Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

‘If I may interject,’ Guuuurk piped up irritably, ‘Brian is unlikely to know what the problem is, since he’s recently lost his memory, and knows nothing. Though, in all honesty, even at the best of times he’s pretty hopeless. To be perfectly frank, you all are. This whole planet is a shambles. How you beat off all three of our invasions, I’ll never know.’

Everyone sighed, almost as if this weren’t the first time they’d heard this diatribe.

At that moment a very large machine, which I assumed to be some sort of mechanical remote messaging device, burst into noisy life in the corner of the room, chattering forth reams of printout.

Dr. Janussen walked over to it with relief and scanned it quickly. ‘According to the Telemergency Print-O-Gram, a large sinkhole has opened at 10° 31’ 03" north, and 104° 02’ 52.4" east. That’s…’ She traced her finger over the world map on the wall. ‘Here: in the ocean bed of the South China Sea.’

The South China Sea! The other side of the world! Miles away from England! ‘That doesn’t sound too terrible,’ I suggested.

Dr. Janussen favoured me with a look one might reserve for brain-damaged plankton. ‘The ocean is draining into it at an alarming rate. If it reaches the centre of the Earth, the enormous temperatures will transform it into super-heated steam. When the pressure reaches a critical level, it will blow the entire planet apart.’

I shifted uncomfortably on the bench. ‘That does sound slightly terribler.’

Quanderhorn shook his head sadly. ‘Will Mankind never learn to stop playing God by meddling with the elemental forces of the universe?’

Guuuurk was studying the map. ‘The South China Sea? Isn’t that exactly the spot you aimed Gargantua, the Dangerous Giant Space Laser, last Thursday?’

The Professor froze momentarily. ‘Dammit!’ He thumped the desk. ‘If I started worrying where I was aiming Dangerous Giant Space Lasers, there’d be no end to it.’

‘ The world will end in… twenty-six minutes .’

‘Don’t worry, the faint-hearted amongst us,’ the Professor reassured. ‘I have a plan for just such an eventuality.’

He rifled through his briefcase, ejecting a partly dissected rodent of some kind, a Stielhandgranate , a South American bolas and a bone saw, before emerging with a sheaf of papers. ‘Ah! Here we are: Make an underground trap big enough to ensnare the King of the Mole People… then torture him until…’

Dr. Janussen interrupted. ‘No, Professor – that’s an old plan.’

‘Oh yes.’ A wistful look crossed the Professor’s face. ‘Almost worked, though, didn’t it?’

‘Not really ,’ Guuuurk said. ‘The Mole People didn’t have a king, they were an autonomous collective.’

‘All right,’ the Professor conceded. ‘Let’s give it eight out of ten.’

‘And they tortured us ,’ Dr. Janussen added sadly.

‘Seven, then.’

The Martian shuddered. ‘I still have nightmares about that incessant Mole Music.’

Troy perked up at last. ‘I liked it. It was hep!’ He started humming a low, hideous thumping dirge. ‘Rummmp dada rummph daadaa…’

Dr. Janussen reached menacingly into her handbag. ‘Troy. Don’t make me get out the Flit Gun.’

This silenced Troy immediately.

‘All right,’ the Professor finally conceded. ‘Let’s give that plan a five, and move on.’ He produced a second sheet of paper. ‘Ah, yes, here we are: Hole in South China Sea, End of World Contingency Plan.’ He took up a pointing stick and crossed to the map. ‘The Dâmrei Mountains, Indo-China: perfectly positioned adjacent to the sinkhole. There’s a natural fault line two-thirds of the way up. If we can generate a sufficiently powerful gravitational wave, it would slice off the top of the mountain like a soft-boiled egg. The peak then tumbles into the sinkhole and neatly plugs it. All we have to do to generate that wave is fly round and round it so fast that we break the X-barrier.’

The X-barrier? What on earth was the X-barrier?

Dr. Janussen reacted in astonishment. ‘The X-barrier? That’s seventeen times the speed of sound.’

The Professor looked grim. ‘It’s almost certainly completely impossible, but it’s our only chance.’

‘The problem is—’ Guuuurk flipped open an EPNS cigarette case that played ‘Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?’ ‘—No one’s ever actually broken the X-barrier. Not even us, with our superior Martian technology.’

This blatant Martian aggrandisement clearly couldn’t be let slip a second time.

‘As I recall,’ Dr. Janussen smiled with just one corner of her mouth, ‘your “superior Martian technology” consists entirely of Death Rays. Which, as it turns out, can be easily reflected with a common make-up mirror.’

This was clearly a sore and oft-repeated point for Guuuurk. ‘How were we supposed to know every Terranean woman carries a small Death Ray repellent in her handbag? We’re not telepathic!’ He paused. ‘Well, actually, we are telepathic, we’re just very, very unlucky.’

Had Guuuurk been rummaging around in my mind when I’d felt that tingling? Is that how he knew I’d lost my memory? I felt somehow violated.

‘ The world will end in… twenty-four minutes .’

‘So, Professor.’ I tried to drag the conversation back to the impending global disaster. ‘How do we break this X-barrier?’

‘Ah yes! We would need a craft that’s essentially an enormous metal bullet with an atomic reactor on the back.’

‘Gosh, darn! Why don’t we have one of those?’ Troy punched the bench in frustration, splintering it quite nastily.

‘If I may make a suggestion,’ Guuuurk offered in a bored voice, ‘why don’t we use your new prototype Enormous Metal Bullet Craft, which I’m given to understand just happens to have an atomic reactor lashed to its back?’

It sounded an exceptionally dangerous and possibly suicidal contraption.

‘It is an exceptionally dangerous and possibly suicidal contraption,’ the Professor mused. ‘But that will be no deterrent to our fearless, and some would say “recklessly foolhardy”, resident test pilot.’

I turned to look at Troy, but was surprised to find everybody had, instead, swivelled towards me.

At last, I’d discovered something about myself. I rather wished I hadn’t.

I smiled weakly.

‘That’s me, isn’t it?’

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

I was finally alone, for the first time in my recollection, in the crew changing room.

The flight suit fitted well, though it was host to several worrying smells and stains. It was made of some peculiar material: a sort of cross between tinfoil and tripe. It certainly was mine, since it had ‘Nylon’ stitched on the breast. It suddenly struck me there might be a clue to my past somewhere about it. I rooted through the pockets, and found a wrinkled conker, a Scout woggle (of course! My lucky woggle!) and a crumpled piece of paper. Wait! This could be it! Heart pounding, I frantically unfolded the paper and smoothed it out, but to my great disappointment it was completely blank. Crestfallen, I was balling it up to throw away when I thought I detected a faint aroma of citrus – invisible ink? Or had it just been wrapped around a sherbet lemon?

There was a knock on the door, and I crammed everything back into the pocket.

Jenkins called: ‘Would you hurry up in there, Mr. Nylon, begging your pardon? They’re all waiting for you in the hangar.’

The metallic voice, which I was coming to dread, burst over the tinny public address speaker and helpfully added that there were a scant fifteen minutes to the end of the world.