The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Read online

  ‘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.’

  Chapter Eight

  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.’

  Guuuurk called: ‘Not to worry, Brian, old sausage. We’ll catch up with this later.’

  I smiled and nodded and prayed we did not.

  Jenkins led me back down the stairs. He also seemed remarkably unruffled by the deafening siren and the metallic voice which chirped in to count down the minutes to the Earth’s destruction.

  ‘Isn’t anyone going to respond to that?’ I yelled.

  ‘Good point, sir. I’ll mute the siren. It does get quite irritating if you’re not used to it.’ He threw a lever on the wall, and it abated.

  ‘That’s not going to help the planetary destruction problem.’

  ‘I’m sure the Professor will get round to that in goodly time, sir. Now, we just need to take the lift . . .’

  There was a bank of lifts behind me. I pressed the ‘Call’ button on the most important-looking one.

  ‘Not that button, sir!’ Jenkins barked. ‘You mustn’t go round pressing buttons and opening doors. There’s buttons that mustn’t be pressed and doors that mustn’t be opened.’

  ‘So, what is that button for?’

  ‘That’s the Professor’s private lift, sir. Nobody can operate it ’cepting him. Security devices.’ He pressed an adjacent button to summon another lift car. ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with polymorphic shape-shifters from beneath the Earth’s crust. Those cunning little beggars. I put some powder down but they’re very persistent.’

  The lift doors pinged open and we stepped in. ‘Here we go, sir. Next stop: the High-Rise Farm.’

  The lift smelled of damp wood and fertilizer. Jenkins pressed a number on a huge bank of buttons. The doors snapped shut immediately, and we surged upward at an alarming speed. A complicated indicator board above the doors, very much like the one at Waterloo Station, was flipping over at a breakneck pace. I could only read the occasional legend as it flitted onwards: ‘Pigs and Sugar Beet’, ‘Currently Fallow’, ‘Soft Fruits and Hops’, ‘Tractor Repair Bays / Slaughterhouse’.

  ‘What exactly is the point of a high-rise farm, Jenkins?’

  ‘Oh, it’s genius, sir: the notion is, if they can put all the agriculture into high-rise buildings, they’ll be able to concrete over the entire countryside.’

  ‘ What? ’

  ‘That’s the Professor for you: always thinking the unthinkable.’

  The lift stopped suddenly, and I didn’t. I banged my head quite hard on the ceiling.

  ‘Sorry, sir, meant to tell you to brace yourself. Here we are: seventy-fourth floor: Chickens, Cows and Potato fields.’

  The doors opened onto a hideous diorama of squawking violence and mooing mayhem.

  Jenkins tut-tutted mildly. ‘Oh dear, they’re fighting over the potatoes again.’

  The metallic voice reminded us the world would end in thirty-one minutes.

  ‘Good Lord, Jenkins – the chickens are enormous ! That one over there must be eight feet tall!’

  Jenkins glanced over and looked away again very quickly. ‘That’s the cockerel, sir. I shouldn’t catch his eye if I were you. The poor old postman did, and he never walked straight again. ’Course, they said it was an accident—’

  ‘But the cows – they’re tiny ! Why is that?’

  ‘Easier to milk, sir: just pick ’em up and squeeze ’em.’

  We carefully negotiated our way around the poultry and bovine carnage, being sure to keep my gaze on my feet.

  ‘Here’s the Professor, now.’

  The figure from the gantry at Westminster seemed even more imposing closer up. He’d shed his overcoat and hat and was dressed in a white lab coat, white wellington boots and long green rubber gloves. He was showing diagrams from his clipboard to Dr. Janussen. He looked up, ignored me completely and shouted at Jenkins:

  ‘Sedate those chickens immediately! And add more plutonium to their feed!’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ Jenkins saluted limply, and wandered off mumbling. I could only catch: ‘More blinkin’ plutonium! That’s his answer to everything!’

  And at last, I was about to face the legendary Quanderhorn himself.

  He turned his stony features towards me, and furrowed his serious brow. His strikingly brilliantined silver hair instantly bestowed him with an aura of wisdom and authority. Cold, steely grey eyes scanned me as if I were a biological specimen.
Thin mirthless lips betrayed no trace of emotion.

  His icy stare seemed to penetrate my very being – as if he knew everything I’d ever been, and everything I ever would be.

  Eventually he spoke:

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Dr. Janussen – whose ear, I noticed, was once again happily vertical – stepped forward and coughed discreetly. ‘It’s Brian , Professor. He’s wearing a different sweater.’

  ‘Ah! Nylon!’ The eyebrows lifted and the smile put in an appearance after all. ‘Pleased to see you’ve recovered.’

  The metallic voice piped up again. ‘ The world will end in . . . twenty-nine minutes .’

  The Professor ignored it. ‘Tea?’ he offered, amicably.

  ‘Uhm, do we have time, Professor? What with this world ending thingumajig?’

  But he was already pouring from the teapot. ‘Milk?’

  ‘Er – no – th—’

  He snatched up a tiny cow from the floor and callously squeezed it over the cup to a strangulated miniature moo.

  ‘Too late!’ He passed me the cup. I really had no option but to sip it.

  It was vile.

  ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Uhm . . .’

  ‘Ye-es. If you don’t squeeze them exactly in the middle, the wrong stuff comes out, and . . . well, it’s vile. We’re working on it.’

  Dr. Janussen coughed again. ‘Professor? The crisis?’

  ‘Ah yes! The chickens seem to have outgrown the coop by a factor of about forty. They’re staging raids on the milking shed. Solution: arm the cows with—’

  ‘No – not the chicken crisis,’ Dr. Janussen corrected. ‘The destruction of the planet crisis.’

  ‘Well, if we must. Instruct the entire team to assemble in the briefing room in exactly forty minutes.’

  ‘ The world will end in . . . twenty-eight minutes .’

  There was a long pause, whilst Dr. Janussen and I carefully considered how to tell the great man. Eventually, she tentatively offered: ‘Forty minutes may be pushing it.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ the Professor scowled. ‘Five minutes, then. But I want toast.’

  Chapter Nine

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

  Ten minutes later we were all gathered in the briefing room. The Professor was pacing up and down impatiently in front of the blackboard, lost in deepest thought, while the rest of us perched uncomfortably on rough wooden benches.

  The terrifying countdown continued relentlessly. I glanced nervously around. No one else seemed particularly anxious. Along with Dr. Janussen and Troy, I was surprised to see that Guuuurk was considered a trusted enough member of the team to be admitted to these briefings. He’d changed into a navy blue yachting blazer with a badge that said ‘Melton Mowbray Ladies Rowing Association’, a red silk cravat and a rather natty pair of co-respondent shoes.

  Finally, Jenkins appeared with a tray.

  ‘Ah!’ the Professor beamed. ‘The toast has arrived at last! Now we can get on.’

  He cleared his throat noisily and wrote the word ‘Crisis’ on the blackboard, then spun round to face us. ‘Nylon – if you’d like to tell us all what’s going on?’

  I looked around. Everyone had swivelled towards me. ‘I . . . have no idea.’

  The Professor sighed. ‘Well, there you have it, gentlemen. Mysterious problem beyond human understanding.’ He picked up some toast. ‘Open a file, and I’ll get back to the chickens.’

  ‘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 aggrand
isement 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?’

  Chapter Ten

  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?