Anthony Horowitz: The Puffin Book of Horror Stories

But Boston didn't looked shocked. He took off his spectacles and waved them; a look of boyish glee suffused his face.

'Stuff the State… exactly. Well, not exactly…' he corrected himself with an effort. 'We all depend upon the State, but we know it isn't omniscient. To the mender of washing-machines, the State supplies split-pins at a reasonable price, within a reasonable time. But suppose our supply of split-pins has run out already; because we imprudently neglected to reorder in time? We still want our split-pins now — even if we have to pay twice the legal price. That is my… our… little business. Greasing the wheels of State, as I always tell my wife (who is a director of our little firm).' He polished his spectacles enthusiastically with a little stained brown cloth, taken from his spectacle-case for the purpose.

'And if we get caught?' asked Martin; but his mood soared.

'A heavy fine… the firm will pay. Or a short prison sentence; that soon passes. We're commercial criminals, not political. We do not wish to overthrow the State, only oil its wheels, oil its wheels. The State understands this.'

They eyed each other. Martin still thought Boston didn't talk like a businessman. But the chances this firm offered… His own bedsitter, perhaps a firm's van… better still, a chance to smuggle on his own behalf. Not just paper for the newspaper… perhaps high-grade steel tubing for guns. He looked at Boston doubtfully; jobs just didn't grow on trees like this. Boston licked his lips, almost pleading, like an old spaniel.

'Sounds a good doss,' said Martin doubtfully.

'Then you accept the vacancy? You're a most suitable candidate.'

Miss Feather came in with the second cup of coffee.

'Will there be a chance to travel?' asked Martin.

'Almost immediately,' said Mr Boston, and Miss Feather nodded in smiling agreement. 'We will have to process you now. Would you mind waiting in here?'

The waiting-room was tiny. Just enough room for a bentwood chair, and a toffee-varnished rack containing a few worn copies of the State magazine at the very end of their life. Martin was surprised anybody had ever bothered to read them; everyone knew they were all glossy lies. There was a strange selection of posters on the walls — Fight Tooth Decay, an advert for the local museum of industrial sewing-machines, and a travel poster featuring an unknown tropical island. Martin wondered if his new job would take him anywhere near there. His head was whirling with the strange drunkenness of accepting and being accepted. Blood pounded all over his body. The vibrations of that damned machine were coming through the waiting-room walls, and going right through his head. It sounded a clapped-out machine, as if it was trying but would never make it.

Too late, the tiny size of the waiting-room warned him; the oppressive warmth. He pulled at the closed door, but it had no handle this side. He hammered on it; heavy metal.

Then there was a crack of blue darkness inside his head. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in a room exactly the same size, but walled with stainless steel and excruciatingly cold. He shivered, but not just with cold.

There was a great round window set in the door. In the window floated the moon, only it was too big, pale blue and green, scarfed in a white that could only be clouds. Below were low white hills like ash-tips. Nearer, lying on the ashy soil, what looked like heaps of the stringy frozen chops you found in the deepfreeze of the most wretched supermarkets. From among the heaps, white skulls watched him, patiently waiting.

But much worse was the black sky, the totally black sky. In which stars glowed huge and incandescent, red, blue, yellow, orange. Some pulsed, at varying rhythms; others shone steadily.

'There!' Boston's voice came from a grille above the door, crackly with radio-static. 'There's your vacancy, Martin. Outer space. The biggest vacancy there is!' His voice was almost gentle, almost proud, almost pleading. 'Look your fill — I can only give you another minute.'

Quite unable to think of anything else to do, Martin continued to gaze at the pulsing stars. Then the door of the capsule slid aside. His body, sucked outwards by the vacuum, turning slowly in the low gravity, exploded in half-a-dozen places in rapid succession. The force of the explosions shot out great clouds of red vapour that sank swiftly to the surface of the white ash. Continuing explosions drove his disintegrating body across the mounds of his predecessors like an erratic fire-cracker. Then, indistinguishable from the rest of the heaps, except for its fresh redness, it settled to the freeze-drying, vacuum-drying of total vacancy.

'It always seems to me a pity,' said Mr Boston, 'that anything as wonderful as the Moon Teleport should have been reduced to this use. We could have conquered space, if we'd only discovered how to bring people back. Now it's no more than a garbage-disposal unit.'

'I always feel so flat afterwards,' said Miss Feather. She lifted a faded print of Constable's Haywain from the wall, revealing a row of stainless-steel buttons and a digital read-out in green.

11,075,019

She tapped the buttons rapidly. The number went down one.

11,075,018

Then resumed its inexorable climb.

11,075,019

11,075,021

Miss Feather gave a slight shudder of distaste, and replaced The Haywain.

'Pity we can't send them all that way.' She pressed her hairstyle back into place with the aid of her compact-mirror.

'Do you know how much it costs to send one to the moon?' asked Boston. 'No, — we can only send the dangerous ones. The ones that qualify for the vacancy.'

'Was he, dangerous?'

'He might have become so. Intelligence, leadership, initiative, mobility, ingenuity, curiosity — all the warning signs were there. It doesn't pay to be sentimental, Miss Feather — I believe young tiger-cubs are quite cuddleable in their first weeks of life. Nevertheless, they become tigers. We remove the tiger-cubs so that the rest, the sheep, may safely graze, as one might put it. I only fear we might not catch enough tiger-cubs in time. The young keep on coming like an inexorable flood, wanting what their fathers and grandfathers had. They could sweep us away.'

They sat looking at each other, in mildly depressed silence.

'That bicycle was a sure sign,' said Boston at last. 'Most original — first I've seen in years. Originality is always a danger. I'd better get the bike off the street, before it's noticed. Ring the metal-eater people, will you?'

Miss Feather rang; put the kettle on for another cup of coffee. Mr Boston came back empty-handed, perturbed.

'It's gone. Someone's taken it.'

'A sneak-thief?'

'Then he's a very stupid sneak-thief,' said Boston savagely. 'Stealing a unique object he'd never dare ride in public'

'You don't think one of his friends… should we ring for the police?' Her hand went to the necklace round, her throat, nervously.

'To report the theft of a bicycle that didn't belong to us in the first place? They'd think that pretty irregular. They'd want to know where our young friend Martin had got to…'

'Shall we ring the Ministry?'

'My dear Miss Feather, they'd think we were losing our nerve. You don't fancy premature retirement, do you?'

She paled. He nodded, satisfied. 'Then I think we'd better just sit it out.'

Facing each other with a growing silent unease, as the light faded in the grubby street outside, they settled down to wait.