by George Mann
“Thank you for the use of your men, Atkins.”
“Not at all, Nutter. Believe me, we want to help as much as we can. Have you heard about our RSM?”
“No.”
“Hospitalized.” Colonel Atkins twirled a forefinger beside his temple. “That sort of hospitalized. Can’t swear, and it’s driven him bonkers. A sergeant major lives by his bad language, doesn’t he?”
“Awful. My sympathies.”
“Well, quite. It means, at any rate, that the men have a vested interest. They’re mad keen to get their own back on this... this thing.”
The van’s rear doors opened, and Professor Bantling climbed out, followed by Edwin Chao. Both were carrying ear defenders, as was Nutter. The professor turned and beckoned, and from within the van’s darkened interior a man ventured forth hesitantly. He was dressed in the same type of hospital-style gown worn by all the test subjects at Chilton Mead, and the lower half of his face was encased in an elaborate-looking surgical gag.
The daylight dazzled him. As Bantling and Chao helped him down from the van, he held a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. Barefoot, he stood on the parade ground tarmac, swaying tremulously, blinking hard, apparently unsure where he was or what he was doing there.
“That’s him, eh?” said Atkins.
“That’s him,” said Nutter. “Now listen. Do you want a set of these?” He held up his ear defenders. “For when he speaks? There are spares in the van.”
“Not me, old chap. What’s good enough for the men is good enough for me.”
Nutter gave a respectful nod. “Very well. Then shall we get on with it?”
At an order from a sergeant, the regiment was brought from at-ease to attention. “All right, you lot,” the sergeant yelled. “You know what you’re here for, but in case any of you haven’t been paying attention, which wouldn’t surprise me, I’ll go through it again. It’s really very simple. When required, you will be asked to listen. That’s all. Just listen. In my experience not all of you are very good at listening, but never mind. I’m sure you’ll manage. If anyone does not hear that fellow over there with the gag when he speaks, say so immediately. I suspect the gentleman will be addressing you somewhat more quietly than me, which I know is hard to believe, seeing how dulcet my tones are. However, there is a chance his voice may not reach those of you at the back. I repeat, if this is the case, say so immediately. It is imperative that every one of you hears him talking. Have you got that? All right.”
The sergeant stamped over to Colonel Atkins, saluted, and said, “Regiment ready to listen, sah.”
“Very good. Colonel Nutter?”
Nutter turned to Bantling and indicated that he should proceed. Bantling and Chao lodged their ear defenders firmly on their heads, and Nutter did the same. As Bantling moved behind his test subject to undo the gag, Nutter pressed the ear defenders hard against his skull to make the soundproof seal tight and absolute.
For a long time the test subject said nothing. His mouth, freed from the gag, hung open in a bleary gape. His name was Alan Lloyd-Jacobs, he was fifty-two, and until three years ago he had been a classics teacher at a top public school, until an unfortunate incident—a misunderstanding, really—had brought about a spectacular fall from grace. Lloyd-Jacobs was still not quite sure how it had happened. The boy had been willing, hadn’t he? That was the distinct impression he had got. Willing, if a tad nervous. Perhaps it was the language he had used in his overtures toward the lad, all that talk of concupiscent sodality and the Hellenic tradition. Lloyd-Jacobs had always prided himself on his elaborate and often abstruse turn of phrase. Pupils used to tease him about it, but it made him different, individual, memorably eccentric, and that was what being a schoolteacher was all about, wasn’t it? Making an impression on impressionable minds? He could not help thinking, however, that had he not been such a confirmed sesquipedalian, the boy might have apprehended his intentions sooner and thus things would not have traveled as far down the fatal road of no return as they did. In the event, Lloyd-Jacobs had been hounded out of his job, out of his home, out of his life, and had ended up broke, haunting a rancid bedsit somewhere in Plaistow and drinking far too much cheap alcohol—had become human detritus, the jetsam of an uncomprehending and unforgiving world. And then some men had grabbed him one night and he had been taken off to a white cube, where he had been subjected to all manner of strangeness and indignity. And now this.
“Say something,” Professor Bantling urged him, speaking too loudly on account of the ear defenders.
Lloyd-Jacobs gazed around at the soldiers, row upon row of them, all sharp creases and strong chests and smooth chins. What could he say? What did everyone expect of him here?
“Come on,” said Bantling.
After several failed attempts, Lloyd-Jacobs finally found his voice. “In the Spartan army,” he said, “sexual affiliation between soldiers was deemed acceptable, nay positively encouraged. It cemented comradeship. It fostered loyalty. A man was far more likely to lay down his life for a brother-in-arms if he had first lain down with that brother-in-arms. Indeed—”
At this point, Bantling hurriedly reapplied the gag, and Lloyd-Jacobs was bundled back into the van.
Among the ranks of Her Majesty’s 11th Bayoneteers there was a certain amount of puzzlement, and not a little consternation as well. Had that man really just started to deliver a lecture on the subject of sex between soldiers? What in heaven’s name was the brass up to, ordering them to listen so attentively to that?
Confusing though this was, it was nothing compared with the orders the Bayoneteers received next.
IT HAD ALREADY been decided, in an emergency session of the Cabinet, that soldiers should be put on the streets.
“Purely a precaution,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference. “Nothing to be alarmed about. There are people who might try to take advantage of the prevailing situation of uncertainty, and a high-profile military presence will discourage them from doing so. Looters, rioters, and other troublemakers need to know that their behavior will not be tolerated.”
“Prime Minister,” asked one journalist, “is this a declaration of martial law?”
“Of course not,” came the reply. “If it was a declaration of martial law, I’d have said so, wouldn’t I?”
Martial law or not, the army was deployed swiftly, efficiently, extensively, and prominently. By Sunday evening there was a pair of rifle-toting soldiers on every street corner, it seemed. Naturally their primary role was to keep the peace, and by and large they succeeded, but they had a secondary function as well. Each regiment, prior to being sent out, had been joined by a member of the 11th Bayoneteers. The Bayoneteers had made a point of talking to everyone they met, and by God, they were a chatty lot! Loquacious in the extreme. And their loquacity, indeed their profuse verbosity, was hard to resist mimicking. In no time at all, almost every member of the British army, from private to commander-in-chief, was exhibiting a facility with and a penchant for elocutionary expatiation of the highest order, seldom using a simple, unornamented sentence construction when something far more fanciful, protracted, and obfuscatory could be employed. The Windbag Strain was taking hold.
AT CHILTON MEAD there was nothing to do but wait and see. Hopes were pinned on Windbag for two reasons. First, its symptoms were less startlingly dramatic than Bowdler’s, and nowhere near as unsettling. Second, by its very nature, Windbag instilled the avoidance of vulgarity. No one who caught Windbag would resort to four-letter words, not while they were so enthusiastically utilizing fourteen-letter words. The full range of the English language was theirs to command, so what need was there to wallow amid the baser idioms when altogether more refined and elegant modes of expression were available?
Monday morning saw members of the British public gracefully bidding one another “a pleasant day” and “adieu” as they passed by in the street. At breakfast tables, parents admonished their children to “exercise vocal desuetude” and “k
indly give Godspeed to the milk.” In offices across the land, banter of Wildean caliber was exchanged.
Likewise in classrooms, teachers found themselves on the receiving end of waspish taunts, which wouldn’t have displeased Noel Coward. Truckers’ cafes, normally home to the saltiest dialogue known to man, became something akin to literary salons, with the waitresses being complimented on their sizeable embonpoints, even as they were invited to provide refills of that refreshing hot infusion, which slaked the thirst like no other beverage. London taxi drivers opened up their fare-wearying homilies with phrases such as “Do you know whom it was my honor to chauffeur just recently?” An on-board train announcement from the conductor could last nearly the entire duration of the journey between stations. Radio DJs managed to do without music almost altogether, being so busy introducing songs that scarcely any airtime was left in which to play them. Meanwhile, call centers suffered a marked decline in efficiency because telephone operatives were spending up to five minutes simply greeting customers.
Everywhere, garrulousness reigned supreme. A whole nation spoke in polysyllables and periphrasis, from just-learning toddlers to slowly-forgetting senior citizens. The only place where no one noticed any difference was in the country’s law courts, which had long been havens for orotundity and convolution. There, it was business as usual.
For a day, it was amusing. People didn’t mind that some of the words coming out of their mouths were unusually and often unpronounceably ornate. They were so taken with their newfound familiarity with the nether reaches of the dictionary that they forgot all about their loss of invective capacity. Windbag, as Professor Bantling and colleagues had surmised, neutralized Bowdler’s symptoms. It was not a cure but it was a palliation, and that was the best result they could expect, under the circumstances.
By Tuesday, however, the British public were rapidly becoming disenchanted. Everyone was saying a lot but not conveying a great deal. There were plenty of words flying about but scant action. The country ground to a halt, much as it had on Saturday but, on a weekday, with more severe effect. Businesses were not doing business. Industry was not putting out output. The economy was starting to become economized. Precious little was being achieved, because everybody was taking too long giving orders and explaining in precise and abstruse detail what they needed. Concision was hard to come by, and hence so was productivity.
Bantling had suspected this might happen, but then the deployment of Windbag was, he had known, only a stopgap measure. It had been intended to give him and his assistants more time to come up with a vaccine, and they had been working round the clock in pursuit of that goal.
They had not yet succeeded, however, and Bantling realized that if they didn’t deliver the goods soon, the countrywide panic, which he’d predicted for Bowdler, would manifest as a consequence of Windbag instead. Colonel Nutter concurred. For him, there was added pressure coming from the direction of Downing Street, and not just from Number 10, either. At Number 11, concern was mounting over the sudden, sharp fall in trade and manufacturing revenue. Financially as well as socially, Britain was at risk of collapse. Nutter was besieged on two fronts at once. When he wasn’t talking to the PM, he was talking to the Chancellor. They were taking it in turns to phone him and berate him. It seemed the moment one of them put down the receiver, he would bang on the party wall to tell the next-door neighbor to pick up his receiver. Tag-team haranguing. Nutter was reaching the end of his rope.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the politest protest rallies in history occurred. A frightened, bewildered populace took to the streets, wielding placards that were inordinately large in order to accommodate the effusive slogans daubed on them. The protestors’ chants too were of significant length and intricacy. The ringleaders did not simply shout “What do we want?” but “Let us adequately state that object of desire, which is of the utmost importance to our good selves,” and the massed responses to such exhortations could last for anything up to a minute. Shakespearean soliloquies have expressed more in less time. The protestors marched through the centers of all the major cities and voiced their fear and discontent. They pressed their already aching tongues into service, letting the government know that they had stomached a plentiful sufficiency of the current situation and were unwilling to accept yet a further portion.
NUTTER DELIVERED THE bleak news to the Chilton Mead boffins on Wednesday morning.
“You’ve failed to come up with any results,” he said, “so I have no alternative. I’m informing the PM that he must resort to drastic measures.”
“D-drastic?” stammered Bantling. “How drastic?”
Nutter rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “On Sunday, the PM told me that if Windbag doesn’t do the trick—and I think we can all agree that it hasn’t— he’s going to go to the Americans.”
“What do the Yanks have to do with this?” demanded Chao. “What the £µ¢« business is it of theirs?” By now, the sound of a Bowdlerized profanity was so familiar it passed unremarked.
“For one thing,” said Nutter, “the Americans rule the world, like it or not. Everything is their business. But for another thing, their research into logoviruses is considerably more advanced than ours.”
“I doubt that,” scoffed Bantling.
“Doubt all you want, but it’s true. Some of the stuff they’ve been getting up to in their Nevada facilities makes your lot’s work look positively Stone Age. I’m sorry to be brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Geniuses though you all quite clearly are, you’re back-of-the-room schoolkids compared to them.”
“But we share data with the Americans all the time,” Bantling said. “Why, Professor Bergdorf and I are in constant touch by email, tossing ideas back and forth. I feel certain that if he knew something I didn’t, I’d know about it. If you see what I mean.”
“That’s what Bergdorf would like you to think, professor. But there are state secrets he’s prohibited from passing on even if he wanted to. He’s been carrying out experiments so classified that he’d be shot just for accidentally mentioning them to his wife.”
Bantling opened his mouth and closed it again. Bergdorf? Hiding things from him? Inconceivable!
And yet at the same time it was all too conceivable. Bergdorf was brilliant in his field, an off-the-scale intellect. Bantling had always been surprised that he treated him, Bantling, as an equal. Flattered, too, but mainly surprised.
But then if Bergdorf had merely been feeding him scraps all along, like a dog at the table, and patting him on the head every so often when he did something clever...
It made a horrible kind of sense.
“What,” he asked Nutter, dry-mouthed, “do they have that we don’t?”
“I believe you mentioned a ‘universal language-negation logovirus’ the other day,” replied Nutter.
“They...” Bantling could not finish the sentence.
Nutter could. “They have.”
THE PRESIDENT OF the United States took the British Prime Minister’s call at 3pm GMT, on Wednesday, June 24th.
Virtually the first words out of the President’s mouth were, “I’ll thank you for not swearing during this conversation.” He said this as a devout Baptist but also because his scientific advisers had warned him to take such a precaution. By some miracle, the Bowdler logovirus had not spread to any other English-speaking parts of the world, most likely due to extreme regional variations in accent and dialect. This did not mean that all possible preventative care should not be taken, though.
The Prime Minister scrupulously avoided even the mildest of oaths as he outlined his request to the President.
The President was eventually persuaded to do as asked, but only with extreme reluctance.
“We ain’t in the habit of using our weapons on our friends,” he said. “Leastways, not on purpose. But in this case I’m gonna have to make an exception.”
“I’m grateful,” said the Prime Minister. “I hope we can chat again sometime soon—although I fear that may n
ot be feasible.”
“Been nice talking with you, pal. Always has.”
The President opened a military hotline and gave the authorization protocols for an attack on Great Britain.
Within the hour, B2 bombers were on their way across the Atlantic.
THE BABEL BOMBS screamed down from the heavens, ready to blare their sonic message like the trump of doom on Judgment Day.
They detonated above city centers and rural areas alike. They roared at gigadecibel level, each loud enough to be heard fifty miles away. Saturation bombardment ensured that there wasn’t a single resident of the British Isles who remained out of earshot. Even at Chilton Mead, the effects of the Babel Bombs were felt, and in some sense were welcomed. Here, after all, was where it had all started. Here, therefore, were the people who least deserved to escape retribution.
Bantling and Nutter sat in Nutter’s office, either side of the desk. There had been silence between them for a long while. Now, finally, Nutter spoke.
“ ,” he said.
Bantling assessed the other man’s body language and decided to agree. With a nod, he said, “ .”
“ !” Nutter shot back testily.
Bantling realized he had misinterpreted. “ .” he said, in a mollifying tone of voice, and added, “ .”
Nutter frowned. “ ?”
“ ,” the professor confirmed.
“ ,” said Nutter. He let his shoulders rise and fall in a tragic shrug.
“ ,” Bantling replied emphatically.
And he meant it, as well.
Personal Jesus
Paul Di Filippo
DESPITE ALL ASSURANCES by experts to the contrary, Shepherd Crooks suspected that his godPod was defective.
If it were operating as it should, wouldn’t his life be as perfect as the lives of all the other happy citizens of the world? Wouldn’t his mind and soul be at peaceful ease? Wouldn’t he exist in a permanent state of grace?
