Um… You’re welcome.
Like a bat out of hell following a spurious short-cut, the carpet raced through the sky over Stoke-on-Trent.
“Where can I drop you?” Jane asked.
Asaf looked down. The hell with it, he said to himself, I’ve come this far.
“Wherever suits you,” he replied. “I’m pretty much at a loose end at the moment, as it happens.”
“Ah,” said Jane. She bit her lip. “Fancy a quick coffee?” she added.
Asaf considered the position and decided that, all things considered, what he hated doing most of all in all the world was deep-sea fishing.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“What do you mean,” Kiss demanded angrily, “she’s gone?”
Sinbad the Sailor shrugged. “I suppose she got tired of hanging about waiting for you to rescue her,” he replied. “I mean, no disrespect, but you did take your time.”
“I got held up,” replied the genie stiffly, “saving the world.”
“It can be a right bummer, saving the world,” Sinbad said, “especially when nobody thanks you for it.”
“You’re telling me.” The genie sighed, letting his eyes drift out across the broad ocean. “There are times, you know, when I really wish I was still in the bottle.”
“Well, quite. You know where you are in a bottle.”
“Peaceful.”
“Nobody to tell you what to do.”
“No telephone.”
Sinbad hesitated for a moment. “Not your old-fashioned style bottles, anyway. No Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“And no bloody women,” Kiss added. “Here, you haven’t got such a things as a bottle handy, have you?”
“Afraid not.” He blinked and looked away. “Sorry to change the subject,” he went on, “but about this saving the world thing you were doing.”
“Yes?”
Sinbad paused again, wondering how to put it tactfully. “If you’ve saved the world,” he said cautiously, “presumably it doesn’t matter that the whole of this sea is swarming with bloody great big nuclear submarines.”
Kiss wrinkled his brow. “Oh, shit,” he said, “the war. I knew I’d forgotten something.”
At the bottom of the sea, far below the parts where the divers go, even further down than the gloomy bits where the light never reaches and you get the fish that look like three-dimensional coat hangers, there is a doorway. And a car park. And a garden, with benches and lanterns. And a big sign, with fairy lights:
THE LOCKER
it says; and in smaller letters:
David Rutherford Jones,
Licensed to sell wines, beers, spirits and tobacco for consumption on or off the premises
and then, going back to the bigger type:
LINERS WELCOME
The eponymous Mr Jones was quietly changing the barrels in the cellar, reflecting on the recession and how improved computerised weather forecasting was eating the heart out of the deep-sea licensed victualling business, when he became aware of an unfamiliar noise far away overhead. He stopped what he was doing and listened.
A humming noise. Like possibly engines.
A grin fastened itself to his peculiar, barnacle-encrusted face, and he ran up the cellar steps to the bar.
“Sharon,” he yelled, “Yvonne! Defrost the pizzas! We’ve got customers.”
Women, Kiss reflected as he soared Exocet-like through the darkening sky. I have had it up to here with bloody women.
And not just women, he conceded, as he swerved to avoid an airliner. Human beings generally. In fact, I’m sick to the back teeth of all the damned creepy-crawlies that hang around this poxy little dimension. Come to think of it, for two pins I’d wash my hands of the whole lot of them.
The thought had scarcely crossed his mind when he became aware of something tiny and sharp, folded into the palm of his left hand. Inspection confirmed his instinctive guess. Two pins…
“Shove it, Philly,” he snarled at the clouds above him. “I’ll deal with you later.”
Ah yes, the war.
No names, no pack drill. We will call the opposing parties A and B.
Army A had occupied all Europe as far east as the Bosphorus, only to find themselves stuck in a traffic jam that reached from Tashkent to Samarkand. Army B had swept up through Central Asia in the time-honoured manner and had broken through as far as Baghdad before realising they’d forgotten to switch off the gas and having to go back.
Fleet A and Fleet B were both pottering about in the Mediterranean, trying to keep out of each other’s way until somebody had the courtesy to tell them what the hell was going on, exactly.
Air Force A was scrambled, on red alert, absolutely set and ready to go as soon as the rain subsided a bit. Air Force B was engaged in frantic high-level negotiations with the finance company which had repossessed its entire complement of fighter-bombers.
In other words, stalemate; at least as far as the conventional forces were concerned. Not, of course, that conventional forces count for very much these days — In the bunker, with half a mile of rock and concrete between themselves and the surface, the Strategic First Strike Command Units of both sides were locked in a desperate struggle with forces which, they now realised, were rather beyond their abilities to manipulate.
“Look,” said the controller at SFSCU/A, “it’s perfectly simple. A child could understand it. If you press this one here, while at the same time pressing this one and this one…”
The senior technical officer shook his head. “That’s the automatic failsafe, you idiot,” he said. “I reckon it’s got to be the little red button here. If you look at the manual…”
“All right, let’s look at the goddamn manual. Congratulations! You have just purchased—”
“I think you can skip that bit.”
“Right, here we are. To commence War press START followed by C and E. The word READY? should then appear on the monitor—”
“There isn’t a button marked START, for God’s sake.”
“It must be the little red one here—”
“No, look at the diagram, that’s just for when you want to set the timer…”
“Actually, I think that’s only for the Model 2693. What we’ve got is the Model 8537…”
“You could try giving it a bloody good thump. You’d be amazed how often that works.”
“How about ringing the other side? They’d probably know how to make the bloody thing work.”
“Well, actually, I think they’ve got the Model 9317, which has a double-disk RAM drive, so…”
“I wonder what this button here does?”
WHOOSH!
Lightning, they say, never strikes twice. This was true before the introduction of free collective bargaining. Nowadays, lightning tends to work to rule.
Cupid, however, is resigned to the fact that he often has to do the job on the same target several times. This doesn’t bother him particularly, since he charges the same fee for a repeat and there’s usually less preparatory work the second time around. In the final analysis, so long as he shoots somebody and gets paid for it, he isn’t too bothered.
A long, silver-tipped round slid frictionlessly into the chamber of the Steyr-Mannlicher, and he folded down the bolt with the heel of his right hand. He centred the crosshairs of the sight, breathed fully in and half out, and…
Her again. God knows, he thought dispassionately as he squeezed the trigger, what they all see in her. Probably, he reflected as he ejected the spent case and chambered the next round, why they need me.
He raised the rifle and took aim. Deep breath in — “G’day, mate. How’s she coming?”
Startled, Cupid jerked involuntarily and the shot went high. A portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which for some unaccountable reason hung over the sofa in Jane’s living-room, glanced down and thought, “Gosh…”
“You idiot,” Cupid hissed. “Now look what you’ve made me go and do.”