‘Why do all aliens seem to use hieroglyphics?’ I wondered aloud.
‘Everything’s a hieroglyphic if you don’t understand the language,’ Gemma explained. ‘Guuuurk?’
‘Why always ask me?’ he complained. ‘Haven’t a clue.’
Gemma scrutinised the etching carefully. ‘Well, this is clearly a lightning bolt.’
‘Oh,’ Guuuurk smiled sarcastically, ‘that sounds inviting.’
‘And below it, here . . . this looks like a route through the Mirror Maze. We have to head forwards and take the first right—’
And ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK !
A jagged blue bolt of lightning sliced through the air without warning.
Gemma, Troy and I quite easily rocked out of its path, but poor old Guuuurk barely escaped being sliced in half!
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Troy asked Gemma. ‘I was distracted by that indoor lightning bolt.’
‘Oh, you mean the one that nearly bisected me?’ Guuuurk raised himself from the floor.
‘What was that you said about the route through?’ I asked Gemma.
‘She said,’ Guuuurk condescended, ‘head forwards and take the first right—’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
Another bolt ricocheted around the mirrors, leaving Guuuurk’s hair smouldering slightly.
‘Wow!’ Troy enthused. ‘I thought it never struck in the same place twice.’
‘Wait! Nobody say anything else!’ Guuuurk dabbed at his singed hair with his hand. ‘It seems to have some sort of verbal trigger.’
‘So,’ Troy mused, ‘you’re saying that a special word makes it happen. Right?’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
Guuuurk nodded. ‘Right.’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
This last bolt actually sliced the end off the cigarette in Guuuurk’s holder. He narrowed half his eyes and motioned for us to be quiet. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Yes. I see it now. Troy, you understand what word you mustn’t say?’
‘No.’
‘Well, obviously I can’t say the word, or I’ll set it off again.’
‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
Gemma and I had resignedly ducked before the bolt had issued this time.
‘Ow!’ Guuuurk yelled, beating out the flames on his blue spotted silk pocket handkerchief. ‘How does it know where I am ?’
I decided to bring some sanity to the proceedings. ‘Troy – as long as nobody says it again, we’ll be all—’
‘Ah-ah!’ Gemma warned. ‘Careful.’
‘Sorry!’
Troy was still baffled. ‘So – what’s this word we mustn’t we say?’
‘The word,’ Guuuurk said carefully, ‘is R-I-G-H-T.’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
‘For the love of sand!’ Guuuurk frantically doused the collar of his protective suit. ‘The wretched thing can spell !’
‘But I can’t,’ Troy pointed out. ‘I still don’t know the word.’
Guuuurk pulled out a scrap of paper. ‘Anybody got a pencil?’
I gave him mine.
‘What are you doing?’ Troy asked.
‘I would have thought it was obvious even to someone of your level of cognitive inanity,’ he drawled. ‘Since I can’t say it, I’m going to write—’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
‘ Ow! That’s not even spelled the same!’ He scribbled frantically before the flaming pencil burnt away completely, and handed the note to Troy. ‘There! This is it – see now?’
Troy studied the scrap of paper for some considerable time, concentrating as hard as I’d ever seen him. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Yes. Yes.’
‘You see what the word is?’ Guuuurk twinkled.
‘Not really. It’s very long.’ His lips tried to form the letters one by one. ‘Rrrigggiitee? Rrrrigghuhurtt? Arruggitta?’
‘It’s Right! The word is Right! Right! Right! Right! ’
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!
Multiple bolts forked around the chamber like flights of deadly flaming arrows. They ricocheted back and forth through the gallery of mirrors, blasting them into clouds of glittering shards.
When we picked ourselves up off the floor and pulled out the tiny slivers of glass from our clothing, only one mirror was still standing intact.
‘Well, my brilliant ploy worked rather superbly,’ Guuuurk crowed. ‘Now we can see our way clear to the exit.’
‘Your . . . foot’s actually burning like a log fire’, I pointed out.
‘Yes, I meant it to do that,’ he lied casually, trying to pretend it wasn’t hurting quite a lot.
‘Here,’ Troy offered, ‘let me stamp you out.’
‘Thank you very much!’ Guuuurk winced, pretending it wasn’t hurting even more as a size 14 boot smashed his toes repeatedly.
‘We’ve wasted too much time already,’ I warned. ‘We need to move now.’
Guuuurk began limping towards the exit, Troy followed, and I hopped after them, realising after a moment that Gemma wasn’t with us. I turned round to see where she was.
She was rooted to the spot, staring into the single remaining mirror.
Her ear was rotating . . .
Chapter Ten
The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen, Sunday 6th January 1952 (Again)
So that’s what I looked like.
And that’s why I’d banished all mirrors from my bedroom.
I’d thought, at the time, it was merely to avoid vanity, which is a foolish waste of effort and energy. But the truth was I had simply been avoiding looking at myself. Because I didn’t like seeing what I saw. It made me anxious, inadequate – unhappy, even. And feelings like that are best locked away, safe inside where they can be ignored. As long as I was fully wound, they’d stay there, and I’d be safe.
And yet, hadn’t Brian said he thought I was beautiful? Of course the lovestruck always think the object of their desires is beautiful. Beautiful I wasn’t! There, I’d finally acknowledged those feelings, and now that I had – somehow I realised they were completely irrational.
I looked over my features again, but more calmly this time. True, I wouldn’t win the Miss World Contest – and frankly who would want to? – but the inventory wasn’t too depressing.
My hair was thick and healthy enough. Eyes were a warm hazel colour and rather clear. Skin fairly free of blemishes. Lips not exactly Rita Hayworth, but not Boris Karloff, either. I wasn’t fat or thin, just normal really. Actually, I quite liked how I looked.
Of course the worries of inadequacy hadn’t gone away, but they had been tempered by fact. I was, in truth, quite presentable. And that was good enough for me.
And if Brian wanted to say I’m beautiful to him – who was I to stop him?
I though he was rather handsome too, between you and me, when he stood up properly and stopped wittering on and forced a smile . . . There he was behind me now, with that lost puppy dog expression. What a useless lump! But quite a cutie, though, if you ignored the—
‘Gemma! Please – come on!’ he was urging.
‘Good grief! We need to go!’ I wound up my ear in a flash, grabbed his hand and we scooted off. In spite of the urgency and the peril we were in, just for a moment it felt to me as if we were a couple of schoolchildren happily running the three-legged race.
Chapter Eleven
The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (very confused), Sunday the 6th of January, 1952
We’re shoring up the cellar, as per instructions. ’Course, I already knows the so-called ‘intruder’ was only Brother Nylon inspecting the cellar for ancillary site safety purposes and allied management misconducts, but I carries on the charade anyways.
I’ve just finished stacking the last of the slow-motion gas cylinders, taunting the attack penguin into a bloodlust frenzy, and replacing the ball bearings with explodin
g kumquats from the Farm.
This Prof’s not too pleased to see what I’m doing when he comes back from looking through the other Prof’s latest notebook.
‘ Slow-motion gas? Killer attack penguins? ’ He dodges its lunge and goes to pop a kumquat in his mouth, but I stops him in time. ‘ Weaponised fruit? And as if that weren’t enough,’ he smacks the notebook with the back of his hand, ‘now he’s trying to gain access to dangerous alien technology to retrieve a hopeless situation, using experimentally modified human replicas like himself! Is there no end to his god delusion? Is there no end to his hubris? Is there no end to . . . my nose?’
The nose does seem to be rather crumbly at the end, now I looks. It’s sort of . . . caving in, like a sandcastle when the tide takes it.
He feels the tip of his conk with his fingers. It shatters like a biscuit. There’s a whole lot of tiny granules down his shirt front now. He looks down at them, sprinkled all over the place, and groans quietly: ‘Nooooooo!’
‘Don’t worry about your nose, sir. Just brush the crumbs to the floor and I’ll fetch the Ewbank.’
What’s left of his face is ashen. ‘Jenkins, this is a bitter blow – my corporeal form is clearly unstable. You realise what this means?’ he keens. A tiny bit of his earlobes falls off at the bottom.
‘Yes, sir. It means you’re falling to pieces.’ I don’t add, ‘If you could crumble into a neat pile, that would be most helpful.’ Though it’s true.
‘It means I’m the duplicate, not him! It means that unethical, mad iteration is the real Quanderhorn after all.’
I can’t help feeling disappointed, on account of I quite liked this version. I sighs. ‘Well, at least we know where we are now, duplicate sir. He’s the top copy, you’re the carbon.’
‘I’m deteriorating rapidly,’ he rasps as his little finger crumbles to the floor. ‘Regrettably, the duplication process itself must be fatally flawed. We have to warn him: he can’t rely on those facsimiles.’
‘Bit late for that, sir. They’re well inside that ziggurat by now.’
‘Then we’ll have to warn him before he sends them in. Yesterday.’ He holds up the notebook again. Where’s this so-called “Future Phone” I—’ He checks himself. ‘ He invented?’
‘There’s an extension over here, sir. But there was only enough tempor-what’s-i-um for one call, and we used it yesterday.’
He snorts a ha ! ‘ Think , man: this will be yesterday’s call.’
‘You may be a crumbling wreck of a duplicate, sir, but you still outranks me in the brains division.’ I hands him the receiver and dials in ‘Yesterday’.
It starts ringing at the other end.
‘Jenkins,’ the crumbly Prof hisses, ‘this is critical – I may need you to prompt me from time to time, so it’s exactly the same as yesterday. Clear?’
This Future Phone business makes my head fair spin, it does. It’s always trouble, if you asks me. I leans in close to listen.
‘ Hello ,’ I hears me yesterday self answer.
‘Quanderhorn here. I need to speak to Quanderhorn.’
I thinks back, and whispers to the crumbly Prof: ‘First, you’ve got to tell him about the ziggurat, sir.’
He covers up the mouthpiece. ‘That makes no sense. Why don’t I go straight to the warning?’
‘Dunno,’ I shrugs, ‘but that’s what you did.’
And we both hear the Yesterday-Prof says to Yesterday-me: ‘ Tell him I’m out .’
The carbon Prof yells: ‘And I know he isn’t out. I’m in the future, dammit!’ He covers the mouthpiece again and turns to me. ‘You’re sure the dire warning didn’t go first?’
‘Definitely not, sir’
‘ I’d better not be wasting my own time ,’ comes from the other end. ‘ Hello? ’
‘Listen, Quanderhorn, there isn’t much time. 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 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 that operator’s voice. ‘ To continue this call, please deposit more temporium. ’
‘. . . rely on the duplicate crew, because they’re going to crumble . . . Hello?’
But the line’s gone dead.
‘Dammit!’ He slams the phone down in such a fury, his hand snaps off with it.
We both stare at the hand on the floor as it trickles away like the grains in an hourglass.
‘I’ve had it, Jenkins’, he says quietly and he begins to sink slowly to knee height into a growing pile of dust. ‘I don’t have long now . . .’
I unfolds a sheet of newspaper and lays it on the ground. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just aiming yourself onto this, sir, it would make my job so much easier.’
But he’s staring into the distance. ‘It was all going to be so wonderful. Virginia and I had such plans. We would cure the sick, feed the starving . . . Where is she, by the way?’
‘Um – Dr Whyte? She’s, er . . . not been quite herself just recently . . .’ is the best I can come up with. ‘Rotting in a putrefying mass on the compost heap’ seems too cruel.
He’s down to the waist now. ‘Sixty-six years in a cupboard, and then this!’ he manages to croak, as his torso collapses.
‘I must say, sir, it’s been a real pleasure working with you.’ And it’s true, even though he’s ruining my newly swept floor. ‘Sorry you have to leave us.’
Then, with just his head remaining atop a pyramid of flakes, he barely murmurs: ‘I’m sorry, too, Jenkins – only the real Quanderhorn can save you all now . . .’
And he’s gone.
Chapter Twelve
Mission log. Flight number 001, Advanced Laboratory-Blasting Squadron (‘The Lab Busters’) Wing Commander William ‘Wee Willy Winkie’ Watkins, Office Commanding. Dateline: Sunday the 6th of January, 1952 02.03 hours
I’ve been awfully patient with the Scotsmen, but I’m afraid I finally snapped.
‘Good God in Heaven ! Can’t you kilted bastards play anything else?’
There was the hideous baby-strangling strains of the bags deflating, followed by an ominous silence. Then the chief Jock stood up, took several steps towards me, creased his brow and rumbled: ‘We could do a selection from Showboat, but Angus here’s a wee bit iffy on “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”.’
A bagpipe was hurled to the deck at the back, and an even deeper voice boomed: ‘Only on the middle eight! D’ya want to mak somethin’ of it?’
‘It’s no’ a criticism, Angus,’ the pipe major rationalised. ‘It’s down to the tonal range o’ th’ instrument—’
‘Could we just calm down a bit,’ I intervened, ‘and perhaps you’d enjoy a little rest for a moment or two?’
But the piper wouldn’t leave it. ‘Are you sayin’ ma “tonal range” is inadequate?’ he challenged, real menace in the voice.
The pipe major squared up to him. ‘Are you sayin’ ma tessitural knowledge is inaccurate?’
‘Aye, I’m sayin’ it. Ye dinna ken wha’ the deil ye’s talkin’ ’bout!’
‘I’m takkin off m’ pipe major hat, now this is jus’ between us, mon tae mon.’ He put up his fists. ‘What’s keepin’ ye, Shirley Temple?’
‘I’ll no’ sully m’ knuckles on a scabby scunner frae Aberdeen. It’d be like punchin’ a wee blind kitten.’
‘Oh – a kitten, is it? Well, even a kitten
could beat a hackit jessie frae Inveraray wi’ a face like a scrot—’
‘Why don’t we all sit back down,’ I soothed, trying with my free hand to cram the feather bonnet back on the pipe major’s bullet-like head, ‘and just have a nice cup of char . . .?’ I suddenly realised that the message light had been flashing urgently for some seconds. I yelled ‘Quiet!’ and flicked the switch.
‘ Come in, Lab Busters . . . ’ It was unmistakably Old Bulldog himself! I felt myself come to attention, even though I was sitting down.
‘Yes, sir, Prime Minister, sir.’
‘ The urgency of the situation demands I speak to you directly. Do you acknowledge my commands? ’
‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’
‘ Now listen carefully: I’m making an alteration to your orders ’
Much as I ached to obey my de facto Commander-in-Chief, there was a complication. ‘Sir, your standing orders were to ignore any deviation from the mission, no matter what efforts were made to the contrary.’
‘ And now I’m changing that standing order. ’
I took a deep breath. ‘Sir, I’m most terribly sorry, but I cannot disobey the standing order without your giving me the top secret termination phrase.’
‘ Yes, you’re right, I remember now. I rather cleverly devised a phrase that no one else would think to utter it in these circumstances. ’
‘Understood, sir.’
‘ Very well, open your sealed envelope now. ’
I nodded at the co-pilot and he dialled in the combination of the tactical security locker, and handed me the sealed envelope within.
I tore it open and scanned the code in dismay.
It read: ‘Proceed with the bombing’.
‘ Wing Commander, have you read it? ’
‘Yes.’
‘ I now say to you: Proceed with the bombing. Do you understand? ’
I didn’t. ‘Not entirely, sir.’ I could feel my heart pounding under my shirt.
‘ Proceed with the bombing. I couldn’t be any clearer than that, could I? ’
My mouth was dry and I had difficulty speaking now. ‘Are you saying “Proceed with the bombing,” meaning I should proceed with the bombing? Or “Proceed with the bombing,” meaning “don’t proceed with the bombing”?’
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Page 29