‘And that,’ Guuuurk ducked under Troy’s arm, ‘is why we’re going up !’
Brian and I knew, naturally, that there was no intruder. At least, not any longer. ‘The optimal course of action is for us all to leave the lift right now.’ But as I stepped forward, the doors slid shut in my face. I reached down and pressed the ‘Open’ button, but for some reason it was unresponsive.
‘In which case,’ Guuuurk tilted his head in that annoying interrogatory way he has, ‘what are you doing in the lift in the first place?’
I glanced round at Brian. His face was circulating though that strange array of expressions he adopts when he is struggling to make up one of his dismal untruths. Fun as it was to watch him, I decided to step in to the rescue. ‘We were heading down to try and find the intruders, weren’t we, Brian?
Brian opened his mouth, but a few baby sounds were all that escaped: ‘Buh . . . Maaah . . . Hnuuuh?’
Hopeless. I had to rescue him, as usual. ‘Then we realised only the Professor can operate this thing.’
‘It always works for me,’ Troy grinned. ‘Lift! Activate that button over-thing, where it all lights up and does stuff!’
I suppose the Quanderhorn voice pattern must have been similar enough to fool the device, because the bank of peculiar hieroglyphics illuminated obediently.
‘ Manual override enabled. ’
I tried to open the doors again, but that button was still dead. Curious.
Guuuurk studied the console without comprehension. ‘Right! Which one is the roof?’
Troy bustled him aside. ‘No – we need to go down and catch those intruders. They may be dangerous.’
‘The thing is,’ Guuuurk looked down at his tennis outfit, ‘I really can’t be seen by dangerous intruders in my plimsolls. It gives such a bad impression . . .’
‘We’re going to the very bottom,’ Troy insisted, ‘and that’s that.’ And he pressed a button.
Brian looked perplexed. ‘Troy – that was the very top button.’
‘No, bottom. That’s the one at the top, isn’t it?’
The lift jolted and started winching us upwards. The rate of acceleration was quite alarming. I had to grip the handrail. Brian’s hand was already there, and mine fell on his. I didn’t want to embarrass myself further by making an issue of it, so I left it there.
Guuuurk steadied himself in a corner, both hands braced against the lift walls. ‘What on earth have you done now, you mutton-headed dolt?’
‘Nothing . . .’
‘ Next stop: Lunar Station .’
Brian literally squeaked. ‘ Lunar? This lift goes to the Moon ?’
Trapdoors sprang open in the walls, and benches with harnesses attached unfolded out of them.
Guuuurk raced over to the console and started punching buttons wildly. ‘No! Delores! Stop! No Moon! No Moon! Reverse! Reverse mechanisms! Stop!’
‘ Manual override deactivated. Please secure yourselves. ’
Guuuurk gave Troy his Death Glare, then carefully slid down onto the nearest bench and started buckling himself in. ‘Well,’ he smiled pleasantly, ‘that’s another delightful contretemps you’ve ingeniously masterminded.’
4
Oxygen
. . . late on in the game I stupidly slapped a Bayern player across the face, after he had been kicking me all the game and was sent off.
Albert Quixall, interview for Retro United
Chapter One
From Troy’s Big Bumper Drawing Book
[PICTURE OF ANOTHER STICK MAN WITH BIG SCRIBBLED BLOBS ON THE TOP OF HIS ARMS, STANDING ON A BIG CIRCLE LABELLED ‘MOON!’]
Hahaha. I prest a buttun. Weer on the moon! Hooray! Its grate here. Theres no air. Theres a moon yot. And a supur spays station. Weer all going to dye, says my frend Gurk. Hes stupid. He smels. Theres an Erth in the sky. Its just like ours only far away.
Chapter Two
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – Iteration 66
Dr. Janussen removed her hand from mine and sat down. She clearly hadn’t noticed they were touching, though, personally, I still felt a warm, tingling glow on the back of my hand where hers had rested. I didn’t say anything. Frankly, my mind was a bit of a mess. The experiences in the cellar had quite knocked me for six. And what was it Dr. Janussen kept trying to tell me? There really was never time to explain anything, here.
And now we were heading for the Moon.
I fastened my own harness and gripped the bench. Could it be true? The Moon? The actual Moon ? Anything was possible, with Quanderhorn. But how long was it going to take us? The Moon was, what? A quarter of a million miles away, give or take? If we were travelling at the speed of sound, which was . . . can’t remember – surely, if I was a pilot I ought to know that – but say, five hundred miles an hour, that would take . . . Start again. If a train leaves Ipswich at 11.35, travelling at . . .
And suddenly, we stopped!
Everybody looked around nervously.
‘ Destination: Moon .’
The doors slowly parted on the most extraordinary vista. Through the panoramic window of the small outpost outside, the sky was perfect black, yet pierced by a million glittering stars. The ground was chalky grey, undulating and studded with craters.
Unless I’d taken leave of my senses, we really were on the Moon! ‘How did we do that? It should have taken hours! Days! Weeks!’
Dr. Janussen shrugged. ‘Meta-acceleration, I assume. Q.’s been working on it for a while, now. Is everybody uninjured?’
Troy had already unbuckled and had bounded outside like an excited toddler on his first trip to the beach. ‘Hey! Come out here and look!’
Guuuurk didn’t leave the bench. ‘I am not stepping out of this lift into what I can only describe as an ineptly converted bus shelter with corrugated iron nailed over the gaps.’
That seemed a bit harsh to me. ‘Nonsense!’ I countered. ‘There’s official signage in a futuristic typeface. See? It specifically says “Advanced Lunar Station Q”.’
‘ Advanced! ’ Troy repeated emphatically.
Something about the Byzantine arcanity of Troy’s tortuous logic always seemed to get Guuuurk’s goat. He completely forgot himself, leapt up and frogmarched me outside. ‘Ad vanced? Look: it’s a bus shelter ! See: there’s a timetable for the 43 to Highgate Woods!’
He did have a point. There was supposedly a bus due in ten minutes.
‘And here!’ He gestured animatedly. ‘A poster for the Tufty Club! Only on your preposterous planet would a squirrel be the spokesman for road safety. Squirrels are hopeless at crossing roads. I’ve never even seen one that wasn’t flat. Crossing the road is the very least of their talents.’ *
Dr. Janussen tapped me on the shoulder. ‘We really ought to go straight back. Troy, tell the buttons to switch back on again.’
But the lad was rapt, staring at the sky. ‘What’s that big blue thing up there?’ he asked in wonder.
Dr. Janussen said, quite matter-of-factly: ‘That’s the Earth, Troy. Now, come on – we’re wasting time. Let’s get back in the lift.’
It crossed my mind to mention to her that the lift doors had just shut again, but at that moment, like the others, I found myself mesmerised in the thrall of the Earthglow. It bathed the lunarscape in its majestic blue radiance, and glinted tantalisingly off the myriad crashed spacecraft that pocked its surface as far as the eye could see.
‘Oh, wowzer! Look at all those beauties.’ Troy’s face was a perfect picture of innocent delight.
Guuuurk, however, wasn’t quite so captivated. ‘It’s like a bally ships’ graveyard out there,’ he whined.
Dr. Janussen tried to steer us all back to sanity. ‘Clearly a very dangerous environment. Which is why we should leave here immediately.’
An electronic buzz-crackle snapped us out of our reveries, and the Professor’s distorted voice echoed from a speaker above a small, circular screen in a box above the advert for Sharp’s Brazil Nut Toffees.<
br />
‘Advanced Lunar Station Q . . . Come in, Advanced Lunar Station Q . . .’
The circular screen fizzled, and a phalanx of zigzag lines resolved themselves into a jerkily moving image of the Professor’s face.
‘Advanced Lunar Station Q, respond . . .’
We bounded over. Gravity here was distinctly different. I could easily have covered six yards in a single leap without any kind of exertion, although I did bang my head on the tin roof rather badly.
Dr. Janussen found the transmit button and pressed it. ‘Advanced Lunar Station Q responding. Over.’
The Professor’s disembodied head scrutinised us with disdain. Clearly, this was a two-way visual link. ‘What are you doing up there, you idiots?’
Guuuurk was affronted. ‘I’ll thank you not to take that kind of tone, Professor. How were we to know the lift went all the way to the Moon?’
‘You’re not even supposed to be in that lift.’
Dr. Janussen asked: ‘Are you saying it’s unsafe, Professor?’
‘Well, its experimental, owing to the difficulty in maintaining the tensile strength of the cables.’
There was the tortured creak of metal rending, bolts shearing, and then a mighty twanging, snapping noise, followed by the rather unmistakable sound of a lift plummeting uncontrollably two hundred and fifty thousand miles back down to Earth.
‘Dammit!’ Quanderhorn keened. ‘What idiot decided to make them out of liquorice whips?’
Not even Dr. Janussen felt inclined to provide the slightly obvious answer to this question.
* It’s about time we went into this. Here are the ‘rules’, it would appear, of the Time Loop:
People who die in one version of 1952 are not resurrected in subsequent iterations.
So, although in the first iteration, George VI was the King, succeeded by Elizabeth II, she would remain monarch for all further iterations (unless she were to die) and remain the same age.
In the timeline you and we enjoy, Tufty was not created until 1953, but we can assume from this journal entry that in this alternative time Elsie Mills, his creator, devised him in one of the previous 1952s. Things (and people) that are created in one of the 1952s persist into future iterations – babies, for instance are not constantly born and then stuffed back into their mothers.
Chapter Three
The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (terminated on moral grounds), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952
Running short of Izal.
Collect football pools money.
Steam off stamps and burn football pools.
An intruder in the cellar = lots of mess. And guess who has to clean it up? Muggins, of course. So the ball bearings are all swept up, and the pools of incandescent phosphorus nicely mopped away – takes a long time with this slow-motion gas hanging around, I can tell you – and I’m just in the porcelains relieving myself – it’s lasted sixty-five minutes so far – when yet another perishing alarm starts its caterwauling. Turns out the, ahem, ‘crew’ have been and gone and taken the lift up to the flipping moon.
I ask you.
The Prof’s calling me, so I interrupt my business without proper shakings and start rushing towards him fast as I can, but this gas means I’m moving slower than that Son of a Samurai in Burma whose hamstrings I severed with the jagged lid of a bully beef tin.
I finally drags meself into the briefing room, and there they are, on the screen, looking all little boy lost and forlorn. I can hear them all speaking over the moon radio as I gets closer.
‘How are we going to get back down there without the elevator?’ Mr. Guuuurk’s asking.
Elevator? I ask you. How that Martian can call himself an Englishman, I just don’t know. Martians? Don’t like ’em.
‘We’re working on a better cable,’ the Prof says, ‘by feeding silkworms with Brillo Pads. I’m hoping for a breakthrough shortly.’
‘What kind of breakthrough?’ asks young Nylon.
‘The kind where silkworms don’t die after eating Brillo Pads. On the plus side, we have produced some delightfully bullet-proof camiknickers.’ That’s the Prof for you. Always turning disaster into triumph.
Dr. Janussen steps up. ‘How long do you think it might be before you can effect a repair, Professor?’
The Prof don’t even have to think about it. ‘It shouldn’t take more than three weeks.’
‘And how much oxygen do we have up here?’
The Prof gets out that fancy Dan ruler of his and starts sliding bits backwards and forwards. ‘Enough for four hours.’
I did the sum in my head. They were several hours short.
Mr. Guuuurk went straight into one.
‘So,’ he wails, ‘this is how it ends for Guuuurk the Mighty, Second Reserve Novice Nose-Ring Polisher to the Emperor’s Deputy Concubine Twice Removed. Suffocated to death, fruitlessly waiting for a 43 bus on the moon. My only comfort: a series of poster-borne platitudes from a tree-dwelling rodent with negligible traffic knowledge.’
He goes rabbiting on like this for a good five minutes more, working hisself up into quite a lather. If he don’t watch hisself, that Dr. Janussen might have to give him a fourpenny one to calm him down.
‘No need for hysterics,’ the Prof coos. ‘Naturally, I have a plan.’ He always has a plan, him.
Young Master Troy pipes up from the moon: ‘Great, Pops! What is it?’
‘To replace you all as quickly as possible,’ the great man says without blinking. ‘Must run along and get straight on with that now. Well done, everybody, but mostly me.’
He snaps off the moon radio, and turns to me, rubbing his hands. ‘Right, Jenkins – when you eventually get over here – we have work to do.’
‘Should I place an advert in the Exchange and Mart for new lab assistants, as per usual, sir?’
‘That won’t be necessary. I have the replacements in hand.’ I wonder what he could have meant. ‘Get a move on, man!’ he says, getting irritated.
‘Running all the way, sir.’ I’m still six feet away, and not likely to reach him much before lunchtime.
The Prof tuts and rolls his eyes. ‘Jenkins. Have you ingested slow-motion gas by any chance?’
‘It’s very possible, sir.’
‘Here.’ He tosses me a funny-looking garibaldi with glowing raisins. ‘Eat this fast-motion biscuit.’ Ah well. In for a penny . . . I raises it to my mouth . . .
‘Can’t you eat it any quicker than that?’
‘Not really, sir. Where are we getting these replacements you mentioned?’
He smiles to himself all secret-like, and his eyes goes over to those peculiar goggles with the violet light I sometimes see him creeping around in at night.
‘You’ll see, Jenkins, you’ll see . . .’
He worries me no end when he goes like that. It usually means what I’ll see is trouble.
Chapter Four
Franday the rth of Phobos, Martian Year 5972 Pink
Secret report to Martian Command, by Guuuurk ‘the Magnificent’, Deputy Sand Lord of the Third Pit, Vice Guardian of the Sacred Bag of Dust, et cetera et cetera.
Dr. Janussen finished smacking my face to snap herself out of her hysterical ranting fit.
‘Thank you, Guuuurk,’ she said gratefully. ‘I needed that’.
‘You’re quite welcome, dear lady.’
I find crises like this bring out my native chivalry. I pretended to sob loudly a little longer, and pounded the floor with my fists to make her feel better.
‘What did he mean by “replace us”?’ the naïve young Nylon asked.
‘No.’ The man-boy-ant shook his head. ‘Pops would never do that.’
‘Oh, you think he would never leave his only son, his chief science consultant, his test pilot, and his closest friend and confidant to asphyxiate to death on an airless satellite in the name of Science, do you?’
‘Which one of those is me?’ Troy asked.
‘You’re the son ! You�
�re the bally son ! Who the devil did you think you were? King Haakon the Seventh of Norway?’
‘I thought I might be his closest confidence.’
‘No! I’m his closest confidence. And it’s not “confi dence ” it’s “ confi dant”.’
Brian looked confused. ‘I thought Dr. Janussen was his closest confidant .’
‘No! Me! I am ! ’
Dr. Janussen started smacking me again for some reason. She really was quite unstable. ‘Pull yourself together, you Martian milksop!’ she ranted. ‘If we’re going to get out of this, we need to concentrate. All right. What resources do we have?’
We all began scavenging for supplies. The station was, well, bus-shelter sized, but it was dark, and stuffed with boxes and lockers and piles of bric-a-brac.
Brian found some rations in a locker: live chickens in a toothpaste tube, a packet of dehydrated pigs, and a gallon of powdered water, the proper use of which had clearly not been thought through. He scrutinised the labels. ‘Look at this: “Contains 200 pigs. Do Not Drop in Bath.”’
‘Let’s drop it in the bath!’ Troy inevitably suggested.
Mercifully, the simpleton was distracted when Dr. Janussen’s torch alit on what at first appeared to be a pile of filthy washing, but turned out on closer inspection to be four complete spacesuits discarded willy-nilly over a stack of boxes. Did I dare to start hoping?
‘Right!’ I said, commandingly asserting myself over the hapless crew. Or it may have been Dr. Janussen. ‘Our only chance is to put on these spacesuits and find one of those ships out there we can repair. Quickly.’
I grabbed a suit. It seemed heavier than it ought to have been, and it rattled oddly. I tipped it upside down and a collection of human bones tumbled out. Round about an entire person’s worth, I would have guessed.
‘Someone’s stuffed mine full of bones,’ Troy announced.
‘They’re all full of bones,’ Brian pointed out.
‘Just tip them out and get into them quickly,’ I or Dr. Janussen commanded. It may not have been me, actually, because I answered.
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Page 16