The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

Chapter One

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 31st December, 1952

I clawed my way out of a swirling vortex of strangling black velvet. I was either unconscious, or trapped under one of the Beverley Sisters’ show dresses. Mercifully for Joy, Teddie or Babs, it was the former.

Slowly, painfully, a distant pinprick of light coalesced, dazzled and finally settled into a nauseating corona around the head of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was looking down at me and gently slapping my face very hard.

I had no idea who she was. And worse than that: I had no idea who I was, either.

I noticed I was uncomfortable. I was lying on some rather scratchy hessian sacking on a cold, hard metal floor. We were juddering, in motion. A manual gearbox protested loudly. I raised my head. We were in the back of a van of some kind. A series of makeshift shelves held stacks of bizarre machinery and tools. A sign pasted over the back window read WARNING: THIS DOOR LEADS TO OUTSIDE.

The exquisite goddess leaning over me said: ‘Brian’. It seemed a strange name for a woman.

‘Hello, Brian,’ I said. But this only made Aphrodite slap me harder.

‘You’re Brian, you mutton-head.’

‘Am I? Who are you?’

‘Oh no. You’ve lost your memory, haven’t you? It’s me, Dr. Janussen.’

‘Dr. Janussen?’

‘Gemini? Gemma? Good grief, it’s really wiped this time.’

I was suddenly gripped by a very exciting thought: ‘Are you my wife?’

This produced a fleeting snort of cruel laughter in the divine creature, yet she neglected to answer.

‘Where are we?’ I tried.

‘There’s no time to explain right now.’

Just then a masculine voice called from the front cabin: ‘Is it left here?’

I raised my head further and espied a handsome young brute in the driving seat: artfully tousled blue-black hair, a steely jaw and a fierce intelligence in his eyes.

‘Is it left here?’ he repeated louder.

The lovely woman, who may or may not have been my wife, blinked with the merest hint of exasperation. ‘No, Troy.’

‘Is it right then?’

‘No, Troy. There are no turnings. We’re on Lambeth Bridge.’

‘So – straight on, is it?’

‘Yes, I think that’s best.’ She sighed and turned back to me. ‘You see? We’ve had to put Troy in the driving seat. Can you please concentrate? We need you right now.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m… I’m trying.’

Outside, I began to make out sounds – crowds of people in the distance, shouting, panicking, screaming.

The lovely woman gripped my face and hauled it towards her.

‘Listen, your name is Brian Nylon. You’re twenty-four years old, and you work with me in Professor Quanderhorn’s research team. The very fabric of Reality depends entirely on our actions in the next ten minutes. Don’t be alarmed. No, actually be very alarmed. Am I getting through to you?’

Her fragrant breath enveloped me like a cloud of jasmine and honeysuckle. ‘You figgy nails are diggy indo by cheeeeks,’ I mumbled through involuntarily gritted teeth.

‘We’ve run out of “straight on”,’ Troy called from the front.

‘Head right, and aim for the big clock.’

‘Okey-doos. Got you. Big clock. No problem.’ Troy chewed on his lower lip for a second. ‘What’s a clock?’

‘That thing with the white face and two hands.’

‘I thought that was Brian.’

‘There! There! That huge round thing! There!’ My possible wife Dr. Janussen pointed urgently, mercifully releasing her grip on my cheeks. ‘And quickly!’

The sounds of the panicking crowd grew louder. Through the rear window, I glimpsed them as we zipped past: hordes of misted faces haloed by street lamps, contorted in fear and horror. What on earth were we getting into? And what had Dr. Janussen meant by ‘the fabric of Reality’?

The van stopped suddenly, but I didn’t. My head crashed through a cardboard box and when I retracted it, I found a small glass valve had jammed itself up my nose. Whilst I was gingerly teasing it out, Dr. Janussen had already leapt out of the rear door. Troy seemed to be struggling to open his.

‘We have to go, now!’ Dr. Janussen yelled, rummaging through a haversack.

Troy yelled back, ‘I can’t get out!’

‘We’ve been through this before, Troy: it’s the handle, remember?’

‘Of course I remember about handles! I’m not an… an— Brian, what are those really stupid people called?’

‘Idiots?’ I offered.

‘Yes, I’m not an idiots.’

I was beginning to revise my initial impression of the ferocity of Troy’s intelligence. He grabbed the handle and to my astonishment, ripped the door entirely from its housing, tumbling with it out onto the pavement with a metallic clatter and a faint yelp of surprise. Who were these people?

Before I’d managed to entirely remove the CV6094 Induction Diode from my nasal canal, Dr. Janussen grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the van.

We were standing in Parliament Square. Silhouetted in the moonlight, Big Ben frowned down upon the panicking multitudes, its face displaying seven minutes to midnight. A struggling line of mounted police barely held back the sea of jabbering humanity, who were torn between fascination and fear. Many of them, rather curiously, were wearing small, cone-shaped cardboard hats and carrying paper trumpets.

I had no idea what was happening. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked the beautiful doctor.

‘There’s no time to explain right now.’ She passed me a large, heavy tube. ‘Here’s your bazooka.’

Chapter Two

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

I thanked her. I looked at it. It was indeed a bazooka. ‘Just a minute!’ I called.

But she was already fighting her way through the human tide. ‘Don’t fire unless it comes towards you,’ she yelled helpfully over her shoulder.

‘Unless what comes towards me?’ I shouted after her, but the crowd had folded in behind her.

So I was standing in Parliament Square at five minutes to midnight, wearing what I now realised were my winter long johns and a novelty Christmas sweater, holding a bazooka, with a valve still protruding from my nostril and a head full of unanswered questions.

Before I could even move, there was a sudden burst from a very loud loudhailer.

‘Keep back!’ rapped an echoing stentorian voice. ‘Keep back from the Giant Broccoli Woman!’

It struck me that the crowd would hardly need this instruction, but a woman near me seemed reassured. ‘Thank Gaawd! That’s that Professor Quanderhorn,’ she grinned, proudly showing off her single tooth. ‘He’ll save us from the vegetable monster, and no mistake.’ Her wizened hand scooped a fistful from a bag of whelks and she sucked on them excitedly.

‘Do you reckon,’ her mousey friend trilled, ‘this is one of them alien invasions, or just another of the Professor’s ‘perimentations what has gone horribly wrong?’

‘Now then, you ugly old termagants,’ a cheerful bobby herded them away, ‘move back for your own good. It’s already eaten three people’s faces.’

‘Oooooh! We’ve never had a face-eater before,’ the whelk woman cooed. ‘I wish I’d known – I’d ’ave brought Bert’s pigeon-racing binoculars.’

The loudhailer burst into life again. ‘This is Quanderhorn himself speaking! Behind the railings, everyone! My team need room to operate!’

The sound of his voice again seemed to calm the crowd momentarily. Who the dickens was this Quanderhorn fellow?

I was about to ask the policeman, when a new chorus of piercing screams erupted all around, and the multitude parted before me.

And I saw it.

I can’t swear it was the most spine-chilling, horrifying thing I’d ever laid eyes on, since I had no memory, but I did at that moment recall exactly what I’d had for breakfast, by virtue of its unexpectedly reappearing on the pavement beneath me. (For the record: spam and toast.)

I was most certainly looking at a monster. At least twelve feet tall, vaguely female in shape, it was green and knobbly, like… well, like a giant human broccoli. It was entirely covered over by a thick viscous mucus, as if a circus giant had been painted with glue and then sheep-dipped in an enormous St Patrick’s Day spittoon.

It threw back its cabbage-like head and let out the most unearthly wail. The crowd drew back further, leaving me standing alone to face it.

It caught me in its monstrous gaze. Was it my imagination, or was there, for a fraction of a second, a spark of recognition in those hideous simulacra of human eyes? Frozen for one moment, I was almost tempted to step towards the wretched beast, when Dr. Janussen grabbed my arm again.

‘Stop dawdling, Brian – the Professor needs us.’

She pulled me quickly away from the clock tower into New Palace Yard, where Troy was waiting. For some reason he had neglected to put on a suitable winter coat. Or, for that matter, a shirt. And I swear he’d slipped and fallen in some engine oil somewhere, because his rather muscular chest glistened unnervingly in the street lamplight. For reasons that eluded me, a gaggle of teenaged girls who had pushed themselves to the front of the crowd shrieked inanely at his every move.

Dr. Janussen narrowed her eyes at the vehicle door under his arm.

‘Troy, why have you still got that?’

‘In case we need to lock up the van when we’re not there.’

With remarkable patience, Dr. Janussen smiled. ‘Get rid of it.’

‘Righty-ho!’ He promptly folded the van door several times, like he was making an origami swan, and leant it against the fence. Clearly, the lad was possessed of an exceptional strength.

She continued briskly: ‘The Professor needs us to wheel out Gargantua, the Toposonic Cannon.’

Troy struck a casual pose reminiscent of bodybuilding contests, to the sound of more pubescent squeals. ‘Consider it done.’ He bounded off into the shadows, muscles a-rippling.

There was a strange whinnying sound, and he re-emerged clutching the forelegs of a rather disgruntled police horse over his shoulders, dragging the struggling beast behind him.

The loudhailer barked: ‘No, Troy, the one with the wheels.’

‘Right you are, Pops!’ Troy grinned amiably. Whirling the angry horse somewhat carelessly into a hedge, he spat on his hands and missed, then raced back into the shadows.

I looked over to the source of the rebuke. Some way in the distance, atop a hydraulic platform looming high above the crowd, was a tall, imposing figure, shrouded in a British Warm overcoat, his features shadowed beneath the brim of a brown slouch hat. He raised his loudhailer once more and pointed it directly towards us.

‘Not to panic unnecessarily, Troy,’ he barked, ‘but the very fabric of existence is at stake.’

This sent a rustle of worried murmuring through the crowd.

Across the yard, Troy emerged again with a thick rope around his waist, towing an entire London bus.

‘Not the red one,’ Dr. Janussen smiled patiently. ‘The one that looks like a cannon.’

‘Are you sure a bus won’t do?’ Troy offered a winning grin. ‘It’s the 43 to Highgate Woods.’

‘Get the cannon, Troy.’ Dr. Janussen glanced towards the clock face. Three minutes before midnight. ‘Now!’

Just then, an agitated murmuring swept across the crowd. I heard a man in pinstriped trousers and bowler hat shout: ‘By ginger! The beastly article is starting to scale Big Ben!’

At first, I couldn’t spot the creature, but suddenly, with a loud electric rasp, a powerful beam, brighter than a magnesium flare, blasted from Quanderhorn’s platform, stabbing through the gloom, starkly illuminating the foul travesty of a humanoid as it clung to the masonry. Temporarily blinded, it slipped slightly, to a communal gasp from the throng, then recovered and began once more hauling itself up the tower. It moved with astonishing agility, considering its clumsy, cumbersome frame.

In a voice that chilled me to my combinations, Dr. Janussen hissed: ‘Brian, it’s imperative she doesn’t reach the clock.’

‘Why?’

‘She may prevent it striking twelve—’

‘Why must it strike twelve?’

‘There’s no time to explain right now. We need to warm up the cannon. Get out there and delay her.’

‘What? Wi-with my bazooka?’ I looked down at the infernal tube. I had no idea which way round it went or how to fire it without being catapulted backwards into the Thames.

‘No! Of course not with the bazooka. Distract her.’

‘What do you mean “distract her”?’

‘Flirt with her!’

‘Flirt?’

I looked over at the unspeakable monstrosity, oozing a trail of vile green slime up Sir Charles Barry’s exquisite Gothic revival stonework.

‘In front of all these people?’

‘You are such a Boy Scout.’

‘Why me?’

‘That thing – it’s Virginia.’

‘Virginia?’ I shook my head. The name meant nothing to me.

‘She used to be part of the team.’

I looked around again at the suppurating behemoth. I was suddenly gripped by a very disturbing thought.

‘Was she my wife?’

‘Not everybody’s your wife. What’s wrong with you, for heaven’s sake?’

I glanced again at the grotesque mutation. ‘And I’m supposed to flirt with her?’

‘We all thought she was rather soft on you.’

‘But how did she—’

‘There’s no time to explain right now – get out there and shout sweet nothings!’

‘And why is there never any time to explain anything?’ But Dr. Janussen had hastened over to the extraordinary contraption Troy was finally trundling over the cobblestones. It was on caterpillar tracks, like a tank, but the cannon barrel looked more like a giant elongated version of the valve that my nose had recently accommodated. Troy shimmied up a lamppost, pulled out the bulb and plugged a long flex in its place. The giant valve began to glow blue and buzz like an angry beehive.

I gingerly leant the bazooka against a wall, adjusted my reindeer pullover to cover the flap of my long johns, and strode purposefully towards the beast. At the base of the tower, I cleared my throat and cupped my hands.

‘Uhm… Virginia! Hullo there! It’s… it’s me!’

The abomination stopped in its tracks, slowly turned its hideous visage towards me, and bellowed in a subhuman growl. The word was distorted and garbled, but undeniably recognizable.

‘Brrriiiiiiii-annn?’

I very slightly wet myself.

Chapter Three

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

‘Ha ha. Yes… Honey bunch – it’s me, Brian.’

A large tendril fell off her and hit the ground with a splat beside me.

‘Brrriiiiiiii-annn?’ she/it repeated.

I glanced round at the horrified faces of the rapt crowd. ‘Yes, uhm… Lambikins.’

A wave of distaste swept through the throng. A small urchin threw a half-sucked gobstopper which struck the back of my head painfully and stuck there. I ignored it with dignity.

‘I was wondering if you might – if you feel like it – stop snacking on people’s faces for just one moment and come down from there?’

The beast let out a pained and angry howl, then turned back to the climb.

‘Wait! Virginia! I’ve been thinking – how would you feel about our going steady?’ This stopped the creature briefly, but there were more groans and some rather distasteful insults from the mob. I pressed on desperately: ‘Obviously we wouldn’t want to rush towards a wedding straight away. I mean, at the reception we wouldn’t know what greens to serve with the chicken—’

‘Grunghhnnnuhn!’ Virginia howled. Somehow, I seemed to have enraged her.

‘All right, all right: we’ll get married straight away! We’ll have children together. A boy who takes after me, and a girl who looks like a huge Brussels sprout.’

‘Gnghhnnarhhhgnuhn!’

A nun from a silent order suddenly yelled: ‘You’re a bloody awful flirt!’ Then clapped her hand over her mouth and crossed herself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Troy furiously cranking a handle to elevate the cannon’s glowing barrel. The broccoli creature was almost at the clock face. It was one minute to midnight. I needed to buy just a little more time. Perhaps if I appealed to the person inside the beast.

‘Listen – Virginia – I don’t know what’s happened to make you this way, but try to remember you started out as a human being. And you still have that elusive spark of humanity inside you… I’m sure there’s a future for you of dignity and mutual respect and peaceful co-habitation…’

She stopped. She turned to me. She exploded.

Quanderhorn’s strange device had blasted her into thousands of fragments of sloppy green flesh and ribbons of foul-smelling viscera. The crowd shrieked as the ghastly carrion rained down on them.

There was a small moment of silence. A lurid flatfish-shaped organ splatted onto my shoulder and flapped alarmingly in its death throes. I slapped it to the ground and stamped on it, realising too late I was in my stockinged feet.

Big Ben began to chime the hour. I looked up from my saturated sock to see Troy’s beaming face.

‘Bullseye, eh?’ He winked. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m covered in the green slimy entrails of a respected colleague. How do you think I am?’

A strange expression clouded Troy’s handsome features. His mouth opened and closed like a fish undergoing a rectal examination. By a crab.

‘Never ask Troy to think. You might damage him,’ Dr. Janussen chided. ‘Troy, stop thinking at once.’ This seemed to do the trick.

The loudhailer barked: ‘Simple common folk – you can all go back to your celebrations. Well done everyone. But mostly me.’

The midnight chime rang, but it had a curious tone to it – a sort of whooshing reverse echo – and I felt momentarily light-headed. Had I sustained some kind of minor head injury in the mêlée, I wondered?

There was a small, shuffling pause, then various appalling renditions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ began to break out among the cheering multitude. Of course! New Year! Scanning the revellers, I spotted some ‘Happy 1952’ banners. Some small part of my brain thought that odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

Troy and Dr. Janussen had started packing the equipment away. I was turning to help them when I felt on my elbow a rather brusque tug, which had enough force to spin me round.

I was facing an imposingly tall and wide man in improbable sunglasses. ‘Do you know what this is?’ He nodded down to where a large object was tenting the front of his raincoat.

I licked my dry lips. ‘I’m sincerely hoping it’s a gun.’

The object jerked to the left threateningly. Gun or not, it seemed prudent to heed its instruction.

The mysterious figure ushered me down a dark alley. Was this to be the end for Brian Whatever My Second Name was? Shot in a dingy alleyway, for murky reasons I couldn’t even remember? The echo of our footsteps changed in timbre slightly. I looked up to see we were approaching a dead end. This was it, whatever ‘it’ was. In an attempt to appear slightly less cowardly than I actually was, I turned to face my tormentor and casually asked him ‘What now?’ with my eyebrow. Sadly, having raised the eyebrow, I couldn’t get it down again.

He leant over, I assumed to strangle me, but instead he pressed a protruding brick by my shoulder. The wall behind me slid aside smoothly and, with a reassuringly metallic prod from the overcoat object, I turned again and stepped into the darkness.

Chapter Four

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

I was in some kind of office. I glanced around, but the wall had slid back in place, and my escort had vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I picked out, on a large mahogany desk before me, a brandy decanter, a cigar humidor, a whisky decanter, a spare cigar humidor, a rum decanter, another brandy decanter, what appeared to be a vodka decanter, yet another brandy decanter, a barrel of Watney’s Pale and several cases of Veuve Clicquot Brut 1937.

Behind it all, panting and dribbling, sat an absolutely enormous bulldog in a bow tie. Its cold blue eyes held me for a terrifying moment, then it cleared its throat, leant into the foggy beam of the weak desk lamp and exhaled a plume of blue-grey smoke. Not, in fact, a bulldog at all, but none other than…

‘Prime Minister Winston Churchill!’

‘Agent Penetrator!’

I looked around for this agent person. There was no one in the room but us.

‘Agent who?’

‘Blast and damnation!’ the Great Man rumbled. ‘It’s just as we feared: they’ve arranged for you to “forget” the past few months.’

‘They?’

‘That infernal Quanderhorn and his cronies, of course.’

‘Professor Quanderhorn wiped my memory?’

‘You’re fortunate it was only your memory: one agent had his entire mind wiped. We had to raise him again as if from birth. You can only imagine the horror of potty training an eighteen stone rugger player with a fondness for vindaloos.’

‘So Agent Penetrator is… me?’

‘That’s right, Nylon.’ (Nylon! Yes – that was my name!) ‘You’re an undercover operative, inserted by Her Majesty’s Government, which is to say myself, into Quanderhorn’s team, along with Agent Cuckoo.’

‘There’s another agent?’

Churchill regarded me rather sadly. ‘You’re wearing her intestines as a cravat.’

‘No, that is my cravat…’ I felt round my neck to straighten it. It was wet and slimy. I yelled ‘Urghh!’ involuntarily, and hurled it across the room. ‘That thing on the tower – Virginia: she was a Government spy, too?’

‘You were both supposed to be rooting out just what the blazes that lunatic Quanderhorn’s up to.’

‘Up to? What makes you think he’s up to anything?’

‘Pah!’ Mr. Churchill poured himself a snifter and took a generous draught. He dabbed dry his lips and fixed me once again with his bulldog stare. ‘Let me ask you this: what year is it?’

I cast my mind back to the banners in the crowd. ‘1952, of course.’

Mr. Churchill’s eyes twinkled impishly. ‘And last year was…’

‘Well, obviously, last year was…’ I suddenly realised what had been troubling me about those banners earlier. Clearly, I had some memory. ‘Great Scott! Last year was also 1952!’

‘And it was 1952 the year before that. In fact, by our reckoning, it’s been 1952 for the past sixty-six years.’

This was quite some rabbit hole I’d tumbled into. The same year over and over again?

‘But that’s impossible!’

‘That brigand Quanderhorn does the impossible for breakfast. We don’t know how, but he’s got us trapped in some kind of infernal temporal Möbius band, and we can’t escape.’

‘But if you’re sure it’s Quanderhorn’s doing, why don’t you stop him?’

‘It isn’t so easy! Not the least of our problems is the confounded maniac’s a national hero! He’s saved us from countless Martian invasions, umpteen deadly space rays and three unspeakable outbreaks of reefer madness.’

Martian invasions? Deadly space rays? My head was whirling.

‘But why hasn’t everybody noticed this 1952 thing?’

‘You’ll find, Penetrator, that most people notice hardly anything. It’s the basis upon which we’ve run this country for the last three hundred years.’

‘Well, we should tell them!’

‘Tell them? Good grief, man, there’d be panic in the streets! Society would collapse! There’d be civil war! Riots! Food shortages! Cannibalism! I’d have to resign! Is that what you want, Penetrator? Labour in power?’

I don’t know why, but I immediately snapped back, ‘Good God, no!’ I may have had very little memory, but even I knew that was insanity.

There was a hiss and a slight grating sound behind me. The owner of the overcoat bulge leant in, and gruffled: ‘They’re looking for him,’ then left.

‘You’d best be off, Penetrator,’

‘Right. But…’ I had no idea what on earth was expected of me. And whatever it was, whether I wanted to do it. And there was something else. ‘Um, Prime Minister – I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could have a different code name, is there? Something slightly less… aggressive and treacherous?’

He utterly ignored me. ‘The whole nation is relying upon you, Penetrator. Find out what’s going on, and report back to me.’

‘How will I get in touch?’

‘I’ll find you, Penetrator, I’ll find you.’

I turned to leave, then turned back. ‘One more thing, sir: can you possibly tell me who I am?’

But Mr. Churchill had gone, leaving behind nothing but the faint aroma of Havana cigars, brandy and, for some reason, herring.

I wandered back up the alley trying to gather my very scattered thoughts. Was I really a spy, or was I really a scientist? It was all devilishly confusing. I found myself back in the celebratory bustle, and fought through the merry, singing, kissing crowd towards Dr. Janussen.

The van was almost packed. I felt slightly guilty. Troy looked up from hoisting an improbably heavy slab of machinery into the vehicle. ‘There he is! Brian – where’ve you been?’

‘Well, I was just…’ I began. Cold as the weather was, I found myself suddenly sweating. My tongue seemed to double in size, as if I’d just chewed a wasp. Try as I might, I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t, quite frankly, even think of a word. ‘…muhnamunhah.’

They stared at me. ‘Brian – you may have forgotten that you’re very, very bad at lying,’ Gemma smiled pityingly.

‘I’m not lying,’ I lied. ‘It’s just…’ Then, with a merciful inspiration: ‘There isn’t time to explain right now.’

They seemed satisfied by this, thank heavens, and we packed up in silence.

That had been a close call. Whoever these people were, I needed to keep them on my side if I was ever to find out what the devil had happened to me.

Chapter Five

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

The van had been loaded into the belly of an ex-army cargo plane, and we were en route to the Professor’s lab, which I gathered was ‘somewhere on the road to Carlisle’. Whatever that meant.

Alarmingly, the pilots’ seats had been removed from the cockpit and replaced with what appeared to be a cannibalised player piano, its bridge pins and hammer flanges connected by an intricate system of levers and wires to various flight controls. It played a complex, silent symphony on the instrument panel as reams of punched paper rolled furiously upwards. Despite its impossibly eccentric nature, the peculiar mechanism did seem to be keeping the bird in trim, at least.

Quanderhorn himself had clearly seen fit to travel separately by some other, and doubtless superior, means, leaving us wretched minions to fend for ourselves in steerage.

From an equipment locker in the fuselage, I’d managed to dig out some army surplus trousers to restore my dignity, and a pair of mauve moccasins to instantly remove it again.

Despite the metallic shuddering and the relentless chopping of the propellers, the others had managed to fall asleep quite easily. Dr. Janussen sprawled elegantly sideways on an unforgiving wooden bench, one foot crooked slightly above the other, slender hands tucked under one lovely cheek as she breathed gently in and out with a sweet, melodic and surprisingly penetrating snore. Troy had wrapped himself, cocoon-like, in some sort of curious white netting he’d found somewhere. He was smiling, mostly, but occasionally he would let out a small high-pitched yelp, and his feet would flail about desperately for a second or two, then he would sink back into his peaceful slumber.

No sleep for me. My mind raced back and forwards over the patchwork of incomplete facts about myself I’d managed to stitch together rather poorly.

I worked for this mysterious Professor Quanderhorn, who was being investigated by the Government, in the form of me. Also. I seemed to have some sort of attachment to Dr. Janussen, about which she remained distressingly ambiguous. What had happened to me to make me forget vast swathes of my life? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? Or was it the result of some kind of scientific experiment gone wrong, as had obviously happened to the wretched Virginia?

Beyond that, things got considerably murkier.

Plainly, I could remember certain things. I could speak, for instance, and read and write. I seemed to know London quite well, and I’d recognised the Prime Minister almost immediately. I had, however, no recollection of my past in any way. Not my parents, nor any siblings, certainly not my schooling: nothing at all biographical.

I was clearly not a Cockney – I didn’t say ‘stone the crows’ or anything like that – but beyond that, I really had no idea about my background. My hands were quite smooth, so I obviously wasn’t a manual labourer, and I had no tattoos, so I’d never been a sailor. I tried saluting, but I didn’t seem very good at it – I wasn’t sure which way round my hand went at the top – so any military career was probably out of the reckoning. Quickly checking the others were still slumbering, I stood up on an impulse and tried tap-dancing. No good at that, either, especially in embarrassing suede moccasins. Thank heavens I wasn’t in show business!

I found a long stick and made an attempt at drawing the head of a noble horse in the dust at my feet, but it just looked like a slug with a grin. No George Stubbs, I. Ah! But at least I could recall art history. And some algebra! I could decline the Latin noun mensa with consummate ease, but that appeared to be the entire extent of my grip on other languages. On the other hand, I seemed to have a quite startling reservoir of arcane cricket minutiae. I found I instinctively didn’t really trust foreigners, and the thought of a lukewarm suet pudding and thick custard with a rubbery skin filled me with deep yearning.

Clearly, I was an Englishman.

In fact, I was beginning to feel a deep-seated need to stand behind someone and wait for something.

More than that, however, I really couldn’t tell. Was I a good man? I certainly felt like one. But then, why was I spying on these people who seemed to be my friends? And hadn’t I just acted as a decoy so a dear colleague could be blasted to smithereens?

Despite these tortured thoughts, and the occasional glance to reassure myself that the piano was flying the plane properly, I found the regular chop-chop-chop of the props had begun to make my eyes feel heavy, and I surrendered, finally, to Morpheus’ embrace.

It was a troubled sleep, in which I ran backwards and forwards with no trousers, pursued by huge psychopathic vegetables spouting Latin grammar and hurling sloppy custard-covered intestines at my head. What could it possibly mean?

And there were other dreams: I was lounging on a riverbank with a woman, listening to an enormous radio – was that my mother? My sister? My wife?… Me, in a dark cave tied in a chair with giant mole-like creatures giving me Chinese burns while chanting some infernal dirge… Tearing open my shirt to find a player piano roll embedded in my chest… Walking into Lyons’ Corner House at 213 Piccadilly and being served afternoon tea by Winston Churchill in a waitress outfit. I had no idea which were memories and which simply disturbing dreams. I was praying the naked trigonometry exam with my fountain pen full of bull semen was the latter.

The Professor’s laboratory was far away from… well, from everywhere. We made our way from a makeshift airfield in a very old jeep with a large Q stencilled on its side. It appeared to have had its roof sawn off and its suspension deliberately removed. Troy spent a great deal of time looking for the door, until Dr. Janussen pointed out it wasn’t there, and he was finally persuaded to jump in.

For some reason, it became clear that I was expected to drive, and I was relieved to find I remembered how. More interestingly, whilst Dr. Janussen was supposed to give me directions, I seemed to know the way instinctively. Though any mental picture of our destination still eluded me.

On the Carlisle road, the trip was merely horribly uncomfortable, as the tiniest stone in our path rocked the entire vehicle, but once our route took us off it, things rather deteriorated. We lurched down a long, overgrown path, cratered with pot-holes, over jutting boulders and through thick bracken. Overhanging branches snapped alarmingly on the windscreen and raked the top of my head. I found it exhausting trying to wrestle the wheel just to keep us pointing vaguely in the right direction.

I’d planned to ask Dr. Janussen a great many questions, but conversation was impossible. Troy, however, had once again fallen into deep and sonorous slumber. This time, he seemed to have glued himself to the seat by means that escaped me, and was untroubled by the bone-rattling vibrations. And was it my imagination, or had his skin turned ever so slightly the colour of the upholstery?

As we got closer, I began to spot a sequence of warning signs nailed to the trees, featuring mind-boggling graphics I couldn’t begin to guess the meaning of: a silhouette of a man being rained on by penguins; a Red Indian being electrocuted whilst sitting on a fat woman; a rabbit and an ‘=’ sign followed by a skull and crossbones with a Robin Hood hat on. And those were the less bewildering ones.

Finally, the rude forest gave way to a clearing, leading to the crest of a hill. As we trundled over its brow, the dawning sun cast a red/orange glow over the long-abandoned exhausted quarry below, inside which the vast laboratory complex nestled.

Chapter Six

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

It was far more extensive than I’d imagined. It sprawled below us, a hotchpotch of dozens of buildings and outhouses, scattered randomly. At its heart were rows of ex-military warehousing, Nissen huts and the like, but there were many and varied later additions, some conventional, others inexplicably eccentric. One or two of them towered dizzyingly upwards, to be cut off by the early morning fog.

We lurched down towards a set of imposing gates, which were cast from some peculiar shiny chocolate brown alloy I couldn’t identify. I stopped the jeep.

There was an unnerving pause, then a chorus of servos screeched into life, and a whole bank of articulated box cameras swivelled as one in our direction.

I was unaccountably nervous. For some reason, I pulled the genial face I usually put on for photographs. The one Mumsie always told me off about, because it made me look like Simple Simon. (What? Was that an actual memory?)

Eventually, the cameras lost interest and turned away, dropping their heads. The great gates began to swing open majestically.

From a high-mounted speaker a curiously metallic woman’s voice said: ‘You are positively identified. Welcome back, everyone.’

‘Thank you.’ I smiled, and turned to Dr. Janussen. ‘Who’s that charming lady? Is she the Professor’s wife?’

‘Not every woman in the world has to be someone’s wife! You clot!’ she chided, rather more brusquely than was called for in my opinion. Looking closer, I noticed there was something ‘off’ about her appearance, but I couldn’t fathom what.

I drove very slowly through several layers of indescribably strange defensive measures, including, rather worryingly at one point, a dog kennel the size of a sentry box. From its dark interior, a pair of red glowing eyes followed us hungrily. Clearly, the Professor did not welcome the uninvited visitor.

Finally, we rattled up to what I assumed was the main laboratory building, which appeared to be an old abandoned fever hospital. I pulled up in the cobbled quadrangle outside it, where some very peculiar vehicles were parked, all stamped with that same Q stencil.

Troy opened his eyes and pulled himself off the seat with a strange sort of suction noise, and panicked momentarily trying to find a door again, until Dr. Janussen brought him a loose one stacked nearby. ‘Thanks, Gem.’ He grabbed it and jumped to the ground. ‘Thought I’d be trapped in there all day.’

The good doctor’s brow was furrowed as she peered intensely into the wing mirror, clearly perturbed by something. ‘Are you all right, Dr. Janussen?’ I asked.

‘Look at my face, Brian,’ she ordered earnestly, turning to me. ‘Tell me honestly: what do you see?’

I gazed at that lovely countenance. Again I sensed there was something askew. But I couldn’t for the life of me work it out.

‘It’s a spot, isn’t it?’ she smiled, with a faintly unnerving kind of calm.

I leant in closer and squinted. There may have been some kind of minor discolouration about the size of a single pore, just beside her nose. ‘There might just be a tiny—’

‘Trust you to point it out! How d’you think that makes me feel?’ She punched me quite hard on the shoulder, spun on her heels and attempted to march with dignity towards the lab, her hand cupped over her nose. Sadly, this obscured her view, causing her to stumble ungraciously over protruding cobblestones until she tottered through the entrance and raced up a stairway.

Troy and I exchanged glances, then tramped across the courtyard after her.

A small plumpish man appeared at the doors to greet us. His upper lip was obscured by a full tash, which had at one time been well kempt, and probably at that one time had considerably fewer biscuit crumbs decorating it. He wore a faded dark green uniform and peaked cap to which the letters of the word ‘JANITOR’ had at one time been glued, though the ‘J’, the ‘A’, the ‘O’ and the ‘R’ had long since fallen off, leaving only the word ‘NIT’. I didn’t say anything.

He called to Troy: ‘You can leave that door, young sir – we’ve plenty of our own.’

‘Oh, right-ho, Jenkins,’ the lad chirruped. He hurled the door away a quite superhuman distance and disappeared inside with a cheery wave.

‘Good morning, Mr. Nylon, sir.’ Jenkins offered a very smart salute. Turns out the palms face outwards.

‘And you’re… Jenkins… the janitor?’

‘Yes, sir. The Professor told me you’d gorn and lost your memory again.’

‘Again?’

‘We’ll just do the usual thing: I’ll show you around the place, as per. This way, sir…’

For some reason, I instinctively mistrusted this Jenkins fellow: there was something going on behind his eyes that belied his servile manner. He led me down corridors with dark green linoleum floors and chocolate brown painted walls, seemingly without end.

We walked in silence for a while. There were yet more inexplicable warning signs on most of the doors: a coalman whose teeth were on fire; a pair of goggles with legs fleeing a giant lightning bolt with a bow tie. Some doors had been nailed up extremely securely with planks across them, others hung off their hinges loosely. More than one colour of smoke issued from underneath many of them. The occasional alcove held what looked like heavily modified fire extinguishers crossed with flame-throwers, others fire axes, and now and then, disturbingly, the odd samurai sword.

Out of the blue, Jenkins piped up: ‘Rum business, innit, sir?’

‘What particular business would that be?’

‘What they done to Miss Virginia, turning her into a vegetable like that. Ain’t decent.’Course they says it was an accident, but they always says that.’

I felt a horrible tightening in my bowels. ‘Are you suggesting it wasn’t an accident?’

‘Least said, soonest mended.’ Jenkins tapped the side of his nose and half-winked. It wasn’t a particularly fetching gesture. However, I took the hint, and we mounted a staircase without further conversation. At the landing, we passed through a green baize door to a corridor where the décor was somewhat softer and less institutionalised.

‘Here’s the living quarters, sir.’ Somehow, Jenkins managed to imbue the ‘sir’ with a kind of dumb insolence.

I heard a strange buzzing thudding sound, like a giant wasp hitting a window. I looked at Jenkins querulously.

‘That’s young Master Troy Quanderhorn’s room.’

‘Quanderhorn? Is he the Professor’s son?’

‘They put it about he’s the Professor’s son,’ Jenkins nodded, ‘but some do say he grew him in a petri dish.’

‘What?’

‘Used his own genetical material and made him extra strong with a pinch of insect.’

‘He’s part insect?’ Well, that did explain rather a lot.

‘Word to the wise, sir: do watch out when he’s swarming.’

‘Swarming?’

‘The Professor’s terrible proud of him, though. Claims he’s a “major breakthrough in Artificial Stupidity”. Least said, soonest mended, sir.’

We passed the next door. Jenkins nodded at it. ‘Dr. Janussen you already know.’ He raised a cheeky eyebrow. What was this upstart implying?

‘Was she all right just now? I mean, she seemed a bit—’

‘Nothing wrong with her. Nothing at all, sir. Excepting half her brain is clockwork.’

What did one say to such an outlandish assertion? I tried: ‘Surely not!’

‘She was in a car crash, and the Professor had to rebuild her slightly.’Course they says it was a car crash, but they always says that.’

‘Goodness! A car crash!’ The poor darling. ‘And you say her brain is clockwork?’

‘Just the right-hand side, sir, the logical half.’ He stopped and drew me in closer, lowering his voice and treating me to a wave of Mackeson breath. ‘Sometimes her emotions run the mechanism down, and then…’ He mimed a silent explosion. ‘All I’m saying: if her ear starts to rotate, just get yourself out of there, sharpish.’

Of course! That was what I’d found peculiar about her appearance in the jeep: her ear was at an angle of forty-five degrees! I needed to ask him more before he said “Least said, soonest mended”.

‘Jenkins – this rotating ear—’

‘You’re going to have to meet the Professor, of course.’ He cut me off rather impertinently. ‘I’ll need to go and clear it with him. I’m sure you’d like to freshen up in your own room, Mr. Nylon…’

‘Oh yes. Very much.’

‘Unfortunately, we can’t have you wandering by yourself around willy-nilly with your memory all shot, so if it’s OK with you, sir, I’m just going to put you in here, temporarily, with the Martian.’

Chapter Seven

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

‘I need to— Wh— Did you just say “Martian”?’

‘That’s right, sir. He’s a hostage, from the last Invasion.’Tween you and me, I don’t think they wanted him back’.

He slid open the door.

I half expected the room to be dark and reek of sulphur, but it seemed bright and smelled of the kind of cheap aftershave a cad might wear.

‘Word to the wise.’ Jenkins leant in conspiratorially again. ‘He learned Earth language watching How Do You View, starring Terry-Thomas – they says it’s the only telly-vision signal they can receive up there, but—’

‘Least said?’

‘In one, sir. His name’s “Guuuurk”, by the way. Four u’s.’

I tried it. ‘Guuu-uuurk?’

‘Close enough, sir.’ And with a rather impudently firm hand to my back, he shoved me into the Martian’s abode.

I had no recollection of meeting a Martian before, but I did know they were our deadly enemies. I was expecting a furious great beast, chained to the walls and raging. But the figure in front of me was standing quite free and unencumbered. I bunched my fists by my sides involuntarily as he slowly turned towards me.

He had a bulbous purple head, about twice the size of a human’s, with six eyes arranged symmetrically in pairs, three on either side of his face, a prominent beaky nose, and beneath it a rather fetching pencil moustache. He was surprisingly dapper, sporting a gold velvet smoking jacket with ebony facings and slightly shiny elbows, black dress trousers, sharply pressed, and a pair of inappropriately coloured moccasins, such as might be worn by a particularly shifty Italian gigolo. And at the moment, me.

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.’

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 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?’

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?

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.

I zipped up my silver bootees, and took my helmet under my arm, but as I made to leave I spotted a mirror at the end of the lockers, and realised I had no recollection of what I actually looked like. I strode up to it, expecting to see a fairly close replica of Colonel Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Instead, I saw a small, weedy chap wrapped in tinfoil, cradling a goldfish bowl. My muddy brown hair was spiky on top and shaved to extinction everywhere else, so my pate resembled a desert island. I had a nose that was more pointed than I would have hoped, and overlarge bushbaby eyes, bestowing me with a permanently startled expression.

I sighed, and stepped out as resolutely as I could manage under the circumstances.

The hangar was vast – bigger than four rugby pitches. Dozens of curious craft were scattered as far as the eye could see, some half-built, others half-destroyed. One or two of them actually seemed intact.

Everyone was waiting for me, rather impatiently, beside a huge, bulky object draped with an enormous dust sheet. Troy and Dr. Janussen were also flight-suited, which I found alarming. Surely they weren’t planning on coming along for the ride? This would not be a suitable mission for women. And there was no such thing as a suitable mission for Troy.

‘At last, Nylon!’ The Professor took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. ‘Ladies and gentlemen: I present to you…’

He whipped off the cover with a flourish.

‘Gargantua – the Prototype Plutonium Cell Hyper-Sound Streamliner.’

There was a silence.

I leant forward. ‘Uhm, is it behind that unusually large dustbin?’

Dr. Janussen shook her head. ‘It is that unusually large dustbin.’

Quanderhorn was unabashed. ‘Few people realise that the dustbin is the most aerodynamically perfect form for hypersonic travel.’

I scanned the disreputable-looking heap of ill-fitted tin panels and corroded rivets. It didn’t look tremendously perfect. Or in any way safe.

Guuuurk looked at me with what I assume was mock adoration. ‘I don’t know how you have the guts to fly a rust bucket like that, Brian. You certainly have our undying admiration.’

‘I have to explain here,’ I tried to keep the pitch of my voice to a masculine level, ‘that I don’t have the faintest idea how to pilot anything.’

‘Don’t worry, Nylon.’ The Professor wrenched open the hatch. Several screws clattered to the ground. ‘I’ve simplified the controls to just two buttons. See?’ He waved his hand towards the rather stark instrument panel. ‘Green, “Go”, and Red, “Go Faster”.’

As was often the case, Dr. Janussen voiced what we were all thinking. ‘And how does it stop?’

There was another silence.

The Professor reluctantly conceded: ‘A third button is in development.’

Guuuurk peered over my shoulder. ‘What’s that horrible mess all over the driving seat?’

Quanderhorn made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s the previous test pilot. It appears the human body can’t entirely withstand Mach 17.’

‘Entirely withstand?’ I croaked. ‘The man is jam!’

‘Which is why I’ve since lined the walls with hundreds of specially tempered armadillo carcasses. Few people realise that the strongest—’

‘Professor, I am not flying this contraption.’

‘The world will end in thirteen minutes and thirty seconds.’

‘Men!’ Dr. Janussen shook her head dismissively. ‘Get out of the way!’ She pushed brusquely past me and began climbing into the hatch. ‘I’ll fly it.’

I grasped her arm to hold her back. ‘I couldn’t possibly allow that. It’s far, far too dangerous.’

She shook herself clear and slowly turned to fix me with a Frigidaire stare. ‘Never, never ever tell me what you’ll allow me to do.’ I could feel my internal organs frosting up. I stammered an apology.

‘That’s jake with me!’ Troy chirped. ‘I’ll fly it. Sounds like fun.’

I knew when I was beaten. ‘OK, OK, I’ll do it. There’s no point in all three of us risking our lives.’

There was yet another silence.

‘Actually,’ the Professor said, ‘there is.’

Despite the paucity of the controls, apparently, the craft also required a co-pilot to monitor communications and a stoker to shovel the fuel elements into the nuclear reactor.

The cockpit was small and cramped and reeked of dead armadillo.

Dr. Janussen seated herself adjacent to me and flicked through the frequency guide in the radio manual, while Troy, behind us, gave up trying to apply Vitalis to his hair through his space helmet and took up his atomic shovel.

There was a large windscreen in front of us, and two smaller ones either side. Portholes dotted the sides.

We were travelling along the launch track towards the take-off pad, running a standard preflight check.

Dr. Janussen called out ‘Green button’ and I replied ‘Check’.

Then she called out ‘Red button’ and I replied ‘Check’.

That seemed to be it.

‘Well,’ I smiled thinly, ‘that was the shortest instrument check ever.’

Troy frowned. ‘I got lost after “Blue Button”.’

We began to tilt into launch position. My woggle fell out of my pocket. Fortunately, neither of the others noticed: they were watching the world slip away through the side windows.

The comms desk burst into life. ‘Tower calling Dustbin Deathtrap! Come in, Dustbin Deathtrap!’

Dr. Janussen corrected him. ‘That is not the name of the vessel, Guuuurk.’

‘Understood,’ the Martian replied jovially. ‘Come in, Gargantua, the Prototype Plutonium Cell Hyper-Sound Dustbin Deathtrap.’

‘Why is the Martian running things?’ I asked Dr. Janussen, alarmed. ‘Where’s the Professor?’ She simply shrugged, unperturbed.

‘Bit of a crisis at the farm, old thing,’ Guuuurk cut in. ‘It appears the Professor’s self-shearing sheep have got hold of some visiting rabbis. He’ll be back as soon as he can wrestle the clippers off them. I’ll be remotely controlling the craft until you reach the target area.’

I flicked my eyes sidewards at Dr. Janussen, but again she seemed unfazed by the notion that our fate lay in the be-thumbed hands of one of humankind’s greatest enemies.

The metallic voice kicked in again. ‘Launch in twenty seconds.’ Then a brief pause and ‘The world will end in…’ Suddenly, the voice struck a note of exasperation. ‘Look, I can’t do both of these.’

‘I’m frightfully sorry, Delores,’ Guuuurk cooed, ‘I’m afraid you’ll simply have to. We’re terribly short-staffed today.’

‘Tch!’ The metallic voice grumbled. ‘The world will end in blah blah blah. Launch in fifteen, fourteen…’

As the twin countdowns continued, Guuuurk cut in: ‘I’ll be firing you straight up into space, you’ll spend a few minutes in parking orbit, and then you’ll loop back down, experiencing tremendous G-force and your faces will look incredibly amusing on my monitor. Ha ha, I love that bit!’

‘…two, one!’

The rockets fired and we launched with astonishing speed. From somewhere in the cockpit, there was a skull-piercing high-pitched scream of utter terror and distress.

Chapter Eleven

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

The craft was buffeting wildly. I swear I could hear rivets bursting like popcorn in the hull.

I yelled over the din: ‘Will that person please stop screaming?’

Dr. Janussen yelled back: ‘That’s you, Brian.’

Alarmingly, it was indeed me. ‘Aaaaaahhhh! Oh yes. Sorry. I just looked down and saw the Earth shrinking away from us! I’ve never seen that before.’

‘Yes, you have. Often. And you always scream like that. There’s really nothing to get nervous ab—’

There was the sudden burst of air, and a fantastic maelstrom of pressure tried to suck us from our seats into the black lifeless void.

I whipped my head round towards the rear of the ship, to find the source of the breach.

Someone had opened a window.

A red emergency light started flashing, a siren whoop-whooped, and the metallic voice kicked in: ‘Hull integrity compromised. Oxygen depletion in… hang on, I’ve got to go off and do the end of the world thing. Just work it out yourselves.’

Straining against the overwhelming suction, I prised my fingernails out of the arm rest. I unharnessed and, holding on desperately to whatever I could, I struggled manfully against the fantastic force that was intent on dragging me inexorably towards the back of the craft. Just as I was nearly there and stretching for the porthole cover, a stanchion I was hanging on to tore free from its housing, and I was almost sucked outside to a cold oblivion.

Somehow I contrived to brace myself against a bulkhead and finally managed to reach over and wrench the wretched thing shut.

I sank to the floor, panting and drenched in the sweat of near catastrophe.

‘Sorry,’ Troy said. ‘I thought a cigarette might relax me.’

‘What?’ I dragged myself upright.

Troy took a puff. ‘There ought to be some sort of sticker here about not opening the window in outer space.’

‘You mean,’ Gemma called, ‘next to the sticker that says “Troy – Do Not Open This Window In Outer Space”?’

Troy tapped the sticker. ‘Yes, right next to that. Nearly sucked my face off!’

I hauled myself back to the pilot seat.

‘Troy, please just keep stoking, or whatever it is you’re doing,’ I pleaded, ‘and don’t do anything else dangerous.’

‘Right,’ he replied. ‘I’d better get rid of this lit cigarette, then…’

I was sucked right back to the bulkhead, cracking my head rather painfully. The glass visor of my helmet was torn away and whipped into the void of space. I was now upside-down and had to fight the porthole closed with my feet, losing one of my silver bootees to the great beyond in the process. I finally managed to stamp it shut. The suction ceased, and I crashed to the floor, again landing painfully on my head. I was getting quite cross with Troy.

‘Darn!’ he grimaced. ‘Nearly sucked my face off! There should be some sort of sticker!’

Just as I’d strapped myself back in again, the craft lurched and slowed at the apex of its path. Guuuurk buzzed in through the comms desk. ‘Levelling off into parking orbit. Estimated time of arrival at the mountain in three point five Earth minutes.’

Finally, I had a few brief moments in which to quiz the evasive Dr. Janussen about all the things she never had time to explain.

‘Um – Dr. Janussen… Gemma,’ I stammered. ‘We haven’t really had a chance to get to know each other yet…’

‘We already know each other, Brian,’ she replied stiffly. ‘You’ve just forgotten.’

‘I know. But – I just have this terrible foreboding that this mission may not end particularly…’ How could I put this so as not to alarm her feminine sensibilities? ‘…cleanly.’

‘Oh, we’re goners! Since no one has yet broken the X-barrier, much less survived it, I think there’s an astonishingly high probability we’ll be shredded into tiny pieces.’

I was amazed at her calm. ‘Really? You don’t think we’ll—’

‘Live? Oh no. It’s pure rationality.’

‘Well. Yes. Well. Exactly.’ I was somewhat nonplussed by her seeming indifference, but I ploughed on regardless. ‘And I’d hate to end up as Johnny-in-the-clouds without clearing up a couple of things. What was all that business about Big Ben? Why did we have to prevent Virginia reaching the clock before it struck?’

Dr. Janussen cast her eyes downwards. Her cool demeanour now seemed to be a little shaken. ‘I’d rather not talk about Virginia at the moment,’ she slowly replied.

‘Why not?’ I foolishly pursued.

‘Because it makes me feel… because…’

There was a sharp ratcheting sound and her ear revolved about twelve degrees anticlockwise.

Chapter Twelve

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

‘Uh-oh,’ Troy said, rather indiscreetly.

Remembering Jenkins’ warning, I said very carefully: ‘Uhm, Dr. Janussen – your right ear seems to be rotating.’

It revolved further at that very moment.

‘My ear?’ she suddenly exploded. ‘What’s my ear got to do with it, you half-witted lummox?’

‘You have to twist it, Brian!’ Troy hissed in a stage whisper.

‘Twist her ear?’

I reached my hand out towards her.

‘Don’t you touch my ear! We’ve just been forced to splatter one of our dearest friends all over Big Ben, and you’re talking about ears!’

‘You need to wind her back up now!’ Troy insisted.

With Dr. Janussen’s eyes burning pure fury at me, I lunged and twisted her ear clockwise. It made a satisfying ratchet sound, but was now upside down.

‘It needs three more turns!’ Troy hissed again.

‘Touch that again,’ she cautioned with that familiar terrifying calmness, ‘and I’ll punch you in the face.’

I twisted again.

She punched me in the face.

She was quite good at punching. But I had no choice: I had to carry on.

Twist. Punch!

Twist. Punch!

Finally, and at the cost of much pain, the ear was righted. Dr. Janussen’s expression unfroze slowly, as if she were waking from a dream.

‘Sorry,’ she smiled, ‘what were you saying?’

‘Good Lord! How often does that happen?’ I asked, dabbing my bleeding nose.

‘How often does what happen?’ She seemed genuinely oblivious.

Troy shook his head in a slow warning.

‘I see…’ I said slowly.

‘Brian!’ Dr. Janussen exclaimed with concern. ‘What the devil have you done to your face?’

‘Oh… it just… bleeds sometimes. And my teeth get loose.’

Dr. Janussen was about to pursue the point, when the comms desk burst into life again. This time it was Quanderhorn himself, slightly muffled at first, as if he were standing back from the microphone. ‘Shalom, gentlemen. The Government will fully reimburse you for the beards.’

‘Oh good.’ Troy paused in his shovelling. ‘Pops is back!’

Quanderhorn came in at full volume. ‘Listen carefully, Nylon: as soon as the target’s in sight, press the green button, which will take you through the X-barrier.’

I nodded. ‘Roger – the green button takes us into the X-barrier.’

‘At that point the gravitational wave will be triggered and there’ll be almost unbearable G-force, whereupon our remote piloting controls will no longer work, so it’s vital you then press the red button to take you safely clear of the blast. Got that?’

‘Roger – then the red button to fire us out again to safety.’

Troy asked: ‘And the blue button?’

Dr. Janussen’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly. ‘There is no blue button, Troy.’

There was a moment while Troy processed the information, then he suddenly panicked. ‘There is no blue button! There is no blue button!’ He raced around like a frantic blowfly trapped under a glass. ‘There is no blue button!’ He stopped flapping his arms around and began patting his pockets. ‘Where’s my cigarettes?’

‘Troy, n—’

This time the porthole was open only long enough to suck out my oxygen mask, whip me backwards over the chair and wedge my head between two racks of metal shelving. Troy fought it closed again fairly easily with his remarkable strength.

‘Wow!’ he yelped. ‘Nearly sucked my face off!’

The Professor sighed. ‘The sticker didn’t help, then,’ he remarked unnecessarily. ‘Listen, Nylon: this is probably the time to tell you, when you pierce the X-barrier, you may encounter certain… peculiar phenomena.’

My neck hairs bristled. ‘What sort of peculiar phenomena?’

‘This is purely in the realm of speculation,’ the Professor conceded. ‘but according to my best hypothesis, you may experience what I can only describe as a “Reality Reversal”.’

My neck hairs had not lied. ‘And by “Reality Reversal”, you mean?’

The Professor made a strange sucking sound, as if he were preparing himself to explain the unexplainable to a chimpanzee in a bellboy outfit. ‘You may find that when you speak, you say the exact opposite of what you think.’

‘The opposite of what I think…?’ I couldn’t fathom what that might mean.

‘My advice to you all is: try not to think.’

Dr. Janussen called over her shoulder: ‘Troy, you may be immune.’

I heard manoeuvring thrusters firing, and through the windscreen, the Earth hove majestically into view once more.

‘All right, chaps!’ Guuuurk cut in. ‘Firing plutonium re-entry jets in… five seconds!’

‘Shouldn’t I be doing that?’

‘You’ve got enough on your plate, Delores.’

‘Thank you, you’re so sweet. The world will end in… seven minutes.’

I felt a brief surge of joy at the prospect of returning to terra firma, then the jets fired and we blasted towards the planet at ferocious speed.

‘Is that me screaming again?’ I asked.

Dr. Janussen said, ‘Yes. You always do that, as well.’

I stopped screaming in time to hear Guuuurk saying: ‘Straightening up…’

The external thrusters fired again, and we were hurtling directly parallel to the ocean’s surface.

‘The world will end in… six minutes and thirty seconds.’

Quanderhorn barked: ‘Press the green button!’

Straining against the incredible forces that wanted to crush me deep into my seat, I reached forward and for a moment worried that I might not be able to perform the simplest job a pilot ever had in the history of aviation. But with sheer will I actually managed to reach the green button and press it.

My head nearly snapped off as we hurtled forward even faster than before. My cheeks seemed desperate to reach my ears. Even Dr. Janussen’s face seemed slightly less lovely, her skin rippling like a lake in a stiff breeze. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear Guuuurk laughing like the policeman from the famous 78 record.

And yet we were still accelerating. Without any warning, the terrain outside shimmered, as if we were no longer part of it, then warped in upon itself, into strange topological shapes painfully blazing with light brighter than the physical world had ever seen. I was aware that my forehead was rivered with sweat and simultaneously colder than the Arctic tundra. I could scarcely pull in each breath, and exhaling was even harder. The blood in my head was pounding like the Mole People song. Charred armadillos were dropping into my lap.

Quanderhorn’s voice returned: ‘You should be hitting the X-barrier any moment… now!’

Chapter Thirteen

Transcript from the Quanderbox Flight Auto-Stenographic device of Flight 002 of Gargantua 1, January 1st, 1952, 11.43 Zulu Time

QUANDERHORN (CONTROL): You should be hitting the X-barrier any moment… now!

QUANDERHORN: Bullseye! You’ve sliced right through the mountain. Well done, everyone. But mostly me.

ANNOUNCEMENT: End of world averted! End of world averted!

TROY (STOKER): Well, that wasn’t so bad.

NYLON (CAPTAIN): No, it was quite fun. (PAUSE) Why didn’t I say that? What isn’t going on?

JANUSSEN (NAVIGATOR): It’s not the Reality Reversal!

QUANDERHORN: Yes! The Reality Reversal’s happening exactly as I predicted. Press the red button now!

NYLON: The green button?

QUANDERHORN: Yes, the red button.

NYLON: (PAUSE) Just to be unclear, Professor: you don’t want me to press the red button?

QUANDERHORN: Absolutely: I don’t want you to press the green button.

NYLON: There isn’t a terrible problem with the button!

QUANDERHORN: What, dammit?

NYLON: I can reach it easily! There’s so little acceleration force.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Gravitational wave approaching! Impact in two minutes.

QUANDERHORN: Press it now! Before it’s too late!

NYLON: I can!

NYLON: It’s well within my reach! Troy! You won’t have to do it!

TROY: Obviously not, if it’s well within your reach.

QUANDERHORN: No, Troy! They’re speaking ‘opposite’! You’re the only one strong enough to reach that button.

TROY: Which button?

JANUSSEN: The blue button!

TROY: There is no blue button!

NYLON: Yes, Troy! Not the red button!

TROY: So, which button is it, then?

GUUUURK: I told you two buttons would be too complicated for them, Professor.

JANUSSEN: Troy – listen to me carelessly!

TROY: OK.

JANUSSEN: Don’t – press – the – red – button!

TROY: I’m not! Why is everyone shouting at me?

NYLON: Because you’re a complete genius!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Gravitational wave impact in ninety seconds.

QUANDERHORN: Troy! If you don’t press that red button immediately, the gravitational wave is going to slice the ship in two!

JANUSSEN: That’s wrong: don’t listen to your father!

TROY: I don’t know what to do.

NYLON: We’re all going to live! Delightfully!

Chapter Fourteen

Gorday the enth of Phobos, Martian Year 5972 Pink

Secret Report to Martian Command, by Guuuurk. Also known as ‘Guuuurk the Indomitable’, ‘Guuuurk the Free’ and ‘Guuuurk the Unimprisonable’.

I have been imprisoned for the past four years by the diabolical Terranean Professor Darius Quanderhorn, enemy number one of our glorious Red Planet. The wretchedly incompetent misfits who call themselves his ‘team’ had got into yet another of their disastrous scrapes. How this species is still in charge here is utterly baffling. They were attempting to perform a simple manoeuvre that required one of them merely to press a button. A button! But even this was proving too much of a challenge for their flimsy human intellects.

True, they were travelling at speeds never before experienced, and had broken what the Professor calls ‘the X-barrier’, which reverses the connection between thought and speech, so they could only say the opposite of what they meant.

Despite my fierce protestations, and in defiance of the Interplanetary Uranian Convention on Prisoners of Failed Invasions, Quanderhorn had compelled me to monitor proceedings from the control tower, which at that moment largely consisted of pathetic shouts of distress from the imperilled vessel.

Brian, the test pilot, was wailing: ‘My underwear is completely dry and comfortable!’, whereupon his female compatriot commented ‘And I’m delighted to be sitting right next to you.’

Only the idiot boy, who you remember is part insect, had the strength to reach forward to the escape button, but he was, of course, too much of an idiot to understand the reality reversal. All in all, a typical day for Quanderhorn’s so-called ‘Task Force’. Task Farce if you ask me. Ha ha ha![1]

The Professor leant over me and barked into the microphone: ‘Troy, listen to me: you’re the only one who’s immune from the Thought Reversal Effect, and you’re the only one who’s strong enough to reach that button. Do exactly what I—’

At which point, there was a bang and a fizz, and the comms bank went dead.

‘Dammit!’ Quanderhorn railed. ‘We’ve lost the communi-link.’ He began frantically pulling panels off the desk, ripping and twisting bare wires back together.

Good old Delores, the end-of-the-world countdown announcer (I’m sorry to say, she had a lot more employment than you could imagine) chipped in with ‘Gravitational wave impact in seventy-five seconds.’

And over the speaker, the panic in the cockpit raged on unabated.

Troy yelling: ‘What am I supposed to do? Somebody tell me!’

Brian shouting: ‘Don’t press the button!’

‘I’m not pressing the button!’

And Dr. Janussen calling: ‘The situation is hopeful. There’s every way we can get out of this!’

It was then the truly twisted nature of Quanderhorn’s warped mind showed itself. He turned to me with that look he has sometimes, when you know you’re going to be talked into something you really don’t want to do. ‘Guuuurk – you have certain telepathic abilities, don’t you?’

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ I japed to throw him off the trail, but he was having none of it.

‘Is it possible for you to telepathically occupy the mind of a remote being?’

‘I’m really forbidden from doing that by the Uranian Convention on PFI guidelines,’ I protested firmly, ‘together with eating our captors’ mothers, and cheating at canasta.’

‘But it is possible.’

‘Only with the simplest of creatures,’ I dissembled. ‘Perhaps a sheep from Norfolk, or a very stupid dog.’

A smile slowly ruptured his face. ‘Or Troy?’

‘Oh, easily!’ I realised with horror I’d been hoodwinked by his devilish verbal trickery. ‘But then I, too, would be stuck in a deathtrap spacecraft that’s about to be shredded like a savoy cabbage in a German sausage restaurant.’

‘Only your mind would be at risk…’ he purred seductively. ‘Your body would be safe.’

‘Yes, but they get along so well together, I’m really loath to split them up.’

‘Really? Because I’m sure you’d prefer that to my notifying your Martian overlords that you’ve been sneaking out at night and [REDACTED] Earth women [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Friday.’

‘That’s a scurrilous lie,’ I protested – which it most certainly was: be in no doubt about that. I was of course intent on denying his outrageous and illegal command, but my innate Martian nobility and desire to assist lower life forms asserted itself. ‘But I think I’ll do as you ask, anyway.’ Sometimes, one just has to take the moral high ground.

Amidst more dire warnings from the countdown clock lady and the bedlam from the cockpit, I tried to focus myself into a state of Waku-Tingg.[2] This, of course, involved taking off my hat, closing all my eyes, inflating my head to its maximum, tiptoeing back towards the exit door, tiptoeing back again when I found the Professor was blocking my way, and inwardly chanting the sacred sonical. Actually, to be honest, I couldn’t quite remember the sacred sonical, so I had to make do with the closest Terranean equivalent, ‘There was a young girl from Nantucket’. Still, it did the job.

The room faded around me. There was a rushing wind. I concentrated on the poor benighted craft. What irony! Only a downtrodden spat-upon hostage, unjustly contemned by all, could rescue these hapless ‘heroes’. What a glorious moment to be Martian!

There was a deafening reverse ‘Whoosh!’ and I projected my mighty mind out into the void. I could sense with uncanny accuracy my precise destination and my essence took flight.

I expertly took stock of my new surroundings.

I could smell salt water and the cawing of strange swooping birds.

A small human appeared to be sitting on my back, for some reason, while another burlier fellow whipped my rump with discomfiting vigour.

‘Donkey rides! Fourpence a go!’ he yelled in an uncouth accent.

I protested loudly, but only a strange hee-hawing sound came out. Was that Bridlington Pier I could see in the distance?

I concentrated harder. ‘Would you kindly stop hitting my bottom!’ I managed to get out.

It was beginning to dawn on me I might have gone marginally off course.

The tiny human shrieked in terror. ‘The donkey’s talking!’ he keened.

‘So he is,’ the ruffian agreed. ‘That’ll be another sixpence. Giddy up, Pedro!’

‘Ouch! That really hurts, you know.’

Clearly this shambolic planet’s magnetic fields were incorrectly aligned, which had thrown me off course. Typical! There was no alternative but to attempt the complex manoeuvre once more. I shook off my straw hat, spat out my carrot and prepared to leap. As my head swelled, the obnoxious minikin yelped: ‘Mummy! My donkey’s saying a filthy rhyme!’

The seaside drained into the distance and I made another mental touchdown.

It took a scant handful of leaps: I spent a few seconds as a chicken straining to lay a particularly large and painfully bulbous egg, a head louse on a hepcat bongo drum player, a devious squirrel whose tree had a delightful view into the adjacent nurses’ home (I made a note of the Ordnance Survey grid co-ordinates for future research), and after one final effort, I was in the right place. Just as I’d planned.

Inside the mind of Troy Quanderhorn.