by Ben Elton
The end of the world.
Shortly after which, the Rat Run started.
It began quite slowly. One morning, about a week after the incidents described above, all the news bulletins were suddenly full of stories describing the Claustrospheres of the rich and famous. Also detailed reports about the preparations which those people were making for their own personal Rat Runs.
‘These days, I have a chopper on permanent standby wherever I go, man. Hey, you’re looking at one mother who ain’t gonna get left out with the garbage.’
There was nothing new in stories like this, except that the reports seemed to indicate a slightly disturbing sense of urgency about the preparations being made. Almost as if the elite were in possession of information which was denied to the general public.
On the second day, these dark hints had become the top story, gaining weight with each repetition. Was there something which the people did not know? Had the pestilence and hunger so long predicted, in fact arrived, and were those in authority refusing to admit it for fear of mass panic? By late that afternoon there were widespread reports that a large, unspecified number of important people had already retreated into their Claustrospheres. The bulletins reported that the US President and the Chairperson of the European Federation could not be contacted for comment, the scarcely veiled suggestion being that their staff did not actually know where they were. Both the White House and the Palace of Peace and Profit quickly issued detailed statements about the whereabouts of the two key figures, but these were only sparsely reported. The suspicion had been planted and it was widely rumoured that the leaders were jumping ship. These rumours were of course immediately picked up and re-reported, gaining credibility as they did so.
‘Is government on auto pilot? Who’s driving the bus? I’m Dan Bland coming to you live, as it happens.’
The story had become self-perpetuating. Those channels that had not run with the original rumours soon found themselves reporting the fact that the rumours had been reported.
By now fear had gripped the world community. Those people who found themselves away from home began to try to get back. Flights were booked out, roads were clogged. Footage of packed airports and colossal traffic jams played heavily on the news media, causing more people to rush to the airports and jump into their cars. Every official denial that there was a problem served only to heighten the suspicion that there really was one. If not, why were they denying it? Smoke was being wafted about and everybody was looking for the fire.
The rumours were turning to fact.
The President of the USA announced that he would make an emergency statement on television. This he did, appearing dressed in a chunky cardigan, standing in front of a fire, and assuring America and the world that there was no need for panic. The exercise backfired badly. The statement was broadcast but so, almost simultaneously, was the news that the majority of people considered it a hoax. They felt that the President looked younger, his hair shorter, his teeth whiter than had been the case of late. The idea that the broadcast had been recorded a year or more earlier quickly gained ground.
Panic now set in in earnest. People spoke of nothing else. Everybody knew someone who knew someone who had already retreated to their Claustrosphere. Ships were returning to port. Airlines and other transport services faltered as staff took holiday in order to avoid travelling too far away from their place in a shelter.
The question was no longer if, but when, and for how long?
‘If we must go,’ people asked each other in anguish, ‘how long must we set our timers for? When will we be released?’
The answer was forty years. Nobody knew quite how it came about, but that figure was suddenly on everybody’s lips. It seemed that some scientist or other on the news had been pressed to take a guess, and scarcely before the words had left his lips, it had become the truth.
‘We’re hearing forty years,’ reporters endlessly asked experts. ‘How accurate do you think that is?’
‘That certainly seems to be the figure we’re hearing.’
‘Four decades!’ The cry went round the world and with every repetition the accuracy of the prediction became more inalienable.
Then it happened. The panic damn burst. Ten billion television sets seemed to broadcast the bad news simultaneously. The Rat Run had started. People had decided that the Earth was giving up. It was being reported that the planet could not and would not support the human race any longer. ‘Don’t drink the water!’ the TVs said. ‘Don’t breathe the air! Get in your Claustrospheres and set your timers for forty years! Everybody else is.’
And everybody was. They all ran at once. Newsreaders turned around, having read their last bulletin, to discover that they were sitting alone in empty studios. Their colleagues had already gone.
As people rushed for their shelters, it was almost as if they were embracing the Rat Run, as if it was in some way a relief to be done with the Earth at last. To be done with the waiting and the uncertainty. To be done with the guilt, and that constant, nagging feeling that one really ought to be doing something, and never really knowing what. Now there was nothing to be done. It was over and nobody had to worry about it any more.
There were of course doubters, those who wondered for a moment if what they were hearing could be true, but they did not wonder for long. The panic was its own proof. People needed no further evidence that Eco-Armageddon was truly upon them than to see their neighbours disappearing into their Claustrospheres. There was no question of holding back, once others had begun to run, particularly for the majority of people who were destined to spend their remaining years in communal shelters. The prospect of being left outside once the BioLocks had been closed and the timers set was too horrible to contemplate.
It was all over in a day. The human race simply disappeared. Not quite all of it, of course. There were those in the poverty nations who had no access to Claustrospheres. They remained outside, scratching away at the dust upon which they lived. Perhaps not even noticing that anything had happened, except that from that moment on, their lives began slowly to improve. To all intents and purposes, however, people just vanished, the only evidence that they still existed at all being the millions, and millions of geodesic domes which dotted what had up until recently been the industrialised world. The human race was hiding from its own nightmare.
This Other Eden.
Plastic Tolstoy had saved the Earth, and ironies do not come any more ironic than that. Judy pieced together the sequence of events as he sat outside Ruth and Sean’s cottage, peeling the potatoes with which Roger had promised to make a shepherd’s pie.
It had happened this way.
Judy and Rosalie had returned from Jurgen Thor’s mausoleum to discover Max sufficiently recovered to inform them that he did not, for God’s sake, possess only one Ansafone. There were, in fact, machines in every room of his mansion and on every one would be a copy of Plastic Tolstoy’s confession.
‘I’m a big star, you know?’ he had whispered from his sick bed. ‘I get a lot of important messages.’
Rosalie decided to wait until Max had recovered a little before telling him that she had seen the type of messages that he received, and that he’d better never receive any more. Meanwhile, Sean paid his first and only trip to Hollywood, collecting all of the incriminating tapes from Max’s Beverly Hills home.
Judy sent one tape to the FBI, one to the LA Police Department, one to the US President and one to Plastic Tolstoy.
That was the day that the Rat Run started. Tolstoy, faced with the certainty of ending his life in a cell, had chosen instead to serve out his sentence inside his fabulous Claustrosphere. It was not difficult to arrange. Panic is an easy thing to provoke, particularly if you own a large percentage of the world’s media. In order to escape the justice of the law, Plastic Tolstoy used his power to sentence the rest of the world to serve time with him.
The extraordinary side-effect of this entirely selfish act was that Plastic Tolstoy
ended his wicked life by saving the world. For the Earth, cured temporarily of people, soon began to recover. Free from the exploitative, parasitic human virus that had infected it for so long, the planet was able to cleanse itself. With no further poisons being produced and no further natural resources being destroyed, the process of renewal actually began with the Rat Run and when, forty years later, the human race reappeared, it was to a fresh start and a whole new view of the planet. For as far as this new generation were concerned, the Rat Run had been for real. A genuine response to a genuine global emergency, which of course in many ways it had been. Only a strange little group of aged, weather-beaten people in the west of Ireland knew the truth and they would never tell. It was better that the people who emerged from the Claustrospheres believed that the lonely exile of the human race had been a necessary punishment for its sins, that they had survived the flood and it was time to start afresh, resolving never again to practise the selfish planetary vandalism that had led their forefathers and mothers to the day of the Rat Run.
Of course, some Claustrospheres were destined never to open again, those into which only the old or the lonely had gone. One such shelter stood silent in California and inside it, under a false sky at the foot of a mountain on the edge of a rain forest, lay a slowly decomposing body. Lasting proof of the fact that whilst the planet may survive, all people, no matter how powerful, must surely die.