At that moment, the naked Crook walks out of one of the fuselage doors, slamming it behind him. He is a bent and shaking man, barely recognizable, weary unto death, his yellow hair stuck to his body with sweat, even his rearing cock a limp cod. “Enough, enough,” he croaks, “yer ruddy whoar, yer ladyship.” He drags himself over to the empty pilot’s seat, assisted by the Fat Girl. “Easy do it,” she says. “Yer’re all in, Crookie. ’Ave a joyride all on yer ownsome noo. Give ’em Bomb-plan Foor. In thirty secs, bomb-doors open an’ drop stick of ’undred pounders. In three mins, sirens, searchlights in t’ cabins an’ ack-ack on theer arses with ’oses. Then give ’em a mo ter say theer prayers, then direct ’it, pull out all stops. An’ if that doant mek ’em coom, they’re mules. I’ve got ole choom ’ere ’oo wants reight spot of kip an’ blitz. Fer ole times’ sake, like. Doan’t worry, Goggie, even if ’ouse blows oop, yer’ll lan’ soft on Rosie. I’m joost simple coontry maiden what all world takes in. ’Appen so, an’ then again, ’appen not.”
As the Fat Girl pulls Gog towards Fuselage 6, Gog sees the exhausted Crook slump against the dashboard and begin pulling at levers and pressing buttons aimlessly and blindly, muttering, “Cows, sods, bitches, queers, they turn me up. They do fair. I’m ’eadin’ fer a nunnery, I am. Peace, quiet, an’ none of that no more. Get shit of ’em. Apes . . .” The iron door of Fuselage 6 slams on Crook jerking moodily at the controls, and Gog is left in a small metal cubicle with the Fat Girl unzipping herself from her black flying-suit and saying, “ ’Urry, ducks. Oot with it afore bomb drops. Me arse is bigger’n better’n it ever weer before it weer scrimmed off unner that damn gippo caravan. So give ’er a try, Goggie. Chocks away! Okey-pokey, penny a loomp. More yer ’ave, more yer boomp.”
But just as the Fat Girl’s vast udders appear pulpy as twin pillows stuffed with curds and swing their sludgy and inescapable one-two at Gog to lay him flat on the narrow bunk bolted to the floor behind him, the inferno blasts off. Incendiaries flare from pits in the floor, the metal walls roll and rattle and bump and grind, hidden nozzles squirt out jets of scented water sharp as tracer bullets, a deafening din cataracts to a clattering caterwaul. Gog is flung pell-mell into the pneumatic Fat Girl, then bounces back askew-agley, thumping round the metal walls and ceiling that’s now a floor, cannoning into the Fat Girl’s tons of wet flesh slopping against him then skidding away, as the whole fuselage rolls over and over in a tail spin without end, then begins to corkscrew and gyrate, while thundering detonations begin splitting the metal sides and make bolts pop out and fly through the air in iron hail. “Christ, ’e can’t stoppit. ’E’s squetched an’ sky-wannocked us. ’E’s pulled t’ole works. ’E’s pulled secret switch ter croosh t’lot inter sardine tins, if t’coppers coom in.”
It’s an abomination of disintegration, a desolation of dislocation, fragments and shrapnel, shards of steel and paint, shreds of flesh and sense . . . whores flying by wearing only W.A.A.F. hats and blue murder in their mouths . . . clients with paunches flapping, rumps slack with fright, shrieking and moaning . . . Her Ladyship in gold garters embossed with coronets, yelling, “My carriage,” as she straddles a tail-fin . . . Crook spinning round the broken Joystick like a teetotum . . . smell of sulphur and excrement, fire and ammonia, fume and sweat. . . electric wires snaking out red and black nooses to twine around aged nudity and spark it into rigadoons and sarabands and schottisches and polkas of pain . . . a dashboard dial smashes through a plexiglass pane and rivets itself into the eyesocket of a putrescent dandy, who glares aghast through his calibrated monocle . . . But Magog, where’s Magog, gone to ground in Fuselage X?
Gog hurtles from door to door with the tin and iron rending about him in squadron wreck and armageddon of armour . . . There’s rumps and thighs of fat whores, spreadeagled and saddled, red and golden and purple-haired where they shouldn’t be . . . bishops without gaiters, soldiers without boots, grocers without aprons, even civil servants caught with their striped trews down . . . but Magog’s got canned and sealed off so completely, he’s as invisible as a slice of tuna in a tin without an opener . . . Yet only one Fuselage door hasn’t been busted and shattered, blown to smithereens and glory by Crook’s pulling the switch for the annihilation of evidence which the police can use against him . . . Fuselage 3 still has its door clamped tight as a welded plate . . . Then Crook’s flailing leg kicks in the last red button and it’s Etna and Vesuvius over the whole earth, Dresden and Hiroshima global, Day of Judgement and Night of Inferno . . . Welling heat, molten metal, pea-soup gas, burning blindness . . .
And Gog feels the Fat Girl yank him by the arm, pull him down through a trap into the cool bowels of terra firma, whispering hoarsely, “We’ll get shit of it . . . T’ last kick, when yer cock’s conked oot, a good shit . . . T’toobe, floosh yer toobe daily . . . Get yer toobe reight an’ yer’ll walk on air oop top.” Gog is made to crawl on hands and knees through a dark dripping passage, stinking with acrid damp and reeking with soft droppings, until suddenly he’s jerked upright and squashed against a mass of bodies, he’s packed closer and closer, the blubbery give of the Fat Girl squeezed up behind him as she’s pressed thin by the other clients and whores shoving in behind her, tighter and tighter into the squashed morass of people, yelling, “No more, no more, no more room,” but still more and more latecomers pack in, until they’re crushed like dates in a sticky-sweet goo in the depths of a hole blacker than Calcutta, darker than the terminus of the journey to the end of the night. Then suddenly the whole glob of humanity begins to shimmy as the floor beneath their feet hums and slithers and lights flicker by at the windows and the Fat Girl whispers, “T’ toobe, t’ toobe, t’ commootin’ toobe, direct link from t’ aerothrill ’oar’ouse ter B.B.C. Bush ’Ouse, zero line, not on map, unschedooled, t’ underground pipe what keeps us regular an’ goin’ on an’ on an’ on. All aboord fer radio city, three pips ’ooray, all aboord!”
The mass jammed into the Tube heave and paw and finger each other. By the sporadic lights passing by, Gog can see an old man picking at the nipples of a small nymph, dressed only in a stenographer’s pad chained round her neck, try as she will to pull away, she’s stuck where she is crammed without mercy, while a jowly brute behind her bites at the nape of her neck and palms her buttocks. “Help,” she cries, “help!” but who can move to aid her, while the grinding wheels shriek louder than her thin wails for succour, and the lecherous press melds and mingles in the connubial crush of commutation, fresh food of flesh sucked in every morning to feed the city, evacuated nightly in filth and muck-sweat towards the suburban villas tidy as toilets. Glutton city, orgy porgy offices, fat-farting factories, gulping down humankind for breakfast like eggs and bacon, passing them out in the evening through the anus mirabilis, the underground intestines called the Tube, while the winding sewer river Thames buoys up the cargoes of the discharging boats that sail up its flow before ebbing with the excrement of the commuters to the salt-cleansing sea.
As a red light bobs by, Gog sees Magog’s skull under its yellow helmet of hair protruding out of the cluttered mob. And with a mighty effort, he jerks up both of his hands out of the rubbing vice that shuts them in between the Fat Girl’s belly and a plump dowager’s back. And Gog grabs at the high knobs for standers on each side of the tube, and with a ho ho heave ho, he hauls himself up and sprawling out of the sucking quicksand of his species, until he’s sprawling beneath the low metal roof of the rushing Tube on a knobbled pool of heads, screaming and cursing and jabbing up at his ribs with thumbs and brollies. But Gog winches himself forward by pulling at the knobs, he swims on the heads of the stewing and sardined people towards Magog, frogging forwards to that hated slick hair and loathly nape of neck, till he gets his hands round Magog’s vertebrae and throat, and it’s full throttle, grip the ridged muscles of the windpipe, as Magog’s Adam’s apple bobbles and gulps like a ball on a fairground jet, and all shout, “Murder, murder,” yet none can free their hands to get at Gog spreadeagled on the heads of the
helpless people crammed into the Tube. So Gog begins to choke Magog to death in the great intestinal passage set up between the Strand whorehouse of aerodynamics and the B.B.C. Overseas Service.
Just as Gog is squeezing the last of Magog’s breath out of his gullet so that his enemy’s tongue stands out like a blue candle between his teeth, the Tube stops with a jolt and a screech and the doors slide open and yellow light streams in and the mob spews sideways, carrying Gog briefly upon its heads, then dropping him as it spreads out. Magog wriggles free of Gog’s grip and Gog stumbles to his knees and his hands drop to the underground platform and the commuters surge by rushing on their errands, trampling him indifferently with their millipede boots and shoes, the ten-thousand-toed-tramp of the Tube people getting on time to the City from the private fantasies of orgy they have each in his dark linen brothel at home, tucked up tight when the lights go out. So Gog rises among the bashing legs, he dives after Magog through the throng, he lunges again after Magog ahead, who looks back unseeing, then darts through a recess and a door, marked Private – Do Not Enter. But Gog is at his heels, and though the door slams in his face, he bursts it open again and enters.
He finds himself in a corridor leading to corridors leading to corridors in a vast communications centre. Iron pipes carry cables along the ceilings and red lights warn away from studio doors and technicians scurry about, self-important and armed with scratch-pads and screwdrivers. And Gog peers in through the thick soundproof panes set in the doors, peers in after the vanished Magog, lost without trace in the labyrinth of spoken words beamed out night and day as the Voice of England, calling Europe and Africa and Asia and America, contradictory yet self-congratulatory, state-controlled yet independent, oh people paradoxical, how do you manage it? But Magog’s gone to earth with the green wire in a control room. So Gog prowls about aimlessly, until he sees through a square pane two familiar faces sitting opposite each other at a table, a microphone between them and the air-waves trembling to carry their syllables to the waiting millions of ears. One face is withered and glossy like a polished pippin, the other sprouts a millrace of white hair about its hook nose. And Gog could cry anger to see Miniver-Cluckitt coldly considering his notebook and he could cry halleluiah to see the Bagman, sitting transfigured with ecstasy by the microphone that rises holy as a chalice, rarer than radium, ready to bellow the Bagman’s message to all the wondering flocks of Albion, ready to tell them to build Jerusalem now on the rubble and the warehouses by Thames’ side.
And as Gog inches open the soundproofed door to eavesdrop on the interview between the voice of logic and the voice of inspiration, he hears the following words through the crack:
Q. “Your interviewer tonight is Professor Miniver, Professor Emeritus of Dialect at the University of Durham. And sitting with him in the studio is Mr. Wayland Merlin Blake Smith, a most interesting type of vagabond rarely met on the English highways and byways in these days of national emergency. You wouldn’t call yourself a tramp, would you, Mr. Smith?”
A. “By their words shall ye know them. You wouldn’t call yourself a squit, would you, Professor Miniver?”
Q. (hurriedly) “Yes, yes, yes. Mr. Smith, this is a live recording and perhaps we should stick to the points in hand. As we all know, those that tramp the roads have the reputation of being philosophers, full of wise saws. In my researches, I’ve met many a fine phrase, (in dialect voice) if ifs an’ buts weer apples an’ nuts, wooldna I fill me guts.”
A. “I know a saying, too. There’s no getting white meal out of a coal sack. Who’s being interviewed, Professor? You or I? O, ye of little wisdom and much education, better that a millstone were tied about your necks and ye were drowned in the depths of the sea than that ye ignore the words of the Almighty spoken through the tongue of His servant, Smith, the prophet of the Lord.”
Q. “What was the origin of your religious fixation, Mr. Smith? Psychologically, you appear quite an interesting case.”
A. “The Lord came to me on Mona’s Ancient Druid Sacred Isle, and He bade me say,
And I am come again in my fourth coming; Smith, the leader of the Israelites, come to build again Zion.
And Magog is burned down in the accursed city, and Gog, his brother; the wrath of the Lord passeth, as the winter into the summer.
And the Lord saith, how shall I give thee up, Albion? How shall I deliver thee, Israel?
I am come to restore Zion and the temples of Jerusalem; this is my servant Smith, in him I place my trust.
I shall be as the dew unto Israel, if she will hearken unto him;
If she will deliver to him the waves of the air I have given her; if she will deliver to him the transmitters, or be cast into utter darkness . . .”
Q. “Your plagiarism of the Bible is really quite accurate. An inspired . . . pastiche! Well, Mr. Smith, you have been given the transmitters for a quarter of an hour in Strange Encounter, our Weekly Rendezvous with Odd Bods and Queer Coves. It’s usual now to ask for one of your favourite bits of music to be played for our eager audience. Your choice is the Messiah, I presume?”
A. “The trumpet of Gabriel. The brazen voice of the Day of Judgement. Play that, Professor Miniver. And we shall have Jerusalem here at once.”
Q. “What recording would you like, Mr. Smith? We have a very nice trumpet voluntary by Purcell. While our records department hunts it up, shall we resume? Time is short . . .”
A. “For us all, Professor. I do not intend to leave the transmitters while I still have breath to repeat the message of the Lord. He has destroyed in the Far East the two cities that I foretold would be an Awful Warning to the abomination and desolation of London, the accursed city. Repent ye, repent ye, in sackcloth and ashes, and give me the airwaves, or ye shall surely be the third city caught up to the flaming heavens by the fiery fist of the Almighty.”
Q. “I’m sure the Royal Air Force will take care of that problem, Mr. Smith. Anyway, the United States of America is our ally, and no other nation will have the know-how to make atom bombs for decades. We’re perfectly safe, Mr. Smith, except in your nightmares. Have you a following at all, people who believe as you do?”
A. “Woe unto them that do not believe the word of the Lord, for they shall perish utterly. Woe . . .”
Q. “Yes, yes, but don’t you think preaching is best left for the ordained . . . ?”
A. “Repent ye, London, for Gog is abroad in the land fighting against Magog his brother, and they are the signs and forerunners of the end of the world . . .”
Here Gog sees Miniver clutch the microphone towards him and begin talking hurriedly into the metal ear of the machine.
“We cut our programme short here to hear Handel’s Water Music, played by the Royal Philharmonic . . .”
The light of battle transfigures the Bagman’s face under the electric bulbs so that his white bush of hair glows with the same yellow light that sparks in his eyes, and he rises from the table, and he wrenches the microphone from Miniver’s grasp with one hand, and with the other he slams Miniver’s balding crown so that Miniver’s face is squashed unconscious against the table. Then the thunderings of the prophet’s denunciations are called down from the skies.
“Woe unto you, England, that drove the true religion from these sacred shores, woe unto you, London, that has swallowed up the fatness and the increase and the forests and the meadows of Albion, woe unto you, Magog, who has consumed the men and women and the children of Israel in the grinding mills of your machines, woe unto you, Gog, who has left the ways of the Lord and the people for your own selfish pride and your own selfish wrath, woe unto you, ye nations of the earth, for ye shall be torn asunder . . .”
The Bagman suddenly howls with fury and drops the microphone and rushes across the room like a wild ram at a nanny-goat. Gog leans forwards from his eavesdropping to see the Bagman hurl himself through the door leading to the control-room of the studio, which has cut him off the air. Behind the plate-glass window of the control-room, Gog watches t
he fight between the Bagman and the male technician and the female technician, as if he were watching an underwater film of Tarzan the Elder taking on two Martians somewhere beneath the great grey green greasy Limpopo River all set about with wireless aerials. The Bagman rips off metal ears that look like headphones, he tears off veins that look like wires, he flays skin that looks like white overalls, he shatters eyes that look like horn-rimmed glasses. When the two Martians are drowning at his feet, he begins pulling switches and turning dials and shouting, yelling, screaming behind the soundless window. The Martians swim off one after the other through the door and scamper away to seek help, while the Bagman barricades himself with a great metal cabinet inside the control-room and plunges into a dementia of manipulation. He yanks out leads and connects them to his armpits, he wreathes microphones round his head like laurel wreaths, he screws valves into his ears and plugs in his lobes, he strips his feet and shoves his toes into cable-sockets, he gathers wires like grasses to festoon about his body and mesh him in tendrils of communications. Then, with his whole flesh connected to the airwaves that will bear his prophecies to the four corners of earth, to all Albion and to all that hear the voice of Albion, the Bagman pulls the master-switch in the control-room. So the regiment of technicians and policemen who rush into the studio at Bush House are just in time to see with Gog the metamorphosis and translation of Wayland Merlin Blake Smith from his fourth incarnation back into the essence of becoming again that is eternal living. From every wire and socket, the blue teeth of electric particles flare and spurt and bite the body of the Bagman into a mad jig of death, a jerking and a blackening and a splaying and a charring and a kicking and a coaling in a frenzy of cremation. Before Gog’s eyes, the Bagman is turned by the fiery waves of the air from a body howling dumbly in the ears of all mankind, he is turned to the effigy in ashes that will be the doom of all mankind. As the corpse of the Bagman withers and shrivels into charcoal among the myriad copper teeth of the radio wires that are his electrocution and his consummation, the metal jaws of the particles lock in one blinding forge of fire, one deafening hammer and anvil of detonation, and Gog is lifted up by the hands of the explosion, he is borne from the underground chambers of London where the machines feed on men in the name of linking them to one another, he is carried upwards through a fissure opening under the pavements of the Strand, he is handed up by the boiling black air and left sprawling in a daze on the front porch of Somerset House, alive and hardly kicking but certainly not calling inside to get a copy of his birth certificate or to hand in his official chips.
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