The Big Over Easy

31. Home, Sweet Home

As Chymes had predicted, Jack’s suitability to carry on the Humpty investigation was the top story on the radio as Mary drove him home. Friedland had done his work well. Questions of Jack’s “competence” and “reliability” were foremost in the report, and they even had a short interview with Chymes himself, who graciously said that he had “every confidence in DI Spratt” but would be more than happy to “offer my own assistance if requested.” There was a reporter on his doorstep wanting Jack to confirm for The Toad that he was a “stubborn fool with a poor hold on reality.” Jack ignored him and went inside.

Madeleine rushed up to give him a hug and said, “I heard all that crap on the radio, sweets. Chymes, was it?”

“In one,” he replied. “The bastard is using every trick in the book to poach the investigation. I didn’t think even he would stoop as low as this. I just wonder what he’s going to try next.”

“You mean he can do more?”

“He’s Guild, darling. Those guys are capable of almost anything.”

“What about Humpty? Figured out who did him in?”

“Not even close. I’m not so sure anymore that Grundy had him killed — and Spongg had more to lose than gain by Humpty’s death.”

“So who does that leave?”

Jack sighed. “An ex-girlfriend named Bessie Brooks.”

“Well,” she said, “if it helps putting it all into some perspective, Stevie’s got a new tooth.”

“Top or bottom?”

“Top.”

“Thanks,” he said, and held her tight.

“Are we interrupting anything?” said Pandora, who had just walked in the front door with Prometheus.

“No,” said Jack as Madeleine returned to the kitchen. “Where… where have you been?”

“To the flicks,” replied Pandora. “They’ve got a Lola Vavoom retrospective at the Coliseum. We saw a Lola triple bill: My Sister Used to Keep Geese, The Streets of Wooton Bassett and The Eyre Affair. Prometheus and I are big fans of Lola’s.”

Prometheus nodded agreement, and they walked into the living room.

Jack watched them go and then ran into the kitchen.

“Madeleine!” he breathed. “Pandora and Prometheus have just been to the cinema — together!”

She didn’t look up from the photo magazine she was reading. “So? She’s twenty — she can go to the pictures with whoever she wants.”

“She’s almost twenty, yes — but he’s older than her!”

“You’re eight years older than me. What’s the big deal? Maybe she prefers older men.”

“Four thousand years older?”

“If you could hear yourself! He barely looks over thirty, and he’s really nice — and think how it will improve her Greek.”

“That’s not the point!” he muttered, glancing out through the open kitchen door to make sure they weren’t listening. “He’s the lodger. I can’t have my daughter… you know, with him… sort of Titan, immortal… thing.”

Madeleine laughed, and he stared at her.

“What’s so funny?”

“You. You’re funny. Daughters grow up. They don’t stay all hair band, My Little Pony and ‘Wheels on the bus go round and round’ forever, you know.”

“I know,” he said as he calmed down a bit. “I’m a father. I worry about my daughter. That’s what fathers do.”

“Well, don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“I won’t. I’ll be very open-minded. But they’re not sitting together at dinner so they can hold hands under the table or anything.”

“Put them opposite each other, then.”

“So they can play footsy-footsy? I think not, thank you very much.”

Ben walked in reading a copy of Conspiracy Theorist.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Ben,” Jack replied, still looking out the kitchen door, where he could see Pandora laughing at something Prometheus had said. “How’s it going?”

“Welsh cattle mutilations are at an all-time high,” he muttered without looking up, “but ball-lightning incidents have dropped. Alien abductions hold pretty steady — although the aliens deny they have anything to do with them.”

“I can’t imagine Constable Ashley kidnapping anyone,” said Jack thoughtfully.

“You have an alien working for you?” asked Ben incredulously, then added with annoyance, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jack shrugged. “I didn’t think it was important.”

“Tsk!” said Ben. “Grown-ups.”

“Can I help?” asked Prometheus, who had just walked in.

“Ah. Yes… you could lay the table. I thought I’d put you at that end and Pandora at this end — ”

“Phone,” said Prometheus, a moment before it rang.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“That thing when you say something and it happens almost immediately?”

“Do I?” asked the Titan, his brow furrowing in bewilderment. “I don’t think I do. It’s your mother, by the way.”

Jack picked up the phone. It was his mother.

“You’ve done it again!”

“I did?”

“Oh, never mind. Hi, Mum, how are things?”

Jack listened while his mother prattled on at some length about the beanstalk. It was now forty feet high, and she still had no plans to get rid of it. It seemed the British Horticultural Society was sending an expert to view it on the following day. Quite a few people had made special trips to see it, and she had entertained a score or two of them, offering tea and a scone with a guided tour at five pounds a head. She had made a tidy sum and wondered whether Prometheus could come around and help out the following day.

“Yes, okay,” he said before Jack had asked him.

“So how’s the extradition fight going?” asked Madeleine as soon as they were seated and they all had some dinner in front of them.

“Okay, I think,” said Prometheus, pouring some gravy. “Zeus’ lawyers are preparing for the case. They claim my punishment was entirely just under Mount Olympus law.”

“Hardly fair, is it?” put in Pandora from the other end of the table. “Zeus is Mount Olympus law. He makes it up as he goes along.”

“Well,” continued the Titan resignedly, “they also claim that Heracles went beyond the boundaries of his jurisdiction in releasing me and that destroying the chain that bound me to the rock was technically criminal damage.”

“Three thousand years chained to a rock with your liver being picked out every night,” said Jack, shaking his head at the thought of the punishment. “Do you really think it was worth it?”

“Stealing fire and giving it to mankind? I still maintain it was the right thing to do. I also gave mankind the fear of death. Did you know that?”

They didn’t. It wasn’t generally known. It was a delicate subject that Heracles had thought was better kept quiet lest it turn mankind against his client.

“No, why did you do that?” asked Jack, pouring Prometheus and Madeleine some more wine.

“Yes, please,” said Ben.

“One’s your lot, sunshine.”

“So you could value your own life,” replied the Titan. “Before that you were under the gods’ thumbs, doing their bidding without caring if you lived or died. When you could see that life was worth living by your fear of the unknown that was death, then you could really make things happen. I gave you lot the wisdom of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and metallurgy. Look at you now. The pyramids, nuclear fusion, CAT scanners, space travel, the Internet, computers, escalators, the La-Z-Boy recliner and cable television. I get to watch 65, Walrus Street every night. If I miss an episode, it’s repeated the following evening on Channel WXZ-23-Reading. You lot truly amaze me, and yes, I think it was all very worthwhile.”

He emptied the glass and pointed at the bottle. “Do you mind?”

“No,” said Jack, “help yourself.”

“What about the side effects?” asked Pandora. “The wars, the deceit, the bloodshed, hate, murder, intolerance? Was all that worthwhile as well?”

Prometheus looked over at her. “Of course not. But you have to look at the big picture. I’ve seen the alternative. Eternal slavery under the gods. Believe me, this is a bed of roses in comparison. Think of this: If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong. The civilization that devises the infrastructure to allow these wonderful things to be created is essentially a product of war — death and suffering — and commerce — deceit and inequality. Even your liberty to discuss the shortcomings of your own species has its foundations in blood and hardship.”

“That’s a depressing thought,” murmured Madeleine.

The Titan shrugged again. “Not really. You should look at your own achievements more. When I created mankind, everyone thought of you as slaves, packhorses to do the dirty work. No one thought you’d amount to much. I and my fellow Titans and a few of the more sporting gods had a sweep going on how far you would develop. Clothes were even money, domesticating animals at three to one, grouping into civilization within a thousand years at seven to one, language with irregular verbs at thirty to one and nuclear fusion within four thousand years a thousand-to-one outsider — I won a tidy little profit, I can tell you.”

Jack, always on the lookout for some misdemeanor, said, “But you gave mankind all that knowledge. Wouldn’t that make the contest unfair?”

Prometheus appeared crestfallen and said, “It was only a bit of fun,” then lapsed into silence, leaving them all trying to guess which was “only a bit of fun,” the betting or the bequest of knowledge.

“Anyway,” said Prometheus so sharply they all jumped, “the point is that you have exceeded all my expectations.”

They ate for a moment in silence, with Jack’s thoughts drifting to other things, such as the Guild, whether Chymes was done trying to poach the investigation and, more important, whether he should sleep on the landing outside Pandora’s bedroom. Pandora, still unconvinced by Prometheus’ fatalist stance, spoke again.

“Your viewpoint is depressingly callous. Are you saying that there’s nothing we can do to improve ourselves?”

“Of course there is. There’s lots you can do.”

“Such as…?”

“Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly, and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.”

“But there will still be wars!”

“Of course. There will always be wars. It has been in your nature ever since — ”

Prometheus broke off suddenly, put up a hand to quiet everyone and sniffed the air. “Do you smell burning?”

They all inhaled. Prometheus was right — there was a faint smell of burning hair, or, as it turned out, fur.

“The cat!” yelled Madeleine. Ripvan had fallen asleep too close to the fire and had started to singe. Jack ran into the living room and snatched him out of harm’s way, tossing the half-cooked mog from hand to hand like a hot potato. He placed her on a chair and fanned her with a magazine. Ripvan thought it was a game and purred loudly, completely unaware of the excitement she had caused. Jack left Ripvan on the chair, collected up the plates and stacked them by the sink. When he turned back, Pandora was sitting in his place — next to Prometheus.

“I think I was sit — ”

“What about coffee?” said Madeleine. “We can have it in the living room.”

She got up, and they all followed her, except Jack, who filled the kettle, and Ben, who went back to reading Conspiracy Theorist.

Prometheus sat next to Pandora on the sofa and stared into the fire with a look of deep distraction and loss.

“You were saying…?” she prompted.

Prometheus sighed deeply. “It wasn’t important.”

But Pandora liked answers and didn’t want to let it go. “You said it has been in our nature ever since…?”

Prometheus looked up into her intelligent face, and his eyes glistened as a sad and distant memory surfaced in his consciousness.

“There was a woman once — Careful, Jack!” A second later there was a crash from the kitchen as Jack tripped over a stool. “I had put those parts of the human id that I thought undesirable into a large jar and sealed it tightly. I hoped to keep intolerance, sickness, insanity, vice and greed away from mankind. But” — he paused — “there was this woman who opened it against my wishes and let them out to taint the race I had created.”

“Pandora?” asked Pandora, who knew a bit about her erstwhile namesake.

Prometheus flinched at the sound of her name. “Yes, Pandora. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, the most rare and radiant maiden who ever walked upon this globe. Her skin was as soft as silk, and her eyes shone like emeralds. Her dark and flowing hair tossed joyfully in the wind as she ran, and her laughter was like cherubs singing in the morning breeze.”

“Hmm,” responded Pandora. “I heard she was a bit of a trollop.”

“Oh, she was,” replied Prometheus hurriedly. “She was as vain, foolish, mischievous and idle as she was beautiful.”

“And yet you fell in love with her?”

Prometheus nodded. “I loved her, and she betrayed me. I had no idea she was sent by Zeus to cause trouble to the human race. Alas, I was wrong. The ills were let out of my jar, and you can see the result.”

“But hope remained,” said Pandora, attempting to raise the spirits of Prometheus, who seemed to have lapsed into depression.

“Delusive hope,” corrected Prometheus quietly. “I had placed it there as a sort of insurance policy. Delusive hope, by its lies, dissuades mankind from mass suicide.”

“And where is she now?”

“I have no idea. After I was sentenced, my brother — fool that he was — married her to avoid a similar fate.”

“And you never saw them again?”

“They kept in contact for a bit, but you know how it is — just cards on my birthday for the first three hundred years and then nothing at all. The last I heard of them was in 1268, when Epimetheus was working as a cobbler and Pandora made a living as a translator. I have tried to find them since my release, but to no avail. I have difficulty traveling without a passport.”

“And the jar?” inquired Pandora, still curious.

He shrugged. “It’s invulnerable to any form of destructive power, so it must still be somewhere. But where that might be, I have no idea.”

“Coffee!” announced Jack, wondering whether sitting between Pandora and Prometheus wasn’t taking it too far. It was, so he sat with Madeleine. They all talked animatedly with Prometheus into the night. Pandora told him about studying for her degree in astrophysics; Prometheus mentioned that he thought Robert Oppenheimer had done the same as he — stolen fire from the gods and given it to mankind. The difference between him and Oppenheimer, he added dryly, was that Oppenheimer was never punished. Pandora told him about Big Bang theory, and he told her that Zeus had created the constellations; it was a lively argument and they had just got around to discussing human self-determination when Madeleine announced that she was going to bed and pulled on her husband’s hand to make him join her.

“I’ll stay for a little longer,” said Jack.

“It’s perfectly okay, Jack,” said Prometheus. “I’m not going to sleep with your daughter.”

His directness caught Jack on the hop, and he laughed at his own stupidity.

“Terrific!” he said at last. “I’m going to bed.”

Pandora and Prometheus continued talking as the fire gradually burnt itself down. Prometheus pointed out the flaws in evolutionary theory, such as how a bird could possibly have evolved wings without having useless appendages for thousands of years that would have hindered its survival. Pandora countered by saying that rule number one of the cosmos was that unlikely things do happen. Indeed, given the time scale involved and the size of the universe, unlikely things, paradoxically enough, become quite commonplace.

“What do you think?” asked Jack as he took off his shirt in the bedroom.

“About what?”

“Pandora and Prometheus.”

“Science meets mythology. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions they draw before the night is out. I’ll be fascinated to hear what Prometheus has to say about the fossil record.”

“Hmm,” said Jack as he climbed into his pajamas and pushed the inert form of Ripvan off his side of the bed. The cat fell to the floor with a thump — and without waking.

Jack slept well that night, curled up with Madeleine like two spoons in a drawer. Below them in the living room, Prometheus and Pandora talked into the small hours, while barely a mile away, in Granny Spratt’s garden, the beanstalk creaked and groaned to itself as it grew, like a bamboo plantation in the tropics.