He thrust the young man on ahead of him and came over to Mr. Campion.
“What beats me is how you cottoned to it,” he confided. “What gave you the idea?”
“I merely read it, I’m afraid.” Mr. Campion sounded apologetic. “All the envelopes were there, sticking out from behind the clock. The top one had a ha’penny stamp on it, so I looked at the postmark. It was 1914.”
Bussy laughed “Given to you,” he chuckled. “Still, I bet you had a job to believe your eyes.”
“Ah.” Mr. Campion’s voice was thoughtful in the dusk. “That, Super, that was the really difficult bit.”
Sir Leo, who had been striding in silence, was the last to climb up onto the road. He glanced anxiously towards the village for a moment or so, and presently touched Campion on the shoulder.
“Look there.”
A woman was hurrying towards them and at her side, earnest and expectant, trotted a small, plump child. They scurried past and as they paused by the stile, and the woman lifted the boy onto the footpath, Sir Leo expelled a long sighing breath.
“So there was a party,” he said simply. “Thank God for that. Do you know, Campion, all the way back here I’ve been wonderin’.”
The Plot Against Santa Claus
by James Powell
Rory Bigtoes, Santa’s Security Chief, was tall for an elf, measuring almost seven inches from the curly tips of his shoes to the top of his fedora. But he had to stride to keep abreast of Garth Hardnoggin, the quick little Director General of the Toyworks, as they hurried, beards streaming back over their shoulders, through the racket and bustle of Shop Number 5, one of the many vaulted caverns honeycombing the undiscovered island beneath the Polar icecap.
Director General Hardnoggin wasn’t pleased. He slapped his megaphone, the symbol of his office (for as a member of the Board he spoke directly to Santa Claus), against his thigh. “A bomb in the Board Room on Christmas Eve!” he muttered with angry disbelief.
“I’ll admit that Security doesn’t look good,” said Bigtoes.
Hardnoggin gave a snort and stopped at a construction site for Dick and Jane Doll dollhouses. Elf carpenters and painters were hard at work, pipes in their jaws and beards tucked into their belts. A foreman darted over to show Hardnoggin the wallpaper samples for the dining room.
“See this unit, Bigtoes?” said Hardnoggin. “Split-level ranch type. Wall-to-wall carpeting. Breakfast nook. Your choice of Early American or French Provincial furnishings. They said I couldn’t build it for the price. But I did. And how did I do it?”
“Cardboard,” said a passing elf, an old carpenter with a plank over his shoulder.
“And what’s wrong with cardboard? Good substantial cardboard for the interior walls!” shouted the Director General striding off again. “Let them bellyache, Bigtoes. I’m not out to win any popularity contests. But I do my job. Let’s see you do yours. Find Dirk Crouchback and find him fast.”
At the automotive section the new Lazaretto sports cars (1/32 scale) were coming off the assembly line. Hardnoggin stopped to slam one of the car doors. “You left out the kachunk,” he told an elf engineer in white coveralls.
“Nobody gets a tin door to go kachunk,” said the engineer.
“Detroit does. So can we,” said Hardnoggin, moving on. “You think I don’t miss the good old days, Bigtoes?” he said. “I was a spinner. And a damn good one. Nobody made a top that could spin as long and smooth as Garth Hardnoggin’s.”
“I was a jacksmith myself,” said Bigtoes. Satisfying work, building each jack-in-the-box from the ground up, carpentering the box, rigging the spring mechanism, making the funny head, spreading each careful coat of paint.
“How many could you make in a week?” asked Director General Hardnoggin.
“Three, with overtime,” said Security Chief Bigtoes.
Hardnoggin nodded. “And how many children had empty stockings on Christmas morning because we couldn’t handcraft enough stuff to go around? That’s where your Ghengis Khans, your Hitlers, and your Stalins come from, Bigtoes — children who through no fault of their own didn’t get any toys for Christmas. So Santa had to make a policy decision: quality or quantity? He opted for quantity.”
Crouchback, at that time one of Santa’s right-hand elves, had blamed the decision on Hardnoggin’s sinister influence. By way of protest he had placed a bomb in the new plastic machine. The explosion had coated three elves with a thick layer of plastic which had to be chipped off with hammers and chisels. Of course they lost their beards. Santa, who was particularly sensitive about beards, sentenced Crouchback to two years in the cooler, as the elves called it. This meant he was assigned to a refrigerator (one in Ottawa, Canada, as it happened) with the responsibility of turning the light on and off as the door was opened or closed.
But after a month Crouchback had failed to answer the daily roll call which Security made by means of a two-way intercom system. He had fled the refrigerator and become a renegade elf. Then suddenly, three years later, Crouchback had reappeared at the North Pole, a shadowy fugitive figure, editor of a clandestine newspaper, The Midnight Elf, which made violent attacks on Director General Hardnoggin and his policies. More recently, Crouchback had become the leader of SHAFT — Santa’s Helpers Against Flimsy Toys — an organization of dissident groups including the Anti-Plastic League, the Sons and Daughters of the Good Old Days, the Ban the Toy-Bomb people and the Hippie Elves for Peace...
“Santa opted for quantity,” repeated Hard-noggin. “And I carried out his decision. Just between the two of us it hasn’t always been easy.” Hardnoggin waved his megaphone at the Pacification and Rehabilitation section where thousands of toy bacteriological warfare kits (JiffyPox) were being converted to civilian use (The Freckle Machine). After years of pondering Santa had finally ordered a halt to war-toy production. His decision was considered a victory for SHAFT and a defeat for Hardnoggin.
“Unilateral disarmament is a mistake, Big-toes,” said Hardnoggin grimly as they passed through a door marked Santa’s Executive Helpers Only and into the carpeted world of the front office. “Mark my words, right now the tanks and planes are rolling off the assembly lines at Acme Toy and into the department stores.” (Acme Toy, the international consortium of toymakers, was the elves’ greatest bugbear.) “So the rich kids will have war toys, while the poor kids won’t even have a popgun. That’s not democratic.”
Bigtoes stopped at a door marked Security. Hardnoggin strode on without slackening his pace. “Sticks-and-stones session at five o’clock,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t be late. And do your job. Find Crouchback!”
Dejected, Bigtoes slumped down at his desk, receiving a sympathetic smile from Charity Nosegay, his little blonde blue-eyed secretary. Charity was a recent acquisition and Bigtoes had intended to make a play for her once the Sticks-and-Stones paperwork was out of the way. (Security had to prepare a report for Santa on each alleged naughty boy and girl.) Now that play would have to wait.
Bigtoes sighed. Security looked bad. Bigtoes had even been warned. The night before, a battered and broken elf had crawled into his office, gasped, “He’s going to kill Santa,” and died. It was Darby Shortribs who had once been a brilliant doll designer. But then one day he had decided that if war toys encouraged little boys to become soldiers when they grew up, then dolls encouraged little girls to become mothers, contributing to overpopulation. So Shortribs had joined SHAFT and risen to membership on its Central Committee.