everyone a great big round of applause for ‘sharing’ the whole horrid business with thirty or forty million complete strangers. Now this type of TV had been fine for a while, whilst there were still some legitimate skeletons left in society’s cupboard. Unfortunately, gloating over other people’s private misfortune made such good television that the search for new problems and new victims very quickly became a network necessity.
‘I’m not interested in decent ideas for comedy and drama,’ the network chiefs would shout. ‘Bring me more sad-acts.’
Teams of researchers scoured the countryside, encouraging people to think of something, anything, that might have rendered them dysfunctional. Large sections of the public racked its collective brain attempting to conjure up ever more interesting ways to glamorise their boring lives. The researcher’s job was also to ensure that, no matter what problem people came up with, there was always an ‘expert’ ready to assure the world that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The inevitable development was of course that those watching the shows began to feel a little inadequate. They began to wonder, since all these desperate family situations were apparently so common, what was wrong with them. Why were they not attempting to divorce their pets, blaming their mothers for making them fat or trying to trace the parents who would have adopted them if their natural parents had chosen to give them up. Eventually, of course, these people also found their way on to the shows, in order to confess how dysfunctional they felt about not having anything to feel dysfunctional about. The resident psychiatrist soon put them right by assuring them that they were doubtless suppressing something absolutely fascinating, and they went away happy, promising to return the moment they had discovered what their problem was, and so the dreadful cycle continued.
One of the few desirable side-effects of this broadcast voyeurism was that it temporarily popped the bubble of the analyst industry. An industry that had been growing unchecked for decades and was out of control. At one point, the prevalence of people seeing analysts, particularly amongst the middle class, had grown to such an extent that society was in danger of grinding to a halt because everybody was sitting in small rooms talking about themselves. All this changed with the introduction of saturation afternoon discussion TV, which rendered the analyst redundant. People b
egan to ask themselves why they should spend enormous sums talking about themselves to just one person, when they could actually be paid an appearance fee to talk about themselves to millions of people. Eventually, however, the analysts rebuilt their fortunes by playing the snob card. Enticing people back to their couches by pointing out that important people had important problems, and should not be used merely as a source of entertainment for the masses. Unfortunately, when people did begin to drift back to their analysts, they found they had become so utterly immersed in the combined problems of just about everybody else that they had lost track of what, if anything, had happened to them that would be worth talking about in the first place.
The drug Baby’s Mouth had been developed in order to enable people whose brains had been filled with crap to discover some genuine thoughts and emotions. It was a truth drug. It made the person who took it say, not what they thought others wanted to hear, nor indeed what they themselves thought they wanted to say, but the truth. The basic effect of Baby’s Mouth was to suppress that part of the brain which is in charge of bullshit. This of course meant that some people were rendered completely dumb by the drug. Many politicians, game-show hosts, a surprising number of poets, all had the disconcerting experience of being rendered absolutely speechless after so much as a sniff of it. For most people, however, Baby’s Mouth simply gave them the unusual sensation of genuinely expressing their true feelings, of actually saying what they thought.
The drug had of course been quickly banned. Its capacity to create mischief was far too great. People need their secrets, and in the brief period that Baby’s Mouth was available, dinner parties ended in gunfights, marriages foundered and even the most saintly politicians were found occasionally to harbour uncharitable thoughts about their constituents. No society can exist without some bullshit. It was soon recognised that if everybody told the whole truth, the whole time, we would all be at each other’s throats.
Lines of communication.
Baby’s Mouth had been suppressed, but it remained a valuable weapon in the world of the secret service, and it was Judy who had supplied Max with the dose with which he had spiked Plastic Tolstoy’s wine. Tolstoy had only taken a sip, but a sip was all that was required, and by the easy way Tolstoy had offered details of his sexual preferences it seemed to be working. Max repeated his question about Nathan’s death, this time a little more firmly. Judy had told him that those under the influence of the drug responded well to a firm hand.
‘Like I said, I suppose you decided to have Nathan Hoddy killed, once he’d come up with the idea that you’re the person who pays for Mother Earth?’
‘It’s an interesting question’, said Tolstoy. ‘Now let me ask you this. Where the hell do you get off coming in here and trying to hit me with a shot of Baby’s Mouth, huh? Is that nice, Max? Is that fair?’
In another part of the Beverly Hills Fortified Village, Judy and Rosalie exchanged nervous glances. They were in Max’s lounge room, listening to the conversation taking place between Max and Tolstoy via the tiny radio transmitter that was hidden inside one of Max’s buttons. The reception was excellent and they could hear only too clearly that Judy’s plan was not going well.
‘You think when some guy asks me to taste their stupid wine right out of the blue, I don’t smell a rat?’ Judy and Rosalie heard Tolstoy saying. ‘What am I? An idiot? Like you, Max? Is that it? Am I as stupid as you? I only pretended to drink your wine, and now I wanna know just what you tried to stick me with. It was Baby’s Mouth, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Max, rather weakly. Denial seemed futile. ‘Should I leave?’
‘Leave? No way, Max, not until you’ve told me why you came.’
‘Because I want to know if the Claustrosphere Corporation is in the business of creating environmental catastrophe… You bastard!’
As the word ‘bastard’ barked out of their earphones, Judy and Rosalie could hear a sudden rush of movement. Max had intended to grab the drugged wine and force it down Plastic Tolstoy’s throat. Instead, he found himself facing a gun.
‘Max, please. No physical stuff. I hate that,’ said Tolstoy calmly. ‘You know what I ought to do? I ought to have you drink that wine yourself, then I could find out who’s put you up to all this. But I’m not going to. Guess why?’
‘Because your re a nice man?’
‘No, not that, not even my best friends, were I to have any, which I don’t, would call me a nice man. No, I’m not going to force you to take the Baby’s Mouth because I don’t need to, that’s why.’ Suddenly Plastic Tolstoy raised his voice. ‘Do I, Mr Schwartz! You hear that, do you, Judy? I know who’s pulling this dick’s strings!’ and Tolstoy laughed a loud, unpleasant, triumphant laugh.
Judy and Rosalie were nonplussed, particularly Judy. He was not an arrogant man but he had taken some pride in the trail he had followed and the plans which he had laid to bring that trail to a conclusion. Now the sound of cruel laughter ringing in his earphones told him that somehow he had been completely trumped by the object of his investigations. What was more, he was being taunted about it over his own secret radio!
Tolstoy continued to gloat.
‘Hey, Schwartz, you think when some guy starts delving into my business I don’t hear about it? You think when some little punk Fed starts checking out where I’ve been placing my ads on my communications empire for the past thirty years, I don’t know! How the hell do you think I got to have my own communications empire? By being a prick? Like you? Huh?’
Max was beginning to feel rather superfluous to requirements.
‘Look, Plastic,’ he said, ‘you’ve clearly guessed I’m wired, so why don’t I just leave you with the radio and you can talk to Judy without me standing around looking stupid. Or maybe you could just phone him, you know who he is.’
‘You stay where you are, Max,’ said Tolstoy. ‘I want to know what gives with you. The FBI got something on you? Is that it? Is that why you did this for Schwartz? Is that why you agreed to come in here and abuse my trust? Abuse the privilege of my hospitality that I extend to so few?’
Max found himself staring at the floor in embarrassment.
‘Why did you do it, Max? Let me guess again. Hah! I got it! It’s a girl, isn’t it? That’s the only time a guy would be so stupid as to try and get the better of Plastic Tolstoy. For a girl! A green girl in this case, no doubt, considering the outrageous nature of Schwartz’s libellous theories. The girl, I would like to hazard a guess, who tried to kill me that time in my own Claustrosphere. Am I right, Max? Yes, I think I’m right.’ Tolstoy called out again, ‘You listening, girlie? I can’t remember your name, I’m afraid, but… let me see, that’s it, you had red hair, I remember.’
Judy and Rosalie were ready to sink through the floor by this time. The man was positively clairvoyant.
‘I have never felt so stupid in my entire life,’ Rosalie whispered.
‘There’s no need to whisper,’ Judy replied, ‘he can’t hear us.’
‘He doesn’t need to, does he?’ Rosalie said angrily. ‘He seems to be able to read our minds.’
‘OK,’ they could hear Tolstoy saying. ‘Give me the transmitter, and anything else metal you’ve got on you. This office carries a metal scanner so I shall know if you try to cheat, and I won’t be happy.’
Back in Tolstoy’s office Max handed over both the transmitters which Judy had supplied him with.
‘Bye-bye, G-man,’ Tolstoy sneered. ‘You look after yourself now, and you look after Max’s cute little girlfriend too. Because you both may just be hearing from my people.’
Tolstoy smashed the little button-sized radios and Judy and Rosalie heard no more. They looked at each other in despair.
‘Maybe the phone will ring,’ said Judy.
They could only sit and wait.
Back in Tolstoy’s office, Max emptied out his pockets, a notebook, a wallet, some cigarettes… a portable telephone.
‘Thank you,’ said Tolstoy. ‘By the way, I d
on’t have no metal scanner, who do you think I am, James Bond?’
Max smiled weakly, scarcely daring to hope that the trick which Judy had suggested he try if his transmitters were discovered would work. Tolstoy had been several jumps ahead of Judy on every point so far. It seemed unlikely that such a simple idea would fool him, but Max had to try.
‘Are you going to kill me, Plastic?’ he asked as he put his phone down on the table beside his other possessions. It was as dramatic an enquiry as he could muster, and Max made it in the hope that Plastic would not notice that as he put the phone down he had deftly pressed 1, the pre-set automatic dialling code for his phone at home. Max used it occasionally when he was out and about in order to leave messages on his answering machine. He was hoping to leave a message now.
Back at Max’s house the phone rang. Instinctively, Rosalie nearly picked it up, but fortunately Judy stayed her hand. There were three rings and then the machine clicked into action. First they heard Max’s outgoing message. ‘Ugh … Hi, yeah .
OK, it’s the machine, right? But you knew that. Listen, uhm leave a message, don’t leave a message … live, die, it’s all the same dream, right? … Bye.’
Despite the tension of the situation, Rosalie grimaced slightly at what she considered to be a highly pretentious message. It did have one advantage, though, it was delivered in a lazy, quiet growl, which at the other end of the line Max was desperately hoping Tolstoy would not hear emanating from the phone.
‘C’mon man!’ Max half shouted, timing it to coincide with the point when he guessed his message would be playing. ‘I asked if you were going to kill me!’
Tolstoy did not hear the message, and he did not spot the trick either, he had seen so many portable phones placed on desks in his time.
Tolstoy answered Max’s question at the point at which, in Max’s house, Max’s answering machine began to record. The portable phone was a video phone, as indeed were all phones, barring the occasional chic antique one, and Max had contrived to place it with its tiny camera facing across the desk. Judy and Rosalie could not only hear Plastic Tolstoy, but also see him, and all the while he was, of course, being recorded.