by Tom Holt
It was a dog; a hairy, bouncy, chunky, substantial sort of a dog, with a fringe that came down over its eyes and a friendly pink tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. It was the sort of dog you’d visualise curled up in front of the roaring log fire of your dreams; a Dulux dog, the kind you want to take for bracing walks through the virgin dew and throw sticks for. You could call it Rover without feeling guilty.
It trotted up, sat on its back legs, and said, ‘Woof.’
It had a barrel hanging from its collar.
Bloody odd ventilation shaft, Hamlet mused, as he hurtled downwards.
Admittedly, he could only spare about four per cent of his mental capacity for the task of analysing the problem - ever since he’d lost his footing and started to fall, the other ninety-six per cent had been fully occupied with thoughts of the AAAGH! SHIT! I’M GOING TO DIE! variety - but he had to admit that he was baffled. On the basis of the observational data he’d been able to accumulate so far, the shaft was very long, smooth-sided, and more or less spiral, like the slide at a fairground as conceived of by a very disturbed mind. As part of an integrated ventilation design concept, it left a lot to be desired.
It was very, very long. He hadn’t been keeping a scientific record of how long he’d been falling down it (why is it that you never have a fully-calibrated chronograph handy when you most need one?) but he reckoned it was safe to say that this shaft didn’t just connect 221B Baker Street with 221A Baker Street, or even the main drain. Bearing in mind that his calculations were unlikely to be all that precise, his best guess was an ETA in Australia in about two seconds.
Nope. This service, apparently, doesn’t stop in Australia. Must be the through-drain. If you’d wanted to get off at Australia, you should have waited for the Super Shuttle.
Not for the first time, Hamlet regretted that he hadn’t been born a thoroughbred action adventure hero. Your action adventure hero, falling down a shaft or drain, somehow manages to wedge himself against the sides, using his shoulders and feet, and then creepy-crawl back up again to safety, the quintessential human spider coming back up the plug-hole. The more intellectual and introspective class of hero to which he belonged just keeps on falling, passing the time with complex analysis of his mental state and carefully worded commentaries on Life, Fate and stuff like that. And, when he finally hits the deck and goes flump, it’s all cosmically significant and Means Something. Bloody cold comfort for a chap who, by this point, presumably looks like a dollop of strawberry jam, but there you go. We can’t all be Arnie, can we?
Well, quite.
FLUMP.
After a pain break and a brief pause for status checks, Hamlet crawled to his hands and knees and looked up. Directly above him, he could see a horrible, nightmare, cheese-just-before-bedtime vision, a huge reptilian head with gaping jaws and about twelve rows of inward-facing teeth. A thin ropelike tongue drooped from the lower jaw. It was forked.
Above the head, the serpentine body spiralled away upwards into the darkness for as far as the eye could see. The whole thing was huge; about the thickness of an Underground train.
And I, he realised, am kneeling on a thick, bouncy mattress.
I just fell down the snake.
Thinks . . .
Down the snake.
Puerile . . .
After that, it didn’t take him long to find the foot of the ladder. It took him rather longer to climb back up to the top of it, and by the time he crawled, raw-handed and bloody-kneed, over the lip of the hole and back once more into Sherlock Holmes’ comfortable bachelor apartment in Baker Street, he was feeling rather tired and sorry for himself. All in all, he wasn’t in the mood for the big framed notice inscribed:SERVES YOU RIGHT
which was the first thing he set eyes on as he emerged. Once he’d caught his breath, however, and had a chance to relieve his feelings by use of colourful and vulgar language, he was able to get a grip on himself and read the small print at the bottom of the notice; which read:BASIC HEROISM THEORY: so you wanna be a hero? Forget it. The ease of the escape is in direct proportion to the stature of the hero. James Bond and Jim Kirk can shin down ventilation shafts and get away with it. You can’t. Next time, there won’t be a mattress. Unfair? One law of gravity for the big guys and another for the small fry? That’s fiction for you. Be told.
Ripping the notice out of its frame and tearing it into tiny pieces was, objectively speaking, a futile gesture and didn’t prove anything, but Hamlet found it helped. A bit.
‘Woof,’ said the dog.
Because her hands were numb, it took Jane an embarrassingly long time to unbuckle the dog’s collar, pull the lid off the barrel and shake out the little foil-wrapped sachet inside. There was writing on the outside, as follows:
Emergency Plot
Get Out Of Trouble Free
Jane sat back on her heels and stared at the dog in wonder.
‘Hey,’ she breathed. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
A sparkling shower of bits, like a shotgun cartridge loaded with glitter and fired by starlight. A dappled twinkling coruscation of tiny flickers, scrapes and flakes of colour, drifting and swirling. A glass snowstorm paperweight, based on an idea by Magritte, Dali and Bosch.
Reality is stranger than fiction. It can afford to be. Reality doesn’t have to worry about getting letters that start off, Dear Sir, Are you aware that on page 153 . . . ?
A million or so bits came together and formed the bounty hunter, all seven feet two of jury-rigged, solder-it-together-and-hope DIY genesis. The big boots. The crudely hand-stitched seam on the forehead. And, yes, the bolt through the neck. God, but every bit of him hurt.
Travelling through time by science fact, as opposed to science fiction, is rather like going by rail, in the guard’s van, in the bottom of a big tea chest full of rusty lumps of iron, instead of flying, first class, Air Canada. It gets you there, and that’s about all you can say for it.
The bounty hunter sat up. He was on Main Street; except that it was slightly different from all the Main Streets down which a man must walk where he came from. No horses tethered to rails outside saloons. No manly men and womanly women bustling about their everyday chores. No distant gunfire as the cowpokes celebrated reaching the end of the Lone Star trail. The houses were still timber-framed and the shops were dusty and board-fronted, but there were a handful of cars parked out in the street, and here and there a few TV aerials were sprouting through, like the first green shoots of spring. Across the way, a man in dungarees was putting a new pane of glass into a cucumber frame; apart from that, he had the place to himself. Welcome to the nineteen-fifties, dateline Chicopee Falls, Iowa.
The bounty hunter grinned.
Temporal displacement theory: a time and a place for everything. If you take something out of its time and place, it leaves a hole, the kind of gap that Nature proverbially abhors. If you then disperse that something into its component physical and temporal particles, for example by bringing it into contact with an overloaded random particle accelerator, the extremely powerful natural phenomenon known as Force of Habit ought to return it to its proper place and time, just as the string jerks back the yo-yo, or the subliminal guidance system directs the racing pigeon. Doesn’t always work, but the same goes for computers, lifts and expensive electrical appliances of all kinds. The effect had brought the bounty hunter back to the place and time where he had been created, Realside, by the pulp novelist Albert Skinner.
More or less. The margins of error weren’t bad; he’d overshot the house by about seventy-five yards, and the time by a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. Doubtful whether it would make any difference, practically speaking. All he had to do was find the mirror window and go through, and he’d be back where he wanted to be. There’s a special providence which looks after villains, particularly when they’re needed in the last reel. It’s like having a combination safe-conduct and bus pass, or being seeded through into the quarter-finals.
The body, he reflected
as he trudged up the street, was a bit of a pain, but that was likely to be nothing more than a temporary problem. Thanking his lucky stars he wasn’t really Real, he opened the gate and walked up the short path to Albert Skinner’s house.
The second law of heroism, briefly stated, is that whereas all engineers are heroes, not all heroes are engineers. To put it another way, there’s no correct answer to the question How many heroes does it take to change a light bulb? for the same reason that there isn’t one to How many elephants are there in the average can of giraffes? It’s a non-question. Heroes don’t change light bulbs. Shoot them out, swing from them, unscrew them for use as improvised weapons, yes; change them, no.
Confronted with the problem of how to get back into Fiction, therefore, Regalian had to admit that he wasn’t quite sure where to start. Jumping through the broken window had a certain specious attraction, but his basic common sense told him that it wasn’t as simple as that; and he had enough on his plate without bruises, concussion and bits of broken glass embedded in his kneecaps.
Think.
Half an hour of rummaging through cupboards, drawers, the bottoms of wardrobes, trunks, chests and old orange boxes produced as diverse a collection of junk as you could possibly hope to find, but none of it produced the intuitive spark in Regalian’s mind that would lead to a brilliantly innovative solution. Apart from the thought that he could hold a garage sale and live comfortably on the proceeds for quite some time, he was no better off than before.
Item: a hammer.
Item: a screwdriver, bent, rusty.
Item: a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Item: two saucepans with the bottoms burnt out.
Item: a hundred and six dog-eared paperback detective novels, long-distance rail travellers for the use of.
Item . . .
Some people, for example Leonardo da Vinci, James Watt and the Wright Brothers, must have felt this way all the time. For Regalian, however, it was a novel experience; the weird, slightly hallucinatory feeling of being on the sharp end of a really spiffing idea. As he stood in Skinner’s kitchen, staring at the heap of junk he’d piled up on every available surface, Regalian could hear the words character bomb throbbing away in the back of his brain like a sore tooth.
(CHARACTER BOMB: Regalian was, of course, rein-venting the wheelTM. Character bombs have been around for a very long time; but they live in those big concrete underground playpens out in the desert where the military hoard their toys, so it’s hardly surprising that Regalian wasn’t familiar with the concept.
Consider the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings standing. The character bomb takes out derivative characters without wrecking the mainframe.
Confused? Try this. A vampire-dedicated character bomb would eliminate every vampire in literature, up to and including the works of Anne Rice, with the exception of Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. Let off a spy-dedicated bomb, and once the smoke had cleared there would be holes in the works of Deighton, Le Carré, Forsyth, Clancy etc. through which you could drive a Mercedes lorry, with only The Thirty-Nine Steps remaining intact. The devastation that would ensue outside of Tolkien if someone exploded an elf-bomb defies even the most lurid imagination. And so on. Even the thought of such a device would have publishers queuing up to jump from upper-storey windows.
To make a character bomb, take the two most extreme and opposite divergences from the norm that you can think of, put them together, and hide under something solid.)
Character bomb . . .
Well, Regalian said to himself, it might work. He set up the tape recorder on the kitchen table, placed two piles of paperbacks on either side of the microphone, and drew up a chair. He took a book from the left hand pile, opened it at random, switched on and began to read into the mike.
‘Ouch!’
The emergency plot or novelist’s escape capsule is one of the few truly revolutionary breakthroughs in the fiction industry since the self-calibrating flashback. Simply tear open the foil sachet, and a fully-fledged storyline whisks you up and away, high above any ghastly standstill you may have written yourself into. Suffering from a writer’s block that makes the Maginot line look like a sandcastle? Just open the packet, close your eyes and grin.
As far as she could tell, Jane had landed in a large-capacity metal wastepaper basket. To be precise, she was sitting in it, with her legs hanging out over the side like fuchsias in a wilted hanging basket. So thoroughly was she wedged, in fact, that she wasn’t quite sure how she was ever going to get out of it.
‘Ouch,’ she repeated. She looked round. At first glance, she seemed to be in an office. A foot or so to her left was a big old-fashioned desk; behind that, a veteran filing cabinet, one drawer of which was open and filled with empty whisky bottles. There was a weary-looking chair behind the desk, also of antiquated design. Beyond the chair was a door with a frosted glass panel, on which was written:
The problem with emergency plots is that there’s only a very limited number of them. This will, of course, change. As with every epoch-making new invention, the first generation products are heavy, cumbersome, gawkish things, the ugly ducklings which will eventually morph into swans shortly after you’ve bought one of the original models. Think of the early prototype photocopiers, video cameras, personal computers, CD players. Compare them with the sleek, compact, self-confident triumphs of design you get nowadays. The same will be true, one day, of the emergency plot. Until then; well, there are snags to be ironed out, minor technical difficulties to be dealt with and - here comes the relevance; all stand - only three basic storylines to choose from. These are:(a) the adultery-in-Hampstead plot
(b) the disaster movie
(c) the gumshoe plot.
They were out of stock of the other two. They usually are.
‘Help!’ Jane observed.
‘“The garden is not looking at all as it should,” said Miss Marple, but still speaking absent-mindedly. “Doctor Haydock has absolutely forbidden me to do any stooping or kneeling - and really, what can you do if you don’t stoop or kneel? There’s old Edwards, of course - but so opinionated. And all this jobbing gets them into bad habits, lots of cups of tea and so much pottering - not any real work.”’
Regalian paused, his eyes closed, his face wrinkled as if with pain. Did they have this much trouble out in the New Mexico desert, he wondered; Oppenheimer and all that crowd, when they were building that other potentially quite dangerous bomb? If so, they had his sympathy.
‘Freeze.’
What?
Oh. Oh for crying out loud.
‘You again,’ Regalian sighed, without turning his head. ‘How in hell’s name did you get here?’
‘Reckon I might just ask you the same thing, partner,’ replied the bounty hunter softly. ‘Now, boy, if it’s quite convenient, unbuckle your gunbelt and stand up.’
‘I haven’t got a gunbelt,’ Regalian said, as if someone had just implied he had some unsightly skin disorder. ‘Sorry.’
‘No gunbelt?’
‘Not even to please you.’
The bounty hunter shrugged. ‘No derringers in the vest pocket?’
‘No vest pocket. Ergo, no derringers.’
‘Bowie knife slipped inside your sock?’
‘Negative. The same goes for Gatling guns cunningly stashed under my dental plate. I do have a paperclip somewhere in the lining of my trouser pocket, but perhaps you could see your way clear to trusting me with that.’
‘On your feet then, pard.’
Regalian stood up and turned his head through twenty-five degrees or so until he had a clear view of the doorway. By a substantial effort of will, he managed not to register surprise at what he saw there.
‘Fancy dress, huh?’ he said.
The bounty hunter frowned (rip rip, crinkle crinkle). ‘Reckon you should keep your smartass remarks to yourself, buster,’ he said, now with twenty per cent added extra menace, absolutely free. ‘Reckon a guy could take offence real e
asy, if he had a mind to.’
A tiny cog or gear engaged in Regalian’s mind. He gave the bounty hunter a long, considered looking over.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but have you got a gun?’
‘Not on me,’ the bounty hunter replied.
‘Thought not. Then why the hell am I doing what you tell me to?’
The bounty hunter thought for a moment. ‘Because I’m seven feet tall and I got superhuman strength?’ he hazarded.
Regalian shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t have thought so,’ he replied. ‘I mean, the height, yes; I can see for myself you’re pretty tall. And I take your word for it about the strength. But if you want to overawe people with your sheer physical presence, I should do something about the stuffing coming out of the split seam under your armpit, if I were you. It lets the side down.’
In the split second it took for the bounty hunter to glance under his arm, Regalian grabbed a heavy object - an old-fashioned, cast-iron, crank-operated coffee mill, to be exact - drew back his arm like a baseball pitcher and let fly. His aim wasn’t spot on; he was trying for the centre of the bounty hunter’s forehead, but he failed to allow for the sheer weight of the projectile, and the shot landed twenty-seven inches low. It’s results that matter, however, and certainly Regalian had no cause for complaint as the bounty hunter moaned horribly, buckled at the knees and sank to the floor, his hands cupped over his groin; a testament to the thoroughness and attention to detail of his creators. When a Yorkshireman builds an artificial human, he doesn’t cut corners and leave bits out, arguing that his artefact would never in a million years find any use for those. While the bounty hunter was thus occupied, Regalian had plenty of time to rootle around in the kitchen drawers until he found Skinner’s rolling pin, walk round the back of the bounty hunter and bash him nine times very hard until he fell over and went, apparently, to sleep. A few turns of washing line around the arms and upper body, a singularly repulsive duster wedged between the jaws to ensure the peace and quiet so necessary when one is engaged in creative work, and another problem solved, under budget and ahead of schedule.