6
As the Memorial Library clock struck one in the distance, Norman finished topping up the battered Woodbine machine outside his corner shop. He locked the crumbling dispenser of coffin nails and pocketed Pooley’s two washers, which had made their usual weekly appearance in the cash tray amongst the legitimate coin of the realm.
Norman re-entered his shop and bolted the door behind him, turning the OPEN sign to CLOSED. As he crossed the mottled linoleum he whistled softly to himself; sadly, as he had not yet retrieved his wayward teeth, the air sounded a little obscure. For some reason Norman had never quite got the hang of humming, so he contented himself with a bit of unmelodic finger-popping and what he described as “a touch of the old Fred and Gingers” as he vanished away through the door behind the counter, and left his shop to gather dust for another Wednesday afternoon.
Norman’s kitchenette served him as the traditional shopkeeper’s lair, equipped with its obligatory bar-fire and gas-ring. But there, apart from these necessary appliances, all similarities ended. There was much of the alchemist’s den about Norman’s kitchenette. It was workroom, laboratory, research establishment, testing station and storage place for his somewhat excessive surplus stock of Danish glossies.
At present, the hellishly crowded retreat was base camp and ground control for Norman’s latest and most ambitious project to date. Even had some NASA boffin cast his knowledgeable eye over the curious array of electronic hocus-pocus which now filled the tiny room, it was unlikely that he would have fathomed any purpose behind it all. The walls were lined with computer banks bristling with ancient radio valves and constructed from Sun Ray wireless sets and commandeered seedboxes. The floor was a veritable snakehouse of cables. The overall effect was one to set Heath Robinson spinning gaily in his grave.
Norman spat dangerously on his palms and rubbed them together. He picked his way carefully across the floor until he reached a great switchboard, of a type once favoured by Baron von Frankenstein. As Norman squared up before it, however, he had no intention of mouthing the now legendary words, “We belong dead”, but instead lisped a quick “Here she goes” before doing the business.
With a violent flash and a sparkler fizz, the grotesque apparatus sprang, or, more accurately, lurched, into life. Lights twinkled upon the consoles and valves glowed dimly orange. Little pops and crackles, suggestive of constant electrical malfunction, broke out here and there, accompanied by a thin blue mist and an acrid smell which was music to Norman’s nostrils.
The shopkeeper lowered himself on to an odd-legged kitchen chair before his master console and began to unwrap his tiny brown paper parcel. Peeling back the cotton-wool wadding, he exposed an exquisite little piece of circuitry, which he lifted carefully with a pair of philatelist’s tweezers and examined through an oversized magnifying glass. It was beautiful, perfect in every degree, the product of craftsmanship and skill well beyond the perception of most folk. Norman whistled through his gums.
“Superbs,” he said. “Superbs.”
He slotted the tiny thing into a polished housing upon the console and it slipped in with a pleasurable click. The last tiny piece in a large and very complicated jigsaw.
Norman clapped his hands together and rocked back and forwards upon his chair. It was all complete, all ready and waiting for a trial run. He had but to select two suitable areas of land and then, if all his calculations were correct… Norman’s hand hovered over the console and it trembled not a little. His calculations surely were correct, weren’t they?
Norman took down a clipboard and began to make ticks against a long and intricate list, which had been built up over many months, scribbled in variously coloured inks. As his Biro travelled down the paper Norman’s memory travelled with it through those long, long months of speculation, theory, planning and plotting, of begging, borrowing, and building. The sleepless nights, the trepidation and the doubts. Most of all the doubts. What if it all came to nothing, what if it didn’t work? He had damn near bankrupted himself over this one. What if the entire concept was a nonsense?
Norman sucked upon the end of his Biro. No, it couldn’t be wrong; old Albert E had discontinued his researches on it back in Nineteen hundred and twenty-seven but the essential elements were still sound, it had to be correct. Just because Einstein had bottled out at the last moment didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
Norman ticked off the final item on the list. It was all there, all present and correct, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, all just waiting for the off. He had but to choose two areas of land suitable for the test.
His hand did a little more hovering; he, like certain sportsmen in the vicinity, had no wish to draw attention to his project before its completion. Caution was the byword. The two tracts of land, one local and one in the area of the object he sought, would have to be unoccupied at the present time.
The latter was no problem. Norman boldly punched in the coordinates he knew so well, thirty degrees longitude, thirty degrees latitude and the minutiae of minutes. But as to a local site, this presented some difficulties. It was his aim to conduct the final experiment during the hours of darkness, when there would be few folk about to interfere. But for now, a little test run?
Norman snapped his fingers. “Eurekas,” he whistled, taking up a Brentford street directory and thumbing through the dog-eared pages. The ideal spot. The St Mary’s Allotment. The day being hot, all those dedicated tillers of God’s good earth would by now be resting their leathern elbows upon the Swan’s bar counter and lying about the dimensions of their marrows.
Norman punched in the appropriate coordinates and leant back in his chair, waiting for the power to build up sufficiently for transference to occur. He crossed his fingers, lisped what words he knew of the Latin litany and pressed a blood-red button which had until recently been the property of the local fire brigade.
A low purring rose from the electronic throat of the machinery, accompanied by a pulse-like beating. The lights upon the console sprang into redoubled illumination and the radio valves began to pulsate, expanding and contracting like some vertical crop of transparent onions. The little bulbs blinked in enigmatic sequences, passing back and forwards through the spectrum. Norman clapped his hands together and bobbed up and down in his chair. A thick blue smoke began to fill the room as the humming of the machinery rose several octaves into an ear-splitting whine. A strange pressure made itself felt in the kitchenette as if the gravitational field was being slowly increased.
Norman suddenly realized that he was unable to raise his hands from the console or his feet from the floor, and someone or something was apparently lowering two-hundredweight sacks of cement on to his shoulders. His ears popping sickeningly, he gritted his gums and made a desperate attempt to keep his eyelids up.
The ghastly whining and the terrible pressure increased. The lights grew brighter and brighter and the pulse beat ever faster. The apparatus was beginning to vibrate, window panes tumbled from their dried-putty housings and a crack swept across the ceiling. Beneath closed lids, Norman’s eyes were thoroughly crossed. Without grace he left his chair and travelled downwards at great speed towards the linoleum.
All over Brentford electric appliances were beginning to faiclass="underline" kettles ceased their whistlings, television pictures suddenly shrank to the size of matchboxes, the automated beer pumps at the New Inn trickled to a halt in mid-flow, and at the Swan the lights went out, leaving the rear section of the saloon-bar in darkness and the patrons blindly searching for their pints.