Falling Sideways

by Tom Holt

  ‘Sorry.’ The man folded his arms. ‘I can’t let you go. You seem to have found out rather more than you were supposed to do, and it’s a matter of planetary security—’

  David nodded. ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Catch!’ he added, lobbing the packet of sugar into the air.

  From the fact that there was still a world at the bottom of the stairs by the time he reached it, he deduced that the one-eyed man had indeed managed to catch the sugar in time. Not that he’d been in the slight­est doubt about that, naturally. Every confidence, and so forth.

  Still there, that faithful old stolen car of his. He was getting so used to it that he was able to find the wires that went together to start it entirely by feel, without having to crane his neck down to see the colours. Of course, he didn’t know where he was going — all part and parcel, he guessed, of having nowhere to go.

  Eventually, without ever having formed the intention of going there, he found himself parked outside Honest John’s. He wasn’t able to get very close to the building, for fear of running over a hundred or so of the vast army of frogs that were hoppiting about all over the pavement and the road, like the lava flow from a green-and-yellow volcano. And somebody’s got to notice that, he told him­self, sooner or later. Like the plague of frogs in the Bible— He chewed his lip thoughtfully, thinking over what the one-eyed man had said about a certain fairy story, and other stuff he’d heard about this being the second time they’d been through this whole procedure. What a busy fellow that man seemed to have been, to be sure.

  If it’d been spiders, nothing would have persuaded him to get out of the car. But he was OK with frogs —didn’t like them, but wasn’t bothered by them — and found he was able to pick a way through the rivetting, shifting carpet without flinching or feeling sick. Of course, he had a pretty good idea what they must be thinking right now — looming presence, black mountains falling from the sky — and in a sense he felt a degree of empathy towards them. Mostly, though, it was like having to talk to his less attractive relatives — just because they’re your own flesh and blood doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to like them. He tried taking big steps and making shooing noises.

  ‘Shoo yourself, asshole,’ said a voice behind him.

  For about half a second, he was sure he was going to lose his balance and fall over, which would’ve meant a nasty fall for him and the end of the line for at least a dozen frogs. Luckily, he was able to pull himself back into equilibrium by waving his hands about ferociously.

  ‘Yeah,’ said another voice. ‘Go jump off a lily pad, tall bastard!’

  Very cautiously, he looked over his shoulder but he couldn’t see anyone. Nobody here but us frogs.

  ‘Yeah,’ said a third voice. ‘Drop dead, spawn for brains.’

  David took a deep breath. ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Screw you, scumbag with very big feet!’

  Oh God, David asked of the universe at large, have I really got to do this? I can put up with most things turn­ing out to be true, but talking frogs— ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but who am I talking to, please?’

  Strange, hoarse laughter, like the creaking of five thousand floorboards. ‘Guy wants to know who he’s talking to,’ said a voice; and try as he might, David had to face the fact that the voice came from somewhere in the bobbling carpet of frogs. Not fair, he muttered to himself, just not fair.

  ‘Excuse me—’ he began.

  ‘No!’ from the frog-mob, followed by more laughter. ‘Go on, get out of here. And take your big stinking feet with you.’

  Suddenly, in a moment of appalling clarity, David realised what it must be like to be a teacher teaching a class of thirteen-year-olds. Then it occurred to him that if the comparison was at all valid, he had a superb model to work from. He closed his eyes, turned back his mental clock twenty-one years and visualised Mrs Parfitt, standing in front of the blackboard. Five feet dead in her Clarks sensible shoes, and beyond question the single most terrifying life form he’d ever encoun­tered.

  ‘Quiet!’ he snapped.

  Quite suddenly the frogs stopped croaking. He had their attention.

  Of course, he remembered, it hadn’t been so much what Mrs Parfitt said as the way she said it. She could make I wandered lonely as a cloud sound like a Mafia ulti­matum. ‘That’s better,’ he continued, digging under the scar tissue of his memory for the classic Parfitt intona­tions. ‘Now then. You. Frog. Yes, you in the front row.’

  A smallish olive-green frog shuffled slightly. The rest were motionless. ‘What, me? said the frog.

  ‘What, me, sir,’ David amended. ‘Yes, you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Krdgdt, sir.’

  ‘See me afterwards. Right, then. Somebody’d better explain what you think you’re doing. Otherwise,’ he added, ‘I’ll keep the whole lot of you in. Is that under­stood?’

  A low, subdued rumble of ‘Yes, sir’ from countless frog throats. ‘Please, sir,’ said a frog. ‘We’re here to inherit the Earth.’

  All David could do was repeat the last three words.

  ‘Yes, sir. That man promised us we could, if we were good, and got on with our evolution.’

  ‘Ah right. And, um, have you?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir,’ said another frog somewhere in the middle. ‘When we left our home planet, we were still just amoebas. We evolved on the way here.’

  ‘I see. And how long did that take you?’

  ‘Sixteen million years,’ the frog replied. “Course, we should’ve been here earlier, only we got held up.’

  David had a shrewd idea of who ‘that man’ was. For one thing, the modus operandi was essentially the same; not to mention the unusual level of patience. The one-eyed man might be a nuisance and a hazard to navigation, but he didn’t rush into things; the sort of man who, having decided he fancied a ham sandwich, started off with a pair of newly snared wild boar and a single grain of emmer wheat. ‘That’s a long time,’ he said.

  The frog nodded. ‘Well, you see, sir, faster-than-light travel wasn’t invented then. And where we come from’s rather a long way away.’

  There wasn’t much he could do except nod, in as close a facsimile as he could manage of Mrs Parfitt’s very best ‘all-right-but-don’t-do-it-again’ manner. ‘When you say inherit the Earth,’ he said, ‘what exactly do you mean by that?’ A score of offside front paws immediately shot up. ‘You, at the back there,’ David selected. ‘No, not you, you. Well?’

  The frog in question sat up very straight, its throat bobbing in and out like a power-driven bellows. ‘Please sir,’ the frog said, ‘the man told us, at least he told the amoebas we evolved off of, and they told their kids, and their kids told—’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ David snapped. ‘What did he tell them?’

  The frog thought for a moment. ‘Please, sir, he said that if we were really good and hard-working and, you know, meek—’

  ‘Meek,’ repeated the other frogs. ‘Meek. Meek-meek, meek-meek...’

  ‘Then,’ the frog went on, ‘we’d get to go to a planet of our very own where there’s no storks or crocodiles or great big fish with loads of teeth, and there’s just tons and tons of water and miles and miles of rivers and great big ponds with really cool islands and stuff in them, and there’d be nobody to eat us or push us around or tell us what to do. Is that right, sir? Is that what it’s like here?’

  ‘In a sense,’ David replied. The frog’s eyes were so big and shiny and trusting that he couldn’t really bring him­self to go into any further details. ‘Um,’ he went on, ‘did the man say why he was doing all this? I mean, was it just out of the kindness of his heart, or was there some­thing he wanted you to do for him?’

  The frog looked startled. ‘Oh, ‘course we’ve got to work. Everybody’s got to work, or they go to the bottom of the Pond.’ Judging by the expression in the frog’s eyes, it seemed rather taken aback to discover that David didn’t know that. ‘That’s why we got evolved, so’s we’d be able to do the work
that’s ordained for us. Isn’t that right, sir?’

  ‘Quite right,’ David replied, ‘good answer, well done.’ The frog swelled a little with pride. ‘All right, you can sit down now. You, middle of the fifth row. What’s the work you’re supposed to do when you get here?’

  Some frog who apparently assumed he was the one being addressed hung his head. ‘Sorry, sir. Forgotten, sir.’

  ‘Stay in afterwards and clean the, um, lily pads. You in the front row, tell him the answer.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The reply came from a small, fat, smug-looking frog with a light brown streak running down its back. ‘We’ve got to do exactly what we’re told to do once we get here, sir. Is that the right answer, sir?’

  David hesitated, to the point where he was in danger of communicating uncertainty and weakness. ‘That’s about the strength of it,’ he said. ‘More or less. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but we won’t go into the details now. All right, you’re dis­missed.’

  The frogs stayed exactly where they were, apart from two who hopped apprehensively towards him, stopped a few inches from his toecaps and sat there staring up at him. Creepy, to say the least.

  ‘Well?’ David snapped, edging away a little. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Please, sir,’ said one of them, ‘you said to see you afterwards.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Um, I’ve decided to let you off with a warning this time, but don’t let it happen again. You got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ They hopped back into the crowd, much to David’s relief. He took a deep breath and picked his way across to the workshop doors. They were still open. What the hell, he thought, and went inside.

  No frogs in the workshop, which was a definite improvement as far as he was concerned. As far as the weird things they’d told him, and the implications thereof, were concerned, he was rapidly reaching the point where he could take that kind of thing at face value and believe it, while simultaneously believing something else he’d been told by some other version of the one-eyed man or his daughter, simply because it was easier to believe than to think. The one-eyed man could turn people into frogs? No problem. Frogs are in fact gast­arbeiter shipped in by the one-eyed man to be used as cheap labour on some unthinkably obscure secret project? Yeah, why not? No skin off his nose whether or not frogs are recycled coppers or illegal aliens or both, just so long as he didn’t have to do anything about it.

  He sat down on the workbench and turned his head in the direction of the door that led out back, behind which was the gadget he truly believed to be an inter­stellar lift (non-functional, needless to say; interstellar or not, the natural default state of all elevators is bust mode). Well, he told himself, here we are. No options left: no British Columbia, no escape to the alien Homeworld. There were policemen staking out his home and at least two bunches of identical clones out to catch him and do him no good at all. Not only had he lost the only girl he’d ever loved, he’d lost her in dupli­cate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant. He hadn’t slept for what seemed like a very long time, and he was seriously hungry. He couldn’t help remembering that in prison they feed you and let you snatch a few hours’ sleep now and then.

  Indeed. Logic dictates that when getting caught is better in pretty well every respect than carrying on run­ning, the very least a sensible person can do is slow down a little.

  He looked round. If he’d had the energy, he could have cooked up a nice little theory about how having briefly been a frog himself had left him with the ability to speak their language. (Of course, he hadn’t actually been a frog, just a human being intermittently convinced he was a frog; in that case, shouldn’t he only be able to manage pidgin frog?) Another line of enquiry he could’ve followed up: maybe some of the frogs out here were froggified peelers, and the rest were strange visitors from the planet of the duckpond-divers. And of course there was always the question of whether people who believed they were frogs reverted to their human shape when they died, or whether they’d carry on being rani­form for ever and ever. All fascinating stuff; and when the day came when humans and aliens were able to live together and get along with each other, somebody was going to be able to stiff the worlds’ universities for enough research funding to last a lifetime.

  David stood up— (Do what they’re told, yes, but what on earth could frogs do that’d justify bringing them all this way, taking millions of years? Why frogs, for crying out loud?)

  —And wandered over to the bank of goo tanks against the wall. The glare of the strip lights overhead silvered the meniscus of the glop like the back of a mirror, and in it he could see his face...

  Another him, identical in every superficial respect; but not him, not him at all. Slowly he reached up and teased out a single hair from the top of his head.

  Well, it would solve one fairly major problem; it would give the police someone to arrest. If he remembered how these things worked, there’d be plenty of time to fish his alter ego out and tie him up securely before he woke up for the first time. Then all it’d take would be one anonymous phone call; he could be miles away before the squad cars arrived. Of course, the clone would go to prison for something he hadn’t done, it’d be monstrously unfair, but if there was a terrible injustice wandering about looking for someone to happen to, that wasn’t his fault; effectively, it would be self-defence. Well, no, of course it wouldn’t be, but it was the only chance of wriggling off the hook that he was likely to get. He looked at the hair: you or me, he thought, and I haven’t done anything wrong, so why should it be me? Whereupon the hair seemed to look back at him, as if to say that he hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

  David sighed. It’d be so easy to let go, watch the little brown wire flop onto the green goo like a hair from apaintbrush. His decision; for once in his life, he had a genuine choice.

  No, he decided, I can’t. I couldn’t live with myself. Either of me.

  And that was the moment when someone slapped him cheerfully and hard between the shoulder blades, making him let go of the hair.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The hair seemed to take a very long time to fall. ‘Hello there,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  David recognised the voice, and the minute part of him that wasn’t busy watching the hair fall riffled through the necessary card indices and identified it as Honest John’s. The hair landed.

  ‘Fuck,’ David said.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Honest John. ‘Lost a contact lens, or something?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  John laughed. ‘Just as well it didn’t go in the tank, then,’ he said. ‘Otherwise—’ He stopped. ‘It went in the tank.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuck.’ John sighed. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘are those your frogs out there?’

  ‘What? Oh, no, they’re nothing to do with me. At least, I don’t think so.’ He turned round. ‘What do you mean, my frogs? I thought they were yours.’

  John frowned. ‘What the hell would I want with a thousand frogs?’ he asked.

  ‘But—’ David bit off the question. Right now, frogs weren’t the issue. In fact, things had gone way, way beyond frogs. ‘One of my hairs just fell in the goo,’ he said. ‘Can we stop it?’

  ‘From growing, you mean?’ John shrugged. “Course we can. Just flip the mains switch, that’s that. Of course,’ he added, ‘it’d be murder. If you look at it that way, I mean.’

  ‘Murder?’

  John nodded. ‘Maybe not in law,’ he said, ‘it’s what you might call a grey area. And it wouldn’t bother me, I couldn’t give a toss. You might, though.’

  ‘You’re right, I probably would.’ David closed his eyes. ‘The bloody stupid, annoying thing is, I came this close to putting the damn hair in there on purpose. It’d get me out of a hole, you see, it’d be really convenient not to have to go to jail for the rest of my life. But I decided not to.’

  ‘Ah, wel
l, then,’ John said. ‘Maybe you were meant to drop that hair in that tank after all. Makes you think, really.’

  ‘Actually, thinking’s never been a problem as far as I’m concerned. It’s the not thinking that gives me trouble.’ He looked away from the tank. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Me?’ John laughed. ‘I’m getting as much of my kit out of here as I can before the next load of coppers shows up, that’s what. It’s extremely expensive, delicate equipment, this is. I can’t afford to go buying it all again.’

  David pursed his lips. ‘John, can I ask you a ques­tion?’

  ‘You just did.’

  ‘All right, can I ask you a different question? Like, what’s behind that door back there?’

  John raised an eyebrow. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ John replied. ‘Oh, except for a bag of sugar.’

  ‘Bag of sugar.’

  ‘That’s right. I like two in tea and three in coffee. Why?’

  David looked closely at John’s one remaining eye. ‘Just a bag of sugar, nothing else,’ he said. ‘Nothing like, say, an interstellar elevator or anything like that?’

  ‘What’s an interstellar elevator when it’s at home?’ David nodded, very slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where are you from, originally?’

  John did a mild double take. ‘Basildon,’ he said. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ David took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. ‘So, have you got somewhere to take all this stuff?’

  ‘Sure,’ John said. ‘I got a unit on an estate up Watford way.’

  ‘Watford.’ David thought for a moment. ‘That’s quite a way from here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Doesn’t take long on the motorway.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not close.’ David smiled. ‘Do you need a hand shifting the stuff?’ he asked.