“Suitcase bomb?” Jim was incredulous, but excited.
“Yes, a 100 megatonne fusion bomb. It is real enough but I hope not to have to use it.”
“We hope so, too,” gulped Jim, my Harry Potter signed collection is in Lynn! Not to mention family and friends.”
“There won’t be a King’s Lynn if this bomb is detonated,” said Louis.
“We are on our way,” said Lim grimly. “Hold back on your threat for a few minutes. The Cardington saucer is being transported shortly and we are coming after it.”
The Companions debated the sincerity of Louis’ threat to detonate a nuclear weapon in the hope of vaporising the saucer, The Needful One and the town of King’s Lynn.
“Nahh, it’s a bluff,” opined Jim, “and I don’t believe that a suitcase bomb could ever be equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. There would not be enough room for the plutonium and the trigger. It’s a bluff.”
Chapter Nineteen – Conflict of the Big Kahunas
Lim, Jim and Tracy tumbled out of the portal in the shadow of The Needful One’s silvery saucer which sat on what had been a flourishing bed of aptly named, Devil’s vegetable, the leafy green vegetable known as kale. It had also crushed a crop of potatoes, yellow carrots and prized purple sprouts. Louis crawled round to them from the allotment shed. It had zero weight but it also had priority in the occupation of its given space.
“Where’s The Needful One?” hissed Lim.
“Oh, he’s addressing his adoring disciples across on the recreation ground, but we do seem to have engaged his attention.” Said Lim.
“Where’s the bomb,” said Jim a little too eager to see such a neat nuclear device.
“Here, in the suitcase beside me,” said Louis, indicating an aluminium case half hidden under his body. It bore the inscription, ‘Now, I am become death the destroyer of worlds’.
“Neat inscription,” said Tracy, who was lying in a dense patch of blueberry plants, “from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. I’m surprise you haven’t got that in your memory too, Lim.”
“No one who does good work will ever come to a bad end, either here or in the world to come,” quoted Lim. That’s a more hopeful bit of the same scripture. I like that one. But why are we whispering and wallowing in mud?”
“You started it,” said Jim, standing up and shaking off some soil made friable by Lim’s father’s efforts, “what’s the plan?”
“When I have The Needful One’s attentions, I am going to make a big show of rigging this bomb to the saucer,” said Louis, “I’m guessing that The Needful One will not wish his ride home to be obliterated.”
“Is it a real bomb?” asked Tracy.
“Oh yes,” said Louis, “has to be. It is likely that The Needful One can probably scan it. His first thought will be to send his local disciples to seize it. He’d love to detonate it himself, somewhere that will kick-start the World War. In Russia presumably. He hasn’t acquired much local support as yet and we have a perimeter of SAS and Specials who can hold them off. With too many casualties unfortunately.”
“So how do we get him into the saucer and through our hidden portal?” asked Tracy.
“We should set the timer running and lodge it in the portal entry inside the saucer. The Needful One will want to retrieve it,” said Lim, “he will think we have transported the bomb to his home base.”
“Well, here goes nothing,” said Louis, opening the case and setting a very prominent and flashy timer, “this is a bit showy to make sure The Needful One does see that a count down is in progress. I’m setting it for detonation in two hours. If it does not attract his attention I can stop the timer or push the case into the portal and out to the Jupiter core outfall. It’s all working isn’t it, Tracy, your portals?”
“Fingers crossed,” said Tracy, suddenly feeling the weight of the survival of Rowling World.
“Ok, said Louis, I am going out to the saucer.”
“Not unprotected, you’re not!” said Jim, “I will give you a silicene cloak that The Needful One cannot penetrate. And remember, he is only empowered to use persuasion to make disciples on this world.”
“Jim’s right,” said Lim, your police and SAS cordon has kept his disciples away and those are the only agents of murder and mayhem he can call upon without breaking his Great Bargain with The Quintessence. And I am going to use my power of levitation to transport you to the lip of the saucer.”
“All for one,” said Jim, “and one for all.”
When a cloaked and levitating threat moved slowly toward the saucer, The Needful One looked round in distant amusement. Then he discerned that a much greater threat was being moved, a nuclear fusion bomb equipped with a timer. He recognised the threat as an assault on his home world at first, then realised that the target was his unique portal linking him to home and faithful acolytes. With a guttural roar he moved swiftly, intending to re-occupy the saucer and move it away with the second option of returning home to regroup. He tested Louis for intent and saw that his enemy was indeed prepared and preparing to detonate the weapon even at the cost of annihilation of himself, his companions and the town of King’s Lynn.
The companions watching in surprise as their ploy worked and The Needful One plummeted down and into the open ‘mouth’ of the saucer. In the next instant, Louis lifted the silicene cloak and threw his suitcase bomb into the saucer after the enemy.
Anxious moments followed and they waited for any indication that Tracy’s portal had activated. Would it work and would there be an absence of blow-back from the 29 million atmospheres of pressure at Jupiter’s core.
The silvery saucer shimmered, swelled and settled back. It looked like a clam digesting a hand grenade. Then it faded to an ashen grey and dissipated in a shower of fine cinder dust which proved invigorating to future crops in Lim’s father’s allotment. The end was almost an anticlimax. For a while no-one moved a muscle, but unaccountably, tears were running down Louis shaking face.
“You were going to detonate that bomb, weren’t you,” said Lim quietly, placing an arm round Louis shoulders.
“Yes, I would have done it. The toll on human lives has already been much too great and The Needful One and his disciples planned much worse.”
In the days that followed, astronomers noted a new phenomenon on the surface of Jupiter. A second but smaller red spot appeared fixed and oscillating with an intermittent pulse of light and matter. It was some kind of internal eruption, they decided. But the Companions and Louis and Newton and Carnegie knew better. The Needful One was writhing fitfully in his attempts to escape, a prisoner of inestimable pressure. And so they hereinafter name him. The Prisoner of Pressure.
But was his bargain with The Quintessence at an end? Was the rapprochement between the West and China and Russia a settled sign of goodwill? Was wickedness and evil defeated for ever. In time, Rowling World came to know that this was just one victory in an eternal war, a regrouping of evil with an implacable enemy able to reach out from his prison and motivate and enervate dark matter into other and more deadly assaults in future time.
Evil was not defeated, just returned to a beginning such that Humankind must ever watch the signs and portents of re-erupting vortices of wickedness. And those whom The Needful One had made disciples, were still his acolytes and adherents. They numbered millions in a world of billions and would occupy the attention of all with their false priests and churches. As a wise man said;
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Do not allow evil to triumph. Do not sit by and do nothing. Stand up and be counted, speak up against evil and speak out against evil men and their sinful deeds. For by their deeds you shall know them. Go to the memorial bench in Rowling World’s King’s Lynn and sit between the Companions of the Order of the Spectacles and reflect upon their adventures. They are only a flip-flack away from you and you may be called upon to swell their next defence against The Prisoner of Pressure. For he st
ill roars in agonised and pained frustration in his boiling, superheated and constricted liquid hydrogen and helium shrouded prison. His only trophy, a thin remnant of silicene cloaking from a torn and disrupted portal trap. As an entity, he has no way back to pursue his destiny. But he has the power to exert influence on matter and antimatter and to prepare new attacks upon the faithful among you who are the Modern Essenes. You must resist his evil which will be with you until the final battle. For so it is written and so it will be. I cannot tell you when his next attack will come or if it will yield him more success. There are no folds in the Space-Time continuum that take me to the end of the universe.
But do not think his defeat is a foregone conclusion for I do know that in a distant future, the adventurous and forgetful young of Rowling World will don their EVA shielded suits and surf the clouds of Jupiter with only a handheld portal to snatch them away from the boiling pressured depths. Those surfers are watched, not by any kind of shark but by an entity deranged by pain and hatred, an entity who waits for one of their kind to fail to surface. He will seize that drowning individual and encapsulate him in his cloak to be a toy of vengeful tortures in that hellish world. Do not let that be one of your descendants. And so you must be the beacon that warns of what is still to come. Worship The Quintessence, for it exists; implore its assistance in your lives and the lives of your families and friends. And do this in the true order of prayer. First, address The Quintessence with respect; Second, give thanks for all your blessings; for potable water, for hot showers, for food, for shelter, for warm beds, for goodly parents, for friends. And thirdly, and finally, seek help in thwarting all evil influences upon you and for aiding your efforts to do good for everyone and all life on your sweet planet, Rowling world.
Chapter Twenty – Time-Space Folds to Cloud Surf Jupiter.
Four Time space folds and several Time creases finds Humanity at ease in a station on the surface of Gannymede. For the elderly, the low gravity, at one sixth of that on Rowling world, is a blessing relieving ailments ranging from heart failure to arthritis. For the young it is a wonderful place for extreme adventures where pursuits like Parkour can be faciltated by the ease of movement in silicene extra vehicular activity suits. The use of droop free Gallium nitride laser lighting and Gallium-Germanium HOLTHertz capacitors made EVA expeditions comfortable and fun. Even at temperatures of -200 Kelvin, holidaymakers could move freely about the surface of Gannymede in suits equipped with a heating mesh able to maintain internal temperatures of 17 centigrade. Suit life was measured in days rather than hours owing to oxygen-packers which solidified gases by defeating the inter-molecular spacing. Nevertheless, there were dangers; the unthinkable event being a rent in the silicene suit fabric and the inner layers of graphene and tiberyllium. The outcome of this or a power failure was instant and immediate death. Moving the corpse afterwards would inevitably shatter it and lead to a suit filled with an icy dust. Luckily suits were now equipped with individual portals that could operate automatically and in a billionth of a second, returning the occupant back to the Gannymede locker room, naked but alive.
The greater dangers lay in the activities to which the young were addicted. Gannymede’s crust of ice had been pierced by drilling and the tunnels had given access to the vast ocean below. The depth was up to 60 miles in places and the crushing pressures could only be resisted by special, rigid EVA suits that had all the attributes of the 21st century Robocop. At extreme depths, adventurers claimed to have seen brief glimpses of some kind of creature defined by a faint luminosity. But the real interest was in the gigantic stalactites which hung down from the surface ice. In some areas these huge columns of ice were in regular arrays forming strange underwater temples.
But the main activity of the thrill seeking adventurer was the excursion to Jupiter itself. Over a million kilometres, the journey was accomplished with ease owing to the establishment of an orbiting station with a Tracy Portal onboard. Would-be surfers suited up on Ganymede, testing and retesting their suit portal escape mechanisms before making the fold to the Jupiter-stationary way-station. On arrival, the surfers found a bare hall with racks of surfing boards and several gates out into the space high above Jupiter. Even returning surfers had to endure the lengthy jumpers’ briefing which ultimately boiled down to a very few words “obey your suit commands’ and “fold back at the recommended height”. The idea was to surf down through the upper clouds of Jupiter’s atmosphere which gradually grew thicker and bumpier to negotiate. At the height designated, still thousands of miles above Jupiter’s unseen core, the surfer had to trigger the suit portal to fold back to the waystation. The suits had automatic portal fail-safes, but most surfers knew exactly how to jailbreak the systems and make the suit free to fall right into the heart of the maelstrom that was Jupiter’s great Red Spot. Then only operation by the suit’s occupant would instigate the fold-back.
Most daredevils decided early in the briefing that they would jailbreak the suit and go beyond ’official’ limits before triggering the suit portal for a return. Later they would compare notes and phone apps showing the heights at which portal escapes were triggered. The guy with the highest triggering out, the ‘chicken’, would buy everyone a round of liquid absynth. The chicken may just have been unlucky enough to hit peak turbulence in a “boil up” which was Jupiter’s equivalent of a thermal. He would certainly claim that to be the case and would provide ‘G’ readings to substantiate the claim. A war of data interpretation would then ensue with contestants paying for access to the waystation computer logs. Company profits soared and this was the main reason why jailbreaking of suits was tolerated. So far, no-one had been killed as a result of over-reaching themselves, though there had been injuries from absynth fuelled fights in the bars of Ganymede when data interpretations were challenged.
The existence of The Needful One as a captive of Jupiter’s gravity was a matter of legend. But the legend was now very old and the manifestations of evil centred far off on Rowling world. It did not trouble the youngsters who holidayed on Ganymede. Their parents worried and warned, but youth remained as indestructible as youth had ever been. Caution burned away in the flames of absynth and daring became foolhardiness. Luckily the ride closer in to the thicker atmosphere of Jupiter was so rough and disorienting that surfers pulled out of their 120 mile an hour dive long before falling into unconsciousness.
Late in the 4th millennium of deep space travel, expeditions from schools became a routine end of term adventure. And among school leavers there were a scattering of addicts, emos, and the bullied. One such child, Evan Drinklage, taunted beyond endurance because of his looks, had decided to make all his companions feel very sorry for treating him so badly. After queueing in the waystation for ages, he gritted his teeth and donned the allotted, name-tagged EVA suit into which some thug had urinated. His plan was simple. He intended to kill himself and render those foul mouthed bullies speechless. The irony of ending his life to make a point eluded him in all his misery and he settled into the wet webbing and jailbroke the suit, disabling the auto-reportal. The thugs in the group raised hands to their visors mimicking the pinched nose response to a nasty smell.
Others in the group were already passing through the gates opening to the atmosphere high above jupiter. Surf board in hand they leapt or somersaulted out into space, outlined against the roiling brown and red clouds below. The art to achieving the greatest depth of penetration was turning and settling the surf board firmly beneath hands, knee and foot. As the clouds thickened and began to cushion the fall, streaming out from under the surfboard in a puthering yellow-brown wake, the buffeting of the jet-stream grew stronger and wilder. Eventually the shaking would reach teeth-chattering intensity and would then become violent enough to blur all vision and thought. At this point, even the craziest surfer pulled the kill-switch and ported back to the Waystation, ready to repeat the run after comparing data sets with his companions. The competitions were organised into practice session, qualifying sessions an
d then the final competition. Only the ten fastest qualifiers entered the final race and the champion was crowned with a wreath of green Ganymede slate fashioned after laurel leaves.
Today in first practice Evan Drinklage waited until all his companions had begun their dive. Then with a calmness remarked upon by the gatekeepers, he stepped forward and with a faint smile fell out into the clouds. As his speed increased, he cast aside the surf board and adopted a head down dive into the abyss. He quickly passed the other scholars who were trying to surf across the roiling cloud and accelerated downwards. Now beyond terminal velocity, he scarcely noticed the shaking and buffeting, feeling only the calm approach of unconsciousness. When he passed the most adventurous of his companions, Fred Dinwinny, he was a mere streak of sulphurous yellow, sparkling with an electrical aura and surrounded by a blue aura. Fred watched open-mouthed as Evan roared down and into the thickest clouds below.
“Reportal, Evan, Reportal!” screamed Fred.
Much further down in the suit-bursting depths of the atmosphere, anti-matter stirred and reached out. Evan was saved and yet doomed. Doomed to an apprenticeship of horror at the hands of the entity known as The Needful One.
Table of Contents
Chapter One – Muggles Introduced
Muggles Bereaved Page 25