Valeddom
7: eeyoo

I must have made some noise when awakening from my coma; it was this which had alerted the nurse. But the one great thought, I’m back on Earth, smothered my outcry. While the nurse ran to fetch the doctor, I sank back on the pillow, knowing all I needed to know.
    Nevertheless when the doctor appeared, my lips formed the question:
    “Where am I?”
    “Lancaster Royal Infirmary,” said the doctor. “And how are we feeling today?”
    “I’m fine,” I croaked, and began a weak laugh which turned into a ragged cough. I could hardly move a muscle. On the other hand, I wasn’t at all groggy. My mind at that moment was on fire with a terrible awareness, and my thoughts were utterly crisp and clear. My eyes pinpointed the doctor, registered his young face, his white coat, his smoothed-over excitement. My verdict: I had better be careful.
    Evidently I rated more than one doctor, for now an older, stouter man came into view. This one said, “Good, good,” frowning in amazement, and then he and his colleague stepped back and muttered to each other.
    Meanwhile in a delayed response my mind lost some of its clarity, overcast by a fog of emotional reaction to my smallness and weakness. I was back in Hugh Dent’s body, and gone was my Mercurian strength and physique. The change hit me two ways, knocking me into a see-saw of depression and elation. Oh no, I would never see Valeddom again! Hooray, I was back home and my former self!
    The older doctor listened to my heart with his stethoscope and frowned some more. “Steady, steady. Can you understand me all right?” he asked, speaking English in a precise, clipped way. (I nodded.) “Good, good. I will ask you some questions now. Simple general-knowledge questions.” And he began firing them at me. What is the capital of England? What is the name of the Queen? Of the Prime Minister? How many players are there in a football team? And so on. After two or three minutes he turned to asking me questions about myself: my name, address, parents, school. I answered all of those too, and he was finally satisfied. “No amnesia, it is clear. You,” he remarked, “are a very lucky young man. In fact I am amazed at the excellent condition you are in, both mental and physical, in spite of the fact that you have been unconscious for.... a great length of time.”
    Eighty-eight days, to be precise, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say it out loud; I preferred not to shock him any further with what I knew. That keen edge of caution still guarded my tongue. My experience on Valeddom had taught me something about adjustment to alien worlds.... and from the point of view of my Valeddomian self I was now on an alien world, Urom....
That afternoon, my parents came hurrying to my bedside. Hugs and tears, rather than words, took up most of that first visit. That was just as well, because my deep joy at seeing Mum and Dad again, confusingly combined with my sorrow at losing my Valeddomian parents and friends, and at losing Valeddom itself, produced a churning mess inside me; but the handy thing was, my scatty efforts at conversation, and the twitches of contrary mood which crossed my face, did not surprise them; for what else can you expect from a boy who has been in a coma for eighty-eight days? Everyone made allowances. And so the blaze and crackle in my mind burned lower, and I could start to relax.
    Still, the happiness of the reunion was itself a strain, clashing with all that had been given to me by a different world, each treasure trove of memory trying to shoulder the other one aside. To picture how awkward this was, imagine waking from a dream and the dream refusing to go away, so that dream and wake keep overlapping!
    Luckily for me, I was given time to adjust. There was no question of going home immediately. The medical team which had been looking after me during the eighty-eight days had massaged my muscles and done their best to keep me from wasting away, but some of the necessary fitness treatment could only be undertaken after I had regained consciousness; so I had many more days in hospital, and I used the time to din it into myself that once I got moving again I would have to remember that I was no longer Ren Nydr, and I must not ask too much, or expect too much, of my reduced stamina and musculature. As for the moral side – my recent, Mercurian habit of being brave – I wasn’t sure whether I could keep that up, or whether it, too, had been left behind.
    The everyday world asserted itself pretty quick. My imagination became accustomed to a reduced diet of humdrum events: meals; graded physical exercise; visits during which I was reminded of pleasant, ordinary things. A card arrived, signed by all my schoolmates and teachers. I savoured the wholemeal-bread plainness of Earthly existence, and told myself not to grumble at the loss of high adventure. “Remember,” I thought, “how it almost ended, in the clutches of the hourless tapede.” And besides, I kept being quietly thrilled by the sheer beauty of Earth: the simple sight of blue sky and distant roofs, and leafy branches waving beyond the hospital car-park.
    You and I (I speak of our Earth selves only) were born with three parents. Your third parent is your planet. Your culture, your civilization, your world.  Everyone takes this third parent for granted. Mine now hugged me in its bosom: good old normal Earth. I made a decision: I would encourage this hold. This was my great precaution. Since I was on Earth, I would be an Earthman; I wanted three parents, not six. Six was too many.
    I viewed this as a matter of survival, and after putting some effort into it I found, as time went on, that I could go for hours without thinking about Valeddom. It turned out to be a question of discipline: I could get on top of those alien memories, limit them and control them, and for a while I even thought I might be able, eventually, to disbelieve in them, though I wasn’t sure whether I should go quite that far. Only in my dreams were the gates of awareness re-opened beyond my control, and Dad once mentioned to me (during one of his hospital visits) that I had babbled in my sleep. The nurse had mentioned it to him; so had one of the doctors; apparently, they weren’t worried as far as I was concerned, but they thought my parents had better be prepared to expect that sort of night-time disturbance….
    “What did I say?” I demanded, anxiously.
    “Snatches of way-out stuff.... You ought to be a writer.”
    That helped me to laugh it off, for I had always been keen on science fiction.
    While I was still in hospital the local Gazette sent a reporter to interview me and take a photo for a feature about the Survivor of the M6 Coach Crash. The lady asked me how I felt after coming back “from death’s door”. It was then that I almost did blab too much. After making some commonplace remark about being glad to be alive, I added:
    “Anyhow, there’s no such thing as death.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked. “Ten people died in the smash!”
    Whoops. “I know,” I said, thinking of those who had not come back from Valeddom – of Justine, Jacko and Mr Bryce. “But if only people knew....” There I went again! I must shut up! Yet it seemed a pity to keep quiet, to withhold the comfort my knowledge might have given to the relatives of the other crash victims. Nevertheless I must shut up. Otherwise, bit by bit the whole story would get drawn out of me, and I’d end up certified.
    Fortunately, the reporter lady seemed used to the general idea of “near-death experiences” and their tendency to induce the belief that death is not the end. Her article, when it appeared, was harmlessly vague. Anyone who read it must have thought I was being mystical, and not too much notice was taken.
    But the day before I left the hospital, the hour came, when visiting time was over and I lay alone, that I came face to face with a practical problem that would not go away.
    Curiosity – an urgent curiosity that saw no means of being satisfied. For there was one big question that nagged at me despite all my efforts at “moving on”.
    How could I concentrate properly on my Earth life while I kept wondering what had happened in that room in the depths of the Archives of Ixli, after that final terrible moment of my existence as Ren Nydr?
    Could I, perhaps, make a sensible guess?
    Fred Jackson, who somehow must have talked his way into the Archives, had manhandled Bryce and me, wrenching us free of the Noleddern trance. That much I knew. I didn’t know whether Jacko had acted alone, or whether Fnekt had a hand in it too. Anyhow, the violence of the rescue had probably killed or seriously injured Bryce, and had surely got Jacko himself (and his accomplices, if any) into a lot of trouble.
    On the other hand, Bryce might be better off dead (supposing he was dead) than as whatever he might have become in the clutches of the tapede. Jacko’s ignorant action at least saved him from that, and saved me, too – gave me a chance to escape completely: for unlike Bryce, I had not been killed in the bus smash; I had a comatose body waiting on Earth, to which my soul was able to bounce back, in its recoil from unendurable pressure.
Which brought me to wonder: what had happened to Ren Nydr’s body? Was the other me lying lifeless? Or had it reverted to the Dluku state it was in when I first entered it?
    How could I possibly ever know? At first I told myself to abandon all such questions. To chew on them seemed pointless, since it seemed vastly unlikely that I’d get any answers this side of the grave. The only way I would ever obtain news from Ixli was by the fantastically remote chance of meeting another person whose mind had made the trip to Valeddom, and, what’s more, to that particular part of Valeddom, and returned to tell the tale. Or by taking part, myself, in another accident, going into another coma.... as if lightning were to strike twice in exactly the same place. But then a plan occurred to me. If Dad’s joking remark became true and I did become a writer, and disguised my experiences as fiction, the published story could become a secret signal to anyone who was in the know. It would convey the message: “Here I am. Please get in touch.”
    It was something to think about in the years ahead.
 
*****

They let me out of hospital and I went home, with permission to return to school after a further couple of weeks. Those weeks, I was told, I must “take things easy”.
    How right you all are, I silently agreed. Yes - “take things easy”. Cease my Mercurian brooding.
    However, during my very first minutes upstairs in my room, my eyes strayed to the bookshelf where stood my old Pictorial Encyclopaedia, which I had last opened on the eve of my adventure. I couldn’t resist the one means that remained to me, to gaze once more upon Valeddom. I brought that old volume down.
    I turned to pages 70-71 and there they were, the planetary landscapes, the one for Mercury including a view over what I now knew was the Capian Plain.
    I stared. I had been there. The black sky, the brown rocks, the sense of brooding, infinite mystery – the scene I had yearned for without hope during my years of childhood – now I could truthfully recollect, I had actually stood on that plain. It was no longer a distant dream but an experienced fact; and now that I had seen the place for real, a sense of peace descended upon me as I realized that my old longings had subsided, quietened by fulfilment, and what remained was thankfulness.
    I then became aware that my heart was tugged in another direction.
    Up till now, whenever I had looked at that double-page spread, I had thought every one of the pictures fascinating – except the one of Earth. The commonplace prettiness of green fields and hedges had not interested me at all.
    Now, the difference was striking!  All of the nine planetary scenes, without exception, called to me – Earth included. Earth, yes, familiar old Earth was now equally haunted by the possibility of infinite wonder: right now I was physically present and alive upon the surface of a strange, mysterious planet and at once the hunger gripped me, to explore the civilizations of Earth.
    And what luck, I’m in one of them now: one of the most fabulous of them: an ancient, awesome civilization called Britain!

                                                 *****

“Taking it easy”, I was taken by my parents on walks of moderate length, in which I inhaled the intoxicating beauty of the Westmorland and north-Lancashire countryside, pleasing my mum and dad by how much I seemed to be thrilled by simple things: hedges, leafy lanes, streams, stiles, inn-signs, dry-stone walls, as well as by the gently magnificent “blue remembered hills”. Cosy but haunted, the English rural scene quietly pumped me with rapturous excitement, so that I was constantly aware of walking about in a land of magical uniqueness. Just one of many various lands, on a planet covered with inexhaustible richness; but this particular land was mine, personally accessible to me.
    So that week-end I followed the matter up. I rummaged among the old atlases, guides and histories which we possessed at home. They confirmed that I lived in a fantastic old civilization called Britain, and not only that, but the country was divided into shires, rich in character and history, each as individual as a primary colour. Of course I had known all this before, but now I really knew it. What a treasure trove of utter never-ending fascination! And this wasn’t some inaccessible ancient culture you had to dig up and imagine, nor a myth like Atlantis; this was something alive and continuing, that you could move about in and feel and touch and explore. And every day its story continued, accumulating episodes. I began to look at newspapers and listen to TV news, which had never greatly interested me before. I realized it would be a while before they made much sense to me. As for history, I had always been interested in it, but again I must stress the difference between realizing something and really realizing it. It took hold of my imagination as never before, almost as though every book I picked up were written in Noleddern.
    The following week I was due to return to school on this strange planet.

                                                  *****

“Taking the plunge” was hard on my nerves, but I was soon made to feel welcome. Janice Dodd and Dave Harper led the cheering as the rest of them thronged around me. “The Coma Kid!” cried Dave, and the others took it up and cheered some more, and I could tell there was no mockery in it – they all really were pleased to see me. Our new form teacher, Miss Bishop, had to appeal for quiet as she tried to take the register: “All right, all right! You can get Hugh to tell you his story later on.”
    I had wondered if some of my more evil classmates might punish me for being such a celebrity, but I did them an injustice. Or maybe they didn’t dare go against the current, for the human element was definitely uppermost that morning.
    Aldridge sidled up to me at the start of break.
    This was the podgy, gormless bully who acted as sidekick to the even more evil Pullen.
    Aldridge said, “That was cool, to survive the crash.”
    With a shattering sense of cosmic amazement I realized that he, too, was behaving like a friendly human being. If you happened to know Aldridge as he was last term, you would find this the hardest thing to believe in my entire story.
    I regret to say I was slow to respond with equal friendliness. I simply couldn’t change gears that fast (though I did better on the next occasion I spoke to him). In fact, that time, I was the gormless one. Just for something to say, I muttered: “Yeah? Thanks. See yer. Gotta nip into the library.” Actually this was true: I did want to consult an atlas, to clear up a point which had been slightly disturbing me.
    I darted into the corridor and stopped short. Standing a few yards ahead of me, munching a chocolate bar, was the king twerp himself, the psycho of 9c. For one awkward instant Pullen and I stared at each other. My mind flew back in recollection to those last moments on Valeddom, to the advance of the ancient horror and to my peculiar impression that its face had been a kind of mask, behind which sneered none other than that contempt typified by Pullen. What now?
    Nothing, now. He was just a boy. My loathing and resentment were gone. And he – he lowered his eyes to his chocolate bar. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. The sheer battiness of the thought that this uninteresting lad might have any connection whatsoever, whether as symbol or outpost or collaborator, with a Mercurian monster! He was just a nothing, and I was a nothing to him. The bullying, the ragging, my answering hatred – it was all over. I had moved on. Pullen had moved on.
    And the hourless tapede must have moved on. It’s had millions of years in which to move on. Now that was a thought I didn’t quite like. Shrugging it off, I strode into the library.
    I lugged an atlas off the reference shelf, sought a table and found myself sitting opposite Annette Sallis.
    “Hello,” she said. “How are you adjusting, Hugh?”
    Serious, swotty Annette - typical of her to be in the library during break. (It didn’t occur to me then that she might have followed me in.) Typical of her, also, to play the psychiatrist and ask about “adjusting”.
    You can usually get away with talking in the library at morning break time, when few people want to go there. Annette was looking at me, expecting a reply. If I’d had any sense I could have neatly turned the conversation round just by saying (truly) how glad I was that she had survived the coach crash. But I didn’t have the sense to say this.
    Even so, I tried to do better with her than I had done with Aldridge. In fact, I used Aldridge, the poor guy, as a topic:
    “Well,” I said, “I’m finding people different from what they were. Confusing, when evil people turn good!”
    “Like who for instance?”
    “Aldridge.”
    “He’s not really evil,” she said. “He just hasn’t matured as quickly as you. You shouldn’t be so judgemental.”
    “Judgemental.... wow, that’s a word,” I said admiringly. I was being told off! – and just when I thought I was being generous! For instead of approving the reformed Aldridge, I could have sneered at the subdued and insignificant Pullen. Evidently my forbearance wasn’t appreciated. Oh, well, at least this meant I didn’t have the usual Annette problem, that is, of wondering how the heck to keep the conversation going, of looking up at the blank ceiling wishing there were suggestions written on it about what to say. In good spirits I went on: “Well, I haven’t got X-ray vision. Can’t see under disguises very well.”
    “Now, now,” she said, “don’t be nasty, Hugh.”
    “Sorry.” Then I remembered what I was in the library for. I was here to look something up, to seek an explanation for a word that had puzzled me, and I had better concentrate - But wait: I might be talking to someone who could save me the trouble! “By the way, Annette, what is ‘Cumbria’?”
    “The county we’re in! Dallingdon is in the county of Cumbra. Hugh, are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
    No, I wasn’t feeling all right. I trembled as I leafed through the atlas. I had never heard of any county called “Cumbria”. But there it was.... and where was Westmorland?
    I had just got interested in the shires, in the past few days, and now – What had happened to mine?
    And to the others?
    The Shires map showed a scene of devastation.
    Some historic counties were still there. Norfolk. Cornwall. Devon. Some were there in name but their shapes were all wrong. Berkshire. Oxfordshire. Somerset. Some had gone altogether – Huntingdonshire. The Ridings of Yorkshire. Herefordshire and Worcestershire seemed to be fused into something called “Hereford and Worcester”. And ALL the counties of Scotland, except Fife, had disappeared!!! No Perthshire, Lanarkshire, Banffshire, Selkirkshire, Ayrshire.... all the exciting, beautiful, resonant names gone, and in their place, dry-as-dust Regions: Highland, Central, Borders....
    “It’s all changed,” I said dully, and shivered as if some ghostly tentacle-tip had brushed my spine.
    Annette leaned forward. “What’s bothering you? What’s all changed?”
    “See you,” I said abruptly. I went in search of a teacher. As luck would have it, the library was being supervised by Mr Ferrar, who had seconded Mr Bryce in the Geography department, and no doubt had been moved up to replace him.
    “That’s quite in order,” he murmured when I showed him the map. He looked at me in surprise.
    I lurched in the direction of the toilets. I felt clammy and sick. I gave myself some mental first-aid – pulling myself together with the thought that there must be some explanation, some acceptable explanation since no one else seemed bothered, no one else was alarmed.... But in a way that was the scariest thing of all, that nobody around here was scared but I....
    The next lesson was Maths, where I got my next shock.
    We were doing Distance/Time questions.
    You know the sort of thing: “if you go x miles for y hours, and then 2x miles for 3y hours, what is your mean speed during the journey?” Expecting something like that, I looked at the textbook, and staring at me out of the page was a word out of nightmare.
    Killer-meaters.
    A car went eighty killer-meaters at one hundred killer-meaters per hour and then another sixty killer-meaters at eighty killer-meaters per hour....
    What in cosmic hell was going on?
    For the second time that day I was confronted by a gibberish more frightening than evil. It gaped at me like a red flaming mouth that I wished to forget.
    Remembering how surprised Annette had been at my ignorance, I kept quiet, tried to work and to stop shivering.
    The teacher, Mr Dawlish, was doing the rounds of the desks, to see how we were getting on with the problems. When he reached me he said quietly, “You doing all right?” I assured him I was “not too bad”. It was my first day back, after all. Can’t expect too much the first day. I asked him what page I could look up a table of weights and measures. He showed me, and there I saw them: the killer-meaters were each a million miller-meaters.
    “Sir,” I asked, “how does this,” and I pointed to the killer-meaters, “relate to miles?”
    His finger went to a shaded facts “box” on the page, and then, fortunately, he left me alone and went to answer someone else’s question.
    I was left staring at a statement, which said:
    1 killer-meater = 0.621371 miles.
    I kept very still.
    Cumbria. Killer-meaters. What else?
    In the far distance behind me, I heard, in my mind’s ear, the soft thud-thud of a padding paw, telling me something I refused to know.

                                                 *****

Suddenly it broke in – the thought that I might not be on the real Earth after all. All sorts of possibilities compressed into one frightful package.
    I hadn’t really escaped.
    Perhaps the hourless tapede had caught me and this was the result of being devoured. Or perhaps in fleeing from it I had switched bodies again, onto some alternate time-track or probability-world, and the differences would pile up as I switched again and again, losing all familiar things one by one, on a ride towards the dark origin of killer-meaters and their like, if all roads led to the tapede.
    Millions of years ago the thing had been a physical animal. By now it could have evolved into an energy pattern, an invisible fiend able to reach across space from world to world.

                                                 *****

I batted at the terror. What was I so disturbed about? Cumbria. Killer-meaters. Miller-meaters. Stupid words – that’s all I’d seen so far; that’s all it was: stupid words. Slap at ’em like you slap a mosquito.
    Whoa there. “Only” stupid words? Ah, you can’t rest on that. The more petty the cause, the bigger the nightmare.
    For just imagine that one day you were to find people measuring Time not in hours and minutes and seconds but in (for example) kruntisnargles, snargles and foopisnargles, and all the while nobody seems to notice anything odd or hideous about the words. You are the only one who sees the madness for what it is. Wouldn’t you find that more scary than seeing a tyrannosaurus on your front lawn?
    Yes, it would be definitely worse. A tyrannosaurus is a huge menace with enormous teeth but at least the problem would get shared around. Other people would notice it, the army would get called in, and something would be done about it. Whereas a purely verbal outrage noticed by you alone....
    It would, if real, indicate that the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum. Well, but, hang on, things need not be that bad. The killer-meaters might just be some new in-joke. A deliberate, humorous ugliness like Fungus the Bogeyman. Writers of maths textbooks will try all sorts of dodges to liven them up.
    During the next few days I tried not to be “judgemental”. Provisionally I accepted the miller-meaters, the scenty-meaters and the killer-meaters, and the disappearance of Westmorland and of other chunks of my heritage. I made an effort to hold the loss suspended in my mind until such time as I might discover the reason for it. “Who knows,” thought I, in an effort to be tolerant, “perhaps there is an excuse, somewhere, for all this promotion of idiot ugliness at the expense of quality and beauty.”
    As I continued my researches I discovered an interesting fact: whatever the excuse for the deterioration might be, it didn’t need to be applied to the USA, for that country had not suffered the disfigurement at all. It was a pleasant moment, when I opened an up-to-date map of the USA and found the various States still in existence. No one had yet abolished Texas and renamed the area “South Eastern Region”. Nor had Kansas and Nebraska been wiped out in favour of a “Central Region”. And looking at some books published in America, I noticed that distances were still given in miles. No nonsense about killer-meaters there. So from then on, whenever my spirit thirsted for relief from the blight that had infected my own country, I could open an American book and derive some consolation.
    This was just as well, for I had enough on my plate in my efforts to re-build my life on Earth, without also having to cope with the cultural disfigurement of my native land every time “killer-meaters” and “scenty-meaters” leered like obscene graffiti from a page or a road-sign. And I didn’t dare confide in anyone, because since they all appeared to accept the oddness, I had good reason to fear that they might think me odd if I mentioned it. Which might start a train of investigation that was dangerous for me.
    For by this time I realized that I wasn’t ever going to manage completely to forget my lost life as Ren Nydr. So I would never, in spirit, be merely Hugh Dent, never be a wholly convincing Earthman. Always the possibility would exist that I might betray myself if, for some reason, the truth were suspected – if, for example, other adventurers were to give the game away.
Moreover, my continuing “homesickness” for Valeddom meant that I needed to do something to fill the gap in my life. I must make up for the loss somehow. I had thought I could do it by enthusing about Britain, but now that the queer rash of nastiness had broken out over my country I was left vulnerable to regrets about that, too, and subject to fits of uncontrollable longing to regain the other lost world.
    Grief is a sneaky thing. It knows it can’t dominate us all the time so it lets us go for a while, it allows us to drift into a routine of eating and sleeping and working, and then, at odd moments, it once more sticks the knife in. Then the pain re-conquers us and we feel how pitiful our new enjoyments are. Compared to what we have lost, they seem nothing.
    The following week came the crisis.

                                                *****

One evening I got home to find my dad with a heavy look on his face.  Something was depressing him – bad news of some kind. Very bad, as I could tell from the droop of his shoulders.
    My mother said, “You might as well tell him, Gerald.”
    “Yes,” he sighed, “I don’t seem able to keep it in, do I? And he’ll learn sooner or later.”
    For a scary moment I wondered if it might be something to do with me. It wasn’t, not at all. As the story came out, I almost wished it were my fault, so that I could put it right.
    “You remember,” my father began, “I was planning to start up a new company.”
    “Um – yes I do, actually! I remember it sounded like a good business idea....”
    “I’ll just remind you, briefly, what the idea was –
    I settled to listen and he began his story.
    “My aim, as usual, was to use organic substitutes for the poisons used in pest-control. And this particular notion was based on my discovery that potato starch, which is not a poison and so can’t harm the ecosystem, could be sprayed on whitefly pupae so that the pupae would stiffen and the insects be prevented from hatching.”
   “Sounds great,” I encouraged him, nodding. “But it’s a while since you mentioned all this. How have you been getting on with it? I’ve been meaning to ask you....” Actually, I had quite forgotten. I’d had so much else on my mind.
    “I got on fine,” he said grimly. “Got a manufacturing company to transform my idea into a saleable product. Got it patented. Got a chemicals company all ready to launch it on the international market. Got it tested by our safety people. Sales projected in the millions. And then.... hah.” A disgusted sound.
    “What went wrong, Dad?”
    “Well, then our old friend the Eeyoo steps in.”
    I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but the effect on me of the strange, unfamiliar word ‘Eeyoo’ was so similar to my experience with the killer-meaters and the scenty-meaters that my stomach felt as if I had swallowed a lump of lead. I could not bring myself to utter a word.
    He continued:
    “Our health-and-safety people, as I said, had given me the go-ahead. As they could hardly help doing, since potato starch is so obviously harmless, it’s already in hundreds of food products and it’s even in the glue we lick on envelopes.
    “But the Eeyoo….
    “Anything that hasn’t gone through its own rigmarole, is classed as an ‘active substance’. An ‘active substance’ requires further safety tests. Tests which would cost a quarter of a million pounds and last three years.
    “Not surprisingly, hearing that we’d have to go through all this before the product could be launched, the companies that were going to partner me have now pulled out. I got the letter from Hartleys this morning. Can’t blame them. End of story.”
    He paused for a breath. “Sorry, lad, for making this bitter speech at you.”
    “But look.... um.... there must be something we can do.”
    “Really? Well, I suppose I could go round telling people that the Eeyoo has smothered yet another enterprise at birth. Rather like informing people that dogs bark or bees buzz.”
    “But maybe you could get together with other businesses....”
    “No. You don’t get it, Hugh. The big firms, the ones with the money to lobby and bribe the Eeyoo, can afford to comply with their regulations. Sometimes they even encourage them, to help destroy the competition – like the pharmaceutical giants who use the Eeyoo to ban natural health products.”
    “But that’s monstrous!” I shouted – my mind now running on monsters.
Dad’s gentle smile made me pause, made me curb my indignation. I was running the risk of making it far too plain how lacking I was in common knowledge – that I simply didn’t have a clue as to the kind of monster he was talking about. And yet I so longed to be helpful.
    “Couldn’t you write to your MP? In Civics class I heard you can – ”
Dad was shaking his head. I dried up, for my words sounded useless even as I uttered them. My sinking heart told me, here is another disfigurement on the face of the Earth.
    Dad said, “MPs are powerless against the Eeyoo.”
    “Oh? But suppose the Government....”
    “The Government? The Government? Lad, the ‘government’, as you call it, is in the Eeyoo. Swallowed up in it. Chanting from inside its belly, that it’s ‘good for jobs’, which is like saying that being eaten is good for one’s health. Ah, you’re going white as a sheet, Hugh! Don’t take it so hard! I shouldn’t have....”
    “No, it’s all right, Dad,” I said hastily. “I need to know about these things.”

                                                 *****

I’m proud of the fact that I got through the evening without showing too much more of my distress to my parents, and that I lasted out through the next school day, and the one after that, and the one after that, in such a way that no one guessed what I was going through.
    One thing did make it easier for me:
    Although my dad didn’t think anything could be done about the Eeyoo thing, at least he did protest. This spared me from that awful sense that I was the only one who had noticed the mad elephant in the room. A shared nightmare is infinitely more bearable than one you have to face alone.
    Nevertheless, I was alone in one sense, in that I dared not admit my special knowledge, nor my special ignorance. I told myself: slowly, slowly, play it cool and slow. Look for clues. Amass evidence.... My life stretches before me, after all. However, later that same week, before I got round to any research, events caught up with me.
    Miss Bishop, besides being our new form-teacher, also took us for music, and, as usual, she wasn’t having much success in getting us to sing. We were groaning our way through “Old Joe Brown is Dead and Gone / We’ll Never See Him More” when a man in a smart suit entered the classroom. He was in his thirties, and he had a confident, professional look about him. We all stood up, glad of the interruption.
    The man went to the front desk and, standing beside Miss Bishop, surveyed us while she introduced him. I thought his glance rested on me for an extra moment, but then my face had been in the local paper quite a few times; however it’s also possible that Miss Bishop’s smirk lingered just a bit in my direction.
    “This is Mr Waller, from CG UK. He’s come to have a few words with you. Please sit down and listen to him.”
    We sat down and prepared to endure. It couldn’t be worse than “Old Joe Brown”.
    “Thank you, Miss Bishop,” said the man. “I’ll explain, first of all, that CG simply stands for Class Gear. My organization specializes in educational materials of the highest quality. Ah, they all say that, you’re no doubt thinking! Well, we claim that we test our products scientifically – and for that, we need guinea-pigs! We are looking for youngsters who are willing to stay behind after school for just a few minutes to help us out, and we don’t expect you to do it for nothing!” He smiled just enough to make us like him. It was cleverly done. “Whoever volunteers will get one of our palm-held work-stations,” and he lifted his left hand to flash a little screen in front of us.
    “So – anyone interested, raise your hands.”
    All our hands flew up.
    “Wow, that’s good,” he said. “Now, because I can only test you one at a time, and because I don’t want to keep any of you hanging around, we need to arrange it so that just one person is tested per day, for about twenty minutes after school. Obviously it can’t be done without it being cleared with your folks at home, so here are some letters for you to take back.” He stepped forward and moved among us, handing each of us an envelope. “I shall be around for the next month or so,” he remarked, “and you and your folks can tick the days you might be available; then with Miss Bishop’s agreement we’ll work out a rota.”

                                                  *****

It turned out that I was the first to be tested.
    Mr Waller made a personal effort to arrange it with my parents. That evening he called at my house, and said that he wanted to make sure they understood it was all right me doing the tests. The way he put it, he got them to agree all the more readily because of my recent involvement in the bus crash and my long period in a coma. The tests, and the materials to be given as a reward, would help me catch up with my missed school-work. He sounded very convincing.
    So at the end of the following day, after the final bell had gone, instead of going home I hung around as if I were taking a long time over packing up my homework stuff. I didn’t wish to make it too obvious to my classmates that I was staying behind to be favoured with the first go at the CG test.
    When all the others had gone, Miss Bishop and Mr Waller appeared at the classroom door. Mr Waller was carrying a big case. “Hello there,” he said.
    He swung the case up onto the teacher’s desk, opened it and began to take papers and stuff out of it.
    “Hello,” I responded tensely.
    Miss Bishop, meanwhile, sat down. She was apparently prepared to stay with me, and though I had never liked her, I was glad of her company.
    Mr Waller chuckled. “You look, Hugh, as though you’re expecting me to attach wires to you and shine lights in your face. Eh?”
    I blinked, smiled, and admitted: “Something like that.”
    “Then I’ll have to disappoint you,” he said. “All I want you to do is to listen to a recording. The words may make no sense to you but, believe me, they have been carefully chosen. They form a pattern of repetition which....”
    As his voice began to drone I wondered, just for a fleeting moment, whether this was going to be the start of some sort of hypnotism. But no. For after he pressed a switch to begin the actual recording, I heard another voice, deep and firm, which fully woke me up as it pronounced:

            Valeddom.
            The capian plain.
            The hourless tapede.

    I sprang up and yelled “Turn that off!”
    Mr Waller, eyes burning with triumph, did so with a flick of his finger.
    With a dry mouth I realized how completely I had given myself away. I turned to look at Miss Bishop, and saw from the satisfied curve of her lips that she was in it too. Well, then, it hardly mattered what I said.
    I hurled questions at them: “Who are you? What’s your game? What blinking thing sent you after me? The Eeyoo? The killer-meaters? Whatever lords it over this Un-Earth?”
    “On the contrary,” said Mr Waller, so calmly that I sat back down. “You know,” he continued, “I’m impressed. You’re all right, Hugh! You’ve got what it takes! You could have run out of the room; in fact you could run out now, no one would stop you, but you’re staying because you want answers.” He chuckled again while I slumped like a flat tyre. “Or maybe the reason you didn’t run out of the room is because you’re starting to think the whole world is a trap, with enemy agents everywhere, so that running would do no good. In a way that’s true, but it’s just as much my problem as yours.
    “You see, I am on your side. As is Miss Bishop. As are all the other members of CG UK. And why are we on your side? Because we, too, have been to Valeddom.”
    “How, Sir?” I whispered.
    Here, if I could believe my ears, and if there was no catch, was a real, honest rescue from loneliness. Here were people I could talk to about the things that mattered most; here were allies at long last.
    “We weren’t all in bus crashes,” smiled Mr Waller. But he didn’t say more to answer my question. I got the picture that a great secret existed, and that those who possessed it were naturally not prepared to give it away just because I asked for it. Not yet, anyway.
    “CG,” he continued, “stands, you’ve been told, for Class Gear. That’s the case as far as our cover is concerned, and we do actually manufacture educational materials and make a profit from them. But for our true purposes, CG stands for the Continuous Glope. Not ‘globe’; ‘glope’ with a ‘p’. Do you remember what glope means, in Valeddomian?”
    He gave me time to answer.
    Such a wave of trust as I had never hoped to feel was gathering force and promising to bear me up. “Glope,” I mused, “er, hang on.... I don’t – yes I do though, I remember something.... it’s something sacred, isn’t it?”
    “You could put it that way. There’s no exact equivalent in English, but the translation we use most, is, I quote, ‘Heritage Awareness Realm’. Clumsy phrase; it’s better just to say Glope. And it’s the continuous Glope because…. well, consider how old Valeddom is. Civilized Valeddom had to face and overcome the heritage problem: how to preserve a society’s soul against predators for millions of years. And we intend to see to it that ours doesn’t die, either. Will you join us, Hugh?”
    “Yes, Sir.” I fumbled for a tissue and dabbed my eyes and cheeks. I coughed and said, “Mr Waller, what’s the Eeyoo?”
    “Ah, there you have spotted what is actually our most urgent problem right now. You’ve raised the issue yourself – just what I was going to test you with, and give to you as a bit of political homework, for it’s the kind of madness you need to understand, if you’re going to join us.
    “What, indeed, is the Eeyoo? It’s possible to give two answers to the question. Listen and I’ll first give you the one that takes you as far as you can go using purely Earth-based causes. You do history, don’t you? Modern history? Twentieth Century?
    “Yessir.”
    “Then you have some inkling of the mess which Continental Europe made of itself, with its wars, civil wars, dictatorships, invasions, massacres and revolutions?”
    Put that way, all in one lump, it drew from me another definite “Yes”.
    Waller continued: “All the big countries of Continental Europe are failed states. The small ones behave better but can’t defend themselves. So it’s maybe natural that all of them, large and small, despaired of liberty, and thought to buy security and peace at the price of submitting to an international dictatorship.
    “And so you have it. That’s the Eeyoo – a bureaucratic regime which has been given the power to make its own rules and is busily creating an oligarchic super-state. Less brutal than the Third Reich, the Eeyoo has chosen a different control-lever: instead of racism, commercial regulation. The Eeyoo regulates anything that moves. (Yes, I heard what happened to your father’s business idea.) Commercial regulation, when taken so far as to reach into every aspect of practical life, easily provides enough of a framework on which to build a dictatorship.
    “We at CG UK don’t judge the peoples of Europe for the choice they have made. We don’t believe we have the right to condemn them.
    “But all this does nothing to answer the question of why our country should submit to their sad arrangement. That’s the poser, isn’t it, Hugh? What has the Eeyoo got to do with our free and undefeated country?  A realm of uninterrupted organic growth, flowering into democracy from a stable political stem that has lasted hundreds of years – why should we lie down with the sickies? True, we’re no better than they, as people; but we’re certainly more fortunate – so why forego our luck?
    “I don’t want to keep you too long, so I won’t give you the other answer, the main answer, as to what the Eeyoo is, just yet.
    “Have a think about it yourself. It’ll be good practice.
    “Then get in touch with me. Here’s my phone number. (Or you can send a message via Miss Bishop.) Meanwhile ask yourself this question – let’s call it your first training exercise:
    “Why should a government – which naturally loves power – surrender that power when it doesn’t have to?”

                                                 *****

So ended my first encounter with the Continuous Glope. I went home in a state of joyful excitement, happy as a mouse who has found the cheese at the end of the maze. I had made a good impression on CG! Of course Mr Waller hadn’t told me everything, but he had proved enough just by uttering the word ‘Valeddom’.
    He knew. That changed everything. That knocked down the walls of despair. I wasn’t going to have to live the rest of my life haunted by a solitary dream of another world and a doubt concerning my own world. The oddities I had noticed since my return to Earth must somehow be part of the whole cosmic picture, which CG would explain to me as soon as I was ready.
So I had better get ready. Do what they say. Be a good boy and think. Not demand to be spoon-fed, but work out some of the mystery on my own.
    Next day, I phoned the number given to me by Mr Waller. There was no answer so I left a message:
    “Hello. Just to say I’m giving a lot of thought to that problem, ‘Why should a government give up power’, ‘What’s in it for them?’. It’s a tough one. I won’t give up on it. But any clues would be appreciated. Thanks. ’Bye.”
    Oops, was that too cheeky?
    The day after that, Miss Bishop, just after school, slipped me an envelope. “A clue,” she said, with a gentler smile than usual. Feeling tremendously relieved, I waited till I was alone, then opened the envelope.
    A folded photocopy sheet, a part of a textbook.... What the heck? “Herwick’s Portuguese Grammar”? A mistake, surely? What had this to do with me or the problem I’d been set?
    I re-folded it, slipped it in the inside pocket of my blazer and walked homewards.
    Steady, steady! Everything happens for a reason. Yes, but. Horrible suspicions crept into my mind. I had, maybe, been tossed something useless, a random senseless photocopy, as a gesture of contempt. A few hundred yards along the street, I stopped and extracted the sheet again and had another look.
    Pages 114-115 of an old-fashioned style grammar book about the Portuguese language, nothing more. Boring, no pictures, just subheadings explaining point after point, using rather technical vocabulary. No handwritten messages scrawled for me. No underlinings. I held it up to the light of the sun – no watermark, no secret script. Nothing special at all. It really was what it seemed to be, and no more. Were CG trying to get me to learn Portuguese? Was their headquarters in Portugal, or perhaps Brazil? Ridiculous. If it was that, why not just tell me straight?
    CG’s Mr Waller was a straight-talking man, but maybe this didn’t come from him, maybe it came from higher up. A straight brush-off right from the top. I stood with bowed head and sinking heart and the suspicion: the reason I feel useless, is that I am useless. Even my talents and abilities, such as they were, might work against me, rather than for me, insofar as they increased my sensitivity, and hence my vulnerability, in the kind of battle the world faced. Perhaps it had been the same story on Valeddom, for after all, what good had hudar done to Ren Nydr? Had it saved him from becoming a Dluku? On the contrary it might have made him more dangerously receptive to the power of Noleddern, that terrifying super-language which has caused many a Valeddomian to take refuge in Dluku animality.
    The great fear, that CG were just playing with me, or sending me a heavy hint that they thought me too big for my boots, or that I was not in their league – this fear weighed me down to the extent that when I began walking again I did so at a slow pace, oppressed with foreboding.
    All of a sudden I halted again, snatched at the page and had another look at it.
    A welcome idea, a clue to a possible solution beamed at me from that page, and when, in delight, I resumed my walk, I was walking and reading at the same time; a funny sight, no doubt, to passers-by.
    The excitement of detection gripped me: nothing else quite matches that grab on your attention, that overtaking significance. Yes, this Portuguese language business was relevant after all. I gazed upon a subheading, “Days of the Week”.
    The Portuguese for “Sunday” is domingo, same as in Spanish. But as you go on to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on, it’s very different.
    Spanish has its own proper names for these week-days. Lunes, martes, miércoles, et cetera. But Portuguese hasn’t!
    It has to make do with segunda-feira (‘second market’) for Monday, terça-feira (‘third market’) for Tuesday, quarta-feira (‘fourth market’) for Wednesday, quinta-feira (‘fifth market’) for Thursday, and sexta-feira (‘sixth market’) for Friday.
    When it comes to Saturday (sábado), we’re back to normal. But those week-days: how odd, the lack of proper names!
    In my next phone message to Mr Waller, I told him what I had found. Oddness, I realized, was the clue. Unnecessary oddness. A patch of scorched reality, barren without cause.
    Motiveless diminishment.
    When you’ve been to Valeddom and back, and you’ve seen and smelled the hourless tapede, you don’t shrug off things like that.
    In the days that followed, I got given other envelopes, other clues, not all to do with language by any means. Some of them I am not allowed to mention, even in this account which pretends to be fiction – they are so politically explosive.
    However, perhaps the weirdest “diminishment” of all, which is to do with language, is already so accessible that it’s far too late to be tactful about it.
You may find this hard to believe if you haven’t studied French or Italian, but here goes:
    The French and the Italians have lost their past.
    Someone asks what you did when you went out. You might reply, “I have bought Granny a birthday present.” Fair enough. But you wouldn’t say, “Yesterday, I have bought Granny a birthday present,” would you? It would be I bought, not I have bought, in that case.
    In other words, the simple past, I bought, is used for things that are over and done with, whereas the present perfect, I have bought, is used for things that have only just finished or still have a link with the present.
    Simple past: I painted this wall last week. Do you like the colour?
    Present perfect: I have painted this wall. Watch out for wet paint!
    The French and the Italians likewise have these two verb tenses - BUT, except in written narrative, they no longer use the simple past! They’ve got it but they don’t use it! In speech, they have deprived themselves of that option.
    So, in French or Italian:
    Last week I have been on holiday. Yesterday I have gone to the beach. Yesterday evening I have gone to the cinema. Last Monday we have been to a restaurant and we have eaten a good meal. A fortnight ago I have bought an interesting book. A month ago I have returned from Valeddom to find that I am living in a madhouse.

                                                 *****

“Come in,” said the voice at the head of the table.
    I had peered through the doorway, into the blacked-out room, thinking at first that I must have made a mistake. Now I stepped through, gingerly, still hesitating to intrude.
    “We have a habit of meeting in darkness,” said the voice. “As a reminder of how things actually are.”
    It was not really pitch dark, though it was dim. They must have insisted that the hotel provide adjustable lights. Sure now that I was in the right room, I advanced to the open end of the horseshoe table, and there I stood, in front of the blurred faces of the men and women who formed the inner Managing Council of the Continuous Glope.
    “Hugh Dent of Earth, alias Ren Nydr of Valeddom, are you ready to take our oath?”
    “I am,” I firmly replied.
    “Even though you do not yet know the wording?”
    I was not put off. I had got to know these people and their ways. I was still in awe of them, but I trusted them.
    “Even so,” I replied.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Because I know what we are fighting.”
    “We must do more than fight. We must win. The alternative is too hideous to contemplate. Tell us the alternative, Hugh. Say it out loud.”
    “Victory for the hourless tapede. Diminishments to Nought.”
    A sigh shuddered round the room, expressive of what was proper to feel.

                                                *****

    “Tell us how you found out,” said the voice.
    Even now, they still weren’t sure of me. They were still testing me, before they would administer the oath.In order to co-operate with them and earn my place in the Resistance, I would have to show that I understood the link between the mindless evil beast that haunted the Vale of Kuz on Mercury, and the boringifications encroaching upon Earth.
    I said, “It’s not so much a matter of ‘finding out’, as of admitting the obvious.”
    “But the proof? Give us your proof.”
    Fortunately I had recently been reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. And I had rehearsed my answer. I had taken care to learn this part of my speech by heart.
    “Sherlock Holmes could tell when his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty had been at work, for Moriarty left his signature on his crimes, in the sense that they showed his unmistakable style.
    “Similarly the hourless tapede, spreading as a spiritual virus across the worlds, cannot help but give itself away. It is the ultimate yob, the anti-mind, therefore its target is mind, its prey is intelligence, quality, or any positive cultural thing; so when good things shrink and die with no profit to anyone, there you have evidence of the hourless tapede.”
    The voice said slyly, “Are we dealing with Satan, do you think?”
I was ready for this too. For, actually, the resources of the English language are open to everybody, even teenagers.
    “The hourless tapede has nothing to do with the traditional human evils of greed and bloodthirsty cruelty. The Hitlers and Stalins of history were not impelled by the hourless tapede. It is when the men of blood and violence and fury have been defeated, that we find the still small voice of the other evil, urging us, after we have won the war, to lose the peace; to make rubbish of what we have won. As my dad keeps telling me – it was after the war that the planners destroyed English towns.”
    “Well put,” said the voice. “But why haven’t the Valeddomians been worse affected than we are? Considering that the thing originated on their world, not ours.”
    Mr Waller had told me to expect this question; it was he who had coached me on the answer.
    “We shouldn’t be surprised that the Valeddomians are relatively immune.”
    “You mean, because they grew up closer to it?” The voice sounded skeptical. “Couldn’t you equally argue the other way?”
    “Admittedly you might argue,” I replied, “that because they were closer to it, they should have suffered more. Likewise, superficially, we may think it odd that big animals survive more in Africa than anywhere else, considering that Man first appeared in Africa, and has had longer to hunt there. But actually, it’s because African elephants evolved side by side with man, that they had much more time in which to learn caution, and so they developed a certain resistance to the tricks of hunters. Else why should African elephants still exist whereas Siberian mammoths got wiped out long ago? Familiarity can lead to immunity.
    “Similarly the people of Valeddom have had time to develop a kind of immunity to the hourless tapede.”
    “Hmm,” said the voice. He knew that I had had help with this answer. But I was banking on the idea that Mr Waller’s assistance had been given to me with their permission; they were all in it together. The real test had to be: how convincing I managed to sound.
    Was I in? The seconds ticked by. I sensed that another question was coming. Please let it be the last one, I prayed, and please let it be one of those for which I had prepared myself. Either a question to which I had figured out the answer for myself, or one to which I had learned the answer from Mr Waller.
    “What connection can you make,” said the voice, “between the hourless tapede and the name of my old firm, Kodak?”
    Kodak cameras. Oh, boy.
    I wondered if other candidates before me had been faced with this and had struggled desperately to concoct theories, to link the firm of photographic suppliers with the hourless tapede, perhaps by alleging that the firm was a front organization for the tapede, or in some way that the invention of cheap photography was a help to the invasion. Surely not.  Surely a candidate can’t be expected to face a question like this without help.
    Just as I had been given help. For I had the answer pat! Yippee! Hard though it was to believe it could be so easy –
    In a strong glad voice I gave the answer.
    “Kodak is a rare case of a completely invented name, that deliberately has no meaning; it’s without etymology – a mere arbitrary label.
    “Similarly the term ‘hourless tapede’ has no meaning except as a label for what it is. And rightly so. For the whole point of it is that it is a devourer of meaning. It eats it and makes dung out of it.”
    “Raise your right hand,” said the head of the Glope. “Repeat after me....
    (I was in the Resistance! I was a full member of the Continuous Glope!)
    “By all I hold sacred – ”
    “By all I hold sacred – ”
    Here it comes, the bloodcurdling commitment, the fight to the death, except I know it won’t be like that, it’ll be something greater, more subtle, for it’s got to work, not against tanks and missiles, but against the most dire foe of all, who preys upon meaning itself.
    And so I repeated the words:
    “I swear that I shall forever maintain my sense of surprise at the destruction of heritage.
    “I swear that I shall never be comfortable or satisfied with the reasons given for such destruction.
    “When folk accuse me of being reactionary I shall thank them for the compliment and say that I am a reactionary because I react to cultural theft by demanding the restitution of stolen goods.
    “Above all I swear to resist the hourless tapede with the most powerful weapon I possess – my most precious asset – ASTONISHMENT.”
    A voice said: “That’s it. You have what you need.”
    The lights came full on.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome the new member of the Continuous Glope!” Applause from round the table. I saw the men in suits and ties, quite a few with bald heads, and the women in severely smart jackets. They were relaxing; some snapped shut their briefcases, leaning towards each other to chat, others got up and came towards me to shake my hand and offer their congratulations, amongst whom the hearty jovial Chairman wagged his bushy side-boards like a Victorian gent as he remarked, “We’re going into the Miller Room for some lunch.”
    “Nothing to do with Miller-meaters, I hope,” I quipped.
    He laughed and patted me on the back as he steered me into the adjoining room, where a long table had been set.  He directed me to the head of the table – an honour for which I was totally unprepared. Heck, I wondered, are they expecting me to make a speech?
    A couple of hotel staff wheeled in a huge trolley. The serving began. Well, CG weren’t going to talk shop while hotel staff were present, so I could use this interval to collect my thoughts. Or so I thought at first. But I soon found that the top brass of CG were good at ribbing each other while observing the need for secrecy.
    The Chairman, seated on my left, introduced me to a nice-looking lady on my right, a physicist. “Dr L____,” said the Chairman (I am not allowed to give names) “didn’t get in as easily as you did. Eh, Paula?”
    The physicist, who seemed to be in her thirties, said, “Ah well, you must make allowances for my advanced age.”
    “True enough. Yes, Hugh’s extreme youth is an advantage. An adult is more likely to get put off by awkward questions.”
    I said, “I learned that much on Valeddom: a thing doesn’t have to be believable, to be.”
    Our first course was served, the trolley was being wheeled out again, the hotel staff were leaving; I followed them with my eyes and wondered what was coming next.
    The Chairman saw my glance. “Aha! You know the tests aren’t over yet!”
    “Don’t listen to Ed,” said the physicist. “He’s just trying to scare you. When you’re in, you’re in – for good or ill – and for keeps.”
    “Now look who’s scaring him,” the Chairman retorted, between mouthfuls of soup. To me he continued, “No harm in trying to gauge at what level you should be placed in our ranks.”
    So soon? It was an exciting thought. “Will you be giving me some sort of assignment, Sir?”
    “Before I do that I must find out more about what you think. Do you – ”
    “No!” said the physicist, making a jabbing motion with her prawn-cocktail fork. “Shut up, Ed. Let him ask the questions.”
    I took a deep breath. This was an opportunity.
    “Am I,” I asked, turning to the physicist, “on the same Earth as the one I left?”
    “Hey hey!” said the Chairman. “Excellent question, Hugh! Let’s see Paula field that one! I bet my shirt that she starts by saying, ‘it depends what you mean’.”
    “I don’t want your smelly old shirt,” said the physicist, and munched her prawn cocktail for a while. Then she spoke seriously, and I was honored by the fact that she did not talk down to me: “As far as we know, there is only one Earth.  But,” she qualified, “that is not to deny that there are alternate time-tracks or probability time-lines, lying side by side like railway tracks at a big junction, and Earth is the one locomotive that must rest on one track or another.  The one and only Earth can be shifted.
    “In fact that is what we in CG are trying to do.  Or rather, trying to arouse the peoples of the world to do.
    “Earth, to our sorrow, has been pulled onto the wrong track by the hourless tapede, and is deviating further and further from the true line. Things are getting worse: we may wake up tomorrow and find history re-written to show that not only in Portuguese but also in English the days of the week have always been given numbers rather than names; or that the killer-meaters are established in the United States; or that the Spaniards as well as the French have lost their simple past tense; or that a loony British government puts the clocks forward during the summer so that noon occurs at one in the afternoon in order to “save daylight” – don’t laugh, the idea has been mooted, and if it happens I dare say the hourless tapede will give it a pedigree, so that it becomes a matter of historical fact that the clocks were put back every summer since goodness knows when.
    “Such pedigrees are manufactured because the hourless tapede works like a spillage of nonsense not only forward but backward in time.  That’s to say, its effect is not only prospective but retrospective. For instance, if you were to research the killer-meaters you’d find they began with the French Revolution. Yes, the tapede always dangles a ‘cause’ onto its idiocies....  BUT – ” and the physicist thumped the table, “we can push back.”
    “Well put, Paula,” said the Chairman. “We’ll shunt the old train back on track some day. Onto the one great central track which leads us all through the finest country, the most colour, the most variety, the most beauty; the one true track for our world.”
    “How do we push, though?” came the murmur through my lips while I had a sudden vision of millions of people with bent knees, bowed backs and outstretched arms, sweating as they tried to push a world-sized locomotive onto the right track....
    “The way we push,” said the Chairman, “is by being. That is to say, by being in the know.  Admiring the truth and naught else.  Not being fooled.”
    “You mean, just by sitting around and....”
    “You’re too young to accept this – but yes.  We fight by knowing.”
    I must have looked completely unconvinced.
    The Chairman leaned back and pushed his soup-plate away. He now had a serene look on his face.
    “The act of knowing,” he said, “is a dynamic deed of tremendous power. People are motivated by what they know, and knowledge is contagious.”
    “Can’t say I’ve managed to spread this germ,” I said.
    He ignored my tone of gloom.
    “Of course it is a political matter. CG works in secret, but we have our affiliates who, unknowingly, work for us out in the open. The UK Independence Party against the Eeyoo. The British Weights and Measures Association against the killer-meaters. The Association of British Counties against geographical disfigurement. And so on. At the very least you will join these and work with them. But the main thing is to know, and not be fooled, and that means to keep your oath, and that means keeping our greatest commandment:
    “Be forever astonished.”
    I thought: he’s right. I would keep that commandment and, moreover, I would not allow myself to forget that, in the long run, because truth is power and because astonishment keeps you awake to the truth, astonishment is power.
    Repeat – astonishment is power!
    “And when we win, Sir?  What happens then?”
    “Hey! I like this lad!” said the Chairman to the physicist. “Hear that, Paula? He’s already looking forward to the day of victory!” He turned to me and said, “When Earth is back on track, who knows what we can do? Have you heard of Dan Dare?”
    “No.”
    “Well, make a note. Perhaps something like his universe of wonder will come true.”
    I stared at this businessman type, marvelling at the boyish enthusiasm that shone in his eyes, while somewhere in my mind a long build-up of trust and confidence clicked into completeness. So at that point I dared to ask the question of questions.
    “You people know so much, Sir, but how do you know what you know? Where have you got all your information from? The way I got to Valeddom and back, it was surely the rarest fluke, and I can’t believe that enough people can have gone through what I went through, to sustain an organization like yours.”
    A glance passed between the Chairman and the physicist. “You tell him, Ed,” said the physicist.
    The Chairman said:
    “Very well. You heard, did you not, something of the history of Valeddom? It’s in your report.”
    “Something,” I admitted.
    “Quite a bit, I’d say. That account in Noleddern, which you read in the Archives of Ixli....”
    “I’m not likely to forget it,” I said dryly.
    “You’ve therefore heard of the south polar city of Casej?”
    “I heard of a south polar city, though not its name,” I cautiously replied.
    “Given time, you might have found out more, for we suspect that there is crystal thought-wave communication between the Oinameks and Casej. No matter. We can fill you in – or maybe they will.”
    The main course had arrived and we were chewing our way through lamb in mint sauce, but at this point I almost choked. Maybe they will – what?
    “Casej, in fact,” the Chairman went on, “is where the link between Mercury and Earth is strongest. Casejan scientists have been known to achieve, under controlled conditions, the kind of mind-transfer which you underwent haphazardly. So if you have any hope of seeing Valeddom again, it is in Casej where you must expect to find yourself. Or then again, they may have other plans for you….”

                                                  *****

I descended the steps of the hotel and emerged into the sunshine. In front of me stretched a leafy city square. I am not allowed to reveal its name but I can say that it enclosed a little park surrounded by railings.
    Autumn leaves lay scattered on the pavement and as for me, I felt like a floating leaf, light and random, on this my day off, with the rest of the afternoon free. I looked across the street to the railings.
    The girl I had hoped to see was leaning there. She saw me and stood up straight. I crossed over to her, thanking my lucky stars that (to judge from her smile) she was not about to complain about my lateness.
    “So – careers meeting over?” said Annette. As far as she knew, CG was just Class Gear. Nor had she shown much curiosity at my appointment with them.
    “Yep. All over at last. Thanks for waiting, Fayn. How about a walk in the park?”
    Annette frowned. “Ren,” she said, “why did you call me Fayn?”
    Then her hand flew to her mouth.
    I, too, stared, my breath suspended between heartbeats; then I took a step towards her.
    “Steady,” I urged, taking her arm.
    “What’s happening to me?”
    “Steady now,” I repeated. “Listen for the call.”

 THE END



Author’s acknowledgement:


My account of Hugh’s father’s experiences was inspired by the real-life horror story reported on pages 18-19 of The Castle of Lies by Christopher Booker.
 



Author’s reassurance:


Some remarks in Part Seven concerning the Italian, French and Portuguese tongues should not be taken as unappreciative of their beauty. In particular I am an admirer of Italian and its great poet of the life beyond. I just wish that, like Dante, the Italians of today would use their simple past tense!