Muggles Bereaved

by Vernon C Moyse

  Jim, energised by donuts and feeling a bit hyper, flung out an arm and shouted “Shazzam!” A perfect 9 metre square of silicene floated to the ground at Slovic’s feet. Jim crouched forward, waited and listened. But there was no accompanying fart.

  “As fart free as a yoghurt,” quipped Lim.

  “Attempting a pun on ‘fat free’, are we, Lim,” said Jim, “you’d best leave the spontaneous joking to me, mate.” The sugar hit had made him excessively bold.

  “I got the joke, unfortunately,” said Tracy.

  Newton stepped towards them, “Right, we are going into the collider now and we’ll see what happens to this, er, kitten simulacrum. We’ll take along The Needful One too.”

  “Wait,” said Lim, “ you need to take this in small steps. First trying your neutrons on the silicene sample and completing a full evaluation of that before doing anything else. You seem to forget that this entity,” he indicated The Needful One who now resembled a doleful caricature by Scarfe, “this entity is also known as The Prince of Darkness and has dominion over the entire world, if anything biblical holds true. He is also an assembly of antimatter and you people need to try your machine on a miniscule amount of that material before you even think of bombarding the kitten.”

  Newton did not take kindly to being taught the experimental method by a Chinese Norfolk bumpkin, but Slovic, who was the authority here, though less famous in Newton’s internal “Who’s Who”, nodded approvingly.

  “This vill tek several dace,” he said in a heavily accented voice, “und we will need vurst to verk out zee schedules and interleaf them with our impotent ongoing verk. I think you, vith your Jim, should look after zees samples in our accommodation block, while Newton and I go to verk. We vill report to you at each stage. I do not sink zee samples should be far from zee silicene cloaker man.”

  “Exactly my proposition, too,” said Newton, who had been rather more anxious to wreak instant destruction on the biblical enemy without regard to matter or collider annihilation. “and fear not, I shall also debate the religious consequences of eliminating the source of all evil and temptation.”

  “Debate with whom?” wondered Jim, in a rather loud whisper, “He’ll use his hotline to God. Ten to one. he tells God what will happen and what any God-fearing God ought to do!”

  Newton already pushed back by Lim, forbore to answer this latest non-Chinese whisper. It did not behove the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics to engage in philosophical discourse with ginger neanderthals speaking sotto voce. He plonked down the two silicene bags, swept up the empty silicene sample and announced, “To the collider!”

  Chapter Seventeen – Ven Vorlds Are Beink Colli-ted

  The first results came in after a lunch of hamburgers and ice cream sundaes. The food was attended by beautifully fresh salad options, orange juice and fruit. Tracy was thus revealed as a meat rejecting fruit bat keen on side salads. Jim was his usual self, an omnivorous gourmand and a veritable black hole for anything calorific. Lim had requested a Chinese option and toyed with ingenious folding cartons, the contents of which looked somewhat like fishermens’ bait, though it was thankfully inert and, apparently, dead. Louis chewed a salad too and busied himself with reports on a borrowed laptop.

  The accommodation block was a minimalist temple filled with vast open spaces and ingenious hidden facilities which required a great deal of searching. Non-stick tables and chairs rose out of clinically clean floors and rows of hatches disguised everything from flat screen televisions to pictures by Jackson Pollock. There were lots of little knacks to be learned. How not to trigger the descent back into oblivion of the chair you were sitting on, for example. Jim fell foul of that one, dropping onto his derriere with a bang and dragging a plate of salad with him. He felt that the green salad looked at home on the floor where it landed, a rabbit food being designed to be firmly underfoot.

  The television news, anchored by a gaunt, heavily made-up blonde with a voice like an Alabaman buzz saw, was revealing. This young man, yes, heavily made-up young man, a protégé of station owner Milton C. Asperger III, was revealing screen after screen of acolytes of The Needful One besieging Mausolea all over the United States in tearful despair. It seems they were awaiting the Third Coming of their Messiah, The Prince of Darkness, and had reached that stage of hysteria where their competitive need for media exposure was producing competitive acts of self-mutilation to shrieks of “Three, three, three is free!”. Some had put out their own eyes, the better to see the Darkness when he, she or it returned. Many were slashing their arms with razors, mistakenly convinced that the Prince of all cruelty would hasten back to save them from – inadequate cruelty.

  In another report, Anglican, Catholic and Methodist Bishops were in a conclave seeking intervention from God. The process of trying to elect a lead denomination for their debate was in its second week. The young anchorman studied his painted fingernails while that debate raged on screen behind him.

  Finally, as a footnote, an after-thought, the disappearance of visiting Professor Newton, ‘Sir Newton’, was mentioned and there was mystery surrounding his technical team, a trio of cute teenagers. The young anchorman simpered over the pictures of Lim, Jim and Tracy which had been provided by their parents. They were pictures taken some years before. He paused to listen to his earpiece with long, slender fingers raised to one ear.

  “Apparently,” he said, “The English notation is to use the ennobling word together with the forename of the ennobled. We most humbly apologise to Sir Isaac for our inadvertent oversight.”

  “I bet that was Newton phoning the Television station’s Uriah Heap, “ said Jim, “Looking at that anchor person, I have decided not to refer to ‘the TV anchorman’, it’s too ambiguous.”

  “You really are developing a dislike for Sir Isaac, aren’t you, Jim,” said Tracy nibbling on a shard of ice-cold lettuce, “and you become quite articulate when sadly venturing into the world of the politically incorrect. I will need to explain transgender issues to you later.”

  “What did I say,” Jim spread his arms in mock distress, “I’d say he was a transvestite in his off-duty moments.”

  “Error, you know your name,” said Tracy.

  None of them knew the name of the TV anchorman who was called “Buzz” by his friends and Mr Ocampo by the station staff. Mr Ocampo, far from being transvestite or transgender was in fact about as asexual as the bamboos of Philippine Gwondanaland whence his parents came. He did not even deign to reproduce meristematically, being a fashion monk, devoting years to being a make-up artist’s guinea pig and fashion coat hanger. But the companions knew little or nothing about sex in all its wondrous varieties. That ‘drive’ had yet to start troubling them unduly.

  “I am not far behind Jim on the Newton thing,” said Lim, “Newton seems to have lost the common touch and I am feeling much more sympathetic to poor old Hooke and his supporters.”

  “Poor, dead Hooke,” said Jim. “I think he died to escape from the ego to end all egoes. The Newtonic bomb.”

  “I read that Newton went on a symposium on a millionaires houseboat on the river Ancre in France and the headline in the online English version of Charlie Hebdo said ‘Ego An’ Cress.’“ said Lim.

  “A bit contrived and constipated,” said Jim, “Private Eye does it better.”

  “You will be constipated,” said Tracy, “after what you’ve been eating.” This presaged the nature of a long, future relationship, when Jim’s appearance, manner, speech and diet would be rigorously directed into channels labelled “hope of improvement”.

  The idle banter was interrupted by a messenger from Professor Slovic who delivered a sheet of paper by way of report. He handed it to Louis, but everyone perked up. Louis grinned at them and read:

  “A first neutron bombardment of a small area of silicene cloak, resulted in disruption of that target into grains of silicon sand. Our second experiment will bombard an antimatter target encapsulated by another part of the silicene sample.”r />
  It was signed jointly by Professors Newton and Slovic, with Newton’s name appearing first and in full. Including titles and honours.

  “The bugger brought his agent with him,” said Jim. “Sir Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Hawking Professor and Professor Emeritus Lymphatology! What a bloody mouthful on a sticky Post-it note!”

  “Language, Timothy,” said Tracy, “How does Professor Slovic sign?”

  “Professor Zoltan Slovic, Dean of Faculty, Oakridge National Laboratory,” read Louis.

  “He’ll have to up his game,” said Jim, “If he doesn’t the days of his tenure at Oakridge are numbered.” Jim made the sign of a man cutting his own throat.

  “Oh, I don’t think BS cuts much ice here in the States,” said Louis, looking up from a completed report.

  Jim pondered hot chocolate bull dung melting through ice and ordered a strawberry confection with hot chocolate sauce instead.

  “Ugh, Jim!” said Tracy. She would say it a zillion times more when they finally married, much later adding, “what an example for the children.” But the current ice-cream-eating Jim would have been horrified if confronted with the prospect of being a father.

  They each retired to their borrowed laptops and the boring chore of briefing parents on their whereabouts. Louis enjoined them to say nothing about what he called “events”. Agents had already visited all the parents and given them a restricted briefing covering the roles of their teenage children as strategic assets under the cloak of drone skill cum gaming strategy. Lim’s father was the first to link this with events in the USA, but was still under the restriction of The Official Secrets Act in a country where the “First Amendment” held no sway. The tabloid press were also in the know and emblazoned their online utterances with “Brit Kids Dominate Assault on the USA Dark Side” and “Prince of Darkness Not even Fourth in Line to the throne”. They were struggling to condense the story into something more pithy. “Trio of Triumph” was one offering that amused Jim.

  “Louis,” he said, “According to the Sun newspaper, ‘The Cat is Back in the Bag’! What about all your secrecy.”

  “There’s always a mole,” said Louis, “and I think The Sun are on a fishing and a phishing expedition. They have learned about Jim’s exploits in the Lynn Library.”

  “Do your moles grow to the size of elephants?” asked Jim, all innocence-that-wasn’t-innocent. “The reference to cat is quite explicit.”

  “Time for some shut-eye,” said Louis, in what sounded like an order, but was just a diversionary tactic, a reflex of embarrassment. It still had the force of the command “lights out” in a school dormitory, but as everyone was exhausted they meekly obeyed and slept like dogs with legs pawing air. Everyone had lost track of time, not even noticing that feature of iWatches, iPads and iBooks. It was a wonder that Apple had not branded sleep as ‘iShut”.

  Hours later, breakfast saw Jim uncharacteristically rejecting waffles and maple syrup. His ginger mop was wayward and his eyes had a haunted look. He confessed that he was worried. Overnight he had unknowingly expressed several sheets of silicene cloak which had formed themselves into a tent, sealing their edges and sliding under his bed to form an airtight container not unlike the sort of tent scouts are familiar with. But this tent had no entrance, or, more urgently, no exit. He had awakened to a sense of suffocation and a strange feeling of empathy towards The Needful One. It had taken him an hour to try and figure out how to undo the seals between the silicene sheets and the carbon dioxide levels had risen to levels that caused him to begin to black out. This was a feeling he had encountered when rowing in the school regatta. Just before he passed out a split had formed in the sheet where a door should have been, allowing air to flood in and Jim to flood hurriedly out.

  “If you don’t believe me, go and look,” said Jim, “the cloak is still there and they’ll never get the bed out of it.”

  They all dropped their spoons forks, bowls and toast and went and looked, returning almost immediately to the siren call of ‘breakfasts abandoned’.

  “Sleep cloaking,” said Lim, “is a new power and a valuable one. It clearly affords protection against any assault by The Needful One. If it cannot get out of a silicene enclosure, it cannot get into one either.”

  “You think I was under attack?” Jim made that mouthy moue of faint horror which so endeared him to Tracy that she rushed to him and embraced him fondly;

  “We won’t let the nasty Needful attack oo,” she said, as in a mock address to a baby.

  “Ger-offf,” said Jim, shaking free of Tracy’s too-public embrace.

  It took the group some few minutes of serious eating to overcome that spectacle and Tracy herself was greatly abashed and fled to the food counter for some more fresh orange juice.

  “Well,” said Louis, “I think ‘oo’ have a fan there, Jim. Well done.”

  Jim’s inflamed complexion now matched his hair.

  “But did you notice how big that tent is. It could easily accommodate our whole group. Including the gigantified Newton! it seems to me that this is an asset,” said Lim.

  “I’m not sure I want Newton inside my tent,” growled Jim, “I’ll restart the farting if he joins us.”

  They giggled. Jim’s antipathy to Newton was almost tangible.

  “Uh-oh,” said Louis, “talk of the hero...”

  Newton bounced up with a plate groaning under an American version of “the full English”, a steak peeping out from under a pile of bacon. “It’s going well, he said.”

  “We were discussing ‘farting’,” said Jim, “then you materialised with the perfect fart fodder.” The level of disrespect for the British genius was becoming an embarrassment to all.

  Newton ignored Jim, “we have annihilated silicene and any atoms we hid behind it, as it were. We are now ready for the kitten, and it knows!”

  “The kitten ‘knows’ is a somewhat unscientific stretch of the imagination,” said Louis, “how do you know it knows?”

  “Well, it sat on a bench from which it could observe our experimental results. It has become very agitated, so agitated that it has stretched the silicene bag in an attempt to escape. It’s clawing and scrabbling really is most pitiable.” Newton grinned, evilly.

  “Said like any mad scientist who’d make Beagles use vape tubes until their lungs burst,” said Tracy who had returned, “I wish you wouldn’t show such delight about it, Professor.”

  Newton cast a brief glimpse over his shoulder to see which of the neanderthals was daring to bandy words with a Lucasian Professor with additional accreditation as the Hawking scholar and the Lymphatology supremo.

  As it was the girl, courtesy demanded acknowledgement. Newton was certainly mysogynist and politically wayward.

  “Satisfaction is with the results so far, my dear,” said Newton, “they are a cause for quiet satisfaction. Slovic is content that the results do not indicate any risk to his beloved accelerator and is willing to put the kitten in the firing line. Quite literally. After I have eaten this,” he pointed to the plate piled with the miracle of breakfast, ” we shall reconvene and banish the kitten back into the cosmic dust from which it sprang. At eleven o’clock precisely. I have persuaded Slovic that you should all attend.”

  “As we are in America, I’ll say that I will take a rain check,” said Tracy, “whatever that might mean.” She stalked away with her orange juice, clearly heading for her room.

  “Er, I’ll stay with Trace,” said Jim, blushing furiously.

  “Oh, no,” said Newton, “Slovic is adamant that the, and I quote, the one known as “Zee Clo-aca” must be present in case of any emergency. He will not proceed without such, er, cover.”

  “Well, I’ll just go and tell Tracy that,” said Jim.

  Lim half rose about to make some comment about ‘solidarity’, but Jim half raised his hand. It wasn’t because it was Jim’s cloaking hand that Lim sat down. It was Jim’s love-sick puppy expression that took the strength out of Lim
’s legs. He plopped back in his seat and said nothing. Jim’s look of grateful understanding was solidarity enough.

  After Jim left, Newton explained further, “Slovic feels that for security purposes, Jim should be on hand to throw a cloak the instant the neutron beam splits the silicene bag. In that instant, the kitten should also be caused to dissociate, but a thrown cloak will cover the eventuality that the kitten is somehow damaged but a purposeful cloud of anti-matter is released.”