Captains Stupendous

by Rhys Hughes

  ‘I like the sound of all that, Mr Gordbloaton. But—’

  ‘What’s your objection, dear fellow?’

  ‘None of our assassins is equipped with a receiver.’

  ‘True, true, that might be an issue … But Tesla claims that an ordinary radio receiver can pick up the signals of his matter transmitter. So perhaps we simply need to instruct each assassin to drag the body of Mr Griffiths to the nearest radio station after the fatal blow. Then they can contact us from there and we’ll immediately arrive.’

  ‘That makes perfect sense. But how do we inform our assassins of this instruction? They might be anywhere.’

  ‘Advertisements in newspapers around the world.’

  ‘Ah, the same way we put the bounty on Mr Griffiths’ head. Brilliant! How I adore you, Mr Gordbloaton.’

  ‘I love you too, dear fellow.’

  ‘Nice to be in the same pair of shoes, isn’t it?’

  ‘Delightful, Mr Gordbloaton.’

  And so they make preparations to contact Nikola Tesla and engage his services. Tesla is no longer the underrated figure he was back then; all the efforts of Edison to damage his reputation ultimately failed. Anyone who knows the story of early 20th Century scientific and engineering progress holds Tesla in high esteem; but when Hubengo contacted him, he was an outsider, an eccentric individual, shunned by the mainstream; a visionary condemned to obscurity and neglect.

  Tesla arrived at the house in the dunes alone.

  Hubengo Gordbloaton greeted him with two glasses of wine, red and white, one in one hand, one in the other.

  Tesla didn’t choose between them. He drank both.

  ‘You have two heads,’ he said.

  ‘Better than one, that’s why,’ explained Hubengo.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Tesla agreed.

  He was an amazing fellow, this unfairly neglected inventor, Croatian by birth. His ideas were so far ahead of their time that time itself would run out before they happened. Some of his projects were so epic in length and scale that their endings were influenced by their own beginnings. He was, for instance, the first fellow to envisage the wireless transmission of massive amounts of energy over vast distances. He designed a device that could destroy the planet with continuous earthquakes; another that could keep reversing our planet’s magnetic field so rapidly that Earth became an immense electric motor with a power output sufficient to nudge Mars and Venus off their orbits into the sun.

  Yet another was a time machine that went into the past at precisely the same speed that time goes forward, one second per second. Tesla drained the last drop of wine and asked:

  ‘So you are interested in matter transmission?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ confirmed Hubengo.

  ‘You do realise that the operation sometimes goes wrong?’

  ‘Really? In what manner, Mr Tesla?’

  ‘If, for example, an object somehow got into the transmission capsule with you, it would alter the matrix.’

  ‘The matrix? Please speak in normal talk.’

  ‘When your molecules are broken down and converted into energy – a process similar to that of alchemy – they form a “soup” that scientists prefer to call a “matrix”, because it sounds better. This matrix must remain pure if possible, so that the energy can be perfectly reconstituted at the receiving end of the transmission. If a seemingly insignificant object, for instance a dandelion seed, got inside the matrix, when you arrive at your destination you would be no longer just a man.’

  ‘We would have some dandelion properties too?’

  ‘Exactly! You’d be a hybrid!’

  Hubengo Gordbloaton digested this news. ‘Well, that’s really not such a bad outcome, is it? There are many possibilities there. The properties of a dandelion! We don’t sneeze at such ideas, Mr Tesla. Indeed no. But for the present moment, our priorities are elsewhere. We want you to build an ordinary matter transmitter for us.’

  ‘It will cost you lots of money. It’s tricky work.’

  Hubengo reached into a pocket of his large coat and pulled out a wad of banknotes and thrust it into Tesla’s face, rubbing it over his nose, chin and cheeks, trying almost to push the high numbers printed on each piece of paper through the pores of his skin.

  ‘Money is no problem for me, Mr Tesla. Oh no!’

  Tesla nodded. ‘Then I accept.’

  Hubengo asked, ‘How long will it take, the installation?’

  ‘A few days. A week at most.’

  ‘Come in, come in; you may have the spare bedroom.’

  Tesla hesitated on the threshold.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ demanded Hubengo.

  ‘The words spare bedroom fill me with uncertainty and fear. It’s well known that lonely houses are haunted, and that the owners of such places always reserve the scariest room for guests. Why they do this, I can’t even begin to guess. But that’s what they do.’

  Hubengo replied, reasonably enough, ‘Very well. I shall use the spare bedroom and you can have mine.’

  This compromise is acceptable to Tesla.

  ‘More wine!’ he suggests.

  My dear tolerant readers! You may have noticed that the telling of this scene has changed from present to past tense. The reason for this is that I am in no position to write with care.

  I am currently limping across a desert with a bunch of Mexicans right behind me. Bullets are zinging past my ears. Both of them. If I had other ears elsewhere on my body, bullets would doubtless be zinging past those also! Distanto has pulled ahead slightly. The airship can be seen in the distance, and it’s a welcoming sight, believe me!

  Ignoring this digression completely, Hubengo said, ‘Would you like a tour of my private museum, Mr Tesla?’

  Tesla squinted in the gloom of the mouldy house.

  ‘Explain what kinds of exhibits you have, Mr Gordbloaton,’ urged Mr Gordbloaton, with a dramatic gesture.

  ‘Ornaments from all over the world,’ said Mr Gordbloaton.

  ‘Any mandolins?’ asked Tesla.

  Hubengo arches his eyebrows. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He wants mandolins, dear fellow.’

  ‘Mandolins, eh? Yes, I have those. I have several.’

  Tesla said, ‘Where do you want it?’

  ‘Where do I want what?’ returned Mr Gordbloaton.

  ‘The finished matter transmitter.’

  ‘Ah, I see! I have a very powerful normal radio transmitter. Will you connect your machine to mine?’

  ‘Certainly. It’ll cost you extra, though.’

  Hubengo threw open a secret door to reveal an entire room crammed with bundles of cash. Then he laughed.

  And Tesla laughed too; but not quite as loudly.

  Conflicting Rascals

  Distanto Faraway puffed up the last ridge; I was trailing behind him. It wasn’t far to go, but I was weakening rapidly. To my astonishment, the airship captain paused on the brow of the ridge. Clearly he was able to see something on the far side that I wasn’t.

  I staggered and stumbled to his side. Then I paused too.

  The plain beyond was thick with rascals.

  Even from this distance, it was obvious that they were of a militant and intolerant bent. The black, brown and green uniforms seemed some warped echo of the prongs of Mario’s trident. Distanto squinted for yet another minute and finally remarked:

  ‘If we run, we can reach the airship before them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I muttered.

  ‘Yes. They are twice as far from it as we are; and we are slightly less than half as weak as they. Hence …’

  I was in no mood for mathematics. I nodded.

  We had no choice but to run on anyway; for Mario Granieri, Pancho Lackey and the other Mexicans were gaining on us. For the first five or ten steps I kept pace with Distanto, then he inevitably pulled away, and I was left to my own company again.

  Stuffed with brown energy, I lurched onwards.

  My vision was clouding over.

 
My eyes were like Welsh skies. Visibility was that poor!

  Death was coming for me, I knew.

  Many different fashions of death but all with the same purpose: behind me, a bullet; in front of me, a stampede of rascals; within my own frame, a gradual leaking away of lifeblood.

  Despite my pearly-misted eyeballs I saw that Distanto had reached the bottom of the dangling rope ladder.

  And now was climbing it with a gibbon’s skill!

  Something in this sight prompted the rascals to a frothing fury. With a single shout, they started running toward the airship, wielding maces and swords and halberds above their heads.

  Some of them had automatic pistols also!

  Most were festooned with daggers.

  They shouted in a variety of languages; and then it became obvious to me who they were. The gargantuan legion Mario had mentioned! Killers, brutes and chumps all of them! Heavies with no mercy. Lovers of blood, racial theory and ignorance. Enemies of reason! Stampers on all that was good about humanity: for I was still naïve enough to believe that humans aren’t entirely a damned species yet.

  Distanto had reached the top of the ladder.

  He pulled himself through the hatch. Then his head emerged again in an inverted position and he bellowed:

  ‘Come on, Mr Griffiths! You can do it, my friend!’

  This encouragement helped.

  But not very much, to be brutally honest …

  Hardly at all, in fact. Ah well!

  If this account were a work of fiction rather than a sober telling of the truth, I would have reached the ladder safely. I would also have managed to climb it and attain the security of the airship gondola. Then the captain, bless his heart and hat, would have cast off the anchor; and away to peace and liberty would we have floated.

  That’s not what happened, I’m sorry to say.

  The savage scoundrels caught me.

  They reached me before I reached the airship.

  And they stabbed me to death with fascistic daggers! Cut to ribbons, I was! Made mincemeat of, poor me!

  Lloyd Griffiths: shredded journalist anyone?

  I recall globules of my flesh being flung away from my skeleton. Then I remember brown light pouring out …

  Distanto was vainly trying to save me. He had had an idea.

  He had decided to use his halo.

  But not in the manner he’d already employed it.

  He tied a rope to it. Then he cast off the anchor. Up lurched his vessel, just before the first villain could reach the rope ladder. Using the halo on the rope as a lasso, he cast and snagged me around the neck. Pulling with all his might, he drew me upwards like a bag of bones without the bag. It put the frenzied villains into an even greater frenzy! An unexpected gust of desert wind pushed at the airship.

  I trailed behind the bulk of the thing, halfway in elevation between the ground and the gondola. All my flesh was gone. I was a skeleton and held together only by tendons and sinews.

  I’ve never known the difference between those biologic items, tendons and sinews; I have no desire to learn.

  But at that very moment, they kept me in one piece!

  A skeleton and yet still alive? Weird!

  But that’s me. Plus I’m Welsh.

  Distanto would have continued pulling me up, I’m sure, but he had to go and attend to the steering; otherwise we might have just gone round in circles. So I remained suspended at the midway point, the maniacs below me howling and saluting in a delirium of frothing rage, so bewildered by my escape that they forgot to shoot me with their automatic pistols. Dolts! But they weren’t the only actors in the drama.

  A shot did ring out; and with deadly accuracy too!

  It severed the rope holding me in place.

  Down I tumbled, limbs jerking.

  Who had done this? Mario or one of his henchmen?

  No, they were also paralysed into inaction: they had spotted something that froze their muscles with alarm.

  Another gargantuan legion!

  A gargantuan legion no less diabolical than the one that had flayed me alive. The legion of hired assassins!

  It had arrived successfully in Almería …

  Unkoo was in the vanguard.

  He raised his club and whooped in his own language.

  One of the assassins directly behind him, I believe it was the one from Jamaica, lowered a smoking carbine.

  As my greasy bones clattered on the parched ground, I comprehended the reason for the rope severance.

  The assassins needed my body as evidence.

  Hubengo Gordbloaton wouldn’t pay them a farthing if my body wasn’t available. Seeing it reduced to a skeleton, they had assumed I was already dead; they didn’t want Distanto to fly off with me! Hence the sniper. The triumphant shrieking of this new mob would have frozen the blood in my veins, had I any blood or veins left.

  ‘Let’s retrieve his corpse and put it in a bag!’ opined the assassin from Namibia. ‘Anyone have a bag?’

  Nobody did. ‘But I have a sack,’ said the Tajik assassin.

  ‘That’ll do,’ was the consensus.

  But the first gargantuan legion, the one comprised of fascistic fighters, even though Fascism as an authentic political movement was barely in its infancy, saluted itself with stiff-armed phallic salutes and said, ‘His body belongs to us! We chopped it up.’

  ‘Finders, keepers,’ said Unkoo in his primal wisdom.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ came the reply.

  ‘What will you do if we do dare?’ demanded Unkoo.

  ‘Try it and find out,’ was the response.

  ‘Bloody will!’ snapped Unkoo.

  Sprawled like a dog’s dinner, or maybe a bear’s breakfast, I managed to lift my skull and watch the outcome of this exchange with my sockets, which seemed to work as well as my eyes had done. There was going to be a battle between the two forces!

  Assassins versus Fascists! Who would win?

  I didn’t think it mattered much.

  The outlook for myself wasn’t too bright.

  ‘Spwng dorth!’ I cursed.

  The Legion Of Legions

  Mario Granieri had recovered his Italo-Mexican composure by this time and was watching the pre-battle preparations with intense interest. These pre-battle preparations mostly consisted of strutting and sneering. At an arbitrary moment, some unknown intelligence, perhaps the mass mind of the gestalt mob, decided that the required amount of ritual posturing had occurred. And then real violence began!

  The blades of swords flashed, because that’s what they are designed to do. The sharpened curves of axes chopped the leg wood of men who knew what it felt like to be a tree for just an instant. Scimitars, pikes and knives were blurs of death in the agitated scene. Assassins yelped; fascists wept! Well-matched were they, the opposing sides, and the sand of the only true European desert gulped cherry mouthfuls

  Bright the blood of fighters! Dim their dying eyes!

  And other poetic observations …

  I am a journalist, a star writer for The Western Mail, but even I had no stomach to put into words the clamour and stench of that localised war; a war of dark honour and twisty morals. I also had no stomach for anything else; and no liver, spleen or kidneys.

  Unable to see everything I wanted to see from my sprawled vantage, I rolled over and clattered to my knees.

  I felt lighter, more awkward in physical form.

  Clearly it would take some time for me to adjust to the fact I now had a skeleton’s body instead of my own, even though that skeleton was mine. Does that make sense? Or am I raving?

  A severed head bounced past me, blinking furiously.

  It belonged to the Swiss assassin.

  Another followed it, knocking into it like a croquet ball. This belonged to a proto-fascist from Macedonia.

  In the heat and dizziness of battle, a heat and dizziness almost exactly superimposed on the already excessive heat and dizziness of the desert, it was difficult to focus properly. Com
batants shimmered; everything was a mirage. Even the mirages of men were fooled by yet more mirages. Such a nightmarish tableaux! Like a labyrinth of distorting mirrors with a blind man at the centre instead of a Minotaur.

  The clash of steel; the zang of bullets; the ululation of tongues, not all of them still connected to mouths!

  And Distanto high above, anxiously waving at me through a porthole. He didn’t leave me, bless him; he was just as noble as Scipio deep down. I may have given the impression he was seedier and darker than his brother in character and manners, but that is merely because I too misjudged him. Don’t take everything I say at face value.

  My own face had no value at all. It was chopped to bits!

  And who would buy a chopped face?

  Not even soup kitchens have a use for such a thing!

  The battle raged and doubtless would have continued to rage until the participants were all slaughtered. But crafty Mario Granieri didn’t care for that to happen. He saw opportunity here.

  He called to his henchmen to go back to the settlement and return with a cannon – he had been keeping it in reserve for emergencies like this. They did so, Pancho Lackey leading them. It squeaked on its wooden wheels as the Mexicans dragged it up the ridge.

  Mario had taken his position there, where the full battlefield could be seen. The cannon was parked next to him. He ordered gunpowder poured down the barrel. Then a stone cannonball was inserted and rammed home. The fuse was inserted and Mario cried:

  ‘Fire the first shot across their metaphorical bows!’

  Pancho Lackey struck a match.

  The fuse hissed. The cannon roared like an amplified ox.

  Blaaammm booom!

  In a hissing arc rose the sphere.

  And then it curved down again, smashing a hole in the ground. At the vibration of its impact, some of the fighters fell. Others fell because their feet had been chopped off. But Mario achieved the desired effect. All the antagonists stopped fighting at once.