A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  It will change your life in little ways. For example, the opening scenes of 2001 will never look the same again, because you’ll be wondering which ape is Uncle Vanya. And you’ll find yourself thanking, next time you see one of those helpful little books that identify edible and poisonous mushrooms, all those hundreds of research ape-men who sacrificed their lives to establish precisely which was which.

  And you can savour the true story that the germ of the idea for all this came to Roy Lewis when, as The Economist’s Commonwealth Affairs reporter in the mid-fifties, he asked the renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey to explain the meaning of some prehistoric cave paintings. Leakey danced the meaning for him.

  From this, and from observations of the dismantling of British colonial rule in Africa, and from reflections on the depths of history that lay under the political goings-on, Lewis crafted this book.

  The famous French biochemist Jacques Monod subsequently wrote to point out one or two technical errors, but added that they didn’t matter a damn because reading the book made him laugh so much he fell off a camel in the middle of the Sahara.

  So sit on something solid.

  April 1988 (somewhere in the Holocene)

  *1 Well, sadly, you don’t—at least not The Evolution Man—but if you can you should get your hands on it.

  THE KING and I

  or How the Bottom Has Dropped Out of the Wise Man Business

  Western Daily Press, 24 December 1970

  Working at this paper was my second job—I had just started there, after leaving the Bucks Free Press, when I wrote this piece. It was at the Bucks Free Press, my first job out of school, that I knew three real wise men: Mr. Church was a solemn one. He took his position seriously and he made us newcomers take it seriously as well. Then there was Bugsy Burroughs, who would bawl you out when you did something wrong. They taught me a lot between them. On my first day I saw my first dead body—an extremely dead body. I was scribbling away with Mr. Alan, the third wise man, showing me the ropes, and I thought, “I’ve learned more today than I think I ever did at school.”

  All I wanted was gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Like a latter-day oriental king. That’s all. There couldn’t be a simpler Christmas shopping list. Easy, I thought. Basic.

  I ended up in the middle of Broadmead, Bristol, in the rain, dressed like a refugee from The Desert Song and feeling like a very recently deposed Middle Eastern potentate.

  I kept thinking: “You’re not cut out for this sort of thing. If they gave you a camel you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  I started out happily enough, I even took a carrier bag. That shows how innocent I was.

  Gold. Well, that’s common enough, you get it in rings and teeth. Frankincense turned out to be a bittersweet-smelling powder; myrrh a medicinal gum.

  Medicinal: I headed for Boots.

  “Frankincense? Who makes it?” asked the lady in the perfume department.

  Oh well. There were other chemists, and I tried them.

  Cool lot, Bristol chemists.

  They can take a request for frankincense and snap back a “Sorry sir, we don’t stock it” without batting an eyelid. Actually one did say, “Good God!”

  I was advised to try the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

  “What? Oh. Really? We’d better telephone you back,” they said.

  They came back to say:

  “You’ve had us all searching. Apparently myrrh used to be used in a mouthwash. If you find the old type of chemist you might possibly still get it.”

  Mouthwash didn’t sound right, but I pressed on. I found Mr. Pughe-Jones, a chemist in West Street, Bedminster.

  “There isn’t the call for that type of thing now,” he said. “We used to sell myrrh before the war. There might be a bit left somewhere, but I doubt if I could find it.”

  Then I began thinking: Perhaps it’s you. What you want is a bit of style. Perhaps people aren’t getting the message.

  So off to Bristol Arts Centre to be kitted up at short notice as an oriental prince.

  The robe was last worn by Herod. I said I wasn’t snobbish.

  “It’s not too bad,” said the wardrobe mistress, surveying me critically, “after all, they’d been on a long journey.”

  Cool lot, Bristol shoppers. No one took a blind bit of notice of an oriental prince hopping along trying to keep his cloak out of puddles.

  This is what happens to a Wise Man who wants to buy gold in Bristol …

  If he goes to the Bank of England he gets handed a form by a sympathetic young man. He soon learns that it’s no good asking for gold just because you want some.

  He is told: “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but that’s just about the worst possible reason you can give.”

  If he’s a real wise guy he gives up then. That form is awfully ominous. A third of it is in capital letters, and full of phrases like FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH CONDITIONS.

  If he’s just persistent he visits a few jewellers. I did. I was shown a solid gold napkin ring which I very nearly bought till I snapped out of it.

  It’s no good. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh don’t get a look in.

  Next year I’ll just buy a hamper.

  Three kings in Bristol would just find their camels towed away for parking offences.

  But of course they didn’t pass through Bristol—wise men.

  HONEY, THESE BEES HAD A HEART OF GOLD

  Bath and West Evening Chronicle, 24 April 1976

  I was a subeditor at this paper, some years into my career as a journalist. They still had lead type, like the old days, and I was fascinated by that. When it’s hot metal printing, it’s real journalism.

  Every newspaper needs to have someone who can write—not simply journalese, but other things, too. So I wormed my way into that and I had a little shed on the roof with birds I could feed. And I got paid for those pieces—countryside pieces, mostly.

  It was a brief shopping list I took to London: gold. I got it. But that’s hardly a beginning, is it?

  Michael Ayrton, sculptor, novelist, artist, and wide-ranging genius, died not long ago. I met him twice. I can think of no other person whose death has affected me so much, even so.

  He wrote a book called The Maze Maker, based on the life of the half-mythical craftsman Daedalus. He was the father of Icarus, and built the wings—in the book, the primitive hang glider—on which his son failed so spectacularly to defy the sun.

  I don’t think it was ever a bestseller, but for many people it is still a book to return to again and again.

  Well, anyway. One achievement Daedalus is credited with is the casting, in gold, of a honeycomb, and in the book Ayrton suggested how it might have been done.

  To cast in metal you can make a wax model, envelop it in a sort of plaster cast, melt out the wax, and fill the impression. And a honeycomb is its own wax mould. Was it really possible? So compelling was the description, I decided to have a go.

  Daedalus decorated his honeycomb with bees cast in gold. You can treat the dead insect like wax, and burn out the ash of its creation in its mould.

  It was November. I enrolled at a local silversmithing evening class, which enabled me to buy gold. Gold! They sell it in high-countered little shops in London, festooned with the stuff like a metal delicatessen. I bought enough—well, enough to see, if you looked closely—and rather more silver. Silver’s okay, you can buy silver like sweets, it’s gold that has the mystery.

  It was winter, but the Bee Research Association came to my aid with a matchbox full of dead ones, a piece of wild honeycomb, and their most interested best wishes.

  I made a pyramid of wax, and on it placed a bee—poised in flight. I ran tiny wax threads to antennae and wings, so that the molten metal would flow into every crevice, working with tweezers and a heated needle.

  And in the workshop I mantled it in an okay cocoon, baked it to red heat, melted a fragment of 22-carat gold in a crucible, spun the whole lot in a centrifug
al caster, and dropped the mould into a bucket of cold water. It exploded. And from the steaming water we took a gold bee, eye-faceted, wing-perfect, pollen bags still full—but full of gold. It took two days to free from its golden web and remove the last trace of clay.

  Then I melted it down. Well, why not? I needed the gold. Some fast talking got me some five locusts from London Zoo—a dozen flew out when I went into the little locust breeding rooms under the insect house, where they’re bred for the zoo’s insectivores. It’s Quatermass and the Pit in there, I can tell you. But the ones that escaped didn’t defoliate the country—they can’t breed in Britain.

  I cast locusts in silver. And the Natural History Museum donated four dead grasshoppers surplus to requirements. In gold you could have used their back legs as saws—and in fact they were once used, in bronze, for that purpose. I cast a honeycomb in silver, a few inches square. It took days to prepare and dripped with silver honey. And finally the gold was used in another bee, which stayed out of the crucible this time.

  It worked, and I had become a minor expert in the ways of transforming insects into gold. Trouble is, anything else would have been repetitive, so I stopped. But at least I knew it could be done.

  Michael Ayrton did it, too. When I met him later, I saw the golden honeycomb he had cast after a challenge by a rich reader of the book. On it were seven golden bees, the best of forty attempts. The whole thing was worth, I suppose, £1,000 at the time. When the new owner set it in the grass by his beehives, the bees visited it. I’ve always wondered whether they filled it with honey, and if the honey was unusually sweet.

  THAT SOUNDS FUNGI, IT MUST BE THE DAWN CHORUS

  Bath and West Evening Chronicle, 2 October 1976

  I think I was possibly one of the first people to find out about working from home. I looked at what work I was doing and where I needed to be for it, and I said to my boss, “I could take a day off each week, for only a little less money.” So I would motorbike all the way back home to the Mendips, and it was a good time. I had just become a father and we had less money, but plenty of time together.

  The song of the mushrooms woke me from my bed. And I groped my way into the laid-out clothes and crept downstairs, it being somehow wrong to put the lights on at five in the morning.

  Past the cat, asleep on her chair, and the evening’s last log crumbling into ash. Up the garden a cockerel starts to crow. Damn thing seen kitchen light flicker on at last; where hell paper bag? Ah—

  And out past the sleeping houses, keeping to the grass because boots ring like bells on the road at this hour. I’ve probably been spotted, even so. (My father recalls trying to fit a new windscreen on his old Singer, on a driveway completely surrounded by bushes and, furthermore, up a grassy lane. It didn’t fit. When he went to the pub that night, a man from the other side of the village gave him a grin and said, “Dint fit, didit …”)

  Mist curls like a cliché over the fields, and there’s half a mile of them to cross. Rabbits scatter. A larger mammal, possibly a hippo, trundles away through a spinney.

  There’s many a clump of ink caps along the forestry track. They’re fungi, and melt into an alarming black goo when ripe. But they’re edible, and taste like mushrooms, and are shunned by the ignorant masses, thank goodness, which means I can pick them without competition and eat them by the plateful as mushrooms should be eaten.

  But this morning picking them would be like shooting a hen. The quarry is more elusive, more unreliable, more like a gift from the gods.

  Through a bramble hedge and there’s a small misty field. It’s a blank green until you get into the way of seeing and look for the right kind of grass.

  Once the eye gets the hang of it, the mushrooms spring out like stars.

  Pick one—and there is a slight cough. Nothing offensive, mark you, just a sort of verbal call sign. There’s someone else in the field. He carries a plastic bag.

  We regard each other for a few moments, then go back to our tasks, each surreptitiously watching the other. He’s got the right technique—ignore the little buttons and rotting giants, and pick the nice pink teenagers. Not that a really ripe mushroom isn’t tasty if you’ve a robust palate. Two years ago I knew a field that sprouted huge horse mushrooms and even after I’d taken my shirt off and filled it, I hardly made an impression.

  In a few minutes I’ve got my ration and my solitary co-picker passes me on the way to the stile at the opposite side of the field. We nod. Speech in a mushroom field at half past five on a misty morning is sacrilege.

  And back home, pausing twice to leave mushrooms outside the back doors of more favoured neighbours. At this stage a few ink caps go into the bag—shame to waste them.

  And there’s happy and sad thoughts. Happy because there’s a breakfast of mushrooms and huge knobbly tomatoes. Sad, because somewhere there are mushroom fields I shall never visit and no one knows about—oh, it makes the fingers tingle.

  After breakfast the sky’s light grey, and some cottage lights are on. Wellington boots clang down the road—someone thinks he’s going after mushrooms, and he’ll probably look in the local fields, where the farmers use fertilizer out of a bag, and say there’s no mushrooms again this year. You’ve got to look sharp—when the song of the mushrooms drifts out of the night.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE LEAKY ESTABLISHMENT by David Langford

  January 2001

  This says it all, really. We both worked in places where science, engineering, and bureaucracy crashed into one another.

  As a press officer, a man responsible for getting information out in a hurry (sometimes, at any rate) I was forbidden to touch a typewriter. Strictly speaking, I was supposed to write out releases in longhand and send them to the typing pool, from whence they might be returned to me tomorrow. However, by this time the average nuclear reactor can be quite well alight, so I just typed stuff anyway, and no one said anything.

  It was, in retrospect, a great life for an SF fan. After Chernobyl it seemed there was no question too weird for the local Nodding Acquaintances of the Earth to plant with willing reporters. Will your nuclear power stations withstand an Ice Age? No? Why not? (Answer: because a two-mile-high glacier scouring the continent down to bedrock puts a crimp in everyone’s day.) Isn’t it scandalous that there’s a fault line running through the power station car park? (Answer: Not really. It’s about 200 feet long and hasn’t moved for 60,000,000 years.…)

  One of my many strange jobs was escorting TV and movie researchers when they were scouting power station locations for upcoming dramas. I’d take them up to the pile cap (the top of the reactor) and they’d look around in dismay at the total absence of green steam. They never believed me when I told them that green steam is not a normal reactor product. Then they’d bring their own for the shoot. Oh, and big fake panels covered in flashing lights, too, because we didn’t have enough. In fact, our power stations were a complete disappointment. They were so unlike the real things.

  I had eight years of this. It was a great life, if you held on to your sense of humour.

  As far as I’m concerned, The Leaky Establishment was one step away from being real.

  I hate Dave Langford for writing this book. This was the book I meant to write. God wanted me to write this book.

  For a large part of the 1980s I effectively worked (which was definitely not the same as worked effectively) for the civil nuclear industry, or at least that part of it that produced cheap, clean nuclear electricity, if I remember my facts correctly, in South West England.

  Reactors hardly ever exploded. I was a Press Officer, so you can trust me on this. But they didn’t have to explode. Some little-known component of nuclear radiation made certain that life for anyone involved with the public face of the industry became very weird. And I worked with Dave Langfords all the time. I had to. I knew about words, they knew about uranium. They were a fine body of men, with a refreshingly different view of the universe.

  When a member of the public turned up at
a nuclear power station and was found to be too radioactive to go near the reactor, they advised me. When I had to deal with the news story about the pixie that shut down a nuclear power station, they advised me again. Scientists with a twisted sense of humour can do wonders for your education, provided you believe only 50 percent of what they tell you. (Er … perhaps 30 percent, come to think of it—I never did actually use the phrase “The amount of radiation released was so small that you could hardly see it.”)

  They’d produce figures to show that the sun was an illegal emitter of laser light and under Health and Safety regulations no one should be allowed outdoors, or that the natural background radiation in granite areas meant that registered nuclear workers should only be allowed to go on holiday in Cornwall if they wore protective clothing. And I can no longer hear the words “three completely independent fail-safe systems” without laughing.

  The job was also my introduction to the Civil Service. Yes, there really was the man who came round every six months to check that I still had the ancient four-function calculator that I’d signed for on joining, and was probably worth 10p. Yes, some of the Langfords upstairs brought in their own word processors to write their reports and then, because of the regulations, sighed, and sent the printouts down to the typing pool to be retyped. And then there was the guy who actually went into a nuclear reactor and … but I’ll save that one, because you’d never believe it. Or the one about the lavatory.