Richard tried to make his pose seem effortless.
Actually, he had never levitated before.
He was siphoning Swellhead’s Talent, the villain’s belief in the worthiness of his foe. It was why Richard had actually felt stronger, sharper in the complex. Swellhead needed an antagonist who could put up a fight. This story needed a hero, and Richard was elected.
Given time, Swellhead would notice.
00:55:01.
But there was not much time.
00:55:00.
“You know how the story goes,” said Richard.
Klaxons were sounding.
“The villain is alwaysthwarted...”
00:50:00.
“... in the last minute.”
* * * *
11
No one had told her Richard Jeperson could fly. All her doubts vanished: this was a man to follow into the jungle.
00:45:01.
She found her knife and threw it at Swellhead. It struck an invisible barrier feet away from him and bounced, falling into the trap along with Adam Onions and Viscount de Maltby.
00:40:00.
Jeperson floated upwards. She saw strain in his face. A trickle of black sweat ran beside his eye, slid down a groove in his cheek, dropped from his chin. The black, she realised, was hair dye.
00:35:01.
On the big screen, the dish transmitted a preliminary signal skywards, visible waves of radiant force emanating from its centre.
00:30:00.
“In the last minute,” Jeperson had said. Not “at the last minute.” She’d instinctively grasped what the Man from the Diogenes Club meant. Somehow, Sewell Head had cast himself in his own movie. She knew from experience that every neighbourhood drug peddler and receiver of stolen DVD players fancied himself as a Bond villain. Head just had the brain-juice to make it so.
But this could be a postmodern, ironic story. A despairing, millennial vision in which the baddie triumphs.
00:25:01.
Swellhead was radiant. His Muzak was playing “All You Need Is Love,” whale songs, a football crowd version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and the “1812 Overture” all at once.
00:20:00.
“Trivia Man, what is transhumance?” asked Jeperson.
“A form of Swiss crop rotation,” he responded.
00:15:01.
You ask him one, Jeperson thought to her.
She didn’t think that would work. Everything was in Head’s head. Everything. History, geography, maths, physics, mythology, archaeology— the whole core syllabus.
“His specialist subject is popular music since 1973....”
00:10:00
A beam rose from the dish, so intense that the video hookup couldn’t handle it. It whited across the screen. It was on its way to the moon, and then would come back to break against the whole world.
Head’s lips twitched. She’d seen that before, in Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory’s office. She recognised the look from hours of suspects lying to her, the “tell” that meant she’d found a button she should press again.
00:05:01.
“Who had a hit with ‘Lucky Lucky Lucky’?” she asked, praying. 00:04:00.
No instant response.
00:03:01.
“Come on,” said Richard, “even I know that! She was in Moulin Rouge!”
00:03:00.
“No clues,” shrieked Sewell Head, furious.
00:02:01.
The big picture fragmented and fell. A glimpse of Kylie Minogue’s face appeared and disappeared in the white static.
00:01:01.
Only the numbers, now in black on white, remained. There was a rumbling in the earth, shaking the floor and the walls.
00:01:00.
Not in the last minute, the last second!
00:00:01.
Swellhead was stricken, Sewell Head looking through his eyes, under his Heath Robinson-Jack Kirby hair-dryer. She could tell he was aware of his own absurdity.
“Kylie,” she said, putting him out of his misery.
With a sad, should-have-known look, Head slumped. His head exploded in a shower of red fragments.
00:00:00.
Jeperson fell, landing on the edge of the trap, falling the right way, away from the hole.
00:00:00:00:00:00.
The zeroes were egg shapes.
Stacy looked for Persephone Gill, and found her dead, a dagger-wedge of Sewell Head’s skull bone stuck in her eye, spearing into her brain.
The tremors were more sustained. The floor was bucking under her. She scrabbled to help Jeperson to his feet.
He was looking around, confused.
“It’s all still here,” he said. “I thought it’d just go pop and be gone.”
The computers kicked their spools, unreeling tape across the control room, and sparked showers that set many little fires. The whitesuits were phantoms, coming apart and forgotten, or slumped corpses.
“It won’t be here much longer,” she said.
Somewhere in the complex was an almighty crash. Everything shook, and there was a huge roaring.
A spout of saltwater rose gusherlike from the trapdoor, tossing remnants of Onions and de Maltby, along with sleek black toothy things, up against the ceiling of the control room, battering away asbestos tile to show bare rock. Water showered all around. Stacy had to fight to keep her footing and hold of Jeperson.
“The Kjempestrupe just poured in,” he said. “Head was keeping it out through force of will.”
She dragged him from the control room, a wash of water around their feet, into the Head Room.
The trophies on the walls were fake now, moulting papier mâché.
The walls themselves slumped, running down in waves like a dropped curtain. Glistening rock showed through.
They had to get to the Blowhole.
* * * *
12
Sewell Head was dead and Swellhead sucked back into the void from which he had come, but the Talent was still here. Breaking a pot doesn’t make the jam disappear. The complex, the huge apport, was collapsing, resolving itself to its physical components—salt and water, mostly—but it would take time. Perhaps traces would remain forever.
In a way, Richard hoped so.
Without Swellhead’s belief, rigidly suppressed but devout, that every villain must be bested by an archnemesis, Richard felt again like a broken old man. He was sure bones had snapped inside him, but the soaking chilled him so much that he could not yet tell how badly he was hurt.
He was back in the world again.
Perhaps Fred was right and he never should have left. If he had stayed in the game, knocking heads with dolts like Onions, perhaps this would have been handled differently. Good people and bad might still be alive, including Adam Onions. There might have been a place for a Talent like Sewell Head, even if it was as the cleverest shop assistant in the universe.
His feet kept working as Stacy helped him through corridors. The lighting was uniformly dim and dying. The carpeting was sludge.
They made it to the lift platform.
“If you can still fly, it’d be a useful backup,” she said, hammering the up control.
He shook his head, too racked to explain.
The platform rose.
Stacy gasped.
Richard shifted—agonies shooting through him—to look.
Beyond the guardrail, he saw the great cavern. The big dish was bent out of shape like an origami structure trampled by Godzilla, and washed back up its tunnel by waters that still poured into the guts of Skerra. White shreds that might have been ghost-goons were whipped around inside the torrent. A mini-jeep was tossed out of the maelstrom like a dinky toy, smashing against the cave wall.
Water got under the lift platform and raised it higher.
Stacy yelled as if on a fairground ride.
The guardrails were like liquorice sticks pulled out of shape. The platform itself felt rubbery and melted in patches.
; Richard took Stacy’s hand and held fast.
He tried to believe again in Swellhead’s world. Where a hero might survive something like this. Where the valiant were rewarded.
Not only was Stacy Droning of Skerra but the new trivia champion. She had remembered, no intuited, that Head hadn’t known the answer to the easy pop music question Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory had raised.
Of course, he could have been peeved enough to look it up in his Guinness Book of Hit Singles in the meantime. Then, things would have been different.
The Blowhole grew bigger as they were forced up at it.
He patted her hand, well done.
The platform threw them up into the open air.
They tumbled down the hillside, away from the waterspout that rose high as if geysered, demonstrating how the Blowhole got its name.
Jagged stone scraped his side. He heard Stacy swear.
It was not too late in the day to break his neck.
He came to rest in a tangle of limbs, wet clothes twisted, and looked up at predawn sky. Dramatic clouds were incarnadine as red washed over his vision.
A bearded face, upside down, obtruded into his line of vision. And neighed rather nastily.
He shooed away the goat.
* * * *
13
After a bare five hours of morning, Skerra day was almost over.
The radio crackled, but neither Stacy nor Jeperson were inclined to climb back inside the Sea King to answer it.
A rescue chopper was on its way.
Soon, they would be lifted off this rock. She would abdicate, turn the iron crown over to the goats. Placating them with chocolate bars, which they ate wrappers and all, she had already come to a truce with her vicious subjects.
Jeperson was comfortable, not complaining of his injuries.
She supposed she was bruised and battered, too. Two of her fingers bent the wrong way and she couldn’t feel them.
Stacy sat by the Man from the Diogenes Club.
He handed her a Bounty. Sewell Head’s backup stash of sweets had been in the Sea King.
She ripped the paper and bit off a chunk. Chewing hurt. She thought she’d lost a filling—though not, Lord willing, any of her precious back teeth—while being knocked about.
“What’s down there now?” she asked.
“A mess. And dead people. Mostly water, though. The apports haven’t lasted in coherent form. Adam Onions missed his chance to study a unique set of phenomena.”
The rescue helicopter approached the island.
“It’ll be good to be back,” she said.
“It is good,” he responded, eyes flashing bright silver.
<
* * * *
THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB:
NOTES
1956 London Olympiad.See The Matter of Britain: Olympiad (with Eugene Byrne),
if we ever get round to writing it.
6d. Sixpence, in predecimal coinage. Two and a half pence in today’s money.
A to Z, the. The London A to Z—indispensable book of street maps.
ack-ack. Anti-aircraft fire.
aggro. Aggravation, violent assault.
Alan Plater. UK TV writer, who debuted on the seminal cop series Z-Cars and has
scripted many series and serials, like The Beiderbecke Affair, Flambards and A Very British Coup.
Albertine disparue. The sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps
perdu.
Aldermaston marches. CND protests, regularly held at Easter.
All Souls. A college at Oxford University.
“Angel Down, Sussex.”See “Angel Down, Sussex” in Seven Stars.
Angry Brigade, the. A British libertarian Communist guerilla movement
responsible for a string of bombings between 1970 and 1972. They did a lot of property damage, but only slightly hurt one person.
angry young men.Writers like Kingsley Amis and John Osbourne, who later got
older but didn’t stop being angry.
Any Questions? Long-running BBC Radio topical debate programme. The television
version is called Question Time.
arachnid overlords. SeeLife’s Lottery (sort of).
Archie Andrews. Britain’s answer to Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist’s dummy
popular on the radio with the long-running program Educating Archie. Archie was worked by ventriloquist Peter Brough, who never chopped off his own fingers. Miss Kaye is probably thinking of Hugo, the nastier dummy operated by the tragic Maxwell Frere—whose personality disorder has inspired numberlessTwilight Zone episodes.
ARP. Air Raid Police, active during World War Two.
Arthur C. Clarke. Now Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of Childhood’s End, screenwriter
of2001: A Space Odyssey, writer on scientific topics and Sri Lankan resident. Known in the UK as host of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, a TV series about Fortean phenomena that is twenty years on the template for muchX-Files-ish fringe documentary programming.
Ascot. Royal Ascot, a major horse-racing meeting, prominent in the English social
calendar. Eliza Doolittle causes a stir there in My Fair Lady.
Auberon Waugh. Crusty conservative commentator, son of Evelyn Waugh, author
of satirical novels. In the 1960s, his waspish journalism was most often found inThe Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.
Autons. Lesser-known alien villains fromDoctor Who, introduced in “Spearhead
from Space” (1970). They returned in “Terror of the Autons” (1971) and, after a long absence, “Rose” (2005). Plastic entities resembling shop window mannequins.
Barclay’s Bank. High Street bank, much boycotted in the 1970s for its ties with
South Africa.
barmy. Slang—slightly mad, daffy
Bay City Rollers, the.1970s boy band, very popular with the sisters of boys who
hated them.
BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the.The corporation’s sound effects department,
responsible for Dalek voices and the Doctor Who theme. Their consultants included the Pink Floyd and Michael Moorcock.
BBC2. In the 1970s, British television had only three channels. The BBC (British
Broadcasting Corporation) channels BBC1 and BBC2 were, and remain, free of commercial interruption, supported by the TV license fee; BBC1 is fairly populist, while BBC2 purportedly caters to more select interests. The third channel was ITV (Independent Television), not so much a network as a loose grid of franchise-holding local broadcasters (eg: Thames Television in the southeast, Westward in the southwest) who carried a great deal of programming in common but with many regional variations. ITV shows might air on different days of the week and in different time slots in diverse parts of the country. This author remembers manually retuning the family set to catch the blurry, distant signal of HTV Wales to watch Hammer Films not being shown in our area.
Benson & Hedges.Brand of cigarettes.
bin-men. Garbage collectors.
bints. Young girls—from the Arabic, imported into English via servicemen posted
overseas.
biro. Ballpoint pen, so named for the inventor, Mr. Biro.
black Mariahs. Police van, used for taking suspects into custody.
Black Watch, the. The Royal Highland Regiment, first raised in 1725.
Blackpool’s Golden Mile. A string of seafront amusement arcades, tourist
attractions, casinos and the like in the Northern resort town. Dick Barton and Adam Adamant both saved it from diabolical schemes.
blower, the. The telephone.
blub. UK slang—cry
bluebottle. Slang—police constable. The expression comes from the distinctive
British police helmet, which also gives rise to ruder synonyms.
BOAC. British Overseas Airways Corporation. Merged with British European
Airways in 1974 to form British Airways.
Bognor. Especially dull seasid
e town in Sussex. After King George V visited in 1929,
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