Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

He was in the act of decanting what smelled like cheap cooking sherry into an expensive bottle. He looked up and smiled. There was a rather endearing gap between his two front teeth. ‘Hel lo there, Brian,’ he trilled in a louche English accent.

‘Hello, er, Guuuuu-uurk.’

‘Ha! Three u ’s too many, old thing. You are a card! Amontillado?’

‘Uh, no thanks.’

‘Very wise. I get it for thruppence ha’penny a gallon from the ironmonger’s. I’d never touch the filthy stuff myself, but you did say a couple of schooners really helps grease the wheels with the fairer sex.’ His eyes performed a rapid sequence of winks as he nodded towards his noticeboard, which was festooned with cut-outs of ladies from corset advertisements.

‘I said that?’

‘Well, not in so many words, you’re too much of a gentleman. Listen.’ He took a more serious tone. ‘Terribly sorry to hear about Virginia. Beastly way to go. Commiserations, et cetera, et cetera.’

‘I…’ I decided not to confide in him about my memory loss. He seemed like a stand-up chap, but I just couldn’t bring myself to trust a Martian. ‘Thank you.’

‘Honestly, it’s a complete fiasco here. They’re a useless shower. Wouldn’t last a second on Mars.’

I suddenly felt very sorry for this poor desolate creature, imprisoned millions of miles from home, separated hopelessly from his friends, his countrymen and his familial comforts. Though I have to say, he’d made his ‘cell’ rather comfortable.

There was a real zebra skin rug, for instance, and the chair behind his somewhat grandiose reproduction French kidney writing desk was throne-like, but upholstered in a garish orange velveteen. Amongst the underwear adverts, right in the centre of the noticeboard, there was a London map with a vibrant red ring around Soho, and a big exclamation mark. What could it mean?

He slipped a pastel-coloured cigarette into an extravagantly long ivory holder and fired up a desk lighter cast in the shape of an erotic mermaid. He exhaled happily, and rooted in his drawer for a dog-eared notepad with an elastic band around it. ‘Anyhoo, whilst you’re here, old boot, perhaps you can fill me in on some more Earth Things.’

I bunched my fists again. I wasn’t about to give any information to an enemy agent. ‘What kind of “Earth Things”?’ I demanded, coldly.

‘Well, gals, mostly.’ He thumbed through the notepad. I noticed with a start that all of his fingers appeared to be thumbs, and there were six of them on each hand.

‘We prefer to call them “ladies”.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, of course.’ He looked at me oddly, then crossed out several different words and amended them. All six of his eyes flitted outwards then back again, then he lowered his voice. ‘Now then: supposing a chap were to have himself a “Date”—’

‘You’ve got a date ?’ My voice suddenly went all mezzo-soprano, rather rudely, in disbelief.

‘Pipe down! You know I’m not really allowed out of here.’

‘With an Earth woman?’

‘Of course with an Earth woman. There’s not a lot else here.’

‘But hasn’t she noticed you’re…’ I waved my arms around ineffectively, not quite knowing how to put it. Ugly? Martian? Purple?

‘No. I simply deflate my head…’ He demonstrated. There was a hiss of escaping air, and his head did indeed halve in size. ‘…close four of my eyes…’ He did so. ‘…and slap on a coat of white distemper. Voila! Instant human!’

I tilted my head and squinted at him. He looked for all the world like Edith Sitwell recovering from a recent strangulation attempt. ‘Hmm, yes,’ I murmured as encouragingly as possible. I was beginning to worry about how terribly bad I seemed to be at lying.

Guuuurk looked back at his notes. ‘Now, as I understand it, first I have to present the… the lady with some elegant plant life, and some diabetes-inducing sweetmeats. Is that right?’

I processed that. ‘Flowers and chocolates? Yes, that’s normal.’

‘Then I take her out and purchase for her even more food…’ He glanced over for reassurance. I nodded. ‘Whereupon she promptly mates with me. Have I forgotten anything?

‘Well, that’s a bit…’ I was feeling rather uncomfortable about this whole area of conversation, frankly, and decided not to prolong it unnecessarily. ‘No.’

Clearly, Guuuurk was not the sort of Martian that could take a hint, if such a creature did indeed exist. He tapped his notebook nervously with a naughty striptease fountain pen. I managed to make out just one word writ large and bold on the page, with several question and exclamation marks after it.

‘You’re worried about dancing ?’

‘Ye-ess. What is that exactly? As I understand it, we are sequestered in a rather unpleasant smelling cavernous hall, where some chaps drag stretched horse-tails over some dried cat gizzards, while others blow through various metal tubes. Then we all have to shake around in some sort of predetermined jiggling ritual, which is a kind of ersatz mimicry of the human mating procedure.’

‘Well, no, that’s… well, I suppose it is really.’ I would never be able to hokey cokey again without some sordid mental picture.

‘Why don’t we just cut out the whole wretched “dance” business entirely and get straight to the mating? It’s almost as if your Terranean females don’t like mating!’

‘Yes, they – they do, but you see – they mustn’t seem to like it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I… don’t know.’

‘And why do we have to shell out for so much food ? Is it a date, or a wholesale grocery operation?’

‘It’s just the done thing.’

‘“Done thing”? It’s clearly a cunning conspiracy by a whole lot of hungry women. And you’ve all fallen for it. I’ve said it before: this planet is a shambles .’

He cocked his head and fixed me with an unnerving six-eyed stare. I got a strange tingling at the base of my skull.

‘I say, Brian – you haven’t gone and lost your memory again, have you?’

How on earth could he possibly have known that? ‘A little bit,’ I confessed.

‘You really do need to be more careful.’

‘How many times have I—’ But before I could finish, a painfully loud siren began to wail. I had to shout as loudly as I could to make myself heard over it. ‘What the devil is that?’

Guuuurk, seemingly unperturbed, shouted back: ‘That noise? Oh, that’s always going off. It’s just the Planetary Destruction Alarm.’

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

The siren did not abate.

‘I thought we’d just averted the destruction of the planet,’ I shouted, rather whiningly.

‘Oh, this is another one.’ The Martian languidly flipped a page in his book.

‘Well, hadn’t we better—’

A wall-mounted speaker added the metallic female voice I’d heard at the gate to the hubbub: ‘ The world will end in… thirty-seven minutes ,’ she announced quite calmly.

‘Thirty-seven minutes!’ I stammered. ‘Shouldn’t we be doing something?’

‘Oodles of time, old stick. Now, the mating equipment: what do I do about this ?’

Without any decent warning, he unzipped with a flourish. I looked away immediately, but what I saw out of the corner of my eye would haunt my nightmares for many years to come…

Happily, at that moment, Jenkins returned to the room. ‘Now, now, put that away, Mr. Guuuurk,’ he chided patiently. ‘You know very well it could activate the sprinklers. This way, young Mr. Nylon. The Professor will see you now.’