The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

Chapter One

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (on the run), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

Keep an eye out for Intruder photo arriving.

I’m at the front desk, poring through the obits, as per – I spots Albert Rawtenstall, the Black Pudding King, is now sadly demised, owing to an unexpected encounter with his own meat-reclamation scraper, thereby making poor old Mrs Rawtenstall a lonely widow woman. Rich, bereft and vulnerable: the holy trinity. I makes a note in my begging book. I’ll be getting out the Basildon Bond later on.

Just then, the postman arrives and passes over the envelope from the chemist’s.

Of course, there’s never five minutes’ peace in this madhouse. Just as the kettle’s starting to steam nicely, that particularly annoying telephone ring starts up. The one that sounds like three fire engines manned by escaped lunatics from Bedlam banging on saucepans. The special stripy light on the wall behind me starts flashing again.

It’s the Future Phone.

I stuffs the envelope in my pocket and charges to answer it.

Thankfully, the Prof’s ordered the door kept unlocked since the last how’s-your-father, so I gets to it pretty quick.

When I picks it up, I’m surprised by the voice on the other end.

‘Quanderhorn here. I need to speak to Quanderhorn.’ Just like the prof to spend the very last bit of Temperaryum on a Future call to himself.

The actual Prof comes into the room behind me and I holds out the receiver to him. ‘It’s you, sir, for you.’

‘Tell him I’m out.’

‘And I know he isn’t out. I’m in the future, dammit!’

I turns back to my Prof. ‘He’s most insistent, sir.’

‘Oh, very well. I’d better not be wasting my own time.’ He snatches the handset off me roughly. ‘Hello?’

I cranes over to hear, without looking as if I’m craning at all. Years of practice pulls it off. ‘Listen, Quanderhorn, there isn’t much time,’ the other one says. ‘The advanced technology in that Mercurian vessel has stirred a powerful alien artefact, a giant ziggurat, slumbering these many millennia under Piccadilly Circus.’[20]

‘Oh, really?’

‘Anyone who penetrates the heart of its structure will discover astonishing secrets beyond human understanding.’

‘I see. And why are you bothering to tell me this?’

‘To be honest, I don’t have the faintest idea. I need to get to the point.’

‘Well, get to the point, then.’

‘Well, if you’d just stop interrupting me, I would get to the point—’

‘You’re interrupting me!’

‘No – you’re interrupting me. Just listen: I must give you this dire warning… whatever you do, don’t—’

And then, there’s this operator’s voice: ‘To continue this call, please deposit more temporium.’

‘Dammit!’ The Prof chops his hand down on the cradle repeatedly. ‘We don’t have any more temporium! Hello? Hello?’

Furious, he slams the receiver down. ‘What idiot would not put the dire warning first, if he knew damn well we were going to run out of temporium?’

‘Begging your pardon, sir, isn’t he you?’

He turns slowly. ‘One phone call to the Military Police, Jenkins, mentioning your Post Office savings book—’

Well, that’s quite uncalled for, in my humble. I’m only trying to defend him. From him.

‘What I meant to say, sir, was: what a idiot!’

He gives me that chilling look. ‘He’s me! Are you being deliberately insulting now, Jenkins?’

Well, I’m all a-fluster. ‘No. I mean yes. I mean… that’s a rum do, that Piccadilly Circus business, isn’t it, sir?’

‘Oh, I already knew about all that.’ He tosses over a strip of ticker tape. ‘This came in earlier over the Telemergency Print-O-Gram.’

I studies the tape. ‘Blimey, sir. The other you was right! Mysterious Hincident in Piccadilly Circus.’

‘Ye-e-es. I wonder why he didn’t remember I already knew it?’

All this Future Phone business does my head in, if you want to know the bald truth.

‘We’d better get down to London. Fast.’

‘Ha ha. Have you seen this joke at the bottom, sir? Very funny. “Take me to your leader!” Ha ha ha.’Cause, you see, Mr Churchill is supposed to be the leader, sir, but really, it’s you, is what they’re saying. Ha ha. Oh, that’s tickled my funny bone, that has.’

He just looks at me, quite grim. ‘Is that Quandertechnicon loaded, Jenkins?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll get the starting handle right away.’

Then, I kids you not, there’s yet another alarum going off. This time, though, it’s only a little ping of a sound, and it’s coming from the Professor’s watch.

He glances at his wrist. ‘Perfect timing! The duplicates are ready.’

Chapter Two

Secret Report to Martian Command, by Guuuurk (Unknown)

‘…pottery-hating psychopath, who – hang on! What’s going on? Where are my feet? Come to that, where is any of me?’

Those were my initial thoughts, recorded purely for scientific purposes, you understand. I’d hate to inaccurately imply that a courageous Martian warrior such as oneself would in any way be in a complete and utter blind panic. Although I was literally blind. And I was, theoretically, panicking. I seemed to be floating about somewhat aimlessly in lots of tiny unconnected parts. I defy any Martian to wake up to that bag of toffees without panicking just a soupçon.

Here I was, haplessly wafting about space as a sort of molecular cloud – an evaporated, diluted, dispersed version of my magnificent solid self.

Quite honestly, I wouldn’t have been in this appalling position were it not for the hopelessly inept bunglings of those brainless Terranean knuckle-draggers I’m compelled to work with.

To think that I, Guuuurk the Uncomplaining, Interim Sub-Manager of refurbishments to the Sacred Temple of Grrrronk, (Car Park Surfacing Underdepartment), fifteenth half-cousin of His Flatulence the Archbishop of Mars – twenty times removed – could end his days… Ohhh, I just can’t be arsed.

I admit, I’d begun to drift away, quite defeated by the futility of it all, into some kind of oblivion…

From the journal of Brian Nylon, No Time.

This is jolly hard to explain. I know it may sound like some of that French philosophical gobbledygook, but I just can’t think how else to put it – I was, and yet I wasn’t.

Perhaps this is what the poor devils in the cellar felt like: being and simultaneously not being – those nomad souls ever wandering an unrealised hinterland in the gap between Form and Consciousness. Innocents condemned to a lifeless twilight? What kind of demons could compel a man to do that? Oddly, none of that seemed to particularly matter to me now.

I had no body, but everywhere was my body. And I was a part of everywhere. I was a planet forming from dust and rocks, I was a spiralling galaxy, I was the heart of a supernova. For a brief, fleeting moment I was the entire Universe itself, expanding everywhere into the Void. And just for this glorious instant, I knew everything.

Everything. And suddenly it was all beautiful and all made utter sense.

I began to drift into a lazy, wonderful daydream. It was like slipping into a warm bath of silky oneness.

There was no point resisting it.

It was inevitable.

From Troy’s Big Bumper Drawing book.

[PICTURE OF A STICK MAN WITH LIMBS AND HEAD DETACHED AND ‘ME!’ WITH VARIOUS ARROWS POINTING TO THE BITS]

The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen. Unknown time.

This was most interesting. Pure rationality would suggest our existence had come to an end, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I still had awareness. In fact, I hadn’t felt so totally complete for some time.

Could it be that being released from my physical self had freed me from the battles that daily bedevilled me? My thoughts were somehow… pure. Pure me, unhampered by mechanical interfaces. Unworried by physical imperfections.

What was happening? Unless this was death, the only feasible explanation was that Guuuurk’s overloading the anger receptors had caused the engines to go into a super-nuclear eruption, disintegrating us all to our very atoms and propelling them through some kind of quantum tunnel.

But something was wrong. I could feel my component molecules racing away from the source of me, like ripples fleeing a stone tossed into a lake.

It was not an unpleasant sensation, but I had an impression that the process was diluting my very Self.

I could sense the others around me, all expanding away, losing themselves to the thrall of the Universal Mind.

I wondered if I might not be able, by an effort of the will, to arrest the dispersal. It’s not a simple matter to exert one’s will without the benefit of a physical brain of any description, but it was imperative I succeeded.

I concentrated, really concentrated.

I reached out my mind to the furthest flung parts of all of us and started hauling them back to our cores.

Chapter Three

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (stripes torn off), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

7:30 Thursday: Cod Supper with Mrs Rawtenstall.[21] N.B. Shampoo moustache beforehand. And afterwards.

The fully loaded Quandertechnicon is a stubborn beast to handle. Very hard to swerve when a deer crosses the road, but I manages to hit most of them and stuffs them in the back. Same with the pheasants. Why the dozy beggars don’t fly more, I really don’t know. They walks more than is good for them, that’s for sure.

The Prof’s way off ahead of us in his streamlined sixteen-skeins rubber band car, and the duplicates is following in the jeep. I’m bringing up the rear, which is how I likes it.

Wedging my pork pie in the air vent, I steers with my knees while I pulls out that envelope from the chemist’s. No time for fancy Dan steaming now. I rips it open with my teeth and slides out the photograph of the cellar intruder.

What I see shocks me to my very marrow. And I can tell you, it’s a pretty big marrow.

Chapter Four

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – [cont’d]

Can you imagine a startling explosion that smashes you to your component atoms happening backwards? A sort of de-splosion? Well, that’s how it felt. With a final, sickening slamming sensation, we found ourselves literally reconstituted on the deck amid the smoking ruins of the Mercurian ship.

A tremendous sense of loss washed over me – the residual effect of my connection with the vessel, as I realised it had crashed very heavily somewhere, and was, in fact, dying.

There was smoke. Small fires had broken out all over the flight deck. The viewports were fogged on the inside with a thick layer of soot, and on the outside with some kind of mud.

‘That,’ Guuuurk dusted himself down, ‘really hurt.’

‘Yes,’ Troy agreed, climbing to his feet. ‘Can we do it again?’

Through the smoky mist, I looked around anxiously to see if Gemma was OK. Mercifully, there she was, efficiently beating out the fires on the console. Even though she had a cute little sooty mark on her nose, she looked as perfect as ever.

‘Did anyone else feel that…’ I hesitated to ask. It seemed so existential-y and French ‘…that molecule thing?’

‘Yes, Brian.’ Gemma doused the final flames. ‘We all exploded into a billion particles. We felt it.’

‘OK. I was just worried I might have—’

‘No, no. It really happened.’

‘Yes,’ Guuuurk snapped tartly. ‘And the odd “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.’

‘Thank you?’ I could barely contain myself. ‘For completely disintegrating us?’

‘In the nick of time! So the laser couldn’t blast us to pieces!’

‘So you killed us…’ Troy reasoned rather painfully, ‘…to stop us being killed.’

‘Nobody got killed. You all just got very slightly atomised.’

Troy struggled with this a while, and then concurred: ‘OK. Thanks, daddio!’

I was still somewhat baffled. ‘So, what actually happened?’

Gemma unconsciously checked her ear. ‘Guuuurk’s right: his little temper tantrum overloaded the engines. They blasted us into… whatever that reality was.’

I turned to her. ‘And did you… you brought us all back, didn’t you? You saved us.’

‘Ha!’ she snorted grimly. ‘Saved us for what? We could have crashed anywhere in the universe, known or unknown. Plus, we’re trapped on a dead ship.’

Not quite dead, but almost. I could feel the last vestiges of its life ebbing away as the colour drained from the bulkheads – once a ruby red, now an anaemic pale pink. A terrible thought struck me – presumably the reason for Gemma’s grave expression. ‘But if the ship dies – there’s no way of opening a door! We’ll never get out!’

But it was too late. The final tint of colour had bled away, leaving the hull a deathly white.

Chapter Five

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – [cont’d]

The lights dimmed to almost nothing. I became conscious of the acrid air supply dwindling terminally. We had fifteen minutes, at best. All the oxygen tanks were dead, of course.

Gemma was examining the area where the door hatch had appeared. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any manual override…’

‘There’s always this one!’ Troy yelled, and grabbed the bulkhead with both hands.

‘Not yet!’ Gemma yelled. ‘We don’t know if the atmosphere out there is…’

With a terrible ripping sound, Troy yanked out a section of the hull leaving a huge, jagged hole.

‘…breathable.’

‘Ooops!’ Troy grinned. ‘Beg pardon!’ And with another horrible metallic screech, he rammed the metal back into place, rather unevenly, like a jam jar lid pushed over a manhole.

Guuuurk actually smacked his forehead like I’d seen Edgar Kennedy do in the pictures. ‘Oh, well done! Another gold for England in the Stupidity Olympics!’

Gemma shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter really. If there’s no oxygen in the atmosphere out there, we’re finished anyway.’ She prodded Troy’s handiwork with her finger, and it fell outwards with a ghastly clang. She stood on the rim. I realised too late what she was about to do. I yelled, ‘No, Gemma!’ But she ignored me, steeled herself and took a very deep breath.

Time seemed to be frozen. To come back from the dead like that, and then just lose her again… that would be beyond cruel.

She exhaled slowly, turned to us and nodded.

‘You should have let me do that,’ I protested.

‘Why?’ she shrugged. ‘So I’d have lived thirty seconds longer than you?’ There was something uncharacteristically melancholic about her, since the lunar business.

‘Cheer up!’ I smiled encouragingly. ‘It may never happen.’

‘What?’ Guuuurk cried. ‘What may never happen? Because I’m running out of terrible things that possibly can happen. What’s left? What have you got lined up for us next, Brian? Do tell, because I must make a note in my diary. The twelfth: we all get boiled alive in a giant lobster creature’s tureen. Afternoon of the fifteenth, we get kidnapped by face-eating daffodils from the ninth dimension…’

There were a lot more of these, but I haven’t bothered to record them. We let him rant on, though. I think we were all slightly hoping the tirade might bring the ship back to life, but sadly, it didn’t.

I glanced back over at the tear in the hull, and spotted with some alarm that Gemma had stepped out through the hole.

I followed, of course.

Outside, it was pitch dark and fearfully cold. The air stank of smouldering foliage. We were in some kind of dense overgrown forest, as if sculpted in gnarled old wood by an insane hand. At least there was life here. Plant life.

Gemma was staring up at the heavens through the tangled canopy of bare branches. Beyond them, the stars glittered coldly. I couldn’t recognise any of the constellations, but then I never did get that badge. From time to time there was a short burst of a call from some kind of creature. A bird? A badger? Some kind of flying badger?

Troy stepped up behind me. ‘Where are we?’

Gemma shook her head. ‘I really don’t know.’

Guuuurk, having realised no one was listening to him any more, had followed us outside. ‘Fortunately for you,’ he declaimed, ‘all Martians are born with an encyclopaedic race memory of every constellation in the Universe. Nooooowwwww…’

He squinted three of his eyes, formed a parallelogram with four of his thumbs, and peered at the skies through it. ‘I would say without any question of doubt we’re on a small jungle-like planet…’

We all watched, impressed, as he appeared to make a number of complicated mental calculations. ‘…somewhere in the Crab Nebula.’

This was devastating news. ‘The Crab Nebula?’

‘Definitely. Quadrant 54, unless I’m very much mistaken.’

Gemma was equally crestfallen. ‘That’s six and a half thousand light years from home.’

‘Woah!’ Troy groaned. ‘Are you saying we’re going to miss today’s broadcast of Muffin the Mule?’

‘I keep telling you,’ Guuuurk snapped, ‘it’s not a real donkey.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Every time!’

‘But he’s so clever.’

‘He’s a marionette!’

‘The truth is, gentlemen.’ Gemma turned. ‘We may as well put all memories of Earth behind us.’

This rather knocked the stuffing out of me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Pure rationality, I’m afraid. It’s an impossible distance. I mean we will never get back.’

There was a shocked pause. Eventually Troy said: ‘I wondered how it fitted on top of a piano. I tried that with a donkey and there was a terrible mess afterwards.’

‘So,’ Guuuurk mused, ‘that’s what happened to my baby grand.’ He paused, then added: ‘And what that zebra was doing in my room.’

‘Well.’ Gemma brought us all back to Earth. Or not, in the circumstances. ‘Accentuating the positive: we are on a class M planet, so we can breathe. There is plant and, it would seem, animal life. So we’re not going to starve to death. We can use the husk of the ship for shelter, at least until dawn. Assuming there is a dawn here.’

‘Yes,’ Guuuurk agreed cheerfully, ‘there are planets in this quadrant where nightfall lasts for millennia.’

‘It’s already getting colder,’ Gemma continued. ‘We need to build a fire. There should be plenty of kindling and firewood about. Suggest we split into teams I want Troy,’ she added, without a decent sporting pause.

‘Fine!’ Guuuurk kicked a tree stump. ‘Though, first, why don’t we play a quick game of Martian Closey-eyesy…?’

But Gemma and Troy were already deep into the forest.

‘Well, Brian,’ Guuuurk smiled with thinly veiled disappointment. ‘Looks like it’s just us.’

Chapter Six

From Troy’s Big Bumper Drawing Book

[PICTURE OF A BADGER WITH WINGS, AND AN ARROW POINTING AT IT, LABELLED: ‘NOT ME!’]

Chapter Seven

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – [cont’d]

I can’t say we made rapid progress. Guuuurk walked in a low crouch, hands poised in a sort of ersatz judo ready position, wheeling round regularly at the slightest sound, and chopping at the air, quite often making himself jump by stepping on dried bracken.

I thought I might calm him with some chat. ‘Guuuurk – back there…’

‘Oh, yes. Of course, I actually wanted to have you on my team, so I rather cleverly tricked Gemma into picking Troy.’

‘She picked him before you could say anything.’

Guuuurk nodded. ‘That’s how clever it was.’

‘Actually, I was talking about when you were making me angry on the ship—’

‘Ah, yes. I did want to apologise for some of those things I may have said.’

‘One or two of them were rather—’

‘Indeed. And it pained me greatly to be forced to say them. I want you to know that, in actual fact, I consider myself an Englishman first, and a Martian second.’

‘Well, that’s what I thought.’

We stumbled on in silence for a few minutes, grabbing up twigs and so on. Finally, I couldn’t hold it any longer. ‘But what you said about George Formby—’

‘Oh, good grief! Perish the thought, dear boy! The man is an absolute caution.’

We both chuckled.

‘That song he sings about peering through windows pleasuring himself while watching women undress and honeymoon couples in the act of mating. It’s a riot!’ I couldn’t help thinking Guuuurk hadn’t quite got the idea of what the song was about. Or, upon careful reflection, perhaps I hadn’t.

Guuuurk suddenly became terribly interested in his feet. ‘And speaking of mating, old fruit. What exactly were you and the delightful Dr. Janussen up to out there on the Moon? Ever since, she’s been more morose than a camel with three humps and I notice you’ve suddenly started calling her “Gemma”.’

Had I? My face was surely glowing like a paraffin heater. ‘It’s nothing really. She just – became more aware of her – you know – clockwork brain thing…’

‘You’ve been listening to Jenkins, haven’t you? It’s not her brain that’s clockwork, old sport, it’s electrical, but it’s powered by clockwork. Otherwise she’d have to strap a heavy duty industrial battery on her head. I fancy even Signora Schiaparelli herself couldn’t conjure up a hat ghastly enough to disguise it.’

‘Anyway. She knows now. I think she’s always known in some buried part of her.’

‘Well, that’s probably for the best. Once she gets over the shock of it. And the calling her “Gemma” business?’

My face was now as incandescent as a three bar electric fire. ‘Oh, well – you know…’

‘I do. I do know indeed, my dear chap. And take it from one who has been… in a similar position, if you know what I mean, on many, many occasions. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this.’ He paused dramatically ‘Never take them to the pictures when they’re showing Woody Woodpecker. He’s a complete passion killer. I think it’s his laugh.’ He shuddered uncontrollably. ‘Quite unnerving. And never put your arm around them until Pathé News. If you’re in luck, something unspeakably hideous will have happened, and they’ll need manly succour—’

This stream of no doubt priceless romantic advice was cut short by our rounding a particularly large tree and rediscovering Gemma and Troy in front of the crashed ship. They were warming their hands over an enormous bonfire, the like of which I hadn’t witnessed since VE Day.

‘I say!’ I called, ‘isn’t that rather overdoing things? We don’t want to attract any predators or anything.’ And as if on cue, I definitely heard the snuffling squawk of a flying badger.

We tossed our meagre bundles of twiglets into the blaze, where they were consumed in seconds, and started preparing to spend the night.

While Gemma and I laid out makeshift beds with fire blankets rescued from the ship, Troy squeezed out a couple of chickens from the tube, which, of course, escaped immediately, so he and Guuuurk had to set off chasing them down.

Which pretty much left me alone with Gemma. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘this is going to be our life from now on.’

‘It very much looks that way.’

‘We’ll be growing old together.’

I offered a rather winning smile, but just got back a rather chilly ‘Yes.’

I took a deep breath, mentally. ‘Look: I’ve been hurled along on quite a tumultuous emotional roller coaster over the past twelve hours. And now we’ve ended up here, together, frankly, it doesn’t seem quite as unbearable a thing any more to come out and – yes – speak my mind clearly. Say what I have to say without any tedious rambling, or beating about—’

She folded her arms. ‘For heaven’s sake, Brian, get to the point.’

‘You and me…’ My voice cracked, just right exactly when you wouldn’t want your voice to crack. ‘Do you suppose there’s a chance we could ever—’

‘No.’

‘Understood!’ I shot back quickly, as if that cold final rebuff had been the most expected and natural thing in the world, and hadn’t in any way ripped my very soul into tiny shreds like the man who does paper-tearing tricks in the music hall.

She straightened and brushed a bang from her forehead. ‘No, you don’t understand: it’s never going to happen for us; the rational side of my brain is literally inhuman. I’m calculating, cold and heartless, and who could love that? And there’s no denying it to myself any longer, but when I wind down, I’m hysterical, reckless and juvenile. And who could love that?’

‘Me,’ I said, proudly. ‘That’s who. Both the impossible sides of you. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, is there? When you feel a certain way about a certain person…’

‘Kiss me,’ I think she said. Yes, she definitely did.

‘What?’

‘You didn’t last time. I won’t ask again.’

She didn’t have to. We kissed. And it was undeniably the most glorious kiss of kisses… and yet… it ignited a torch in some dark corner of my memory. I had been kissed like this, exactly this, before! Yet, I couldn’t recall a face or a time for it. But what did it matter? This was now, and it was real. And it was my Gemma.

Somehow, we parted. ‘Was that…?’ I hesitated to ask, because the wrong answer would dash my soul against some very cruel rocks. ‘…is your ear winding down?’

‘No, Brian. It makes no sense to me whatsoever…’

‘But it does! You’re finally allowing the two sides of you to communicate – you’re incorporating your emotions with your reason – and it’s wonderful!’

‘You could be right!’ she beamed. ‘And I think that I’m very much in—’

A chicken hit me in the face, squawking, as it fled the lumbering figures of Troy and Guuuurk.

‘Oh, well done, Brian! You practically had it in your hand. We’ll never catch it now.’ Guuuurk turned to Troy. ‘Squeeze out another one.’

‘Tube’s empty.’

‘Seriously? You mean we’ve lost all thirty of them?’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘This entire planet’s going to be populated by angry chickens!’

Troy creased his brow. ‘Why d’you think they’ll be angry?’

‘You can’t expect them to be pleased – they’ve spent who knows how long squashed into a toothpaste tube!’

I looked over at Gemma, but even though she returned my smile, once again the moment had passed for us.

Still, I must admit to feeling schoolboy happy as we all sat cross-legged, staring into the bonfire, trying to fry three eggs on the end of a stick. I even considered suggesting we sing ‘Ging Gang Goolie’, but the thought of having to explain it all to Guuuurk, and especially to Troy, put me off completely.

Guuuurk stood and clapped for attention. ‘We have to face facts, chaps and chappess,’ he announced. ‘We’re going to be stuck here in this shocking place for the rest of our naturals. We can’t go on as we were, however much we might have liked to. There must be changes. First, we must elect a leader.’

‘Hang on.’ Troy cocked his head. ‘I think I can hear a bus coming.’

A bus! We all laughed. Even Gemma giggled slightly.

‘I seriously doubt,’ Guuuurk chuckled, ‘that buses come quite this far, young Master Quanderhorn. A leader,’ he repeated. We all turned to Gemma. Guuuurk pretended not to notice, and pressed on. ‘Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it need not necessarily be the most obvious candidate amongst us. What we require is a sort of rakish wisdom, from someone who is undeniably a member of the ruling class, and who, ideally, has first-hand experience of surviving on another world.’

There was a worrying glow of something approaching in the distance through the thicket of trees right behind Guuuurk, and a faint, disturbing growling sound, which was growing louder.

Oblivious, the Martian continued: ‘Naturally, this fêted person, whoever she – or perhaps more likely “he” – may be, would have the pick of the food, the women, any spare cash lying around, animal furs, a splendid shelter built by the other, lesser members of the tribe, and first dibs on the nattiest clothing. Now, modesty forbids my suggesting any individual in particular, but I’d say six eyes were an absolute prerequisite— What is that bally noise?’

There was no ignoring the rumble now. It sounded like the engine of an AEC RT Regent III bus, with bodywork by Eastern Coachworks at Oulton Broad.

Which was precisely what, at that very moment, drew up beyond the mound behind him.

‘I think,’ I replied, ‘it’s the number 43 to Highgate Woods.’

Guuuurk turned slowly and stared in disbelief. ‘I didn’t know there was a Highgate Woods in the Crab Nebula!’

But by then, we were all running over the mound towards the road.

‘Come on, you dozy lot!’ the conductor complained, hanging off his platform. ‘We can’t hang around here all evening. We got ’omes to go to.’

Earth! We were on Earth!

Then I remembered my Scout Camp Laws. ‘Hold that bus!’ I yelled. ‘I’ve just got to put this fire out.’

Chapter Eight

Lumpy the blith of Deimos, Martian Year 5972 Pink

Secret Report to Martian Command, by Guuuurk ‘the Infallible’, fifteenth Minnow of Gaaaark ‘the Unfathomable’, and his ninety-third concubine, Bong.

After a rather unpleasant contretemps with the over-officious bus conductor, involving some Peruvian coinage and a twenty-seven bolivar note from Venezuela, we found ourselves rudely ejected from the bus at the very next stop, in Highgate Village.

I was acutely aware my face colouring was drawing unwanted attention, even in the dark, so I persuaded Brian to pop into Timothy White’s and get me a bottle of calamine lotion, which I slapped on in the absence of distemper. If anything, it looked even better than the paint. It gave me the glowing, tanned aura of a young Randolph Scott. With the masculine tang of zinc oxide.

The general plan was to get to a telephone of some kind, but the booth on the high street had been annexed by a gang of juvenile delinquents, who were beating at the coin box with crowbars. I was slightly cheesed off there were no postcards with tempting telephone numbers on display therein, which that moustachioed mountebank Jenkins had promised were all over the place in London.

Still, plenty of other intoxicating naughtinesses to investigate now we were On the Loose and In the Smoke!

Hardly able to contain my excitement, I skilfully persuaded the others that an unvandalised telephone would most likely be found in the saloon bar of the Wrestler’s Arms. Licking my lips at the prospect of some actual hard liquor – not the rancorous filth Jenkins distils in the professor’s laboratory, or that dreadful rot gut they decant at the Wytchdrowninge ironmonger’s – I was first through the inviting etched-glass doorway. ‘Ales’, it promised. Ales! ‘And Stout’. Stout! Imagine! I’d no idea what stout was, but it sounded the very ambrosia of the gods.

Imagine my disappointment to find the way to the bar blocked by a huge scrum of inebriated humans, clustered around a wireless set.

As we drew closer, we heard one of those dinner-jacketed BBC types droning on about something bizarre happening at Piccadilly Circus. Some kind of pyramid object – ‘a ziggurat of great antiquity’ – long buried under Eros, had forced its way up from the Earth’s crust into the Tube station.

Honestly, these Terraneans get distracted by the slightest thing. I was just about to fight my way to the counter and demand the best stout that money could buy (on the slate), when blow me, if the next voice on the radio wasn’t old Quanderhorn himself.

‘Stand back!’ he was calling on his megaphone. ‘Stand back from the ancient alien artefact!’

Damned if my slight hesitation didn’t allow Dr. Janussen to grab my forearm. ‘Guuuurk – where d’you think you’re going? We’re wasting time. We’re clearly needed—’

And then, oddity of oddities, Dr. Janussen’s voice was also issuing from the wireless.

The BBC chap introduced her as ‘one of the Professor’s associates, the lovely Dr. Gemini Janussen.’ I could feel the real Dr. Janussen’s grip tighten on my arm in shock.

‘Good evening, everyone,’ this other Dr. Janussen replied. ‘And thank you for the charming compliment.’

I realised, on reflection, that her voice was almost the same as the real Gemma’s, but not quite. Slightly… gentler. And – dare I say it? – more feminine.

Brian looked as if he’d applied some of my calamine lotion to his own face. ‘How can you be there and here at the same time?’ he asked Gemma.

‘Actually,’ the radio Dr. Janussen trilled, ‘being merely a woman, I just make the tea and stuff around here.’

I screamed in pain as the real Dr. Janussen’s fingernails dug deep into my arm. I swear I thought they were going to meet in the middle!

‘What?’ She thundered in a terrible voice. ‘Is she mad?’

I patted her hand with my working arm, and craftily slid the other one out of danger’s way. Thank heavens I did, too, because the next words out of the radio might well have caused her to snap it in two.

‘We should all put our faith,’ the radio Gemma went on, ‘a s I do, in my fiancé, our brave test pilot – Brian Nylon.’

Brian, as usual, had fixated on the wrong part of the sentence. He half-smiled: ‘Fiancé?’

‘She is mad,’ I muttered to myself. And now there was another Brian on the radio.

‘Hello, everyone,’ declaimed this second pretender breezily, in a much more confident version of young Nylon’s whiny tones. ‘Nothing to worry about, now. I’ve got it all in hand. Two sugars for me, darling.’

‘You’re sweet enough already, darling,’ the radio Gemma cooed, and the two of them laughed gaily for very much longer than one would have expected.

‘Does anyone have a vomit bag handy?’ spat the real Dr J.

Ha ha ha. The look on Brian’s and Gemma’s faces! Quite clearly, they’d been replaced, and their pitiful egos couldn’t cope with it. It really was quite jocund when you think about it. Honestly – these vain creatures have absolutely no sense of humour when it comes to themselves.

And then, horror of horrors, the presenter made a rather more startling announcement. ‘And unless I’m mistaken,’ he said, ‘they’re followed by none other than Edith Sitwell!’

‘What?’ I found myself exclaiming. And then some appalling parody of my own mellifluous voice started ranting: ‘Death to all Earthlings! Soon you will all be overrun by the superior warriors of the planet Mars and fry in the white heat of our inescapable Death Rays!’

The reporter chuckled indulgently. ‘Marvellous new poem, Dame Edith.’

How dare that stinker pretend to be me, pretending to be Edith Sitwell? Was he utterly devoid of morals and ethics? ‘He’s nothing but a scurrilous liar,’ I protested.

‘What is going on?’ Brian demanded.

Gemma had managed to gather herself. ‘Somehow, the Professor’s duplicated us all. Only, not quite.’

‘Not quite? “Death to all Earthlings”? Is that something I regularly say to you over breakfast?’ I mean, obviously I secretly agreed with the fellow’s sentiments, Death to all Earthlings et cetera et cetera, but it seems frightfully infra dig to come right out and say it to their faces.

But the radio fellow wasn’t finished with the treats. ‘And here comes young Troy Quanderhorn, the Professor’s son with the matinée idol looks.’

‘Ooh,’ our Troy crooned, ‘he’s my favourite.’

‘Troy – a word for our listeners.’

This duplicate Troy, quite frankly, sounded indistinguishable from our own lummox. ‘I don’t know any words,’ he said. ‘Oh – except “herringbone”. Is that a word?’

Our Troy threw back his head and laughed. ‘Ha! That Troy fellow’s an idiot! Everyone knows “herringbone” isn’t a word.’ He shook his head pityingly.

‘So,’ the penguin-suited popinjay concluded, ‘with the Professor and his crack team about to descend to the Tube line and break into the mysterious ziggurat – hopefully to discover momentous secrets hitherto unrevealed to humanity for millennia – we return you to Max Jaffa and the BBC Palm Court Orchestra, resuming tonight’s Hungarian Hoo-Hah.’

‘No, no!’ I yelled impotently at the wireless set. ‘Go back! We need to know what’s going on with those unspeakable imposters!’

But the ghastly racket of horses’ tails being scraped across cats’ intestines started up, and the crowd immediately began to disperse. I was bundled out of the way as absolutely every last one of them headed for the bar. Was I never going to get my glass of stout?

Brian’s brow was as furrowed as Mrs Wiggonby’s goitre. ‘If they’re supposed to be duplicates, why are the other “us”s so different?’

‘Clearly,’ Gemma answered somewhat stiffly, ‘Quanderhorn couldn’t resist making “improvements” to us. The arrogant fool.’

I found this actually quite shocking. I’d never heard anyone on the team directly criticise the Professor, much less the stalwart Dr. Janussen herself. She was normally so dispassionate about everything.

‘There’s nothing for it,’ she announced. ‘We have to get to Piccadilly Circus.’

Piccadilly Circus! The heart of Soho! Now we were talking.

‘Follow me, everyone,’ I ordered, heading back through the scrum for the doors.

In my head, I stared singing:

‘In the day time Grandad’s searching for truth,

But at night time he’s searching for his youth

In Piccadilly, Piccadilly, dear old London’s broad highway…’

Chapter Nine

Outprint from Gargantua, the pocket Quanderdictoscribe. Dateline: Saturday the 5th of January, 1952, 19.37 hours

JENKINS: …and this just clips under here, sir… I just switched it on.

NEW BRIAN: Got it! Testing, testing…

JENKINS: Yep! It’s printing out the other end lovely. Not too heavy, is it, new Mr. Nylon, sir?

NEW BRIAN: No. Nghh.

JENKINS: It is less than forty pounds. Miracle of miniaturisation, it is. Off you go then, sir.

NEW BRIAN: (CLEARS THROAT) I am standing deep in the heart of Piccadilly Circus Underground Station, where a gigantic pyramid-like structure has forced its way from the bowels of the Earth to the top of the platform…

JENKINS: Just near the chocolate machine.

NEW BRIAN: Yes, thank you, Jenkins, you can go now.

JENKINS: (MUMBLING) You tries and gives them colourful detail, it gets thrown back in your face.

NEW BRIAN: It’s impossible to tell how deep the edifice goes. There appear to be the markings of a doorway inset into the hard, rough grey granite-like material of its surface. There are two huge closed eyes carved in relief above the ‘doorway’, somewhat reminiscent of Egyptian and Aztec hieroglyphs. On the crumbling remains of the platform before it, gangs of Irish navvies stand by, pickaxes at the ready, awaiting the Prof’s instructions as to how we’re going to smash our way in, and give old Johnny Alien a shellacking he won’t forget.

NEW GUUUURK: Ha! Enjoy that pitiful illusion of human superiority while you can. When our mighty fleet lands, you’ll be bending the knee before your Martian overlords!

NEW GEMMA: What shall I do, Brian darling?

NEW BRIAN: You’re already doing it, my poppet: just stand there and be gorgeous.

NEW TROY: I don’t know if it will help, but I’m going to rip open my shirt and expose my magnificent oiled chest.

NEW BRIAN: You’re not wearing a shirt, old chap.

NEW TROY: Nyaaaaah. Anyone got a needle and thread?

QUANDERHORN: Stand back, everyone! This is a job for Gargantua, the giant Quandersaw. Bring her forward, Mr. O’Reilly!

O’REILLY: (DISTANT) Assuredly. Bejabers.

NEW BRIAN: (LOUD) I’m looking at a colossal chainsaw rumbling forward, with three atomic-powered turbine drives spinning fifty titanium technic axles and a, what? A thirty-foot diameter blade…?

QUANDERHORN: Thirty-five. Spinning at fifteen million revolutions per minute, made of specially reinforced chiffon.

NEW BRIAN: Sorry, sir? Did you say ‘chiffon’?

QUANDERHORN: Yes. What of it?

NEW BRIAN: The giant whirring blade is lowered into position… makes contact with the granite doorway…

NEW BRIAN: …and just sort of flaps impotently for a couple of seconds, then rips to shreds. And the Professor cuts the engine.

QUANDERHORN: What idiot thought you could reinforce chiffon?

NEW BRIAN: The Professor is now looking at me rather angrily.

QUANDERHORN: Do you have to keep up a running commentary on absolutely everything that happens?

NEW BRIAN: Well, yes, sir. Those are my orders from you.

NEW BRIAN: Professor! The wall!

QUANDERHORN: Describe it, man, describe it.

NEW BRIAN: I hardly know what I’m seeing. The ancient stones on the face of the edifice are sort of… sliding around… rearranging themselves. The eyes! The great stone eyes are opening! It’s looking at us! It’s actually looking at us!

QUANDERHORN: Tantalising!

NEW GEMMA: Hold me, Brian, I’m frightened.

NEW BRIAN: There’s nothing to be— Oh, my God! The mouth’s opening! It wasn’t a door, it was a mouth all the time! It’s speaking!

Chapter Ten

Lumpy the blith of Deimos, Martian Year 5972 Pink

Secret Report to Martian Command, by the real actual Guuuurk ‘The Adventurer’, Assistant Assistant to the Assistant Assistant’s Assistant Stick Sharpener, temple of Draaaag (leap years only).

The Tube trains were all cancelled, of course, and as we neared Piccadilly on foot, the roads and pavements became absolutely crammed with fleeing cars and panicking Terraneans. So our progress through Soho along Brewer Street was disastrously slow. Not as slow as I’d have liked, though. Everybody kept tugging me onwards whenever I stopped to ask directions from the ladies standing in doorways, who seemed only too eager to offer helpful advice and even, for some peculiar reason, Gallic language tuition.

Eventually, I was dragged to the corner of Great Pulteney Street, where our way was completely blocked by a police cordon. Brian tried to explain to one of the officers that we were the real Quanderhorn crew – unlike those swizzlers from the radio – but his troubles only earned him a thump on the head from a truncheon.

A great Martian general, at this point, would come up with a strategy so ingenious that it would reduce his followers to slack-jawed, dewy-eyed awe.[22] And so it was when I hit upon the rather ingenious notion of our doubling back and taking a short cut through the Windmill Theatre.

The others could scarcely contain their utter adulation, and barely tried to restrain me at all as I dashed in through the stage door with Brian literally hanging off my shirt tail.

In my giddiness, I rather clumsily happened to stumble into, of all places, the showgirls’ dressing room! Being a gentleman, of course, I immediately averted my eyes from the array of half-stockinged legs, suspender belts, peek-a-boo brassières, feathered G-strings, sheer silk negligées, lacy peignoirs, and, in one or two cases, entirely naked bodies! Of women!

And dash it all, if I hadn’t completely forgotten about the Gentleman’s Novelty Instant Camera which I’d hidden in my buttonhole when coaching the St Winifred’s upper sixth tennis team, for evaluating tricky line calls. For some reason, it chose now to start going off.

It might not have induced such loud screaming and rushing about had it not been for the blizzard of snaps popping out of my breast pocket, and the blinding flashgun which I’d rather thoughtlessly concealed in my flies.

The bouncers were terribly understanding about the whole business, and as a warning broke only three of my thumbs.

Escorted to street level via a window that really ought to have been open, I rejoined my colleagues, only to be furiously congratulated by Dr. Janussen with a cricket bat. (I assume she’d somehow obtained it from the theatre’s props room.)

I managed to dampen down her excitement by observing there was now only one way past the police cordon.

Down.

Young Troy easily lifted a rusted manhole cover. In order to distract the growing attention of the milling crowds, I had him hurl it in the air like a discus, and yelled: ‘Look! A flying saucer! It’s probably those awful Martian stinkers!’ (which is obviously the most terrifying prospect on the planet for the feeble and cowardly Terraneans), and while everyone calmly got out their mirrors, one by one we slipped down into London’s dank sewers…

Chapter Eleven

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (on the run), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

Boil dishcloths.

Well, I thought I’d seen everything, what with being the Prof’s Ada-de-camp all these years, but a talking pyramid was a new one on me.

I can see right deep into its mouth, which is a sort of corridor with steps disappearing down the epiglottis.

They all stands there, gawping at it, as it comes out with a perculiar lingo in a voice like a foghorn jammed up an elephant’s jacksie (which takes me back to that day in Tobruk, when we’d had a little bit too much of the laughing juice).

Me, I do something useful: I tries writing down what it’s saying. It comes out as: ‘Tugggggah shhhhhhhhpkkkk! Vuuuuuk com com dooooooffffahhh!’ or thereabouts. Could be Italians. Italians! Don’t like ’em.

The Prof snatches the paper off me and starts typing it into one of his Gargantua things. This one’s got a big speaker on the side. Blow me, but after a minute, it starts chittering out proper words. Now I writes down exactly what it says:

‘Blimey, Professor,’ I says, ‘that’s more or less what Tomorrow-You exactly said.’

The Prof says: ‘Ye-e-ess,’ all long and drawn-out and dripping with suspicion.

He walks over to the mouth, which has now fallen still and silent, and become an entrance to Gawd knows where. He peers inside, tapping it with his knuckles.

‘It seems to be a kind of invitation,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we should take it up?’

‘Yes, but remember, Professor, begging your pardon, You also told yourself: “Whatever you do – don’t.”’

This doesn’t sit well with the Prof. He don’t like being told what to do, even by himself.

‘Dammit, Jenkins, if I started not doing anything a future me told me not to do, there’d be no end to it!’ He turns and calls to the duplicates: ‘Everybody suit up: we’re all going into that ziggurat!’

He goes to leave, then turns back and adds: ‘But mostly not me.’

Chapter Twelve

From Troy’s Big Bumper Drawing Book

[PICTURE OF A STICK MAN UP TO HIS NECK IN BROWN SCRIBBLE, AND AN ARROW POINTING TO HIM, LABELLED: ‘ME!’]

Chapter Thirteen

Lumpy the blith of Deimos, Martian Year 5972 Pink

Secret Report to Martian Command [cont’d]

I was quite dry and comfortable as we crawled along the sewer tunnels. What I’d forgotten, of course, is that humans, for the most part, don’t have handy suckers on their palms and knees. Ha ha ha. They were making quite a brouhaha as they scrabbled along in the aromatic unmentionableness below.

‘Thank you, Guuuurk,’ Brian whined, ‘for providing the perfect end to the perfect day.’

‘How was I to know you couldn’t crawl along the ceiling, like any respectable species?’

‘I could do that,’ Troy grinned, ‘but I don’t want to. I like it down here, where it’s all warm and sludgy.’

‘We’ve just got to put up with it,’ Dr. Janussen called. ‘It’s the only way through. Now, stop bleating and let’s move on. We must be almost adjacent to the Tube platform by now.’

And, sure enough, Brian found a door inset into the brickwork up ahead. ‘Here!’ He waded quickly towards it. ‘This must be it!’

He tugged open the door, and I swear to you, an absolute cascade of crockery teetered over like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in an earth tremor and positively hurled itself into the tunnel in a miasma of shattering fragments.

‘What the devil?’ he groaned, as sugar bowls and teapots narrowly missed his head and committed ceramic hara-kiri before our eyes.

‘What is it with you and crockery, Brian?’ I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Are you some sort of deranged porcelain-hater? Are you unable to pass an intact dinner service without experiencing irresistible murderous tendencies?’

Brian simply stood there agog. Dr. Janussen pointed out a sign on the door which indicated it was the basement storage vault for Swan and Edgar’s department store. She shut it firmly and waded over to an adjacent door, this time an iron one with a London Transport roundel cast into it, and a large, rusty hatch wheel below.

As Brian strained to turn the wheel, we all prayed it wasn’t the Underground train drivers’ canteen pantry.

Fortunately it wasn’t.

‘Wow!’ Troy was wide-eyed in wonder. ‘There’s a whole spare Tube station in this cupboard!’

Chapter Fourteen

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (never formally charged), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

Darn dishcloths.

While the replacement crew is off putting on their safety suits, the Prof finally asks me the question I’ve been dreading.

‘Do you have the photo of the cellar intruder, Jenkins?’

There’s no getting away from it now, is there? I fishes in my pocket. ‘The envelope fell open whilst I was driving, sir.’

‘I imagined that might happen.’ He kept his hand held out.

‘Prepare yourself for a terrible shock, Professor,’ I warns him, when, blow me, I’m the one shocked!

The access door behind me clangs open, and I hear someone say: ‘Wow, there’s a whole spare Tube station in this cupboard!’ which can only be young Master Quanderhorn hisself! The original one, I means, not the carbon.

He squeezes himself through the orifice, and sure enough, the others tumble out after him. I don’t know what to say.

‘Master Quanderhorn, sir! And the rest of you! Bless my soul, we thought you’d all perished on the Moon.’

The Prof’s gone deadly quiet. For a moment, I’m thinking he’s had an attack of some kind.

‘No, Jenkins,’ Dr. Janussen says in a voice that’s dripping acid. ‘We were in that vessel someone tried to obliterate with the Giant Space Laser.’

‘You wasn’t!’ I don’t know where to put meself. I mean, I’ve killed a lot of people with friendly fire over the years – who hasn’t? But this was the biggest SNAFU of ’em all. ‘What about a nice cup of char,’ I suggests, ‘and a lovely fig roll for the weary travellers?’ But there’s no deflecting the stream of venom.

‘Yes, Quanderhorn,’ the Martian spits, surly as I ever seen him, ‘I think you have a few questions to answer.’

The Prof unfreezes, sharpish, and starts fiddling with some machine or other. ‘You’re alive,’ he says, all matter-of-fact and dum-de-dum. ‘That’s most inconvenient.’

Well, the Martian turns a colour I’ve never seen him go before and fairly bites through his cigarette holder in fury. ‘Incon venient? Incon venient is when you’re forced to hide in your paramour’s wardrobe because her husband has unexpectedly returned from Malaya. Incon venient is when the play you wanted to go and see is banned by the Lord Chamberlain simply for featuring a nude woman in a wheelbarrow. Getting blown to your component atoms by a deadly Giant Space Laser is a little bit more than Incon-bloody- venient!’

‘For me, it’s inconvenient. I’ve gone to all the bother of replacing you. Or rather, upgrading you.’

And this is what gets Mr Nylon’s goat. ‘In what way upgrading? What makes you think we need upgrading?’ he queries, all defiant like.

Don’t faze the Prof, though. ‘For instance, you, Nylon, I made more assertive. You comply far too easily with what other people want.’

‘Well,’ Mr Nylon says equitably, ‘that seems fair enough.’

‘It does not!’ Dr. Janussen cuts in – she’s changed her tune on him, that’s for sure. ‘It’s Brian’s humility that makes him what he is: what makes him special.’

‘Well, thank you, Gemma,’ he says, all beaming like a schoolboy who’s conker’s just become a twelver. ‘That’s a jolly nice thing—’

‘Oh, shut up, Brian,’ she snaps.

‘Right-ho!’

Gemma now, is it? I wonders what went on up there on the Moon? Nocturnal manoeuvres with full kit, I shouldn’t be surprised.

‘Dr. Janussen,’ the Prof ploughs on regardless, ‘I made you more agreeable. None of this “having opinions” nonsense.’ Quite right, an’ all. Confuses the men.

Dr. Janussen is dumbstruck by this. For a change, I have to say.

‘And Guuuurk, I dispensed with your appalling dishonesty.’

‘That’s a scurrilous lie!’ The Martian fishes out a cheap medallion. ‘As you can clearly see, I was recently awarded, by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, this Empire Pedal for Consticuous Honesty. Pay no attention to the spelling. They’re terribly short-staffed at the Royal Mint, apparently.’

‘What about me, Pops?’ the young lad chirrups. ‘You can’t improve me.’

‘Ah, Troy. I magnified your intelligence a thousandfold.’

‘Woah! That’s more than seven!’

‘Unfortunately, that only amounts to a couple of extra IQ points.’

‘Woah! That’s more than seven!’

Mr. Nylon is looking all bewildered and hangdog about the whole business. But I notice he’s put his hand all gentle and that on the small of Dr. Janussen’s back. And she don’t even bat it away! Least said…

‘But where does this leave us?’ he asks.

The Prof rubs the dust off his hands and turns back. ‘Much as it pains me to say this: I’m afraid, my erstwhile colleagues, it leaves you… replaced.’

Chapter Fifteen

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – [cont’d]

Replaced!

And, right on cue, they emerged from under the canvas of the makeshift tent, clad in white, one-piece protective coveralls with the hoods pushed back. It was an extraordinary shock to see their faces. The new Gemma was wearing peachy lipstick and rouge, and, unless I was mistaken, a rather heady French perfume. She’d eschewed the white wellingtons the others had donned, and instead was teetering on rather impractical if undeniably flattering heels.

The new Troy, on the other hand, looked indistinguishable from our own: brawny and permanently bewildered. The replacement Guuuurk had a cold, reptilian look of fanatical hatred burning in all of his eyes. His features were more pinched – meaner, somehow. And was that really a Hitler moustache, or just a shadow under his nose?

But the other Brian – that was flabbergasting. He looked exactly like me. Only, strangely, more handsome. How did he pull that off, exactly? Was it the hair? His manner? His whole bearing, perhaps?

‘Well, blow me down!’ he laughed rather rudely. ‘If it isn’t the bag of misshapen seconds!’

‘No,’ Troy shot back, ‘you are.’

His bulky lookalike snapped: ‘No, you are.’

Whereupon they entered a battle of wits:

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you really are!’ the duplicate announced triumphantly.

‘Damn!’ poor Troy vented. ‘I didn’t see that one coming!’

Gemma was regarding her fluffy double with undisguised contempt. ‘You may as well know that you’re not needed, now that we’re back. So you can just spray on another gallon of whatever perfume that is – I presume French Tart Number 9 – cake your face with even more powder if that’s remotely possible, and hobble off on those ridiculously improbable stilettos.’

‘Ooh, I don’t like the other me at all!’ her replica squeaked. ‘She’s so aggressive and shrew-like.’

‘Take no notice of her, my darling.’ My double literally patted his Gemma on the head. I waited for her inevitable retaliatory punch in his kidneys, but it never came.

The pseudo-Guuuurk had squared up to his counterpart. His voice was flatter and more – I don’t know – robotic than our Guuuurk’s. ‘I propose,’ he droned, ‘we Martian brothers massacre all the humans and eat them, in preparation for the glorious invasion.’

‘Good plan,’ Guuuurk nodded indulgently. ‘Only, I have a terrible feeling they might put up a teeny-weeny bit of resistance.’

‘Ha!’ his counterpart snorted. ‘And if we are slaughtered in the heroic attempt, so much the better!’

‘Ye-e-e-s.’ Our Guuuurk carefully screwed another lavender Sobranie cocktail cigarette into his holder. ‘Although… I do have a doctor’s certificate here that regrettably excuses me from suicide missions until my impetigo clears up.’

Outraged, the new Guuuurk slapped him in the face. ‘Worm! You are a despicable turncoat and a miserable coward.’

‘Have you been reading my business card?’ Guuuurk enquired, I think quite seriously.

‘Stand aside.’ My double rather boorishly bundled our Martian friend out of his way. ‘Let the streamlined primo team-o take care of this.’ He even sounded better than me. Was he deepening his voice somehow?

Still, boorishness like that shouldn’t be tolerated. ‘Listen, old chap, it’s not a competition, you know. Why don’t we all just shake hands and—’

The Professor, who’d been watching the whole thing with amused fascination, abruptly piped up: ‘What if we were to make it a competition?’

My double threw back his head and laughed like Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood when Basil Rathbone pulls out his rapier. ‘Excellent notion, Prof! Both teams face the petrifying dangers of the ziggurat, to see which can reach the relic concealed in its heart without being horrifically butchered by the unknown terrors that undoubtedly lie within!’

‘Ye-e-e-es,’ Guuuurk said again, ‘although… I do have another doctor’s certificate…’

‘You’re lower than a worm!’ pseudo-Guuuurk snarled.

Troy stepped in to defend our lad. ‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’ duplicate Troy shot back.

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you are!’

‘No, you really really are!’ the duplicate announced triumphantly.

‘Damn!’ poor Troy vented. ‘How does he keep doing that?’

‘Professor, you can’t allow this,’ my Gemma protested calmly. ‘It’s beyond childish.’

‘Well,’ ‘Errol’ grinned – even his teeth were whiter! It was really irritating. ‘If you Old bods are too lily-livered to do it, we New Improved bods’ll go in alone.’

‘No!’ Troy snapped, eying his duplicate with loathing. ‘I want to beat me, and beat me hard. I want to show everybody what a useless idiot I really am.’

The Professor sighed. ‘Very well, both teams will go in, and the winners will get to keep their positions.’

‘And the losers?’ the new me asked, before Gemma could object again.

‘Good point,’ the Professor conceded. ‘We can’t have two sets of you wandering around willy-nilly. It could cause all manner of misunderstandings.’

‘Fine.’ My double raised an arrogant eyebrow. Surely he hadn’t actually been tweezing that? ‘In the unlikely event we lose,’ he chuckled, ‘my whole team will voluntarily enter the Obliteration Chamber.’

Obliteration Chamber? I’d never heard of any Obliteration Chamber.

What else did this other ‘me’ know that I didn’t?

It occurred to me for the first time that this other incarnation of myself might have access to my entire memory. The answers to everything.

‘Oh, Brian,’ the lacy, frothy version of Gemma swooned, ‘you’re so heroic!’

I saw my Gemma looking at me meaningfully. Well, I’d show them who was heroic. ‘And if we lose,’ I announced defiantly, ‘so will we!’

‘Nooooooo!’ Gemma screamed, punching me rather effectively in the kidneys. ‘You idiot!’

‘Excellent!’ The Professor nodded, and having suddenly registered the rather extended tea break in which the navvies were still indulging, he wandered off to gently berate them.

‘To the death, then,’ he remarked casually, over his shoulder. ‘Get your safety suits from Jenkins, and let battle commence!’

Chapter Sixteen

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (innocent until proven), Saturday the 5th of Janury, 1952 [cont’d]

Well, what a how’s-your-father! Mr. Guuuurk doesn’t look none too pleased by this battle-to-the-death development, as they all walks behind me towards the changing tent.

All hissy quiet-like, he goes: ‘Brian, are you insane? If we don’t get hideously killed in the Ziggurat of Certain Death, we have to step into the Obliteration Chamber. I can’t be obliterated! Not at my time of life – I’m a despicable turncoat and a miserable coward!’

Which is true. I picked up his business cards from the printer’s.

‘Sorry. I just don’t know what came over me.’ Mr. Nylon is genuine upset. ‘That so-called “duplicate” of me jolly well gives me the pip!’

Dr. Janussen is made of sterner stuff. ‘Oh, what’s the point of worrying, anyway? We’re up against an insectoid meathead, a Martian Nazi, Captain Loves-Himself and his flibbertigibbet girly-girly girlfriend. Quite honestly, if we can’t beat that lot, we deserve to be obliterated.’

The relief on Mr. Nylon’s face! I swear he’s more worried about her reaction than he is about facing oblivionisation!

Then Master Troy chirps: ‘Where do we buy these Cigarettes of Certain Death? They sound great! Mine are just filter-tips.’

Dr. J. begins to patiently explain as they all steps through the tent flap. I looks around furtive, like, and sure enough, the Prof’s off down the far end of the platform, busy herding the navvies. I clears my throat pointedly before Mr. Nylon follows the others. ‘Ahem. Could I possibly have a quick private?’

‘What is it, Jenkins?’

‘It’s about a certain photograph, sir. Here.’

I hands him the dreaded envelope. He looks puzzled, but then he slides out the photo, and he gets my drift, quick enough.

‘My goodness!’ he exclaims, a bit too loud for comfort.

‘You were the intruder in the cellar, sir. It was you.’

‘Yes, well… Um, I can explain that—’ He starts his usual blathering.

‘No, don’t, sir. You’re a truly terrible liar, begging your pardon.’

‘Well, that… That’s true enough.’

‘We both know you’re a spy.’ Well, I have seen men suddenly go deathly pale – usually because of those giant leeches that lurk down the khazi in the Burmese jungle – but Mr. Nylon beats ’em all. He looks like an albino dipped in icing sugar at the North Pole, singing ‘White Christmas’.

‘Do we?’ he stammers.

I puts him out of his misery. ‘We’re both spies.’ Now he goes a completely different colour.

‘Are we?’

‘On behalf of the British Operatives for the General Biological Research Union of Sanitation Handlers,’ I announce proudly.

I can see him trying to work out what they call the ‘acronym’. ‘We don’t refer to it by its initials, of course. For obvious reasons.’

I think I hears him mutter: ‘Is there any organisation I’m not a spy for?’ but we’re talking so low, like as not I’ve misheard.

‘In the light of which developments, comrade brother,’ I winks at him, ‘as shop steward, I have to employ my endeavours to find some way of not showing that photograph to the management, viz. to wit and i.e., Professor Quanderhorn.’

‘Could you draw a moustache and beard on it?’ he asks.

‘It’s already got a moustache and beard,’ I points out.

‘No,’ he says, ‘that’s gravy browning.’

I don’t ask. Dr. Janussen starts calling him from the tent. I pats my boy on the shoulder. ‘You’d best be off, comrade. Don’t worry, old Brother Jenkins’ll think of something. Be like Dad – keep mum.’

‘Brian!’ she calls again. And he scampers off obediently, like Lassie to a mineshaft.

Think of something? All very well saying that, old Brother Jenkins. But what?

Then there’s this tap on my shoulder, and the Martian pops back out of the tent, in his white boiler suit. He’s adding a cravat and a spotted silk hankie in the top pocket.

‘Jenkins, old bean,’ he hisses, ‘can I have a private?’

‘I have to tell you, Mr. Guuuurk, I’m in a bit of a rush at the moment.’

‘I think you’ll find time for this.’ He reaches into his inside pocket – I notice he’s got tape round three of his thumbs. ‘I have a fresh consignment of particularly… artistic photographic studies of the most tasteful nature taken backstage at the Windmill Theatre.’

The Windmill! I feel a tiny drop of drool forming under my moustache, which I wipes away all surreptitious-like. You don’t want these Martians aware you’re keen in negotiations.

‘Knowing you as a well-travelled gentleman of the world and a long-standing connoisseur of pulchritudinal portraiture—’ he spiels.

‘I do like big ones, sir, and that’s for sure,’ I blurts, before I can stop myself.

‘I was wondering if you might be interested in obtaining them, as per our usual financial arrangement. Which, I recall, is a crisp, white fiver.’

I narrows my eyes and stares him down.

‘Fourpence,’ I says. ‘Take it or leave it.’

He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack while sucking a bowl of lemons. ‘Fourpence? You cut me to the quick!’ he wails. ‘Here am I trying to make a meagre crust from the pathetic scrapings of a miserable existence and you insult, nay, mock me with your derisory offer! Three pounds!’

‘Fourpence’, I fires back.

‘You’re stealing the bread out of my children’s mouths! I know I don’t have any children at the moment, but I plan to have some, and feed them bread! Two pounds!’

‘Fourpence.’

‘Let’s split the difference.’

‘Agreed. Fourpence.’

‘Oh, very well,’ he groans, handing the snaps over. ‘Mind you, I shall want a written receipt for tax purposes. Shall we say for five hundred pounds?’

‘I’ll write one for three shillings and elevenpence ha’penny,’ I says. ‘And that’s my final offer.’

‘Done!’ He certainly has been. He’s solved my problem. But him, poor blighter, his problem’s just beginning. I’ve seen what that Obliteration Chamber can do.

Chapter Seventeen

Private Diary of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill: Saturday the 5th of January, 1952.

Tea break over, I packed away the Fortnum’s hamper and silver champagne tankard. Retying the knotted string around my trouser knees, slipping back the false red nose made from an old tomato, and reinserting the signed photograph of Joseph Locke into my wellington, I resumed my erstwhile persona as ‘Mr. O’Reilly’, the simple Irish navvy.

Of course, no one had recognised me in this impenetrable disguise, and I had therefore been able to witness in person the sinister alien apparatus issue forth its terrible declamation.

The Secret of the Eternals! Should such a prize fall into the hands of the accursed Quanderhorn, he would become unstoppable, and this great nation of ours could never be liberated from the pernicious snare of his infernal Time contraption.

The years of tremulous waiting must end. The hour of action had been finally thrust upon me!

But before I could put my ultimate plan into action, there was one question that demanded an answer.

And at last I spotted Agent Penetrator himself, hovering around the mouth of the ziggurat, reconnoitring. As fortune would have it, he was blessedly alone, at least for a moment or two. I hurried over to him, keeping to the shadows cast by the malignant alien edifice.

‘Pssst. Begorrah and bejabers,’ I brogued expertly, ‘do you have a light for a simple bog Irishman’s shillelagh?’ I still have no idea what that is.

‘Mr. Churchill!’ he exclaimed, rather indiscreetly.

I hushed him. ‘Indeed it is, Penetrator. You’re a hard man to track down.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been looking for me, sir.’ There was something different about the fellow. He seemed more assured, more dauntless. He even looked slightly taller. Clearly that holiday on the Moon had worked wonders on his constitution.

‘I have to tell you, sir,’ he went on, ‘this is all being recorded and transcribed.’

‘I’m aware of that, Penetrator. Don’t concern yourself – my people will tear off and destroy the printed version when we’ve finished.’

‘Your people?’

‘Yes, Penetrator. None of these men is actually a genuine navvy.’

One nearby pipes up: ‘Oi am, sir.’

‘You’re sacked.’

‘Fair enough. I’m orf to da pub.’ He tossed his shovel aside and trundled off happily.

‘Now none of these men is an actual genuine navvy, so we can speak freely.’

‘Roger that, sir.’

‘So, to the important business: I need to know precisely what you found in Quanderhorn’s cellar.’

He looked completely mystified. ‘I didn’t find anything in the cellar.’

I knew it! That scabrous fox Quanderhorn had been talking the whole thing up to thwart any manoeuvre against him. But I needed to be certain.

‘Nothing dangerous down there at all?’ I persisted.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

I looked deep into his eyes, as I’d looked deep into Stalin’s. I can ascertain whether or not a man’s telling the truth. Stalin wasn’t. Penetrator indubitably was.

‘That’s excellent news!’ I slapped the fellow on the back. ‘There’ll be a medal in this for you, young rapscallion! Though regrettably it won’t be the Empire Medal for Conspicuous Honesty. We’ve had a lot of trouble with cheap forgeries, recently.’

He looked momentarily perplexed. ‘I’m afraid I really don’t know what all this cellar stuff is about, sir—’

‘Of course you don’t.’ I winked. ‘And neither do I. Carry on, Penetrator. But don’t be too successful.’

Leaving him behind, I hastened to the transcribing device to supervise the immediate destruction of any record of our conversation. I was finally free! Free of the confounded restraints that had prevented my moving against Quanderhorn.

Free as the goddess Nemesis herself to deliver that final, delicious and richly merited thunderbolt.

Chapter Eighteen

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (pleas taken into consideration), Saturday the 5th of January, 1952

‘Good God in Heaven!’ The prof’s veins all knot in his forehead.

‘I told you to prepare yourself for a shock, sir.’

‘But this!’ He slaps the photo with the back of his hand. ‘What devilish agency would infiltrate my top secret cellar in G-strings and rotating nipple tassels? The Russians? The Martians? The Elastic-eating Mothmen from Trappist-1?’

‘Oh, I remember them Mothmen, sir. Nasty bits of work. The amount of bloomers that fell down after that attack!’ Mothmen? Don’t like ’em.

Corner of my eye, I see some navvies tearing up bits of paper. Why can’t they just use bog roll, like civilised people?

The Prof’s eyes is flittering from side to side, his mind churning nineteen to the dozen. He don’t usually get agitated like this. ‘Whoever it was, the blundering buffoons were threatening the very essence of existence.’

Blimey. ‘If you’ll forgive me, sir, d’you mind me asking how?’

He goes all quiet for a moment, then shoots me this look which really frightens me. ‘Yes, Jenkins, as a matter of fact, I mind very much.’

Knowing what’s good for me, I hastily changes the subject. ‘The duplicates are ready to go in, sir. The originals are still arguing who gets to hold the flaming torch.’

‘I’ll deal with all that, Jenkins.’ His veins don’t look much less purple. ‘We can’t risk any more incursions into that cellar. You have to get back to the lab urgently and shore things up. Double the slow-motion gas, triple the ball bearings, quadruple the flame-throwers and raise the invisible shield.’

‘If you remember, sir,’ I reminds him, ‘you put the invisible shield down somewhere, and now we can’t find it.’

‘Dammit! Secure that cellar at all costs!’

Well, I don’t know exactly what he’s got going on down in that cellar, but I ain’t never seen him scared like this. Never.

Chapter Nineteen

Dr Virginia Whyte’s diary, December 31st, [the very first] 1952

I can’t honestly say I knew precisely what it was in London we were on our way to, but it was thrilling, nonetheless. I’d never seen Darius look quite so exhilarated, as he powered the Jaguar XK120 roadster down the A1, snow-covered fields flashing past on either side. Despite the temperature we had the roof down, and I was rather thankful for the woolly scarf and mittens Aunt Alice had knitted for me for Christmas. The wind ruddied our faces and occasional flecks of snow stung my cheeks before melting.

As night fell we stopped off at a transport café to put the roof up. We sat, gratefully cupping our hands round hot mugs of cocoa, amid the gruff lorry drivers and intense-looking young men in leather jackets and tight blue workman’s trousers. What a hoot! It was, quite frankly, a tremendous adventure!

I managed to hold back until we finally purred into central London, then I could supress it no longer. ‘So, are you finally going to tell me, you beast?’ I asked.

‘Tell you what?’ He grinned.

‘Whatever it is, you silly goose! I can see you’re bursting to come out with it.’

‘Virginia.’ He positively gleamed. ‘Remember when we first started out, with barely enough money to keep body and soul together?’

‘I’m not likely to forget that. We had to live a whole week on that awful soup I cooked up.’

He laughed heartily. ‘Yes, I can still taste it! I’ve got a confession: I fed most of it to that funny little dog you had.’

‘My chihuahua? Gargantua? You didn’t! You could have killed him!’ I punched Darius playfully on the shoulder.

‘And remember,’ he grinned on, ‘how we’d sit up into the wee small hours, telling each other fine stories of how one day we would do some work – important work – that people would remember us for for ever?’

I laughed. ‘Yes! Pipe dreams of the young and foolish!’

‘It may have seemed like a pipe dream at the time—’

‘Darius – what are you telling me? You’ve finally got the Vegetablising Ray operational?’

‘No, not that…’

I almost missed a heartbeat. ‘Not the Möbius Project? Have you found a way to make it work? But that’s enormous! And you kept it to yourself?’

‘I didn’t want to raise false hopes. But if I’m right, Virginia, this is it! Our masterpiece! Our magnum opus!’

‘Come on, Q-horn – don’t keep me hanging. How will we pull it off?’

As usual, once unleashed, there was no stopping the Professor in him. ‘Well, what we needed, of course, was to identify the precise location where the conflux of temporal energies are most powerfully focused.’

‘Yes, clearly, but—’

He held up his driving-gloved finger. ‘By fracturing the very continuum itself only at that precise spot, the ruptured time stream would be forced out under tremendous pressure along the path of least resistance to find egress at another precise location elsewhere.’

‘But we already knew all that. We simply don’t have the geomaths to calculate either of those points.’

Grinning unbearably, he reached into his door bin and handed me a battered exercise book.

I skimmed the formulae-strewn pages greedily. ‘This… If this is correct—’

‘It is.’

‘Then the emergence point would be precisely beneath the old fever hospital we converted into our laboratory!’

He nodded, rather smugly. ‘Directly into that cavern we made into our cellar…’

‘Our cellar…? I wondered why you chose that curious site.’

‘Where the excess years can be safely stored in a five-dimensional array of polytopic hyperspheres!’

‘So that’s what all that equipment was!’ I raced through the rest of the calculations as best I could. ‘And that would make the origin point…’

He smiled to himself as we rounded New Palace Yard, slithered to a stop, and gazed up the yellow illuminated face of the clock popularly (and incorrectly) known as ‘Big Ben’.

It was half an hour to midnight, and the revelries were in full swing. We pushed through the milling throngs below, into the Palace of Westminster. We ran giddily through the maze of stone corridors and slipped in at the base of the clock tower. Darius took my hand and led me quickly up the stairs.

‘So,’ I panted, ‘starved of fresh tomorrows, Time would loop over and over – a temporal Möbius strip – and it would be perpetually 1952!’

‘We’ll be virtually immortal – of course people will still die, but not of old age any more. We’ll stay just as we are for ever! It’s the single most important contribution anyone’s ever made to humanity.’

I stopped to catch my breath. ‘But what about people who are miserable, people who are in pain? Aren’t we condemning them to perpetual suffering?’

‘But I’ll have time, Virginia. Time to find a cure for all diseases. To end all suffering. Time to pursue all my projects—’

‘You mean all our projects.’

‘Yes,’ he said too slowly. He didn’t mean it. ‘Our projects. Of course.’ There was a distant look in his eyes. ‘But mostly mine,’ he added rather strangely. He began climbing again.

‘But, Darius – people may not want to stay the same for ever, have you thought of that?’

He was several steps ahead of me by now, ‘People! What do we care for people? People don’t think – they have no idea what’s best for them! We’re giving them stability. Constancy. No more fear of things changing – it’ll be a perpetual golden age no one need ever look back to!’

We rounded the last twist of the stairway and he pushed open the door to the clock chamber. I stepped in after him, lungs and legs aching.

The ticking of the colossal mechanism was deafening, but what startled me was the bewildering and complex series of relays, switches and devices which had been jury-rigged to the famous workings. They beeped, buzzed and burred, lying in wait like some monstrous insect that had made its atrocious nest in our national monument.

‘Y-you’ve already set the whole thing up?’

‘I told them it was a minor weather experiment.’ He laughed rather unkindly. ‘They’re so easy to dupe, it’s almost cruel.’

A horrible realisation flooded over me. ‘Now I see why you waited ’til New Year’s Eve to tell me.’ He didn’t even register my disappointment. I’d naïvely assumed he was being romantic. ‘You’re going to activate it tonight!’

‘It’s already activated, Virginia! I wanted you to be here to witness it firing up with me.’

He looked over the terrible creation with something like pride. Or was it obsession?

I had to deter him from this path. It was madness. ‘We can’t just go ahead with this – there are so many things we need to work through—’

‘Plenty of time to work them through after midnight has struck. All the time in the world, in fact!’

‘But the polytopic hyperspheres are finite. They won’t hold more than ten years safely. Twenty at the most.’

‘Agreed, but we’ll have found another way to safely dissipate it long before then.’

I checked the reverse clock face; it was almost midnight. ‘Darius, we have to disengage this right now—’

But as I spoke the giant minute hand tocked up to the twelve and the chimes began, shaking the chamber and forcing my hands over my ears.

‘You have to listen to me,’ I shouted. ‘The storage array will eventually become unstable. Please wait!’ But the machinery was already gathering speed, and each new chime was getting closer to the last.

‘Impossible!’ he yelled back. ‘Now it’s in motion, the Time-Splicer can’t be stopped. It’ll automatically fire up at the end of every year to keep the Möbius time stream turning back on itself. It’s synchronised to the final stroke of midnight.’

‘Darius! No! Once those tanks reach capacity, the slightest tremor in the cellar could cause a temporal fissure that would split the planet… maybe even reality itself!’

The final chime rang out. The sound seemed to hang in the air, and then reversed itself, like a genie being sucked back into its bottle.

I thought I felt a slight wind, but it didn’t seem… physical, somehow. It didn’t hit me, so much, but passed through me, like a wave.

We stood in blank silence for a second or two.

Then, suddenly, after a slightly bemused hiatus, the crowd below began to cheer and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

He grinned. And as I stared into his eyes, I realised with deep sadness and not a little dread, that the Darius I knew had gone.

‘Happy Old Year,’ he said.

Chapter Twenty

Private Diary of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill: Sunday the 6th of January, 1952

I positively skipped over to the dark archway where my men had concealed the field telephone. My hand was uncharacteristically steady as I raised the receiver and jauntily cranked the handle.

‘Hello? Is that the Air Chief Marshal?’

‘It is, Prime Minister. Awaiting your orders.’

I gleefully savoured every syllable: ‘I’m activating Plan 43. Scramble the newly formed Advanced Laboratory-Blasting Squadron.’

‘I’ll need the code phrase, sir.’

I gave it to him. And feeling capriciously frivolous, I added: ‘Oh, and toss in the massed bands of the Royal Scots Dragoons, to give the attack a more carnival atmosphere.’

‘Acknowledged!’ and he yelled, off the phone, ‘Scramble the Lab Busters!’

I slowly clicked down the receiver.’Twas done. And done well.

Tonight, once and for all, that maniac Quanderhorn’s laboratory complex shall be wiped from the face of the earth!