The Greatest Show Off Earth

by Robert Rankin

  ‘I am.’ Raymond giggled foolishly. ‘I’m pissed as a puddle, me.’

  ‘Sadly no. You see all the drinks served at this table are of a non-alcoholic nature.’ The professor waited while this ‘sank in’.

  Raymond refocused his eyes and steadied his spinning head. ‘Oh,’ said he, in a sober tone. ‘Just fancy that.’

  ‘Just fancy that indeed.’ Professor Merlin toasted Raymond with his glass. ‘But you will not, I fancy, fancy what I have next to tell you.’

  ‘Now that I find surprising.’ Raymond took up his own glass, sniffed at its contents, sighed and returned it to the table.

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

  Raymond nodded mournfully.

  ‘Then cop your whack for this, our kid. To begin somewhere near the beginning. Do you know of Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres and Polar Voids?

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Raymond. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  The professor raised his tattooed eyebrow. ‘Is that intended to be an ironic retort? Or was it just a plain old lie?’

  Raymond shrugged. ‘Just a plain old lie, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Fiddle-de fiddle-dum.’ Professor Merlin frowned and Raymond was fascinated to see the way the tip of his chin touched the end of his nose. ‘I shall try to keep this as short as possible. To spare us both the agony.’

  Raymond popped another sweetmeat into his mouth. If he couldn’t get drunk, then at least he could get really fat.

  ‘Captain John Cleves Symmes was a philosopher,’ said the showman, ‘and he had a theory concerning the composition of the Earth. He believed that the planet consisted of a number of concentric spheres, one inside another, open at the poles to allow access between them. Are you following this?’

  Raymond munched and nodded. ‘The hollow Earth theory. My pal Simon had a book on the subject. The theory has been around for centuries, that there may be another race living inside the Earth.’

  ‘And you do not believe this theory.’

  Raymond shook his head. ‘I certainly don’t.’

  ‘And why would that be, do you think?’

  ‘Because it’s a load of old cobblers.’ And here Raymond winked. ‘Although I’ll tell you this. Apparently there were these Russian scientists. And they were doing this experiment in Siberia. And they drilled down twenty-three miles. And their drill broke into a kind of a cavern. And they lowered down a microphone on a very long lead. And you’ll never guess what they heard.’

  ‘Was it the sound of millions of souls, screaming in eternal agony?’

  ‘Aw, you’ve heard it.’

  ‘I have. And a horrible noise it is too.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘But let us return to Symmes’ theory. What if I were to tell you that the planet Earth consists of two concentric spheres, one inside the other. And that both have intelligent life on their outer surfaces?’

  ‘I would say it were cobblers,’ said Raymond.

  ‘But nevertheless it is true.’

  ‘Oh no it’s not.’

  ‘Oh yes it is.’

  ‘Not,’ said Raymond. ‘Not not not. Believe me, Professor. If there was another race living beneath the Earth, we would have discovered them by now. And the polar openings. There is no other world beneath the one I live on.’

  ‘You are correct and true as Peter Pure.’ Professor Merlin smiled once more. ‘Because it is above the one you live on.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘It is you who live inside the Earth. Another world exists above your head. About ten miles above it, in fact.’

  ‘No no no.’ Raymond shook the head that had no other world above it. ‘That is serious cobblers. Listen, if I stand in my garden and look up. I don’t see the underside of some other world above. I see the sky.’

  ‘An illusion of sky.’

  ‘I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.’ Raymond whistled the refrain, but he couldn’t remember who sang it. ‘I’ve seen the sun and the moon and the stars,’ said he.

  ‘Oh no you haven’t.’

  ‘Oh yes I have.’

  ‘Oh no you haven’t.’

  ‘Have too,’ and Raymond stuck his tongue out.

  ‘Now just you listen!’ Professor Merlin threw up his hands and grew just a little bit fierce. ‘I am going to explain this to you just the one time. And when I have spoken, you will be permitted to ask questions. Do you savvy? Comprehendo? Are we firing on all pistons? Do you understand me?’

  Raymond nodded. ‘No need to shout,’ he said.

  ‘Righty-right.’ The showman straightened his waistcoat and rearranged his watch chains into a pleasing composition. ‘A brief lecture entitled “The True History of Mankind”, delivered by Professor Prometheus Merlin.’

  ‘Prometheus?’

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘“The True History of Mankind”. As follows. Pay close attention if you will.’ Raymond sat up straight. ‘Intelligent life on Earth began on the outer shell of the planet, a very very long time ago. A race evolved, as races often do, formed into a society, mapped the planet. And discovered the holes in the poles. Early explorers descended through the northern polar opening in hot air balloons and found the world within. A twilight world, ruled by monsters of the deep. Dinosaurs. The world which later you would be brought up on, Raymond. Back then it was dark and dank and not really suitable to support human life. There just wasn’t enough light coming in through the pole-holes. It needed proper lighting.

  ‘Of course it was many centuries later that the technology came into being, capable of developing the artificial sun, miniature moon, planetary and starry sky effects you see today. The “topsiders” wanted to create a real Garden of Eden down there and they wanted to reproduce a perfect facsimile of the heavens. It’s a true masterpiece of engineering, I’m sure you will agree. Most convincing.’

  Raymond sighed and rolled his eyes. ‘So how does it work?’ he asked. Professor Merlin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But it does.’

  ‘Cobblers,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So. And so. The world below is now ready for colonization. The government of the day has all but bankrupted itself constructing the artificial sun, etcetera, but is expecting to make a vast fortune from the millions of eager bodies wanting to buy land down there. But, oh deary me. To their surprise, no-one wants to move below. Because, when you think about it, who would really want to live inside a planet? Bits of the outer planet might fall down on your head. Which, of course, they do. You call them meteorites. And the artificial sun might break down once in a while and plunge you into darkness . . .’

  ‘Which we no doubt call solar eclipses,’ said Raymond in a most sarcastic tone.

  ‘Shut it once more.’

  ‘So sorry.’

  ‘So what can the government do?’

  Raymond put up his hand.

  ‘What is it?’ the professor asked.

  ‘Let me guess what they did. They did just what we did when we shipped our convicts off to Australia. They dumped all their criminals down onto the inner world.’

  ‘You are the personification of exactitude, me old cock sparra. That is precisely what they did. The inner world was rich in mineral resources and so it was speculators who snapped it up and took the criminals for slave labour in the mines and cultivating the land and whatnot.’

  Raymond rolled his eyes once more.

  ‘Now, as you can imagine, these early “settlers” were something of a rough old bunch and not exactly given over to conservation issues when it came to the indigenous wildlife and so—’

  ‘Me me!’ Raymond’s hand was once more in the air.

  ‘Go on,’ said the professor wearily.

  ‘They hunted the dinosaurs to extinction. I’ll just bet they did.’

  ‘Punctiliously pukka. They did just that. From then on you will find that the history of mankind on the inner world
is pretty much as you read it in your books. The exception being that all references to the world above have long since been deleted.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on.’ Raymond flapped his hands about. ‘I spy a flaw or two in all this.’

  ‘You do?’ The professor was surprised.

  ‘I do. For one thing, how come no-one today knows of the existence of the outer world?’

  ‘But they do, my dear Raymond, they do. Those in charge know. Those whose job it is to maintain the myth that space above is an airless void. Those who control the population. Those who oversee and profit from the interworld transportation of “George”. Those who keep mankind in ignorance.’

  ‘What, you mean like prime ministers and presidents and people like that?’ ‘It’s an inner-world-wide conspiracy.’

  ‘Nah.’ Raymond shook his head. ‘If these people in power knew there was a world above, they’d all want to go up and live there.’

  ‘And they do, young Raymond. They do all the time.’

  ‘Nah.’ Raymond gave his head another shake. ‘You don’t hear of the US president vanishing away for months on end every year.’

  ‘What, this president, do you mean?’ Professor Merlin pointed. And where Zephyr had been sitting—

  ‘Mr President,’ said Raymond. ‘How did you get here? Oh I see! You’re not! I mean. Oh bloody hell!’

  ‘To my own knowledge,’ the showman counted on his wonderful fingers, ‘the present president has so far been played by no less than four topsiders, working shifts. No-one down below can tell the difference, because outwardly there is no difference.’

  ‘They walk among us,’ Raymond said.

  ‘And they sell us for food and have been doing so for centuries, since they began to trade with the other planets. Uranus holds the current franchise.’

  ‘Abdullah, the lying starfish.’

  ‘Abdullah, is a pirate. More unscrupulous than most.’

  Raymond took to the scratching of his head. The big question was, and it was a big question, was any of this really true? The Abdullah bit was certainly true. And the replaceable presidents? That could be done. But that the world he had grown up upon was actually inside another world? It still seemed a little far-fetched.

  ‘Could I see it?’ Raymond asked.

  ‘See what, me old fruitcake?’

  ‘The Earth. From the outside. With its outer shell and its holes in the poles. Through a telescope, or something?’

  ‘Of a surety you may.’ Professor Merlin produced a slim brass telescope from his top pocket. ‘I thought you might enquire. Thrust it through yonder porthole.’

  ‘Which one where?’

  ‘That one there.’ Professor Merlin gestured and Raymond spied out the porthole in question. It had been incorporated into the erotic wall fresco in a manner which, although amusing, was immodest to say the least.

  Raymond excused himself from the banqueting table and took himself over to the saucy porthole, raised the telescope to his eye, focused it and then said, ‘Shiva’s sheep! There’s a big blue planet out here with a hole in the top.’

  ‘Now he gets the picture,’ Professor Merlin said.

  Raymond returned to the table. He returned the telescope to the professor and his well-tailored bum to its chair.

  ‘There’s a hole in my planet,’ said Raymond, said Raymond. ‘There’s a hole in my planet,’ said Raymond.

  ‘A hole.’ ‘Must come as a bit of a shock to you.’

  ‘A bit of a shock?’ Raymond buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Perhaps you have other questions you would care to ask.’

  ‘Other questions?’ Raymond unburied his face. ‘Yes I do have one or two.’ ‘Then ask on, oh guest at my table.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Raymond. ‘Assuming that I believe what I just saw, and I think I probably do, tell me one thing. Which Earth are you from? The inside one or the outside one?’

  ‘From the inside, as yourself. My circus and I were kidnapped on the whim of a certain very Far Eastern potentate. We would have ended our days in the pot had it not been for the fair Zephyr.’ Professor Merlin bowed his head to the beauty in question. ‘We “appropriated” this vessel and made good our escape. Now we travel between the planets on forged papers, posing as topsiders and affecting rescues where we can. Gathering recruits to our noble cause.’

  ‘This cause being that you intend to wage war against the topsiders?’

  ‘We must. The trade in human beings must cease. And the plans that the topsiders are presently formulating must not be allowed to proceed.’

  ‘And what plans are these?’

  ‘Plans to deal with the pollution.’

  ‘I am lost once more,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Pollution.’ Professor Merlin plucked at his nose. ‘From the inner Earth. Our Earth. All that smoke and gas and what-have-you. Where do you think it all goes to?’

  ‘Well, I always thought it went into the atmosphere and just sort of hung about there. I’d be wrong on that I suppose.’

  ‘As wrong as can be. It pours out of the polar openings and contaminates the world above. And the world above has had enough of it. Their ruler, an evil despot, has decided upon a drastic course of action: that the inner world be environmentally deprioritized.’

  ‘Environmentally what?’

  ‘Deprioritized. The plan is to switch off the artificial sun and plug up the holes in the poles. Concrete them over. Seal them. Airtight!’

  ‘What?’ Raymond fell back in his chair. ‘But if they did that, then it would mean . . .’

  ‘It would mean that the last man alive on the inner Earth would be the one who could hold his breath the longest. Probably a pearl diver, would be my guess.’

  ‘That’s not funny!’ Raymond smote the table with his fists.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be funny. Pearl divers really can hold their breath for a long time. I used to have one with the circus. Did the now legendary Houdini’s water tank escape. Used to hold his breath and drink his way out. Got too fat to perform in the end, if I recall.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Raymond’s raised voice was once more the only one to be heard. ‘We must act at once. Do decisive things. Lead your army against the evil topsiders. Blow up all their cement works for a kick off. I will be honoured to serve in this noble cause.’

  ‘Knew you would, good sir. Just knew you would.’

  ‘But to take on a whole planet. That is some challenge. How many thousand men do you have so far?’

  Professor Merlin diddled at his chin. ‘How many thousand, did you say?’

  ‘You do have several thousand men?’

  ‘Not several thousand, no.’

  ‘One thousand then?’

  Professor Merlin shook his head. ‘Not as such.’

  ‘Several hundred then?’

  Professor Merlin made the ‘so so’ gesticulation. ‘Not as such,’ he said again.

  ‘How many men do you have in your army?’ Raymond demanded to be told.

  ‘Just you,’ said the professor. ‘You are it.’

  ‘I am it?’ Raymond, who in the heat of things had risen from his chair, now fell back into it. ‘I am it? But you said you were affecting rescues. Gathering recruits to the cause.’

  ‘We are, dear fellow-me-lad. But you’re the first who’s actually passed the entrance exam. Do you think perhaps that I’ve been setting too high a standard? Perhaps I should just get them to fill in a form or something, rather than go to all the expense of the banquet each time?’

  Raymond once more buried his face in his hands. And this time he began to weep.

  ‘Is something wrong, my boy?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Raymond blubbed. ‘How could anything be wrong? My world is about to have its air-holes paved over and the army of deliverance amounts to myself alone. How could anything possibly be wrong?’

  11

  Simon limped home and kicked his cat. Not specifically, but just in passing. The way you would. All things considered
.

  It wasn’t a particularly interesting cat. Just one of those tabby jobs, that slide round your legs like a silken pervert whenever they want feeding, and pointedly ignore you the rest of the time. Simon rarely remembered to feed it, but cats being far less intelligent than their doting owners give them credit for, this one turned up again and again on the off-chance of a free lunch. It wasn’t getting one today though.

  But there was no love lost. The cat did not resemble Simon in the very least and he in turn looked like it not at all.

  Simon kicked his cat. The cat bit Simon’s leg. Simon swore at his cat, pushed open his front door, went inside and limped upstairs.

  He was not best pleased about the way things had turned out this day. Having pushed the dresser aside, he tore up the loose floor board, dragged out The Greatest Show off Earth, threw it into the air and head-butted it across the room.

  Then he screamed, slumped down onto his bed and clutched once more at his poor aching head. It now appeared to ache in stereo.

  ‘You rotten sods,’ he complained to the world. ‘You dirty rotten sods.’

  When the double vision had cleared, Simon crawled across the floor and retrieved Raymond’s biography. ‘Stitched up,’ he snarled. ‘Done. Robbed blind. All my winnings and my one hundred pounds also.’

  The man of sorrows returned to his bed of pain and spread the book before him on his lap. Boldly going where no man had gone before, well at least not him, Simon turned straight to the back of the book. Did it have an index? Yes it did. Was he mentioned in it? Yes he was. Not a lot of entries though. Considering it was such a thick book.

  ‘Hold on there.’ Simon leafed violently back to the page in question. Yes, here he was, leaving the bookie’s with his winnings. Simon skimmed down the page. There was no mention of any car knocking him down, or B.E.A.S.T. terrorists stealing all his money. Why was that, eh?

  ‘I’ll tell you why.’ Simon made a bitter face. ‘Because bloody B.E.A.S.T. wrote this book and they are hardly going to admit that they stole all my winnings. What do they say?’

  He read aloud from the book,

  In a sudden and quite unexpected gesture of goodwill and public spiritedness, Simon donated all of his winnings to a local charity. And on which selfless note, plays no further part in our narrative.