The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

by Andrew Marshall

  Then, as the viewport swam back into focus, it came flooding back again.

  The laser was indeed getting brighter by the moment. I reached for the joystick, but I must still have been connected to the ship in some way, because I was instantly aware that firing the retro-rockets wouldn’t be sufficient to escape. ‘We have to get out. Are there escape pods? Parachutes?’

  Guuuurk shook his inflating head. ‘Nothing like that. I happened to check that the very first moment I came aboard, by sheer coincidence’

  ‘So,’ I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice, ‘is there nothing we can do?’

  Guuuurk frowned for a moment, then smote his forehead. ‘Of course! What was I thinking? The shield!’

  ‘We have a shield?’

  ‘Of course! Every Mercurian ship is fitted with a ceramic-powered weapon shield.’

  On top of the burgeoning terror, I began to feel slightly nervous. And sick. ‘A what?’

  Guuuurk clambered to his feet and started fighting his way to the back of the flight deck. ‘An impenetrable energy shield that can repel anything – even a Martian Death Ray.’

  Unhelpfully, Gemma murmured: ‘I have a sequinned bag that can do that.’

  Guuuurk pretended he hadn’t heard. ‘It’s powered by ceramic oscillation. A series of discs fit into that slot there.’ He waved his hand at the console. ‘They’re the exact dimensions and structure to create the perfect resonance.’

  ‘Ceramic discs?’ I asked. For some reason, I was beginning to sweat a great deal.

  ‘Yes.’ Guuuurk began opening and closing various doors and hatches.

  ‘You mean like . . . dinner plates?’

  The Martian snorted. ‘I suppose so, to the untrained eye. Yes. Fortunately, every vessel has a large store cupboard full of them.’

  He opened the door. The couple of plates I’d managed to leave still intact slipped off the shelf and smashed into the rest of the detritus, with a horrible final crash.

  ‘What the blazes?’ Guuuurk squeaked. ‘It’s like a Greek wedding in here!’

  ‘I may have chipped one or two of them earlier,’ I admitted.

  ‘Chipped? Chipped? They’ve been pulverised to powder !’ On his knees, he started rooting through the debris, trying to find a plate that was more or less whole.

  Troy was at the viewport. ‘Laser thingy’s going all blue! I think it’s about to blast us!’

  No time for guilt! ‘Could we glue some bits together?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Guuuurk scooped up handfuls of ceramic fragments and let them dribble through his thumbs. ‘We have ample time to painstakingly reconstruct an entire dinner service from what is essentially dust, and perhaps paint it daintily with a lovely willow pattern and sign it “Josiah Wedgwood” in our remaining two seconds of life !’

  There was definitely a lingering connection with the ship’s emotional interface, because I felt a sudden surge of energy in my stomach, and the needle on the console’s power indicator leapt simultaneously.

  Gemma had spotted this herself. ‘Calm down, Guuuurk – you’re overloading the anger engines.’

  ‘Calm down? CALM DOWN!? ’ His face began to take on a rather dangerous tint of orange, and his head started swelling alarmingly. ‘I’ve been very patient with all of you up till now, even though you’re an utterly useless shower !’ I’d never seen his head quite so swollen. ‘I’ve been catapulted to the Moon , forced to project myself into the head of an imbecile and locked in an attic for twenty-four hours while a possessed village performed a ceaseless cacophony of uncontrollable rumpy pumpy in the room below.’

  I opened my mouth to try and reason with him, but he was in full flow now.

  ‘I’ve been tortured by Mole People, imprisoned by shape-shifting troglodytes and painfully stamped on by a giant sandal in the Attack of the Forty-Foot Bishop . . .’

  The power needle had leapt off the scale, and the whine of the engines had grown to a deafening roar. ‘Guuuurk . . . you’ll blow us sky-high!’

  He simply ranted on and on. ‘But this really puts the skin on the Ambrosia Creamed Rice, this does! Our one, solitary, slim chance of survival, and Brian, a man who was drummed out of the Quakers for being excessively placid, suddenly takes it into his head to go on a senseless rampage of crockery destruction – like a deranged Italian housewife who’s just discovered her husband in bed with the Pope .’

  I could barely make out what he was saying above the shrieking engines now.

  ‘ Why , Brian? Why? ’

  I felt a hand in mine, and looked down to it. Gemma mouthed: ‘I’m afraid we’ve really had it this time.’

  Guuuurk raised his voice above the cacophony. He was raving and shrieking now. ‘And as if that weren’t enough, at the end, the only companions of Guuuurk the Magnificent, Patronome-In-Waiting of the fifteenth biggest gas puddle on Phobos, are a clockwork-brained female , an insectoid simpleton and a pottery-hating psychopath who—’

  We were all enveloped by a blinding flash, and I actually felt my component atoms scatter in a million directions.

  5

  Chiffon

  What a chimera . . . is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of the truth, a sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!

  Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  Chapter One

  The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (on the run), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

  Keep an eye out for Intruder photo arriving.

  I’m at the front desk, poring through the obits, as per – I spots Albert Rawtenstall, the Black Pudding King, is now sadly demised, owing to an unexpected encounter with his own meat-reclamation scraper, thereby making poor old Mrs Rawtenstall a lonely widow woman. Rich, bereft and vulnerable: the holy trinity. I makes a note in my begging book. I’ll be getting out the Basildon Bond later on.

  Just then, the postman arrives and passes over the envelope from the chemist’s.

  Of course, there’s never five minutes’ peace in this madhouse. Just as the kettle’s starting to steam nicely, that particularly annoying telephone ring starts up. The one that sounds like three fire engines manned by escaped lunatics from Bedlam banging on saucepans. The special stripy light on the wall behind me starts flashing again.

  It’s the Future Phone.

  I stuffs the envelope in my pocket and charges to answer it.

  Thankfully, the Prof’s ordered the door kept unlocked since the last how’s-your-father, so I gets to it pretty quick.

  When I picks it up, I’m surprised by the voice on the other end.

  ‘ Quanderhorn here. I need to speak to Quanderhorn. ’ Just like the prof to spend the very last bit of Temperaryum on a Future call to himself.

  The actual Prof comes into the room behind me and I holds out the receiver to him. ‘It’s you , sir, for you.’

  ‘Tell him I’m out.’

  ‘ And I know he isn’t out. I’m in the future, dammit! ’

  I turns back to my Prof. ‘He’s most insistent, sir.’

  ‘Oh, very well. I’d better not be wasting my own time.’ He snatches the handset off me roughly. ‘Hello?’

  I cranes over to hear, without looking as if I’m craning at all. Years of practice pulls it off. ‘ Listen, Quanderhorn, there isn’t much time ,’ the other one says. ‘ The advanced technology in that Mercurian vessel has stirred a powerful alien artefact, a giant ziggurat, slumbering these many millennia under Piccadilly Circus .’ *

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘ Anyone who penetrates the heart of its structure will discover astonishing secrets beyond human understanding. ’

  ‘I see. And why are you bothering to tell me this?’

  ‘ To be honest, I don’t have the faintest idea. I need to get to the point. ’

  ‘Well, get to the point, then.’

  ‘ Well, if
you’d just stop interrupting me, I would get to the point— ’

  ‘You’re interrupting me !’

  ‘ No – you’re interrupting me. Just listen: I must give you this dire warning . . . whatever you do, don’t— ’

  And then, there’s this operator’s voice: ‘ To continue this call, please deposit more temporium. ’

  ‘Dammit!’ The Prof chops his hand down on the cradle repeatedly. ‘We don’t have any more temporium! Hello? Hello? ’

  Furious, he slams the receiver down. ‘What idiot would not put the dire warning first, if he knew damn well we were going to run out of temporium?’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, isn’t he you?’

  He turns slowly. ‘One phone call to the Military Police, Jenkins, mentioning your Post Office savings book—’

  Well, that’s quite uncalled for, in my humble. I’m only trying to defend him. From him.

  [SQUEEZED IN BETWEEN LINES AT A LATER DATE IN GREEN BIRO :]

  And I must point out for legal purposes, according to my union rep, that the implication of these allegations are entirely without substance, and a jury of my peers would almost certainly ex-honourate me.

  [ORIGINAL JOURNAL CONTINUES :]

  ‘What I meant to say, sir, was: what a idiot!’

  He gives me that chilling look. ‘He’s me! Are you being deliberately insulting now, Jenkins?’

  Well, I’m all a-fluster. ‘No. I mean yes. I mean . . . that’s a rum do, that Piccadilly Circus business, isn’t it, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I already knew about all that.’ He tosses over a strip of ticker tape. ‘This came in earlier over the Telemergency Print-O-Gram.’

  I studies the tape. ‘Blimey, sir. The other you was right! Mysterious Hincident in Piccadilly Circus.’

  ‘Ye-e-es. I wonder why he didn’t remember I already knew it?’

  All this Future Phone business does my head in, if you want to know the bald truth.

  ‘We’d better get down to London. Fast.’

  ‘Ha ha. Have you seen this joke at the bottom, sir? Very funny. “Take me to your leader!” Ha ha ha. ’Cause, you see, Mr Churchill is supposed to be the leader, sir, but really, it’s you, is what they’re saying. Ha ha. Oh, that’s tickled my funny bone, that has.’

  He just looks at me, quite grim. ‘Is that Quandertechnicon loaded, Jenkins?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll get the starting handle right away.’

  Then, I kids you not, there’s yet another alarum going off. This time, though, it’s only a little ping of a sound, and it’s coming from the Professor’s watch.

  He glances at his wrist. ‘Perfect timing! The duplicates are ready.’

  * The atrocious spelling in this reported speech has been corrected for the purposes of clarity.

  Chapter Two

  Secret Report to Martian Command, by Guuuurk (Unknown)

  ‘. . . pottery-hating psychopath, who – hang on! What’s going on? Where are my feet? Come to that, where is any of me?’

  Those were my initial thoughts, recorded purely for scientific purposes, you understand. I’d hate to inaccurately imply that a courageous Martian warrior such as oneself would in any way be in a complete and utter blind panic. Although I was literally blind. And I was, theoretically, panicking. I seemed to be floating about somewhat aimlessly in lots of tiny unconnected parts. I defy any Martian to wake up to that bag of toffees without panicking just a soupçon .

  Here I was, haplessly wafting about space as a sort of molecular cloud – an evaporated, diluted, dispersed version of my magnificent solid self.

  Quite honestly, I wouldn’t have been in this appalling position were it not for the hopelessly inept bunglings of those brainless Terranean knuckle-draggers I’m compelled to work with.

  To think that I, Guuuurk the Uncomplaining, Interim Sub-Manager of refurbishments to the Sacred Temple of Grrrronk, (Car Park Surfacing Underdepartment), fifteenth half-cousin of His Flatulence the Archbishop of Mars – twenty times removed – could end his days. . . Ohhh, I just can’t be arsed .

  I admit, I’d begun to drift away, quite defeated by the futility of it all, into some kind of oblivion . . .

  *​ *​ *​ *

  From the journal of Brian Nylon, No Time.

  This is jolly hard to explain. I know it may sound like some of that French philosophical gobbledygook, but I just can’t think how else to put it – I was, and yet I wasn’t.

  Perhaps this is what the poor devils in the cellar felt like: being and simultaneously not being – those nomad souls ever wandering an unrealised hinterland in the gap between Form and Consciousness. Innocents condemned to a lifeless twilight? What kind of demons could compel a man to do that? Oddly, none of that seemed to particularly matter to me now.

  I had no body, but everywhere was my body. And I was a part of everywhere. I was a planet forming from dust and rocks, I was a spiralling galaxy, I was the heart of a supernova. For a brief, fleeting moment I was the entire Universe itself, expanding everywhere into the Void. And just for this glorious instant, I knew everything.

  Everything. And suddenly it was all beautiful and all made utter sense.

  I began to drift into a lazy, wonderful daydream. It was like slipping into a warm bath of silky oneness.

  There was no point resisting it.

  It was inevitable.

  *​ *​ *​ *

  From Troy’s Big Bumper Drawing book.

  [PICTURE OF A STICK MAN WITH LIMBS AND HEAD DETACHED AND ‘ME!’ WITH VARIOUS ARROWS POINTING TO THE BITS]

  Im an atum! Its grate. Theres other atums too, and theyr me. Im more atums than Gerk is. His atums smel. Ha ha. Woooa! Here I go. Im a sun. its hot. Id take of my vest, but atums dont have vests. I like smashing my particals together. They mak big brite bangs!!

  Boom! Boom! Booooom!!!

  Im staying heer for EVR.

  *​ *​ *​ *

  The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen. Unknown time.

  This was most interesting. Pure rationality would suggest our existence had come to an end, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I still had awareness. In fact, I hadn’t felt so totally complete for some time.

  Could it be that being released from my physical self had freed me from the battles that daily bedevilled me? My thoughts were somehow . . . pure. Pure me, unhampered by mechanical interfaces. Unworried by physical imperfections.

  What was happening? Unless this was death, the only feasible explanation was that Guuuurk’s overloading the anger receptors had caused the engines to go into a super-nuclear eruption, disintegrating us all to our very atoms and propelling them through some kind of quantum tunnel.

  But something was wrong. I could feel my component molecules racing away from the source of me, like ripples fleeing a stone tossed into a lake.

  It was not an unpleasant sensation, but I had an impression that the process was diluting my very Self.

  I could sense the others around me, all expanding away, losing themselves to the thrall of the Universal Mind.

  I wondered if I might not be able, by an effort of the will, to arrest the dispersal. It’s not a simple matter to exert one’s will without the benefit of a physical brain of any description, but it was imperative I succeeded.

  I concentrated, really concentrated.

  I reached out my mind to the furthest flung parts of all of us and started hauling them back to our cores.

  Chapter Three

  The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (stripes torn off), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

  7:30 Thursday: Cod Supper with Mrs Rawtenstall. * N.B. Shampoo moustache beforehand. And afterwards.

  The fully loaded Quandertechnicon is a stubborn beast to handle. Very hard to swerve when a deer crosses the road, but I manages to hit most of them and stuffs them in the back. Same with the pheasants. Why the dozy beggars don’t fly more, I really don’t know. They walks more than is good for them, that’s for sure.


  The Prof’s way off ahead of us in his streamlined sixteen-skeins rubber band car, and the duplicates is following in the jeep. I’m bringing up the rear, which is how I likes it.

  Wedging my pork pie in the air vent, I steers with my knees while I pulls out that envelope from the chemist’s. No time for fancy Dan steaming now. I rips it open with my teeth and slides out the photograph of the cellar intruder.

  What I see shocks me to my very marrow. And I can tell you, it’s a pretty big marrow.

  * Jenkins often reports he is partaking of a ‘Cod Supper’ when dining with a lady friend. Whether or not this involves the consumption of actual food is a moot point. Certainly, there is no record of there ever having been a fish and chip emporium in the village of Wytchdrowninge.

  Chapter Four

  From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – [cont’d]

  Can you imagine a startling explosion that smashes you to your component atoms happening backwards? A sort of de-splosion? Well, that’s how it felt. With a final, sickening slamming sensation, we found ourselves literally reconstituted on the deck amid the smoking ruins of the Mercurian ship.

  A tremendous sense of loss washed over me – the residual effect of my connection with the vessel, as I realised it had crashed very heavily somewhere, and was, in fact, dying.

  There was smoke. Small fires had broken out all over the flight deck. The viewports were fogged on the inside with a thick layer of soot, and on the outside with some kind of mud.

  ‘That,’ Guuuurk dusted himself down, ‘ really hurt.’

  ‘Yes,’ Troy agreed, climbing to his feet. ‘Can we do it again?’

  Through the smoky mist, I looked around anxiously to see if Gemma was OK. Mercifully, there she was, efficiently beating out the fires on the console. Even though she had a cute little sooty mark on her nose, she looked as perfect as ever.

  ‘Did anyone else feel that . . .’ I hesitated to ask. It seemed so existential-y and French ‘. . . that molecule thing?’

  ‘Yes, Brian.’ Gemma doused the final flames. ‘We all exploded into a billion particles. We felt it.’