Here Comes the Sun (11 page)

‘Thank you,' said Jane. ‘I see. Nobody did mention it, actually, but I suppose I should have worked it out for myself.' She put her cup down on its saucer. ‘I suppose I'd better go back and do that, hadn't I?'

‘That would be a splendid idea,' the person agreed. ‘Oh, by the way. Aren't we forgetting something?'

Jane stopped still and turned her head slowly. ‘Are we?' she said. ‘Sorry, we didn't mean to.'

‘Thirty zlotys for the coffee,' said the person sweetly. ‘We always put the money in that tin on the shelf there.

It helps,' he added, ‘to avoid bad feeling and disruptive outbursts of temper.'

Jane sighed. ‘That's a nuisance,' she said. ‘You see, I've only got terrestrial money. I don't suppose they accept that here, do they?'

The person shook his head. ‘Not really,' he said. ‘I mean, yes, it's the thought that counts, but it doesn't actually buy a new catering-size tin when the present one runs out. Let me,' he added unpleasantly, ‘lend you thirty zlotys until you get paid.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Don't mention it.'

The person, having watched carefully while she put the money in the tin, walked away, leaving her to scream silently in peace and quiet. Then she found Norman and asked him to explain properly about the Register.

 

There was a crash. The four intruders stopped dead in their tracks, or at least they tried to. Alcohol, however, tends to enhance momentum. They fell over each other. In the far distance a dog barked, then fell silent.

‘Mind where you're putting your bloody feet next time,' Darren hissed. ‘There's guard dogs about. I heard one.'

‘Bollocks,' Jason hissed back. ‘Haven't had dogs here for years. Cutbacks. Didn't you know?'

Darren shrugged and fumbled in his pocket for the key to the hangar which he'd lifted off the hook four hours earlier. He was still worrying about the possibility of dogs, but he wasn't going to let his mates see he was worried. He had his cloud credibility to think about.

The lock clicked and he pushed hard on the door. As it rolled back a single piercing ray of light speared out into the blackness. Jason hurriedly threw himself against the crack.

‘You prat,' he snarled. ‘All that bullshit about dogs and then you nearly let the light show. What a
wally
!'

The four adventurers squeezed through the crack and then drew the door to behind them.

Inside the hangar it was, of course, as bright as day; in fact, very considerably brighter. For a moment they all stood dumbfounded by the sight; even Darren, who worked in the shed during the day, had never been this close to the thing before. It was enough to fry your brains.

Dave was the first to break the silence, and he did it with a nervous giggle.

‘Oh come off it,' he said. ‘We're
never
going to be able to fly this thing.'

It was intended merely as an observation, but somehow it got badly mutated on its way out past the gate of Dave's teeth, and by the time it reached Jason's ears it was a challenge with a strong superficial likeness to a taunt.

‘You reckon,' Jason said. ‘Watch this, then.'

‘I didn't mean . . .' Dave started to say, but his friend was already halfway up the ladder towards the cockpit. There was nothing for it but to follow.

‘I'm beginning not to like this,' observed a voice from the foot of the ladder. ‘Why don't we just forget about it and do something else? We could go and smash up a few phone boxes or something instead.'

‘You've lost your bottle,' Jason sneered. ‘You haven't got the nuts, have you?'

‘No,' replied Adrian, with a remarkable note of sobriety in his voice. ‘Not for this I haven't, anyway.'

Dave and Darren paused on the ladder because this was somewhat disturbing. It was commonplace in their social circle that Adrian played the complete head-case, afraid of nothing. His favourite way of letting off steam, it was widely rumoured, was spray-painting graffiti on the sides of moving asteroids. If Adrian didn't fancy it, the chances were that there was an element of risk.

‘Stuff you, then.' Jason's voice drifted down from the top of the ladder, but it sounded far away and hollow. He had clearly found out how to get into the cockpit. ‘Hey, those morons left it unlocked. What a load of pillocks, huh?'

‘Nobody gives a toss,' Dave agreed, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after all. It really was very big, very big indeed.

‘Gotcha!' There was triumph in Jason's voice, and the other three exchanged glances. ‘You coming, Ade, or not?'

Adrian paused for a moment; then he shrugged and shinned quickly up the ladder. He wasn't afraid any more - it had gone past that stage - and he was very curious to find out what was going to happen. ‘Coming,' he said.

‘Only if you're not going to bottle out,' Jason shouted back. ‘'Cos if you suddenly get scared, I'm not stopping, right?'

‘Get stuffed,' Adrian replied, and from his tone of voice the others could tell that he was himself again: the same Adrian who thought nothing of playing Chicken on the edge of Time. ‘We'll see who shits himself first, my son.'

Jason grinned. He was sitting in the pilot's seat, trying to guess which controls did which. He hadn't, he realised, the faintest idea.

‘Here,' he said. ‘How do you make this thing go?'

Adrian shrugged. ‘I dunno,' he said, and leaned forward. ‘Let's try this.' He sprawled his hand out into a pink fan and pressed as many buttons as he could.

‘Don't do that, you luna . . .' Dave started to scream, then his mouth went dry and his tongue became inextricably welded to his palate. The hangar had suddenly become filled with the most agonising light, and all around them they could feel the pulsing of a planet-sized engine.

‘Switch it off, for fuck's sake!' Dave yelled, but nobody moved. They were all paralysed with terror, and besides, it was painfully apparent that it was too late now. The thing was beginning to move.

Slowly at first; then, as it built up momentum slipping down the ramp, very fast, then faster and faster still. As if in a dream, Dave noticed that the hangar doors were firmly shut. But the chances were, he felt, that that wasn't going to make much difference. In fact, it was extremely doubtful whether anything was ever going to make any difference ever again.

The four joy-riders had just enough self-possession left to hurl themselves to the floor of the cockpit as the giant machine ploughed through the diamond-and-titanium doors of the hangar like a bullet through a bubble, left the ramp, hung for an everlasting fraction of a second in mid-air, and then began to drop like a very large stone. Then the engines fired.

It is at such moments that essential character, distilled and compressed, is most easily observed. Dave and Darren both howled ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit!' and tried to squash themselves into the same small space under the computer console. Jason sat flattened against the back of the pilot's chair, his face apparently splattered across the front of his head in an expression of sheer horror that would be
worth millions to an ambitious film producer. Adrian grabbed wildly for the joystick, and pulled.

The sun checked itself, seemed to hesitate, and then lifted.

The sun rose.

 

‘Where is it now?' Staff demanded.

There was silence at the other end of the wire.

‘Well?'

‘Well,' said the voice, and Staff could feel the effort of self-control running up through the wire. ‘You know that sort of lacy constellation just under the armpit of Sagittarius? Like an ammonite with woodworm, I always think. It's out there.' A pause. ‘Somewhere.'

Staff let the hand with the phone in it wilt. Disasters he could cope with - anyone whose days are spent in any form of high-level administration gets withdrawal symptoms without at least one disaster before breakfast - but there are limits. His lips went through the motions of repeating the word Somewhere, but his larynx wanted no part of it.

‘You still there, Chief?' said the voice.

He put the phone back by his ear. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Look, I know this is a damn silly question, but I owe it to myself to ask. Is there any chance whatsoever of getting it back?'

‘None, Chief. Sorry.'

Staff winced like a salted slug. ‘Right. Fine. Thanks for letting me know.'

The line crackled a bit. ‘So what do we do now, Chief ?' said the voice nervously.

Staff sighed. ‘Heaven only knows,' he said, and put the phone down.

He was, of course, lying.

Jason was worried.

He had good reason to be. He was a long way from home, his companions had blacked out - for good, by the looks of it - the fuel gauge was deep into the red bit on the far left-hand side of the dial, and there was a funny rattling noise coming from under the bonnet. The only good thing about running out of fuel, as far as he could see, was that when it happened, then the bloody thing would slow down and perhaps even stop. He had been trying to make it do that for some time.

The monotony of the view from the cockpit window didn't improve matters. It had been as black as two feet up a chimney for the last forty million light years, and that sort of thing can get to you once the effects of the beer start to wear off. To put the tin lid on it, he found that he'd run out of cigarettes.

And then he saw the light; just a tiny little pinprick, far away in the distance, but definitely light. For a few seconds he was elated, until he remembered that (a) light didn't necessarily connote safety or help, and (b) even if it did, he couldn't steer the damned thing towards it anyway.

He needn't have been concerned. The engine chose that moment to drain the last drop of fuel in the backup reserve emergency tank, and the sun decelerated and started to drift. A few minutes later, the gravitational field of whatever that bright thing over there was started to have effect, and the whole contraption slowly turned and started to travel towards the light. Jammy.

The light was a star. The star had a planet; you could see it from light years away. It was big and bright, and blue with the most incredible oceans Jason had ever seen. It was, he realised with a leap of the heart, inhabited. And he was headed straight for it, at a nice slow drift. He'd have called it Destiny if it wasn't for the fact that
he'd worked there for six months and knew how it really worked; so he called it bloody good luck instead.

Soon, much sooner than he had imagined, he was close enough to see the two wide belts of golden asteroids that encircled the planet, and a few miniscule sparkles of flashing metal which could only be space stations. He was nearly there.

‘Help!' he screamed. It was, he knew in his heart, a bit early to expect anyone to hear, but there was no harm in just warming up, so to speak. He also stood up in his seat and waved both his arms.

And then . . .

It was one of those moments when the soul dies: when all the lights go out and all that remains is the horrible feeling of having got it wrong. He shaded his eyes with his hand, hoping against all the probabilities that he was mistaken, but he wasn't.

They weren't space stations; they were parking meters, and he had no change of any sort whatsoever. Likewise, the things he had taken for a twofold belt of golden asteroids were something rather more prosaic but utterly unambiguous. They were double yellow lines. To ram the point home to the point of complete and utter superfluity, the planetary authorities had picked out the words
in glowing red dwarves right across the azimuth.

‘Fuck,' he said.

If it had been a smaller planet, of course, it would have had to orbit him rather than the other way round. As it was, there was nothing he could do except scream a lot and wave his fists about and, after a while, once the lack of food and the helium-rich atmosphere began to tell on him, he couldn't even do that.

When he had been there for a very long time, so long that he could no longer quantify the time with any degree of accuracy whatsoever, he became aware of strange, immaterial figures wandering about the cockpit. They spoke in strange, distorted voices and had a disturbing tendency to walk right through him and out through the cockpit into the blackness outside. They ignored him completely, being apparently entirely engrossed in inexplicable conversations of their own which he was quite incapable of following beyond a few tantalising phrases.

There is no reason to believe that he isn't there to this day. Certainly, the inhabitants of the planet would have had no reason to disturb him, given that his timely arrival saved them the expense and trouble of launching a purpose-built satellite to bounce their afternoon soap-operas off. The fact that, by some strange quirk of optical distortion, Jason occasionally features in some of the episodes, probably adds to their overall enjoyment.

 

‘Now then,' Staff said. ‘Let's just pause there a moment, shall we, and recap for a minute. We have the following suggestions.'

It was an hour and seven minutes later, and the pale, taut faces round the boardroom table were uniformly blank. Nobody was in any hurry to say anything.

‘First,' Staff continued, ‘we have the proposal that we get the moon back down, spray it all over with luminous paint, bang it up there at sunrise, and hope nobody notices. Now, it strikes me that there are a number of potential difficulties with that idea.'

He proceeded to enumerate them. When he had finished, nobody spoke, and he took the silence as his cue to move on to the next suggestion.