Kronk

CHAPTER FOUR

Lulu Tower, which stood where Buckingham Palace had been before the exigencies of economics and tourism caused it to be removed to Monarchiland in the Scottish Highlands, was the tallest building in London. Being a slender, domed cylinder exactly five hundred metres high, it was also one of the finest phallic symbols in Western Europe.

It was occupied in descending order by the most important institutions in the United Kingdom. The dome and the top fifty storeys housed NaTel, its governors, director-general, public relations officers, controllers, accountants, producers, telefamilies, camera crews, technicians, and make-up girls — even unto the lowly script spinners. Immediately under NaTel were the storeys that contained what was left of the Mother of Parliaments. And immediately beneath the two Parliament levels were the various ministries and government departments necessary to give the illusion of running a small country containing a mere seventy million people.

The branches of the Civil Service extended downwards for nearly one hundred storeys to the base of the building. At ground level, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Mental Health waged unending total war upon each other for possession of the greater number of eighty-eight small cell-like rooms. In fact both were fighting for a lost cause, since the Ministry of Sport was expanding downwards.

Occupying a south-facing room well above the critical halfway mark in the great glass and titanium phallus, Dr. Peregrine Perrywit found some cause for satisfaction. Few men had climbed the Thing from base to shining dome; but Dr. Perrywit, who had started with MinEd ten years ago, had now reached the seventy-seventh level. Not only that, but he was already on drinking terms with two NaTel producers (Get High With Mother and The Junior Sex Hour) and his wife had attracted the attention of a lush lezzy NaTel accountant. Dr. Perrywit, although still only in the mid-level of the Ministry of International Security and Race Harmony, was confident that he had far to go.

The possession of a B2 security pass carried with it certain advantages. He was, for example, able even now to shoot up to NaTel reception level without being challenged. He made it a practice to do so at least three times a week. Sometimes, he would walk out to one of the helicopter decks as if he had been assigned to meet an important incognito; and at other times he would take a drink in the guest bar, again with the air of one keeping a vital assignation.

But, as Dr. Perrywit sat at his desk and gazed through his double glazing on this fine summer morning, he was aware that before he could aspire to the giddy heights of NaTel, he needed to be at least two grades higher in Insect Race. And that would require talent and initiative. Both of which, naturally, he had in plenty.

Perhaps his chief talent was for the reduction of expenditure. Originally, he had specialized in divinity, gaining his Ph.D. in this skill. Divinity had been a necessary discipline because, in his youth, he had yearned to become a computer designer, specializing in the then new God Machines. It was a time of great opportunity. The Christian churches had integrated into Romaprot, which had hired the best business efficiency firm in the U.S.A. to switch the church to automation and restore the waning fortunes of religion to a sound commercial basis.

The computerization of God had caught not only the imagination of prollies and think tanks but also the imagination of Peregrine Perrywit, who was neither. The Instant Absolution advertising campaign (masterminded by the legendary Homer T. Krappe Associates) that followed the first phase of automation had started the folding money rolling in once more.

Romaprot went public as a limited liability company and was oversubscribed instantly. Share values doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Peregrine Perrywit, hot from University and with the ink still wet on his Ph.D., had a thirty-five second interview with Cardinal Archbishop Cyril Cantuar and got hired on the spot.

To design God Machines.

Unfortunately, there was an almost immediate misunderstanding. Dr. Perrywit, of North Country origin and with a wired-in compulsion to thrift, was under the impression that he was to operate on a cost-efficiency basis. He was not. He was hired to spend money not to save it, Romaprot having reached that critical stage where it could no longer afford to think small.

Dr. Perrywit, after two years’ intensive work, produced the design for a mobile, confessionhearing, advice-proffering, absolution-dispensing, French/English/German/Italian-speaking God Machine that could be manufactured for less than nine hundred thousand pounds.

He was fired. Not only as project-leader but from Romaprot employment altogether.

His rival project-leader had had the wit to produce a machine that could do all that Dr.

Perrywit’s machine could do. Further, it could play the organ, produce plainsong, conduct baptism, confirmation, expulsion, marriage, divorce, eutahanasia and death ceremonies while simultaneously playing a useful part in Romaprot’s vast accounting procedures. The fact that it would cost five million to build was an additional argument in its favour.

So Dr. Perrywit was consigned to the limbo of MinEd. His thrift compulsion went with him. He succeeded in cutting the budget of his first project — the computerized control of nappy changing in State crèches — by twenty per cent. MinEd saw the writing on the wall and shot him upstairs.

MinSport suffered a similar ordeal by Perrywit when he attempted to introduce plastic grass in two thousand football stadia throughout the country. The saving would have amounted to more than twenty million pounds a year. Perrywit was clearly dangerous, so again they shot him upstairs.

Insect Race, however, knew how to make use of Dr. Perrywit’s peculiar talent. As the largest and most expensive ministry in the Thing, Insect Race swallowed one quarter of the nation’s annual income. And at times it had come dangerously near to spending one third. It needed Dr. Perrywit. It needed him badly. The Ministry of International Security and Race Harmony was basically responsible for the armed forces, the diplomatic service, foreign aid, scientific research and the maintenance and organization of an élite cadre of agents provocateurs.

At present, Dr. Perrywit’s talent was devoted to scientific research. And for the past few weeks he had been concentrating on decimation of the Microbiological Warfare Division with a target of reducing its overall budget by fifty per cent.

That is why he had fired Professor Eustace Greylaw after forty years of almost blameless and even, on occasion, almost meritorious service. That is also why he was concerned with the problem of disposing of various animals, while at the same time ascertaining what had happened to one tiger, one squirrel, one lion, one lamb, one panther and one white rabbit.

Ten years before, Professor Greylaw had received an important brief from the then Chief of MicroWar (since elevated to anchor man for NaTel’s Beauties of Mother Nature series).

Professor Greylaw had been instructed to develop a micro-organism that could be used over a period of time to ease any aggressive nation out of its war psychology without it looking as if there had been external interference. This was a tall, if not impossible, order. Which is why O.C. MicroWar had chosen Professor Greylaw.

Throughout his generally undistinguished career, Eustace Greylaw had been accident prone. Ask him to develop a new Black Death, and the chances were he would have absentmindedly wiped out the Home Counties before he had finished proving the bug. Ask him to develop a form of instant trypanosomiasis suitable for use in a cold climate and he would have put half Scandinavia to sleep before he was satisfied that he had accomplished the task.

Professor Greylaw was dedicated, conscientious and painstaking — which is to say dangerous. So he had been given an impossible task simply to keep him out of trouble.

Eustace Greylaw still had enough grip on the external world to realize why he had been removed from the plum project of irreversible brain damage and consigned to the limbo of anti-aggression. So, determined to spite everyone by achieving the impossible, he had conducted his work in grim secrecy. Apart from the fact that he used up a lot of animals, no one knew what progress he was making. After a time, when O.C. MicroWar was promoted to NaTel’s Uncle Dan, nobody even knew what he was supposed to be doing. Naturally, he neglected to inform anyone of his success. Naturally, after Dr. Perrywit had discovered that, over the last nine years, Professor Greylaw’s annual budget had averaged ninety thousand pounds, Eustace was fired.

The only remaining problems, as far as Dr. Perrywit was concerned, were how to account for the loss of various animals and how to dispose of the occupants of what was left of the Greylaw zoo, a ramshackle collection of huts and cages which, until the Perrywit era, had enjoyed a maximum security rating.

He had an idea. He pressed the toe stud under his desk.

In imagination, he saw a tall busty blonde goddess in a white cat-suit enter his office. He sprang round the desk and locked the door, secure in the knowledge that the office was completely soundproofed. The goddess whirled with a look of alarm on her face. But he was too quick for her. He leaped towards her, whipping the freezair pencil from his pocket.

One brief squirt and the goddess froze. He lowered her rigid body gently to the carpet.

Then he gave her the merest whiff of relaxant, so that her muscles slackened, though she still could not move.

Her eyes were open and she had to look at him. Yes, that was good. She had to look at him.

He kissed her savagely. He bit her lips, her ears, her neck. He crushed beautifully inert mountains of female tissue in his cruel fingers. He tore at the cat-suit, flinging himself upon her in an ecstasy of brutal frenzy. How the strength was upon him! He thrust savagely — once, twice, three times. Always she had to look. Was that a moan? Please let her be relaxed enough to be able to moan!

The only question left was should he strangle her at the point of orgasm…

His daydream was shattered as the door opened and a tall busty goddess in a white cat-suit entered his office.

“Good morning, Dr. Perrywit.”

“Ah, good morning, Dr. — ah — Slink.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to control his breathing. Heart still racing. That was bad. He opened a drawer and fumbled for the tiny pink pills.

“Was there something, sir?”

“Yes — yes, there was.” He found the pills and swallowed one. “The Greylaw matter. I delegated it to you. All satisfactory? He — ah — he took it well?”

“I never actually saw Professor Greylaw. I don’t think anybody now here has actually seen him. Though I’m told he did attend a seventieth level conference eighteen years ago… I think there is something you ought to know, Dr. Perrywit. A few days after his retirement, the Professor died rather sadly.”

“How?”

“He — he fell under a Circle Line train.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Dr. Perrywit — still disconcerted by recent non-events -

briefly lost control. “Bastard!” he shrieked. “Lazy, deceitful bastard! Why couldn’t he have done it ten days ago and saved us that massive severance fee?”

Dr. Slink looked at him, shocked. One of these days he really would squirt her and savage that proud voluptuous body; and she would have to look at him while he was doing it, and…

With an effort Dr. Perrywit shook himself out of it. “I didn’t mean it that way, Dorothea.

But, responsible as I am for MicroWar’s money — oh, hell, what are we going to do about the animals, the ones that are left? At least we can lose the feed bill.”

“We could have them put down, Dr. Perrywit. It is standard procedure for MicroWar experimental animals on project termination.”

“Waste! Think of the waste. Squirrels, yes, but cats are worth a lot these days…

Experimental animals indeed! What did Greylaw do? No records, no anything. No project specification even. Only the code-name Tranquillity. The old footler just fed his pussies for nine years at the expense of MicroWar, Insect Race and the great British Public… Last time I saw the inventory there were elephants. What happened to them?”

“One broke out and got killed.”

“How?”

“It derailed the London-Brighton hovertrain. The other one died of a broken heart.”

“Hm. We really will have to trace those missing cats. The records you know. I need my records absolutely perfect.”

“Yes, Dr. Perrywit.”

“Perfection, symmetry, balance, order, economy — these, Dr. Slink, are vanishing ideals in an age of chaos. But while I live I will strive to attain…” He was suddenly struck by a brilliant thought. “You needn’t worry about the surviving animals, I think I have a solution, an elegant solution. Meanwhile, see they get enough to eat. They are your responsibility.”

“Yes, Dr. Perrywit. Thank you.” She turned to go.

“Oh, and Dr. Slink.”

She half turned back. Those proud and living mountains stared disdainfully at him with their hidden X-ray eyes of nipples.

“You look,” he croaked, “you look, you look very — ah — efficient this morning.”

“Thank you, Dr. Perrywit.” Her nostrils quivered, an eyebrow ascended one point five millimetres, then she turned and opened the door. She closed it quietly behind her.

Dr. Perrywit took another pill. Then he began to contemplate his elegant solution.

Upon succeeding, the Marquis of Middlehampton had been saddled with death duties of about three mill. So he had sensibly turned Middle Acres into a combined tourist centre and natur reserve. What would he not say to the magnificent no-strings-attached gift of three big cats?

And the younger brother of the Marquis was no less than the Games, Contests and Prize Programmes Controller of NaTel. The only question was: could one — in these days of crumbling values — rely upon the noblesse to oblige?

darling… And then there were two.”