Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

‘Professor Quanderhorn wiped my memory?’

‘You’re fortunate it was only your memory: one agent had his entire mind wiped. We had to raise him again as if from birth. You can only imagine the horror of potty training an eighteen stone rugger player with a fondness for vindaloos.’

‘So Agent Penetrator is… me?’

‘That’s right, Nylon.’ (Nylon! Yes – that was my name!) ‘You’re an undercover operative, inserted by Her Majesty’s Government, which is to say myself, into Quanderhorn’s team, along with Agent Cuckoo.’

‘There’s another agent?’

Churchill regarded me rather sadly. ‘You’re wearing her intestines as a cravat.’

‘No, that is my cravat…’ I felt round my neck to straighten it. It was wet and slimy. I yelled ‘Urghh!’ involuntarily, and hurled it across the room. ‘That thing on the tower – Virginia: she was a Government spy, too?’

‘You were both supposed to be rooting out just what the blazes that lunatic Quanderhorn’s up to.’

‘Up to? What makes you think he’s up to anything?’

‘Pah!’ Mr. Churchill poured himself a snifter and took a generous draught. He dabbed dry his lips and fixed me once again with his bulldog stare. ‘Let me ask you this: what year is it?’

I cast my mind back to the banners in the crowd. ‘1952, of course.’

Mr. Churchill’s eyes twinkled impishly. ‘And last year was…’

‘Well, obviously, last year was…’ I suddenly realised what had been troubling me about those banners earlier. Clearly, I had some memory. ‘Great Scott! Last year was also 1952!’

‘And it was 1952 the year before that. In fact, by our reckoning, it’s been 1952 for the past sixty-six years.’

This was quite some rabbit hole I’d tumbled into. The same year over and over again?

‘But that’s impossible!’

‘That brigand Quanderhorn does the impossible for breakfast. We don’t know how, but he’s got us trapped in some kind of infernal temporal Möbius band, and we can’t escape.’

‘But if you’re sure it’s Quanderhorn’s doing, why don’t you stop him?’

‘It isn’t so easy! Not the least of our problems is the confounded maniac’s a national hero! He’s saved us from countless Martian invasions, umpteen deadly space rays and three unspeakable outbreaks of reefer madness.’

Martian invasions? Deadly space rays? My head was whirling.

‘But why hasn’t everybody noticed this 1952 thing?’

‘You’ll find, Penetrator, that most people notice hardly anything. It’s the basis upon which we’ve run this country for the last three hundred years.’

‘Well, we should tell them!’

‘Tell them? Good grief, man, there’d be panic in the streets! Society would collapse! There’d be civil war! Riots! Food shortages! Cannibalism! I’d have to resign! Is that what you want, Penetrator? Labour in power?’

I don’t know why, but I immediately snapped back, ‘Good God, no!’ I may have had very little memory, but even I knew that was insanity.

There was a hiss and a slight grating sound behind me. The owner of the overcoat bulge leant in, and gruffled: ‘They’re looking for him,’ then left.

‘You’d best be off, Penetrator,’

‘Right. But…’ I had no idea what on earth was expected of me. And whatever it was, whether I wanted to do it. And there was something else. ‘Um, Prime Minister – I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could have a different code name, is there? Something slightly less… aggressive and treacherous?’

He utterly ignored me. ‘The whole nation is relying upon you, Penetrator. Find out what’s going on, and report back to me.’

‘How will I get in touch?’

‘I’ll find you, Penetrator, I’ll find you.’

I turned to leave, then turned back. ‘One more thing, sir: can you possibly tell me who I am?’

But Mr. Churchill had gone, leaving behind nothing but the faint aroma of Havana cigars, brandy and, for some reason, herring.

I wandered back up the alley trying to gather my very scattered thoughts. Was I really a spy, or was I really a scientist? It was all devilishly confusing. I found myself back in the celebratory bustle, and fought through the merry, singing, kissing crowd towards Dr. Janussen.

The van was almost packed. I felt slightly guilty. Troy looked up from hoisting an improbably heavy slab of machinery into the vehicle. ‘There he is! Brian – where’ve you been?’

‘Well, I was just…’ I began. Cold as the weather was, I found myself suddenly sweating. My tongue seemed to double in size, as if I’d just chewed a wasp. Try as I might, I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t, quite frankly, even think of a word . ‘… muhnamunhah .’

They stared at me. ‘Brian – you may have forgotten that you’re very, very bad at lying,’ Gemma smiled pityingly.

‘I’m not lying,’ I lied. ‘It’s just…’ Then, with a merciful inspiration: ‘There isn’t time to explain right now.’

They seemed satisfied by this, thank heavens, and we packed up in silence.

That had been a close call. Whoever these people were, I needed to keep them on my side if I was ever to find out what the devil had happened to me.

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 1st January, 1952 – Iteration 66

The van had been loaded into the belly of an ex-army cargo plane, and we were en route to the Professor’s lab, which I gathered was ‘somewhere on the road to Carlisle’. Whatever that meant.

Alarmingly, the pilots’ seats had been removed from the cockpit and replaced with what appeared to be a cannibalised player piano, its bridge pins and hammer flanges connected by an intricate system of levers and wires to various flight controls. It played a complex, silent symphony on the instrument panel as reams of punched paper rolled furiously upwards. Despite its impossibly eccentric nature, the peculiar mechanism did seem to be keeping the bird in trim, at least.

Quanderhorn himself had clearly seen fit to travel separately by some other, and doubtless superior, means, leaving us wretched minions to fend for ourselves in steerage.

From an equipment locker in the fuselage, I’d managed to dig out some army surplus trousers to restore my dignity, and a pair of mauve moccasins to instantly remove it again.

Despite the metallic shuddering and the relentless chopping of the propellers, the others had managed to fall asleep quite easily. Dr. Janussen sprawled elegantly sideways on an unforgiving wooden bench, one foot crooked slightly above the other, slender hands tucked under one lovely cheek as she breathed gently in and out with a sweet, melodic and surprisingly penetrating snore. Troy had wrapped himself, cocoon-like, in some sort of curious white netting he’d found somewhere. He was smiling, mostly, but occasionally he would let out a small high-pitched yelp, and his feet would flail about desperately for a second or two, then he would sink back into his peaceful slumber.

No sleep for me. My mind raced back and forwards over the patchwork of incomplete facts about myself I’d managed to stitch together rather poorly.

I worked for this mysterious Professor Quanderhorn, who was being investigated by the Government, in the form of me. Also. I seemed to have some sort of attachment to Dr. Janussen, about which she remained distressingly ambiguous. What had happened to me to make me forget vast swathes of my life? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? Or was it the result of some kind of scientific experiment gone wrong, as had obviously happened to the wretched Virginia?

Beyond that, things got considerably murkier.