by Ashly Graham
Even the hams and airwave pirates who were still at large, and able to get news instead of propaganda by means of shortwave radio, smoke signal, tom-tom, bull-roarer, heliograph, and other bush telegraph methods, did not go unenlightened.
The bald facts were summarized in layman’s language with the minimum of alarmism, in an attempt to avoid the sort of hysterical reaction that greeted Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” radio hoax, which had been taken to be a genuine announcement that an antennaed invasion force from Mars had landed in New Jersey.
Also, a detailed brochure on the meteorites was e-mailed and faxed to former employees of NASA, university science professors, scientific research institutes, astronomy observatories, physicists, and chemists; and to discredited religious leaders, ditto doctors of philosophy, ditto historians, ditto psychologists, to allow them to make their own independent evaluations even though they would be constrained to keep them to themselves.
The few remaining Luddites would in the morning receive first-class mailings, delivered by loyal but mystified long-retired and redundant Royal Mail, and United States Postal Service employees, and their counterparts around the world, who had found stamped addressed manila envelopes in the post bags that they had been allowed to keep for miscellaneous use along with their superannuated vehicles and bicycles.
In separate online media distribution packages were included photographs of Water-Sky, and the Captain and crew wearing their own garments, for they had no uniforms, and big smiles. A humorous note described the agony that the group had gone through, trying to decide what to clothe themselves in for the group picture.
An article on Blender family life gave an overview of how they raised their children on their star—no directions were given to Lightyear nor any clues as to its whereabouts; what they ate and drank, and read; their pets; how much holiday they took; how hay fever could be cured by drinking a tisane of banyan tree bark boiled in water with a soluble aspirin and a teaspoon of sugar; and the process by which the Blenders had succeeded in developing a candy bar that tasted ten times better than chocolate.
Only the last item was not genuine; but as a white lie the Alliance’s Executive Committee authorized its release because—as the Central-proscribed poet T. S. Eliot observed—it was aware that “Human kind |Cannot bear very much reality.”
Chapter Thirteen
“The end of the world is nigh!”
The secret was out, the truth known to all. Although Central’s spokesman, a white-haired hermaphrodite named Root Snail 6231C, refused to confirm the fact, it was now common knowledge that what had been talked about ever since Man started talking in words of more than one guttural syllable, was indeed coming to pass. The Big Guy was saying, “Enough is Enough,” in the same Old Testament voice that He had used to inform Noah that there was a one hundred per cent chance of rain for the following day, and the next, and the next; and that no one would be able to try and put Humpty Dumpty Earth together again because, following the Great Fall, there would be nobody around to quote the job.
While to the dismay of the members of the Alliance of Intergalactic States, Water-Sky’s efforts to win a measure of cooperation from Central had failed, internally Central, in conducting its own research into the allegation that Man had been a Bad Boy Who Deserved a Spanking, was taking the possibility of sooner-rather-than-later Earthly termination very seriously.
In so doing it went to great lengths to control public reaction, by denouncing the extraterrestrials—the ETs—and condemning what they were saying as “…disingenuous disinformation and the fallacious incendiary disseminations of an opportunistic alien civilization bent on cosmic hegemony”. Displaying every ounce of chutzpah at his command, Central’s Historical Recorder, Alan Fabrikant 8883C, began issuing daily communiqués that, rather than attempting to discredit them, reminded everyone that Voltaire had been right: “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
Not since the denial of the Holocaust had such a stunt been pulled. As Fabrikant 8883C warmed to his task—his job hitherto, frankly, had been a little dull—he edited his weekly Good News bulletins with enthusiasm. The masses, though not believing a word, swallowed the plug like a largemouth bass in a lake, preferring to hear a bogus version from the devil it knew, Central, than listen to nihilistic announcements of terrestrial termination from a giant PlayStation filled with, however they cared to disguise themselves, little green men.
When Water-Sky, after its great burst of PR, conveniently fell silent again and remained that way, Central, its confidence restored, and adopting the principle of “out of sight, out of mind”, downgraded the threat from the ET squatters. Although supervisory satellites were programmed to keep an eye on the intruder, the Neptune Force was withdrawn, and henceforth Whelksville, as it was named, ceased to be of note except as a landmark folly for passing aircraft.
Fabrikant 8883C was not the only person charged with ensuring that there be no popular revolt against the As, Bs, and C’s worldly stewardship, which had been accomplished by a similar coup d’état. Central’s Nominating Committee chaired by Boyce Jobs 5812B appointed his friends Harlan Hamfatter 3300A and Judy Jeffreys 3301A as new joint heads of State Security, replacing Hedley and Honor Platter, whose alphanumerics no longer mattered because they had been indicted for laxity in enforcing the penal code, and were now putting their familiarity with laxity to good use, cleaning Central’s toilets with toothbrushes.
Now that legislation was by fiat, the Hamfatter–Jeffreys duo was an obvious choice for the appointment: Harlan had been Chief of Police, and Judy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The pair implemented draconian measures to shut down what freedoms, or “liberty loopholes” as they referred to them as in internal memoranda, remained. To emphasize how darkly they frowned on those who took advantage of them, and as a warning to others, hundreds of citizens were selected at random, hauled up on trumped-up charges of treason, and reclassified as Slaves—fodder for the Exeat Institute’s minotaur.
“The end of the world is nigh!”: finally it was possible to say it and mean it, and hear the words spoken by reputable scientists rather than now-outlawed religious nuts. In a democratic outburst that Central was powerless to resist, and pace the almost lovable Alan Fabrikant 8883C, who remained dedicated to sugar-coating the pill, at last the phrase could be uttered with a straight face instead of a mad stare and a cackle.
“The end of the world is nigh!”: the long-ignored or scoffed-at trademark rant of sidewalk trompers in sandwich boards scrawled with the message was now recast as fact. Those who had always given the eccentrics, and that was a polite euphemism, a wide berth and got upwind as quickly as possible, now competed with them and each other for pavement space. In place of bums clambering from cardboard shelters to spend the day shuffling up and down the shopping precincts, smartly dressed men and women were accompanied by support teams with audio-visual equipment to explain and illustrate the onset of finality.
The suspect seers, as soon as their pet prediction had been validated, gave up in disgust and went off in hope of being inspired by a more reliably fatuous prophecy.
It soon became ironically apparent that there was no concealing the truth. A hastily convened world panel of experts, sequestered for a week to consider the evidence, which they had not previously considered because they had not been looking for evidence, not suspecting that there might be any, at a symposium in Central’s Neo-Newtonian Institute in Washington, D.C., after liaising with the men and women at their research institutes who actually knew and understood what they were doing, confirmed the situation to be exactly as Water-Sky had described it.
With the facts supported by every possible calculation, graphic depiction, and simulation, the Newtonian’s chairman, Roswell P. Applebaum III 5156B, with a lot of help oversaw compilation of a paper confirming that the cause of impending Apocalyptic outrage was indeed myriad mighty meteorites that were hurtling out of an appendix of the universe. The steroidal st
ones were now visible on the longest of long-range detectors, as they zoomed in from a zillion light years away.
There could be no doubt that these boisterous boulders, this barrage of buckyballs, were on a collision course for Humankind. In a million snooker breaks, the meteorites would also cannon every other planet and star in the universe...the Blenders had not mentioned in their communiqué that their star was outside the trajectory pattern...into the vacant interstellar spaces, a phrase that might have been attributed to the renegade poet, Eliot—the creep’s literary crepitations used to crop up everywhere—had not Central’s Minister of Culture Reed Schmead 3187C assumed the copyright.
Large particle physicists, scientists, and mathematicians emerged hourly and grey from their laboratories and ivory towers, in between heavily codeined bouts of evaluating sequences of random or stochastic time–space Poissonian models, bosonic strings, and TOE, Theory of Everything (now surreptitiously referred to as “Time is of the Essence”), models of the four forces of nature—the strong, and weak, nuclear forces; electromagnetism; and gravity—to issue grave statements about the rate of progress of the egregious gallstones, and to confess the pointy-heads’ lack of success in discovering how they might be forced to bugger off sharpish.
Screens showing the meteorites’ path and rate of progress were put up in public for everyone to watch. Unless somebody, anybody! could come up with a means of stopping them, it was only a matter of time—yes! Time, that traitorous foe of Mankind, instead of standing still in chained solitary confinement, like the Titan Prometheus, was now acknowledged as having broken loose and escaped from its banishment in outer space and to be returning with a vengeance. As at the end of the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—when aircraft commander Major T. J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens, aloft and straddling a nuclear bomb while he effects some repairs, and finding the bomb bay doors suddenly opening beneath him and releasing the bomb, rides it earthwards like a rodeo cowboy, whooping and waving his cowboy hat—the mad meteorites would shortly, absent some panacea, after a chorus of We’ll [Not] Meet Again, as was [not] sung by Vera Margaret Welch, the adored (Dame) Vera Lynn in WWII, would violently exhume John Brown’s thoroughly mouldered body from the grave and declare that his soul no longer had anywhere to march.
In fact, Time, since the news had been released that it was on the run again, although the meteorites were not yet visible by the great-great-grandsons of the Hubble telescope, seemed to be speeding up as if it were mesmerized by the prospect of getting the whole bang shooting match over with ASAP, and disappearing up its own fundament in a grand kamikaze finale. People swore that it took half as long to get where they were going on their air-compression cycles, or from station to station on the monorails. Those taking the long weekends that they were occasionally allowed to ward off nervous collapse at work—vacations were no longer allowed—felt that they were over before they had begun.
But the absolutely strangest thing of all was that two Human Beings, an unorthodox couple of mundane, terrestrial, down-to-earth, sapient hominids, had independently beaten everyone, even the Blenders, in discovering that Armageddon was only a hop, skip, and a jump away.
The scoop had been published two months ago in the words of a woman fortune-teller, Madam Flahita, who lived in straitened circumstances and an adobe hut outside Taos, New Mexico. After reading an incomplete pack of Tarot cards, this lady had written a letter to the Agave Advertiser declaring that the future was in as short supply as toilet paper at a prune-sellers convention.
Shortly thereafter a national convention being held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of the Pseventh-day Psychics, which had last predicted an Event that did not happen for 22nd October, 1984, confirmed Madam Flahita’s finding to the interest of no one and no body except the Pseventh-day Psychics, after one of its members tore the article out of the Agave Advertiser on the table of a Santa Fe endontologist where he was awaiting an emergency root canal.
Earlier still the malevolent missiles, the horrendous hailstorm, had been detected by an unnamed satellite the size of a beachball, which had been sent into space years before on an experimental rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The event was so insignificant that CSSA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, had been renamed the Central State Space Agency, under the direction of Beame Meupp 6543B—had not even bothered to enter it into the launch log.
Because the minuscule module’s technology and hardware were suspected to be faulty, the satellite was forgotten about the moment it left the launch pad.
Actually, the object of the exercise had been to get rid of the satellite in the litter bin of outer space, after it was discovered to have been built by a former NASA scientist, Dave Bunkum, who had turned out not to be a scientist at all: “Dr” Bunkum had forged his credentials in order to get a better-paying job than the one he had as a Pennsylvania welder. The satellite, which Bunkum had put together from his son’s high school class’s science project design, from superannuated NASA parts, was too embarrassing to have to enter in the Administration’s inventory and equipment records.
But instead of burning out and disintegrating outside the Earth’s atmosphere, the rocket bearing the obsolete satellite kept on going up, faster and faster. And just because the bobbly beacon’s technology was out of date did not mean that it was not functional.
Rupert Vignoles 0281V was a deputy sub-assistant at the Department of Astronomy, in the Inessentials and Ephemera section. Vignoles, who resided with his mother in Sidcup, south-east London, had never lost touch with the little satellite, which had been constructed by his welder-NASA father to Vignoles junior’s science project class’s specifications: now deceased, “Dr” Dave Bunkum had become Victor Vignoles after fleeing America with his wife and son by crossing the Atlantic from Florida in two motorized claw-foot bathtubs that he had welded together into a catamaran.
Since his parents had not allowed him to have a pet as a child, Rupert Vignoles 0281V, the former Bunkum junior, had adopted his late father’s realization of his son’s high school enterprise as if it were a pet dog, and named it Lassie, after the fictional short story–novel long-haired collie dog character created by Eric Knight, which inspired the MGM film Lassie Come Home.
Vignoles 0281V continued to track the weak signal that Lassie transmitted, which he called his bark, on the microphones of a radio tracking station that he had thrown together—unlike his father, Rupert was not good with his hands, and he had contributed nothing to his high school science project—in the Sidcup garden shed, using such inessentials and ephemera as his mother’s old hair curlers, a toasting fork, a dibble, a rake, a rusted reel lawnmower, a retired Kenwood kitchen mixer, thirty-two one hundred watt light bulbs, a cat’s whisker wireless, an alternator, a Zimmer frame, a hi-fi amplifier, a hundred fridge magnets, a black-and-white television, a second-hand generator, and fifteen car batteries on chargers.
To serve as a receiving antenna, Vignoles, perhaps inspired by the memory of his old man, and following a manual, managed to solder together twenty steel salt-water fishing rods, bound them with copper wire, and set the pole up in the garden braced with guy-ropes from an army surplus tent.
The rods were a gift of the one-legged retired Rear Admiral next door, who, when he also lost an arm, on the same side as the missing leg, which he had lost in the same fashion the year before, to a blacktip shark with a larger than usual overbite while holiday fishing off the Florida Keys—south of Cape Canaveral—said he no longer had any use for them (the rods). Which was doubly true, because the Admiral died the following week when he lost his balance while returning from a naval reunion at the local Rotary Club…where he had been telling some of his old shipmates about the one that got away with his arm, which (the shark) the Admiral suspected was the same one as had made off with his leg…and drowned in a puddle of rainwater.
In accordance with his wishes, what remained of the Admiral was buri
ed at sea, in the same element as contained the rest of him.
Vignoles’ haphazard construction did not work…until he tossed into it a bag of paper-clips, which his mother had removed and saved over the years from the lining of the Harris tweed jacket that Rupert wore to work, when she was renewing the pocket liners and the leather patches on the elbows.
Then the tracking station jumped to life, beeping and flashing.
So fierce was Rupert Vignoles 0281V’s devotion to Lassie that, so as not to miss the faintest whimper of the receiver, Vignoles moved a camp bed into the garden shed, where he spent his evenings and cooked his meal on a paraffin stove, and stayed up later than he should. He hung a sign on the door forbidding entrance to unauthorized persons—by which he meant his mother—and disclaiming responsibility for the electrocution of anyone who was reckless enough to trespass on his domain; by which he also meant his mother, whom he loved only second to his dog.
When the satellite’s solar-powered batteries began to fail after relaying the first fuzzy images of the meteorites on the old black-and-white Pye television, 0281V kicked the structure of the tracking assembly and succeeded in altering the satellite’s course so that it was swept along in the meteorites’ slipstream and able to conserve energy. Now that he was generating enough power to transmit pictures and an ever-strengthening signal, Lassie’s “owner” was astounded by the clarity of the photographs that he woofed back to Sidcup, Earth. Vignoles could almost hear him panting.
Lassie was coming home!
But in his excitement 0281V made a mistake. One starry night, stoked with pride and several glasses of his mother’s Stone’s Original Green Ginger Wine (sweet, hint of spice), mixed half and half with the same of Crabbie’s (fruity, herbal), Rupert Vignoles inadvertently broadcast Lassie’s coordinates to the world, using a hard-wired tin cup as a transmitter, when boasting about his pet to a divorced mother of three in Fairbanks, Alaska, who had picked him up on her ham radio and got in touch to say that she had always wanted to visit Sidcup, but could not afford the fare.
