by Hugh Macnab
held between his hands, tears running down his pock-marked cheeks. An unexpected pang of guilt ran through Shylock as he shook the snow from his clothes and crossed towards his cheerless consort. ‘What’s wrong Bb,’ he asked.
‘I’m dead,’ Bb replied, simply. ‘Dead.’
‘No you’re not,’ Shylock told him in a vain attempt to mollify his new-found friend. Yes, he was beginning to think of him as a friend. ‘If you were dead, we couldn’t be talking about it.’
Bb lifted his head and wiped a tear from his eye. ‘You don’t understand,’ he explained. ‘He’s escaped, skedaddled, vamoosed, flown the coop….gone!’
‘Who has?’
‘Change, of course!’
For the first time since the doorway was opened, Shylock looked inside the glass prison. Not only was there nobody who could even remotely be described as Change, but other than some sand at the top, the sphere was empty. Everything else had gone. ‘Even the snow’s escaped!’ he uttered, astonished.
A re-iteration of the premise that he was dead, was all Bb could add to the conversation at this point.
‘I don’t suppose this could be perceived as a good thing?’ asked Shylock apprehensively; already suspecting he knew the answer.
‘Good!’ cried Bb. ‘Good! Are you nuts? This is a disaster of inter-dimensional proportions – and I caused it!’
‘You were only trying to help…’ Shylock tried, only to be met with another re-utterance of the now incontrovertible fact of Bb’s impending death. ‘Look, we’ll get him back,’ he suddenly proclaimed. ‘Yes, that’s it. We’ll find him and put him back in the sphere before anyone misses him!’
Bb looked up and saw that Shylock at least appeared to be serious, even if his suggestion had been ludicrous. ‘You think you can capture Change?’ he asked.
Suddenly not so sure, Shylock gave a small nod hoping that it was too small to be taken as any serious form of commitment. He was wrong. Bb bounced up, rushed towards him and gave him a huge hug. ‘I knew you were an okay-sort when I first met you,’ he proclaimed in earnest.
‘That was when I stupidly entered your shop without knowing what I wanted, apparently suffering from a severe hearing disorder. Then, couldn’t find my own way out again? That sort of okay-sort?’ Shylock teased.
Bb flushed. ‘Oh, I was just joshing with all that stuff. You know, fooling around, kidding, messing. You didn’t really take anything I said seriously, did you?’
Shylock decided to let that pass for the time being, and instead decided to ask Bb if he knew how they could go about finding Change, to which Bb suggested following his trail shouldn’t be too difficult. How right he was.
White sands
After discussion, it was agreed that initially they should go back to Get Lucky to check on the beach and plan a course of action, and so with a few simple instructions from Bb, Shylock took a deep breath, cleared his mind and wished himself on the beach. Travel in this topsy-turvy land seemed to be no harder than that. Only now did he fully realise the prank Bb had played on him, turning him into a unicorn.
When they arrived, neither of them could believe their eyes - all three of them. The once familiar beach was covered in snow, with the once inappropriate white-capped conifers complete with coloured lights looking much more at home - as if, inexplicably, they had somehow been fore-planned. The sea, no longer breaking on the distant reef, instead lay frozen-over with people – at least life-forms – all over it skating, curling, cross-beach skiing, and even drilling holes in the ice to fish. One family had opened a Mr. Whippy, ice-cream store and was trading briskly, and Shylock was puzzled why this didn't seem to attract Bb’s interest, concluding perhaps Bb was simply too deeply shaken – even to think about profits, or that someone had figured out how to sell ice-cream in winter.
The colour (puce) had drained from Bb’s face, and he’d fallen back into re-iterating his prediction of his own rapidly oncoming demise – over and over. ‘I’m dead. I’m dead….’
Shylock grabbed a hold of him by the shoulders, or at least around the top one third of his ovaloid shape, and shook him violently. ‘Stop it! Stop it! This is no time to lose control. We’ve got to come up with a plan.’
Persisting for a few moments to no avail, it appeared as if Bb had entered an endless loop, continuously re-iterating the one pre-recorded message of doom. So, leaving him for the time being, Shylock turned back and studied the beach more closely. He wondered if all he now saw in front of him had been caused by Change’s escape, and what Constance might think of Bb’s beach now! Concluding that it would be quite some coincidence if the alterations weren’t connected to Change’s release, Shylock concluded that Change had already been here and by good fortune, at least they were already on the right track. But where next?
Infinite Resources Inc.
It was the ski’s that did it – brought the sudden thought to mind that is. Where had they come from? For that matter, where did everything - that wasn’t here before - come from? Shylock thought-projected himself towards the cross-beach skier’s, carefully synchronising his movement with that of one of them surprisingly easily (trying hard not to wonder what form of life required three skis and resembled a cross between an elephant and a jellyfish), and read the manufacturer’s label on the nearest ski - Infinite Resources Inc.. ‘I wonder,’ Shylock muttered to himself. ‘If they can make skis….’
After a brief look towards where Bb hovered, totally preoccupied with his new beach and the fearful implications, Shylock thought of Infinite Resources.
Nothing happened.
Frustrated, Shylock tried again repeating the name in his mind to reinforce the image. Infinite Resources…Infinite Resources…
Still nothing happened. Perplexed, he thought his way back to Bb and interrupted his companion’s trance-state by pulling his lower lip back as far as it would go – which was a good three or four paces for Shylock – and releasing it. The loud thwack even caused the life-forms on the beach to look their way. Bb jumped and yelled. ‘Ouch!!! Who did that?’ he snapped, angrily focussing his attention on Shylock. ‘You?’ he asked.
‘Sorry,’ replied Shylock. ‘But I can’t seem to think my way to somewhere.’
‘And for this, you flipped my lip? Do you realise how painful that was. It was worse than sore, more like agony or maybe excruciating or even…’
‘…Have an Aspirin,’ Shylock offered, pulling a small brown glass bottle from the pocket of his gabardines. ‘This’ll make you better,’ he added, emptying a couple of tablets into the palm of his hand - barely managing to hide his surprise. They were yellow with pink spots all over them….no, green with…more like red actually, and they were round…flat…oval. Trying to appear confident and that he expected his painkillers to behave in this manner, he held out his hand and passed the dynamic tablets to Bb.
‘Ooh, nice!! These can become whatever you need them to be. Just what I needed,’ Bb drooled, saliva running from the lower corner of his mouth. ‘My favourites. So pretty, too.’
‘Yes, well,’ interrupted Shylock as Bb popped the tablets into his mouth and chewed, spraying spittle in all directions. ‘As I was saying, I can’t seem to think my way to somewhere I want to go to.’
‘And where is that?’ asked Bb.
‘Infinite Resources,’ Shylock answered, explaining how he’d seen the name on the skis.
‘You think Change has gone there?’ asked Bb.
‘Well, sort of,’ Shylock replied, evasively.
‘Hmm, okay’ muttered Bb, thinking of Infinite Resources. ‘Doesn’t work for me either. Are you sure you’ve got the right name?’
Shylock ran the memory of the label over one more time in his mind muttering out loud as he did so. ‘Infinite…. Resources….. Inc.’
‘Ah! There it is. You forgot the Inc. in your thought-stream. I tell you, this thought transportation system works really well but you have to be really precise. You must use the full name and include capitals, dots, hyphens etc. etc.�
�in your thought, or else you may just end up in entirely the wrong place. There are just so many places you see…precision, that’s what you need. Funny you didn’t get an error message though?’
Deciding to leave Bb to his error message musings, Shylock tuned his thoughts into Infinite Resources Inc. – being careful to include all capitals and dots as instructed…and it worked. Or at least, it seemed to work.
Infinite Resources Inc. – if indeed that was where he was at - appeared to be housed in a small garden shed at the far end of a wide moving automated pedestrian walkway. Stepping around to the side of the walkway seemed as impossible as it had been to change his view of the beach. So, accepting that this was apparently the only way to get to the distant shed, Shylock stepped on the walkway and headed for the shed.
Only when he was getting into his stride, did he realise that the walkway was slowing down. Slower, slower, stop. Shylock kept walking, now simply without any artificial help - at his own speed. Suddenly without warning, the walkway shuddered, slightly jarring it’s only passenger, then took off at quite some pace in the opposite direction, soon unceremoniously dumping him back where he had started.
Peeved, to say the least, Shylock searched everywhere for a button designed to change the direction of motion, or even halt the annoying cantankerous machine, but could find nothing that even vaguely resembled one.
Frustrated, he