The Fifth Correction

by Robert Wingfield

  “Please do,” said Tom. “I want to go somewhere a bit drier. How soon can you come and get us?”

  * * *

  In the Tax Office, Vac and Tanda were collected by a tired-looking woman in a grey suit with a long pencil skirt showing lower calf, and stockings with a seam up the back. Sturdy black shoes clicked on the stone floor as she led them along more grey and featureless corridors. Eventually, she stopped in front of a door, knocked three times, tied a yellow ribbon round the handle and opened it for them.

  “Mr Dullman, Vac McSkagan and moll to see you.” She walked up to his desk and handed over a form.

  “Thank you Deirdre. I will take it from here. Did you tie the ribbon to the door handle to indicate that we are not to be disturbed?”

  “The yellow one, sir; this is only an interview I presume, not the full interrogation?”

  “Correct.” The man behind the old oak desk was very large and imposing. He wore the standard three-piece suit of dark grey flannel, but had brightened it up with a white shirt and grey striped necktie.

  “Please take a seat,” he said in a monotonous voice. They sat in the two chairs placed in front of the desk. He rummaged silently through a pile of papers.

  The Skagans exchanged glances and then Tanda stared at the man who had not looked up since they entered. A nameplate in front of them advertised the incumbent as ‘Horace Dullman TA, Assessor of Tax Rebates’, and apart from the jumble of paperwork in front of him, the only other items were an executive toy guillotine and a photograph of the man himself with his family, a dull-looking fat woman with the regulation, fat-woman short haircut, and three overweight children of unspecified sex, in various states of disarray. The family was all dressed in grey, and the photograph had obviously been taken in a studio; the lighting was perfect and the backdrop showed a swirling grey cloudscape.

  Vac leaned back in the chair and studied the room. There was nothing much to see. The walls were featureless, painted in a sickly yellow. One had a dark portrait of a dour-looking man with the name ‘Stringbanger Nasty, Assessor of Taxes 21001-21098’, and another had been brightened up with two plastic signs, one of which said ‘You don’t have to be boring to work here, but you will be if you want to keep your job.’ The other was more cheerful. There was a picture of a grinning red demon with a clown spiked on its trident. The caption read, ‘Laughter is the voice of the Devil.’

  “Nice office,” he said to the man.

  “Do not speak,” said Dullman. “I have to finish looking through this claim from the Gong Farmers’ Union about a rebate on their deposits before I can interview you.”

  “This won’t take long,” said Tanda. “And then we can be out of your way, so you can deal with more important issues.”

  Dullman shook his head resignedly. “If you must then; what can I do for you?” He looked at his visitors for the first time since they entered, and then peered down at the paper Deirdre had given him. “It says here that you are Mr Vac McSkagan. You don’t look like a ‘mister’ to me. He stared at Tanda’s chest, where her nipples were showing clearly through the thin material of her combat-chemise. “Do you find it cold in here?”

  “A bit,” said Tanda.

  “Regulation nineteen degrees,” said Dullman. “I’m told we can’t get it any warmer because of the density of the building necessary to withstand missile strikes. On the plus side, it is always nineteen degrees in winter too.”

  “I can live with it,” said Tanda. “Now about our claim…”

  “I would need to talk to Mr McSkagan,” said Dullman.

  “This is he.” Tanda indicated Vac, who was busily digging a bogie out of his nose.

  “Hi,” said Vac, extending his hand.

  Dullman ignored it disdainfully. “So what’s your problem, young man?” he said.

  “Er…” The rabbits driving Vac’s brain temporarily went off on a carrot hunt, and left him lost for words.

  “I will speak for him,” said Tanda. “He’s not good around bits of paper.”

  “And you are..?”

  Tanda handed over a business card she had knocked up on a machine in the lobby while they were waiting. Dullman looked at it with a puzzled expression. “It’s blank.”

  “Turn it over.”

  “Right,” He read out loud, “Jill Gray, Child of Fire, Queensryche, Australia. Financilia Advisor..?”

  “Bugger,” thought Tanda, “I’ve fat-fingered the text… and furthermore, I’ve now got 500 of them to give away.”

  She leapt up, and thought on her feet, “Financilia; it means ‘collective finances’, you know, tax, income, bar-tabs, and payments to premium numbers, dodgy roofers, deposed despots and the like.” She sat down again.

  “I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been an Assessor here for forty years come next Tuesday at 3:15p.m.”

  “It’s an Austr-alien term. Nobody else understands it or even how to pronounce it?” She finished the statement with an unnecessary inflection to try to make it sound more genuinely from that part of the cosmos.

  “Good, so I assume you are representing Mr McSkagan here?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then represent; I haven’t got all day you know.”

  “Simply put, my client has submitted a book for print on demand. The printing apparently takes place on this planet and then is distributed.”

  Dullman yawned and started resetting the guillotine, but Tanda pushed on.

  “He has sold two copies, one to himself and the other to me, and now has received a tax statement, Form 1042S, stating that you are withholding 50% tax on the proceeds.”

  “Standard practise,” said Dullman. “If you don’t register for tax in this location, then we take 50% of the proceeds as an incentive for you to give us all your personal details, which we then pass to the Espionage Service and eventually leave on a bus in a database stored on a thumb-drive.” He took a breath. “For anti-terrorist reasons, you understand.”

  “But we don’t live on this planet. We shouldn’t be paying any tax here at all.”

  “I thought you said you were an Austr-alien?”

  “That was an Austr-alien ‘at all’, not an Irish one.”

  “I see. Is there a mutual tax agreement between us?”

  “Yes,” lied Tanda after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Not that it matters,” said Dullman. “The standard rate of tax to all aliens is 50%. This way we make sure that we optimise public income without taxing our own people, who I might say, are reluctant to give us any of their earnings. Most of them are dealing cash-only these days and we can’t tax that more than once.”

  “But our own government charge us 50% tax, on the original amount. This leaves the authors with nothing.”

  Dullman hummed. “I’m sorry but I can’t speak for your own tax people. Anyway, being an author comes with its own pain; you don’t expect to make any money from writing do you? What sort of profession is that?”

  “I had hoped…” began Vac.

  “Sorry, but we have rules; we have to tax; there are only two things certain in life,” he paraphrased, “death and taxes.”

  “Why?” asked Vac.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do we have to pay taxes?”

  Dullman smiled. It was a question he had heard many times before, and had the answers off pat. Pat, the assistant, had left him a crib-sheet. He reeled off the reasons, using his fingers to count. “To pay for the government, salaries of public workers such as me, the cost of the roads, colleges, public buildings, law enforcement, fire and health services, the military…”

  “So we’re paying to keep an establishment in place to tax the people?” Tanda cut in, as she could see Vac was getting annoyed.

  “What?”

  “Why do we pay for a government?” she pressed.

  “It can’t pay for itself, it has no income.”

  “Suppose it did. Suppose it could sell p
roducts which kept the salaries paid?”

  “Suppose it could; we would still have to fund the services; fire, health, police, Euro MPs’ expenses and all that.”

  “If you think about it,” said Tanda, “they could pay for themselves. If you call out the fire service, they put out the fire and then send you a bill. If you call out the police, they charge you a call-out fee and then recoup the rest of the money from the criminals they catch. If you get sick, you pay the hospital for your treatment. It can all be done if you have the correct insurance. Even the roads; you are already paying a road tax I presume, and another tax on fuel?”

  “Correct, but what you are saying is that if we changed the way we govern, we wouldn’t need this establishment at all; we would simply replace tax and government with ‘insurance’?” Dullman leaned back, steepling his fingers and considering the alternatives.

  “The difference is that people would have a choice in what they paid for.”

  “You make an excellent point, Miss Gray. I presume it is ‘Miss’, judging by your business-like manner, which would drive off the normal insecure man in favour of someone more homely.” He shot a loving glance at the family photograph.

  “You can call me ‘Jill’,” said Tanda batting her eyelids.

  “As I said, Miss Gray, you make an excellent point, but your claim is rejected. The 50% tax rate stays in place as per the Law and Due Process. Good day to you both.”

  He dismissed them with a wave and returned to studying the Gong-Farmer paperwork. Tanda stood up and walked towards the door. Vac followed her, bemused.

  “That went tolerably,” he said.

  “Ignorant bastards,” muttered Tanda, “and we can’t do a thing about it. They take the money before it gets anywhere near us. Let’s get back to the ship before they start charging us rent to park at the aerodrome.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, at the main GUTS building, the fire alarm bell started to echo around the corridors. William Eckaslike, a young man with only three of the regulation chins pulled on his high visibility vest, after thoroughly checking the Process Manual.

  This was the first evacuation he had ever marshalled; fire-drills were never organised, because the building was solid stone and deemed fireproof. This was also by intention because there had been several futile attempts to burn the place down by disgruntled tax payers. The concept of there being a fire alarm now, worried him. There was no reason there should be a fire alarm. Even when that pile of gunpowder barrels had been discovered in the basement distillery, they had only needed to clear the first floor while it was dealt with.

  “There must be some reason,” he thought. He knocked on the door of the first office, ignoring the black ribbon on the handle, and went in. On the floor was a thin man begging for his life, while the office owner towered over him, reading out final demand statements.

  “Mr Complete-Bastard, we have to leave,” said William. “Fire alarm.”

  “I can hear the damn thing, Willie” said the man. “It’s driving me nuts. Can’t you shut it off? Call me CB though, it’s more efficient.”

  “It’s a genuine alarm, CB.”

  “Not a drill then?” said the man, producing a fine example of a ‘Jack Black & Carol Decker’ power-hammer to insert into the hapless victim on the floor.

  “Not this time. We need to evacuate.”

  “I think he already has,” said CB, inspecting his victim’s trousers.

  “No, I mean, leave the building. We are all in danger.”

  “Can’t see it myself,” said the man, “but I’ll finish this interview first and then come and join you in the muster area. Where is it by the way?”

  “Down the street, next to the explosive factory; you can’t miss it, the big building made of glass and decorative metal fragments.”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  William had similar problems at each office he visited. Firstly they would refuse to believe that there was a problem, and then they would get angry that he had the nerve to disturb their daily activities. He would insist, showing them his official armband and referring them to the Process Manual. They would try to bargain for more time; could he let them finish this important phone call or complete filling in this eviction document or other excuse? He would keep explaining and referring to the manual, and got to know that when the shoulders slumped, he had succeeded. Finally, they would leave the office, to be shepherded along the corridor to the never-used fire escape. There developed a long queue as people fought to squeeze through a doorway which had been designed before the fast-food joints moved in and took over the lower east side.

  Tanda looked down from their hovering Pig-Ugly at the stream of people still moving slowly out of the GUTS building. The individuals below did not look up; their necks would not allow them unless lying down, and lying down entailed the use of lifting equipment, so they didn’t bother. It was fortunate they did not, because apart from losing their mid-elevenses pies when they saw the Pig-Ugly, they would have seen the ominous barrel of the Dokushunt cannon protruding from below the ship.

  “They are taking their time,” said Tanda. “It’s four hours since we sent the bomb threat. I suppose we should wait until they’ve cleared the building.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” said Vac. “You must be going soft. There would have been no mercy in the old days.”

  “Nothing to do with mercy,” said Tanda. “As you know, it took us all this time to fill in the exit papers before they would let us take off.”

  “I wondered what you were doing while I was posing for those Lard adverts. I made quite a bit of money, but they took 50% in tax.”

  “So you’ve made some alterations to the weaponry then,” said Tanda, changing the subject before Vac’s ego filled the cabin any more.

  “Yes,” he said. “are you sure you don’t want to hear about how great I was at the filming?”

  “It was fine the other three times, thank you. I’d rather hear what you’ve done to the Shunt.”

  Vac grinned. “I popped some more of the mats into the mechanism, and a couple of hand-grenades I found lying about. Oh, and I’ve increased the bore a bit and flared the end of the barrel to make it look pretty.”

  “That should impress them. Do you think it will do the job and damage the archives sufficiently to erase our tax records?”

  “I’m aiming at the room where they store them all,” said Vac. “Nice of them to leave all those maps with ‘You are here’ on them stuck to the walls. How much longer do you think we should wait?”

  We’re only targeting the archives,” said Kara. “They must have cleared out of there by now. I want to get off home; it’s nearly teatime. Fire at will.”

  * * *

  Down below, Will, Willie or William, depending on who was talking to him, did manage to look up. The fold of fat at the back of his neck strained to return his head to the horizontal, but he had time to notice the Pig-Ugly and the dreadful (in the original sense of the word) barrel of the Shunt aimed at the building. The dread and the revulsion combined, and he lost his pre-elevenses, elevenses and his post-elevenses all in one go. His legs, unused to any movement, yet alone anything rapid, propelled him forward, and he lumbered past the queue of people on the groaning fire escape, shouting for them to flee for their lives.

  “Who’s he to tell us what to do?” said one woman.

  “Some nobody that thinks he’s Phoist Almighty because he’s got a reflective jacket and an armband,” replied her friend.

  “I’m glad he’s gone. All that shouting and bright colour was giving me a headache. Oh, what was that ban…?”

  * * *

  “I didn’t expect that,” said Tanda as the Pig-Ugly was punched far into the atmosphere by the explosion below. The GUTS building had shattered in a blinding flash. Wildfire was spreading in all directions along the surrounding streets and currently playing around by the firework factory. “Maybe we should leave.”<
br />
  As they cruised back the long way around the asteroid field, Tanda settled back in her seat. “What happened?”

  “Not sure,” said Vac, “but looking at the plans of the building we stole, I think they may have forgotten to remove the gunpowder from near that room where they were making the moonshine. I’m operating the long-range DOKUDAR.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” said Tanda, “I can see what you are doing.”

  “In that case,” said Vac, “I won’t tell you about the fleet of ships that has left the planet and is currently heading our way. With the amazing detection powers of the Magus’ invention, I can see that their gun-ports are open and weapons are primed.”

  “Shame they’re sore losers,” said Tanda. “I’d have thought they’d have been grateful for us removing their tax problems.”

  “They may be,” replied Vac. “I’ve received a transmission.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Dear aliens,” read Vac, “We thank you for your application for total annihilation, and have pleasure in attaching this pro-forma invoice to cover the costs of salaries, fuel and missiles for our attack fleet. Please pay promptly... It’s signed ‘NSA PLC, An independent arm of the Military Forces of the DSO’.”

  “They’ve taken up my suggestion about life without tax then,” said Tanda. “That was quick. Better get a move on. We can easily outrun them of course. Pop a couple of extra mats into the drive unit.”

  “Ah,” said Vac. “I used those up when I modified the Shunt. Normal speeds only.”

  “My Phoist, can we get away?”

  “Nah,” said Vac. “They are closing in rapidly.”

  “What can we do?”

  “We can die bravely,” said Vac. He checked his watch. “Today is a good day to die.”

  “No it bloody isn’t,” said Tanda. “I’ve not finished that jumper I was knitting for the Magus yet.”