‘We thought you might like a little drink,’ said Calamity. ‘It must be thirsty work living in a world without machines.’
‘How thoughtful of you,’ said James the Less. ‘Samson, go and fetch some cups. It is so nice of you to come and visit. Most people shun us for our alien ways, even though our lives are not so very different from the ones their forebears would have lived.’
‘That’s very true,’ I said.
‘If they only cared to wish us good day or engage us in conversation, they would discover the same heart beats in our breasts as in everyone else’s.’ He sat on a bale of hay. ‘Yes, it is so nice of you to come out all this way just to say hello to some strangers you met on the train.’
‘To be honest,’ I said, prickling with guilt, ‘it would be wrong of us to mislead you into the belief that we came here solely to say hello.’
Samson returned with some unglazed earthernware mugs. Calamity poured the drinks. We raised mugs and wished each other good health. But instead of drinking, James the Less hesitated, then said, ‘You . . . you haven’t got anything stronger, have you?’
A glance of complicity passed between us.
‘Does a still count as a machine?’ I asked.
James the Less smiled sheepishly. ‘On this particular issue the scriptures are far from clear.’
I took out my hip flask of rum and unscrewed the cap. ‘In that case, at least until the scholars reach a consensus, it would be best to proceed on the assumption that a still is not a machine.’
Like a dog who keeps dancing and jumping up to your hands while you’re still opening the tin of dog food, James the Less struggled to maintain a dignified reserve in the face of mounting excitement. ‘It would be impertinent to argue with such a learned man,’ he said and threw the dandelion and burdock onto the floor with a surprising lack of ceremony. He held out his mug. I gave him a generous measure and took one for myself. James the Less took a deep gulp, coughed, swallowed, coughed, swallowed harder and finally looked up with the air of one electrocuted. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘That hit the spot! Now, what was it you wanted to see us about?’
I handed him the top-secret Aviary document. As I did so, a chit of paper fell out and James the Less picked it up and gave it to me. It was a newspaper cutting, a report, a few lines amounting to a fragment of column space that detailed an atrocity on the Thai–Burmese border. It was one of those stories that are terrible but not deemed newsworthy and serve only to provide copy to fill an empty inch. I wondered: did the story describe the tragedy in which Raspiwtin had been involved? Or did he just read about it and pretend it had happened to him?
James the Less gave the Aviary document to Samson, much like a proud parent cajoles his son to play the recorder for a visitor.
‘Interesting case,’ the boy said earnestly. ‘The story about the alien woman buying the cadaver of Iestyn Probert is widely circulated. I’d never paid much attention to it and had assumed it to be the invention of superstitious fools. This puts a different complexion on the matter.’ He brought out a jeweller’s loupe and screwed it into his eye. We all held our breath as he pored over the document. He began to mutter to himself as if not pleased with what he was seeing. Calamity looked at me and pointedly rolled her eyes. Finally the boy looked up and removed the loupe.
‘The Documents appear to be of dubious provenance,’ he said. ‘The stamp TOP SECRET/AVIARY EYES ONLY appears to be one of those stamps with changeable letters – see, the V and the Y are slightly out of line – this is wrong; official Aviary stamps have always been solid rubber specific to the purpose. Similarly, there are references to the necessity to conceal events from the media; in 1965 this word would not have been current, and the more usual “press” would have been used, or “newspapers”. By the same token, the document refers to extraterrestrials instead of aliens, again not current in the 1960s. The typefaces are anachronistic – Helvetica subheads and Times for the body – these would not have been used in Aviary documents until the late ’70s and the advent of IBM Golfball electronic typewriters. In the ’60s all such documentation would have been produced on Smith Coronas with Prestige Elite fonts. And this is a carbon copy but has been folded. This is unusuaclass="underline" carbon copies were for filing only. I regret to say that my initial examination forces me to conclude that the item is a forgery. Although do not discount the possibility that the source of the forgery may, paradoxically, be the Aviary itself. Sometimes they forge the truth in order to discredit it.’
James the Less clapped his hands. ‘Bravo!’
‘Could you repeat the last bit?’ I asked.
‘These people are not acquainted with your advanced theories,’ said James the Less. ‘You must be patient.’
The boy made a great play of summoning patience.
‘As you know,’ he said loftily, ‘the Aviary exists in the main to suppress truth and keep the masses docile and unsuspecting, happy with their lives of meaningless and unending tedium. No doubt you have observed them yourself: walking up and down Aberystwyth Prom each day, dispensing the requisite oohs and ahs at the sunset each evening, unaware that it is not significantly different from the one they praised the evening before. Taking an ice cream and exchanging tittle-tattle with the lowly stall-holder . . .’
I saw myself doing exactly as the boy described. Admiring the sunset, taking an ice cream at Sospan’s the same time each day. Was it unendingly tedious? I quite liked it.
The boy continued. ‘A time-honoured technique for suppressing the truth, for getting the self-satisfied burghers of Aberystwyth to ignore the truth before their eyes, is to discredit that truth, to make a mockery of it. It is my belief, derived from my researches into the works of those cunning artificers of invented testimony the Aberystwyth police, that many of the more bizarre accounts of alien contact reveal the hand of the authorities at work. By inventing a story that contains the truth but which is demonstrably absurd, they in effect undermine any credence that might attach to it. The famous flying-saucer abduction account of Barney and Betty Hill from 1961 is a case in point. Most of it came out under hypnotism. We must ask ourselves who supplied the hypnotist. The answer? The military supplied the hypnotist. I leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.’
A rain cloud followed us back to town. It was roughly puma-shaped and had the same deep, lustrous colouring of blue-black silk that glistened and glinted.
‘It’s gaining on us,’ said Calamity, who had her own small cloud left in place by the boy’s speech.
‘Cheer up,’ I said.
‘I’m fine, really I am. The kid obviously doesn’t know the first thing about the Barney and Betty Hill case.’
It sounded to me like he knew quite a lot about it, but sometimes you need to help your partner just as there will be times when your partner needs to raise you from the trough. That’s what partners are for.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He was talking through his hat. We’ll definitely go and see Mrs Bwlchgwallter and get her to hypnotise the farmer.’
Calamity grinned.
The cloud overtook us on the long straight down into town at Penparcau and was already in place on the Prom when we reached the bandstand. Mrs Bwlchgwallter moonlighted here in the afternoons from her rôle as official maker of gingerbread to the town. She stood on stage, clutching the mike and backed by her three cousins, the Gingernutjobs. The arrival of the rain threatened to bring an end to the gig. The audience consisted of a coach party of pensioners who moved and acted as a single organism, like a colony of bees or a shoal of fish responding to some unseen, unvoiced communication, telepathic perhaps, or pheromonic. As soon as the first raindrop registered its presence on the spectacle lens of one person, this information was communicated to the colony. They leapt up in unison from their deckchairs, perfectly synchronised, and began the intricate reverse-origami of unpacking pac-a-mac coats. We stood entranced by the spectacle. Their hands worked feverishly like the mandibles of leaf-cutter ants sawing away at a cellophane rose. All of a sudden the bond which held the rose closed was broken, whereupon something even more extraordinary happened: a huge science-fiction dragonfly of polythene squirted upwards and attacked them. Gauzy wings caught the breeze and fanned out enveloping the pensioners in plumes of gossamer. Mrs Bwlchgwallter, in a bid to win back the crowd’s attention, launched into a rousing version of her trademark song, ‘Blue Suede Orthopaedic Boots’: