Here Comes the Sun (7 page)

‘I didn't mean to creep,' Staff said. ‘I just . . .'

But Jane wasn't going to be conciliated that easily. ‘I mean,' she said, ‘there I am, brushing my teeth, and suddenly there's this face over my shoulder. Did you ever work for a man called Hitchcock by any chance? Fat bloke, big nose.'

The man looked puzzled. ‘Not that I can remember,' he said.

Jane smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘Human joke. I don't suppose you devils know much about the movies.'

The man looked hurt. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘I'm not a devil. Not at all.'

‘Sorry,' Jane said, ‘I meant to say dæmon, it just slipped out.'

‘I'm not a dæmon, either,' the man replied. ‘I'm a . . .'
He paused, and blushed. ‘Well, I'm not a dæmon. Different department.'

Jane thought for a moment, and then a slow grin spread over her toothpaste-flecked face. ‘I've got it,' she said. ‘You're an angel.'

‘Please,' said the man, ‘I really would prefer it if we didn't use that word. It's so . . .' He waved his arms helplessly.

‘Well,' said Jane. ‘What word should I use?'

‘Public servant,' said the man, firmly. ‘I think it's a much better word, really, don't you?'

Jane nodded, and looked at the man carefully. Tall, grey-haired, thinning a little on top and thickening out a bit round the middle, with a lot of hair on the backs of his hands and wearing a suit with rather shiny cuffs. Public servant did seem to fit the bill rather better than angel. ‘Quite right,' she said. ‘Look, can we get out of the bathroom, please?'

‘Yes, of course.'The man moved awkwardly and opened the door for her. Jane tried not to mind.

‘Coffee?' she said.

‘Yes, er, thank you.' The man sat down on a straight-backed chair and folded his arms. He looked embarrassed.

‘I've put the kettle on,' Jane said. ‘Now, is all this connected with what happened to the sun just now?'

The man nodded. ‘You're very observant,' he said.

‘Not very,' Jane replied, wrinkling her nose. ‘I mean, look at it sequentially. The sun goes haywire, supernatural beings start following me about, you don't have to be Aleister Crowley to get the idea that there may be a common factor . . . Sorry, did I say something wrong?'

‘No,' said the man, ‘or at least, you weren't to know.

It's just that we don't mention that person in the Department.'

‘Person? Oh!'

‘Exactly,' said the man. ‘You may remember Peter Wright; you know,
Spycatcher
? Well, think on, as we used to say when I was a boy.'

‘Oh.' Jane bit her lip. ‘Look, can we get to the point? What do you lot want with me? The other one - the, er, dæmon - said something about a
job
, but I . . .'

She tailed off. The man was nodding his head.

‘A
job
?' she repeated. ‘You can't be serious, surely.'

The man stood up and walked to the window. ‘Well,' he said, drawing the curtains slightly, ‘you saw all that today, I take it? The sun and everything?'

‘Yes indeed.'

The man cringed slightly. ‘Wasn't very impressive, was it?'

Jane shrugged. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘Was it supposed to be? I mean, I'm not really up on portents and things like that. I thought that sort of thing only happened when people like Julius Caesar got stabbed, and there isn't anybody like Julius Caesar about much these days. I mean, you've got to be realistic, haven't you? The whole lot of them aren't worth a light shower between them.'

‘It wasn't a portent,' said the man quietly. ‘You'd guessed, hadn't you?'

Jane nodded. ‘Have you got my mind bugged, or something? Because if you have . . .'

The man shook his head firmly. ‘Nothing of the sort, please believe me,' he said. ‘But we at the Department . . . well, you had guessed, hadn't you?'

‘Yes,' Jane said. ‘If you mean that business with the sun was a cock-up, then yes.'

‘It was,' said the man, and shuddered. ‘Staff shortages.'

Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘Staff shortages?'

The man nodded. ‘It's a nightmare,' he said. ‘An absolute bloody nightmare. Honestly, I haven't the faintest idea where it's all going to end.'

From the kitchen, Jane heard the click of the kettle switching itself off. She decided to ignore it.

‘But how can you have staff shortages?' she asked, bewildered. ‘I mean, I thought the whole point of you . . . you public servants was, you go on for ever. Immortal, you know.'

‘Immortal,' said the man quietly, ‘doesn't mean you go on working for ever, it just means that you have a very long retirement. Which means,' he added, ‘that with each year that passes, paying the pensions takes up more and more of the available budget. At the moment, pensions account for ninety-nine-point-nine-seven-two of our available revenue. Think about it.'

Jane thought about it. ‘I see,' she said.

‘Exactly,' said the man. ‘And that's only part of it. Put bluntly, we're running out of manpower. You see, every time a public servant retires, there's a vacancy, right?'

‘I suppose so,' Jane said. ‘I hadn't thought.'

‘Take it from me,' said the man. ‘There is. Now, the number of . . . I don't know how to put this.'

‘You don't?'

‘No,' said the man, shaking his head. ‘It's delicate. Um.

Where do you suppose angels - public servants - come from?'

Jane felt her tongue go dry with embarrassment. ‘Er, mummy public servants and daddy public servants?'

The man scowled. ‘Certainly not,' he said. ‘It's a metaphysical impossibility. No, the stork brings them, of course. And do you know what's happened to the natural habitat of storks in the last fifty years?'

‘Um.'

‘Well,' said the man, ‘I think you can see what I'm getting at. The storks are dying out, so we're . . . well, it makes recruitment a problem. A bloody great big problem. And that's where you come in,' he added.

Jane felt herself going red all over. ‘Now look,' she said.

‘No, no,' said the man quickly, ‘not like that. I mean, we've decided, or at least Mr Ganger and I have decided . . .'

‘Mr Ganger?'

‘You've met him,' said the man.

‘Oh.'

‘We've decided,' the man continued, ‘that the only way out is to start recruiting mortals - suitable mortals, obviously - and, well . . .'

‘Well, what?' said Jane. Her voice, incidentally, would have frozen oxygen. The man swallowed hard, and then made a show of noticing his watch.

‘Good lord,' he said, ‘is that the time? Anyway, you'll think about it, won't you? I mean, you'll be, like, the guinea . . . I mean, a pioneer. That's right, a pioneer. The whole success of the programme . . .'

‘No.'

‘And if it works,' the man said quickly, standing up and knocking over a small pile of tapes on the floor, ‘it'll mean that we can start replacing key staff, reorganising the whole running of the department, and . . .'

‘No.'

‘So you'll think about it. Good. Well, I'll be saying . . .'

‘No.'

‘We'll be in . . .' The man suddenly became translucent, ‘touch. Please give it very serious . . .' Then transparent, ‘thought.' Then invisible. ‘Thank you.'

‘No,' Jane said. ‘Absolutely not. No way.'

She stopped. She suddenly had the feeling that she was talking to herself.

‘Honestly!' she said.

 

 

 

 

L
ook in Sir Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica
and you will learn all about gravity.

Gravity, according to Sir Isaac, is a natural phenomenon, as immutable as it is impersonal. Because of gravity, objects stay attached to the surface of the planet instead of flying off into the void. There's nothing mystical or even intentional about it; it just happens, because that's how the great machine works.

In all fundamentally important respects, Sir Isaac was right. Gravity is, as he observed, a physical force resulting from the interaction of bodies possessing mass upon each other. It is not dependent upon the whim of any deity or supernatural entity. It can, in other words, be relied on; provided, of course, that somebody remembers to grease the main drive-shaft once in a while.

‘It's not my job,' complained the Head Technician loudly, above the ear-splitting scream of grinding diamonds. ‘By rights, it's down to Maintenance to . . .'

The Technical Supervisor snarled at him. ‘Well,' he observed superfluously, ‘whoever was supposed to look after the sodding thing, it's seized. The gearbox's
completely stuffed. Look out!' he added, as a chunk of diamond shrapnel flew past his ear. ‘Bugger me, Fred, the whole bloody thing's breaking up. We'd better get it switched off quick.'

The Head Technician stared at him. ‘You can't do that, you lunatic,' he said. ‘Switch this lot off, you'll get people drifting off into space, we'll be lynched.'

‘Look,' replied the supervisor, ‘either we switch the bugger off or it'll switch itself off. Something's got to be done, right?'

For the next second and a half, speech was impossible, as the bearing manifold suddenly shattered, spraying egg-sized diamonds about like birdshot. The Head Technician dived behind a flywheel and put his head between his knees.

‘Come out of there, you coward!' yelled the supervisor.

‘Not my problem,' the Head Technician shrieked back. ‘You look in the files, chum, you'll see. I wrote a memo about it five years back. I warned you lot that if the whole gearbox wasn't renewed . . .'

‘Shut up,' the supervisor observed, ‘and bring me a spanner. All we've got to do is slip the clutch and let it freewheel while we bodge up the transmission. Its own momentum'll keep it turning for hours.'

The Head Technician considered this for a moment. ‘Bollocks,' he opined. ‘It'll just grind to a halt, and then you'll have all the mortals floating upwards yelling at us. You may not give a toss about your pension, chum, but . . .'

The ball race chose that moment to fuse, filling the air with a sparkling cloud of diamond dust. Planet Earth wobbled sharply on its axis.

‘All right,' hissed the Head Technician, ‘only if this goes wrong, you just remember it was your idea, right? Like, you gave me a direct order and . . .'

‘Shut up,' the supervisor reiterated, ‘and find me that spanner.'

A few moments later, Planet Earth stopped shuddering and began to spin noiselessly, easily round its axis. It began to slow down . . .

 

‘Ouch!' said Jane, aloud.

It hadn't been her first choice as a flat; it wasn't really her kind of neighbourhood: it was a fair old hike to the station every morning, the bedroom wall needed papering badly, the doors stuck in winter and there was something of a condensation problem in the kitchen; but hitherto at least, she'd never had any problems with the ceiling being too low. Until now, apparently.

She looked down. Yes, there was the floor, just where she'd left it. There was her furniture. Same old furniture, mostly the unsuitable and heterogeneous offerings of relatives and friends, except that previously it hadn't shown any signs of wanting to jump off the ground and float about the place like a shoal of dazed tuna. And there was her breakfast - mug of coffee, slice of toast - swimming obligingly towards her through thin air.

She grabbed at the coffee-cup as it floated past, missed the cup but not the handle, and split the coffee. It fell upwards and splashed against the ceiling.

Gingerly, and conscious that there were rather more cobwebs up here than Mrs Beeton would have approved of, Jane raised her left hand above her head and pushed the ceiling away from her. She felt herself bob downwards for a few feet, and then the current, or whatever the hell it was, caught her up again and lifted her slowly upwards. She kicked violently with her feet, but it didn't help. She hit her head gently on the lampshade, pushed off again, and walked on her hands across to the door frame.

‘Somebody,' she said to a passing telephone directory, ‘is going to have some explaining to do.'

The directory fluttered its pages and continued to drift
upwards, until it was splayed open against the plaster-work. Jane gripped the wooden frame of the door with both hands and tried to haul herself downwards.

‘That's better,' she said, as her feet connected with the carpet. She looked down. The fibres were trying their best to stand on end, giving the impression of one very frightened Axminster. Worse still, all the dust she hadn't got around to hoovering out of it was slowly rising. It got up her nose and she sneezed.

A flower vase drifted past her, upside-down and bobbing about erratically as air escaped out of its inside. This wouldn't do at all. She managed to propel herself on to the back of the kitchen table, which was passing by slowly and ponderously, a mere foot or so above the ground. As she had hoped, her weight helped to push it down, and she found herself a mere six inches above floor-level. What she needed now, she reckoned, was some sort of punt-pole.

A passing golf umbrella solved that problem, and soon she was punting cautiously across the floor, steering clear of drifting armchairs and trying not to hit the walls too hard, towards the window. She had an idea that things were going to be a bit surreal out there, and it was a pity that her camera was presently nuzzling against the ceiling-rose like a small black remora.