The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  “Hey, Maddy,” he said. He paused for a couple of minutes, as if weighing the import of his next words. “Looking good,” he said, finally.

  Maddy reached down for a toffee-cream smoothy from the NutriMent outlet and took a long slurp, licking the thick mixture from her lips afterwards. “Likewise,” she said.

  Nicholas’s eyes didn’t stare straight out of the buddy window, so Maddy knew he was watching something on his vee. She took another slurp.

  Nicholas was something on the town Advisory Board. Maddy liked it that at least one of her vee buddies was Somebody. He would even consult her when big issues came up. Things to be dealt with. They usually agreed that matters could safely be deferred. Let them blow over. If they were important, they’d come up again. She liked to think that she and Nicholas were a good team: a town Somebody and his focus group of one. She liked to bring him into her world, too. “I yelled at Bud and Suze,” she told him now.

  They sat in shared, distant silence.

  “I told Suze that Bud was a no good jerk.”

  Nicholas nodded.

  “You watching them?”

  Now, he shook his head. “Just a wet,” he said.

  It was Maddy’s turn to nod. “You yell at it yet?”

  He shook his head.

  She finished her smoothy and asked for another one. Seconds later, the NutriMent outlet churned out her order. She realized her leg was getting uncomfortable, tucked up under her as it was. She was still getting used to her relocation to the sofa. She realized that more space can be harder to cope with than too little, in some ways. She would have to move. Not yet, though; give it a few minutes.

  “That Bud’s a jerk,” Nicholas said, eventually.

  Maddy nodded. She couldn’t agree with her friend more. She studied him more closely, his bushy moustache drooping down around his mouth, the folds of skin under his eyes, those sad dog eyes. If Maddy’s mother hadn’t passed away three years ago she’d be telling her she could do a lot worse. It was true: she could do a lot worse.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s a jerk.”

  They let another long silence pass.

  “They say the Queensbury flyover is looking a bit shaky,” said Nicholas.

  “The Board really should do something about that,” advised Maddy.

  Nicholas shifted, scratching somewhere just beyond his buddy window. “Hmm,” he agreed. “It should be a priority item, of course. Top of the list.”

  “I do hope someone raises it,” said Maddy, revelling in the cut and thrust of town governance. “It might fall down one day.”

  “Hmm,” said Nicholas. “We have other matters to deal with, of course – the state of the fire service, for a start. Buildings could burn to the ground before anything was done. But the flyover should be a priority matter after that. Before it falls down, at any rate. Let’s just hope it doesn’t catch fire . . .”

  Maddy realized that her leg had gone to sleep, which could hardly be excused when she was dealing with such elevated matters as agreeing that something should be done eventually, when all other matters had been dealt with. This was important business. But now . . . she leaned to one side, and regretted it, for a needle of pain stabbed her previously dead leg. She shifted again, and eased her leg out further along the sofa so that it was not trapped under her. There. That was much better. She would get used to this arrangement before long. Maybe all she would have to do was tilt the vee a little.

  3

  In which Tracy butts in, uninvited, and plays gooseberry to Maddy’s voluptuous melon

  Tracy buddied on to Maddy’s veescreen. She wasn’t really Maddy’s buddy, but when she had called Nicholas he’d made it a threesome, as it would have been rude of him to talk to her and leave Maddy dangling. So up on to her screen, just below Nicholas’s buddy window, Tracy Wordsworth pinged into virtual presence.

  Tracy was a good ten years younger than Maddy’s mumblety-mumble years, and she came in at comfortably less than a hundred kilos, which was just plain unfair in Maddy’s reckoning. She had good teeth, and full lips, and long, black hair that curved just enough to frame her face in a really pretty way. She was Nicholas van Pommel’s personal assistant. Maddy smiled at her, hoping that neither she nor Nicholas could detect the steady grinding of her teeth.

  “Nicholas,” said Tracy, in her girly voice. “You’ll never believe me when I tell you there’s been a fight!”

  Maddy saw Nicholas come to attention, his eyes peering directly out of his buddy window, one eyebrow raised all of a couple of millimetres. She had not seen him so alert since the final of Whose Breakfast?

  “A fight, you say?” Nobody ever fought in Sunny Meadows, other than the street kids, and they didn’t really count because the mall mood sprinklers kept them subdued easily enough.

  “Well . . . not so much a fight,” said Tracy. “More an altercation. Nothing physical. But voices were raised. In Dr Bull’s house. At the presentation.”

  Ah, the presentation. Dr Bull had bought out the local NutriMent UK franchise, and was proposing some significant improvements to the home delivery system. This afternoon he had been demonstrating the system to a few select guests at his home on the other side of Sunny Meadows. Nicholas had been invited, of course, but he had deferred a decision on whether to attend or not, and now, well, now it was too late, which was just as well by the sound of things. An altercation . . . Such things did not happen in Sunny Meadows, always such a peaceful place, where nothing really happened at all.

  “It was Mr Green and that Mr Darley. They were getting very hot under the collar. It was after the sampling. They just started disagreeing with each other. It was most unseemly.”

  Maddy knew from what Nicholas had told her of Town Board affairs that such behaviour was quite out of character for the two misters. She wondered what could possibly be behind it.

  “Thank you, Tracy. I think that will be all for now.” Nicholas’s eyes had wandered back to the main panel of his veescreen, but he was clearly perturbed by these happenings. “My associate and I were dealing with pressing matters.”

  So, she was his associate, was she? That must be good. Tracy’s buddy window popped away.

  Pressing matters . . .

  “That Bud’s a jerk,” said Maddy.

  After a long pause, Nicholas nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “He certainly is.”

  4

  In which Maddy and Nicholas pay a visit to Dr Bull and it emerges that the good doctor may not be all that he seems

  Who, then, was this man who went by the name of Dr Bull?

  He was, it’s fair to say, something of a one-off. In an age of sitting back and having the world come to you, Dr Bull was a man who went out and instigated things. He was a doer. A thinker, too; in fact, it was in the area of scholarly endeavour that his star shone the brightest. He had presented papers to the Royal Society, and published in the world’s leading journals – unusually, ranging across a wide spectrum of specialisms, from physiology through psychology and sociology to logic and telecommunications. He had studied at the finest institutions, and challenged some of the greatest scholars of his time; certain observers had even described him as the great revolutionary thinker of the age. To any onlooker aware of the doctor’s background, his current occupation as proprietor in chief of Sunny Meadows’ NutriMent feed might appear to be something of a departure. Such an onlooker would not be surprised to learn that Dr Bull had assumed this position in order to make improvements and refinements to the system, or even that he was treating such intervention as a grand experiment, upon which he and his able assistant Gideon Eden were making copious notes.

  Dr Bull was a man of medium height, and he would also have been of medium build were it not for a slight tendency to over-indulge. Now, he sat back behind his deep oak desk and plucked another marshmallow from a silver dish. “Well, Gideon, well indeed!” he said, biting a quarter from the marshmallow. “These people of Sunny Meadows – we know from our preliminary study t
hat they are the dullest, flattest, least animated people in the land. For animation they are midway between sponges and coral! And yet, at my little demonstration – transformed! They bickered and they questioned. They expressed opinions! We have seen the first ripple in a dull, flat expanse of water.”

  “You heard Darley and Green?” asked young Gideon.

  The doctor nodded. “No harm was done,” he said. “That two men, normally so close to comatose, should come close to blows was an interesting outcome, this early in the game. We will have to monitor the inputs, I think.”

  The assistant dipped his head in agreement.

  Dr Bull beamed at him. “I think the time has come to extend our trials,” he said. “We should tackle a public space. Just think, Gideon: if things carry on like this we could transform the world!”

  Gideon smiled back. The two were, quite clearly, very pleased with how things were progressing.

  As, too, was Maddy Wheatfen. Very pleased indeed! For, right at this moment, she was on her way to visit Dr Bull himself. The previous evening, after well over an hour’s buddy chat with Nicholas consisting of little more than half a dozen remarks by each, Nicholas had suddenly become more animated. Daintily licking cream from his fingertips, having just consumed an oversized eclair from his NutriMent outlet, he had fixed Maddy’s gaze and said, “We shall confront him! That’s what we will do.”

  Caught out, Maddy tried desperately to think back to the last remark either of them had made. Confront whom? Why? How? She gave up and simply nodded. It seemed like the right response.

  A few minutes later, Nicholas added, “In the morning, I think. One can’t rush in, after all.”

  Right now, as she fussed with her appearance, and tried to remember the things she needed – keycard . . . well, that was about it – Maddy felt that they were rushing things nonetheless, and then she realized that she quite liked the sensation. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Nicholas in actuo. She sucked her lips in to moisten them, remembering gorgeous Tracy’s pout.

  She went outside.

  The sun was bright. Too bright. The air moved, and smelled different. It all seemed so . . . uncontained. When was the last time she’d seen anybody? She stood on the threshold, unsteadily. Had he actually meant this? Maybe Nicholas had been talking about confronting whoever was to be confronted on the vee. Did you know that you don’t have to call it a buddy window? It’s really easy to change the labelling, so some people might be buddies, others slaves, or heart-throbs, or subhumans; maybe Nicholas was meaning to confront this person via an arch-antagonist window? Last night, Nicholas had been in a sweetheart window, not that he had known.

  But no. He had been quite clear. He had wanted Maddy to come for him, in person.

  She liked driving, although she could barely remember the last time she had done so. She liked the sense of power, of control. She liked to be actually doing something, participating instead of merely viewing. Her car rolled out of the parking niche and a door opened. “To the home of Nicholas van Pommel,” she told it, when she was settled in the driving seat. As the car set off, she adjusted the seating position to give herself a little more room. She wondered what it must be like to have to do steering and speed and directions, all at the same time. It was hard to imagine. No wonder people used to need training before they could drive.

  Soon, Nicholas was climbing in to join her. “Thank you so much, Maddy,” he said. “So kind of you.”

  Dr Bull lived in a house that was older than those around it. It had probably been here before even Sunny Meadows. The two stepped out, and Maddy told her car to go park. Dr Bull’s front door did not respond to their voices, but there was a sturdy-looking bell suspended to one side. Nicholas nodded towards it and said, “Do you think we should?” Maddy shrugged. They could, she supposed, but was it necessarily the right thing to do? What if it were there for show and there was some more subtle means of getting a response from the door?

  The door opened while they were still deliberating, and a rather handsome young man bowed in greeting. Maddy was just adjusting her mental image of what Dr Bull must look like when she learned that this was, in fact, the doctor’s assistant, Gideon Eden.

  “You would like to see the doctor?” he said. “Of course. Please follow me.”

  They did so.

  “Please, wait here,” said Gideon, gesturing towards two chairs and a tray of pastries. They were in the doctor’s study.

  They sat, but the silence between them was not the normal comfortable silence of vee buddies: Maddy saw in the occasional glance around the room, and the clumsiness with pastry crumbs, that her friend was . . . yes, she was sure, he was getting impatient. That was not like Nicholas, at all. She found herself glancing at the door, as if that would speed things along. Where was the stupid man?

  The doctor entered the room, apologising for the delay; he was accompanied by his assistant, who remained standing by the door. Dr Bull was almost exactly as she had pictured him, which she realized was probably because she had seen him on the vee at some time. He was an eminent man, after all.

  The doctor seated himself behind his wide desk. He placed his elbows on the wooden surface and steepled his fingers in front of his nose. Finally, he said, “Yes?”

  Nicholas nodded. “It has been some time since we had the pleasure,” he said. He took another cake and bit deeply.

  “So it has,” said Dr Bull. “Although I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” he added, nodding towards Maddy.

  As Nicholas was busy with his confectionery, Maddy decided to make the introductions. “I’m Maddy,” she said. Then she decided to elaborate: “I am an associate of Mr van Pommel.”

  “My pleasure,” said the doctor.

  “Mine too,” said Maddy. This all seemed to be going terribly well.

  “I had hoped to attend yesterday’s demonstration,” said Nicholas. “But you know how it is. These things can’t be rushed.” Then he leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “In fact, that’s exactly it, Dr Bull. Here in Sunny Meadows we never rush what can be done at a sensible pace. We like to measure ourselves, and deal with things in their own good time. I hear that your demonstration caused something of a controversy, and in my role as Deputy Chair of the Town Advisory Board I feel it is my duty to investigate. We can’t be having these . . . these reactions in Sunny Meadows.”

  The doctor seemed amused. “And yet, here you are, in my study,” he said. “That seems very spontaneous.”

  Nicholas drew himself up. “We considered the matter at length before rushing here to see you,” he said.

  “Go on, go on,” said the doctor, waving a hand at the pastries, having seen Nicholas’s gaze wandering back to a particular cream and jam extravagance. “I’m glad you’re here,” continued Dr Bull, leaning forward. “You strike me as both fine examples of the upstanding citizenry of Sunny Meadows.”

  Maddy felt a surge of pride at this. She didn’t upstand often, if she could help it, but it was nice to know that her qualities had been recognized.

  “What would you two say if I told you that we of Sunny Meadows are on the verge of something revolutionary? Something that would have our community leading the way instead of sitting back and watching? What would you say to that?”

  Maddy quite liked the sound of the words, even though she had no idea what he meant. She looked at Nicholas, expecting him to have that slightly-raised eyebrow of angry resistance. It wasn’t there. He nodded instead, and said, “It would be our proper place!”

  “My little demonstration yesterday was a success. And now I must confess that you have been part of a repeat. The cakes – you like them?”

  Nicholas looked at them. Now his eyebrow was just a little raised, out of curiosity. “My favourite,” he said. “Particularly after the exertion of travel.”

  “I know,” said the doctor. “Or rather, I don’t know: the system does. Over the last few weeks my modernised NutriMentPlus system has modelled y
our preferences, and ninety-nine per cent of the time it knows what you want before even you know it. When the system is fully operational it will do this wherever you go: stop off at anywhere with an outlet and it will recognize you and deliver what you want without you having to do a thing.”

  “Not have to do a thing, you say? That seems a very Sunny Meadows approach.”

  Dr Bull smiled.

  “When will it be available to everyone?” asked Maddy. It seemed unfair that only a select few should be benefiting from this revolution.

  “Oh, you know,” said the doctor. “We can hardly rush into these things. We must proceed cautiously, at a sensible pace.”

  “We should consider such matters at length,” said his assistant. Maddy had forgotten he was there, standing by the door.

  “In the fullness of time,” said the doctor.

  Nicholas leaned forward and banged his fists on Dr Bull’s desk. “I want it now!” he cried.

  The doctor seemed amused by this uncharacteristic outburst. He paused to make a note on a block of paper, then glanced at his assistant.

  “Perhaps,” said Gideon, “we could tighten up the schedule. Move critical points forward, that kind of thing.”

  Dr Bull nodded. “Then it is agreed,” he said. “We will proceed with all possible haste.”

  5

  In which the risen come, blinking, into the sunlight

  All returned to normal in Sunny Meadows. The altercation at Dr Bull’s little demonstration was soon put aside as Messers Green and Darley resumed their amicable acquaintance by vee. Nicholas van Pommel’s outburst in the doctor’s study was easily forgotten, as Maddy would tell no-one, although she stored the memory of her friend’s animation for moments of personal recollection.

  Maddy had signed up for ExerThighsTM classes, every Wednesday in the Sunny Meadows Amenity Centre, starting this week. She drove there, telling the car to park as close as she could get, and then went into the building. There were lots of kids here, and for a moment she thought she had come to the wrong place. They stood around in small, grunting groups, heads hung low, eyes glazed from too much vee. Then she remembered that there were games sessions today, too, and she understood why they were here: while she was upstairs thumping about to some ancient disco beat, these kids would be playing shoot-’em-ups on the vee. It got them out of the house, she supposed.