The chickens, all plucked and pink and all but ready, barring the decerebration, came out of a little hatch in the wall, plopped onto a conveyor belt and were delivered at regulated intervals to the chopping table for head-removal and skewering for the rotisserie.
Jack put a certain vigour into his work.
“You go at those chickens as one possessed,” the head chef observed after lunch (of chicken).
“What do you do with all the heads?” Jack asked as he tossed yet another into a swelling bin.
“They go back to the chicken factory,” said the head chef. “They get ground up and fed to more chickens.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Jack, parting another head from its scrawny neck.
“It’s called recycling,” said the head chef. “It’s ecologically sound. I’d liken it to the nearest thing to perpetual motion that you can imagine.”
“Chickens fed on chicken heads,” said Jack, shaking his.
“Well, think about it,” said the head chef. “If you want a chicken to taste really chickeny, then the best thing to feed that chicken on would have to be another chicken. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?”
Jack looked up from his chopping and said, “I can’t argue with that.”
“Mind you,” said the head chef as he drizzled a little oil of chicken over a headless chicken and poked a rotisserie skewer up its backside, “chickens are a bit of a mystery to me.”
“Really?” Jack nodded and chopped.
“I don’t know where they all come from,” said the head chef.
“They come out of eggs,” said Jack. “Of this I am reasonably sure.”
“Do they?” said the head chef. “Of that I’m not too sure.”
“I think it’s an established fact,” said Jack.
“Oh really?” said the head chef. “Well, then you explain this to me. Every day, in Los Angeles alone, in the Golden Chicken Diners, we sell about ten thousand chickens.”
“Ten thousand?” said Jack.
“Easily,” said the head chef. “We’ll do five hundred here every day and there’s twenty Golden Chicken Diners in Los Angeles.”
Jack whistled.
“And well may you whistle,” said the head chef. “That’s ten thousand, but that’s only the tip of the chicken-berg. Every restaurant sells chicken, every supermarket sells chicken, every sandwich stall sells chicken, every hotel sells chicken. Do I need to continue?”
“Can you?” asked Jack.
“Very much so,” said the head chef. “It’s millions of chickens every day. And that’s only in Los Angeles. Not the rest of the USA. Not the rest of the whole wide world.”
“That must add up to an awful lot of chickens,” said Jack, shuddering at the thought.
“I think it’s beyond counting,” said the head chef. “I don’t think they have a name for such a number.”
“It’s possibly a google,” said Jack.
The head chef looked at Jack and coughed. “Possibly,” he said. “But where do they all come from?”
“Out of eggs,” said Jack. “That’s where.”
“But the eggs are for sale,” said the head chef. “We do eggs here. Again, at least five hundred a day. And that’s just here, there’s –”
“I see where you’re heading,” said Jack. “Googles of eggs everyday.”
“Exactly,” said the head chef.
“Well, the way I see it,” said Jack, “or at least what I’ve always been led to believe, is that fertilised eggs, that is those that come from a chicken that has been shagged by a cockerel, become chickens. Unfertilised eggs, which won’t hatch, are sold as eggs.”
“You are wise beyond your years,” said the head chef, “but it won’t work. The numbers don’t tie up. Unfertilised eggs, fine – battery chickens will turn those out every day for years. Until they’re too old to reproduce, then they get ground up and become chicken feed. But think about this – to produce the fertilised eggs you’d need an awful lot of randy roosters. Billions and googles of them, shagging away day and night, endlessly.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” said Jack.
“What, you’d like a job shagging chickens?”
“I would if I were a rooster. And it’s probably the only job they can get.”
“Well, it doesn’t pan out,” said the head chef. “I’ve never heard of any chicken stud farms where millions of roosters shag billions of chickens every day. There’s no such place.”
“There must be,” said Jack.
“Then tell me where.”
“I’m new to these parts.”
“Well, don’t they have chickens where you come from?”
Jack remembered certain anal-probings. “Well, they do …” he said.
“It doesn’t work,” said the head chef, oiling up another chicken and giving it a little flick with his fat forefinger. “Doesn’t work. There’s simply too many chickens being eaten every day. You’d need a stud farm the size of Kansas. It just doesn’t work.”
“Well,” said Jack, “I have to agree that you’ve given me food for thought.” And he laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” asked the head chef.
“Sorry,” said Jack. “So what is your theory? I suspect that you do have a theory.”
“Actually I do,” said the head chef, “but I’m not going to tell you because you wouldn’t believe it. You’d laugh.”
“You’d be surprised at what I believe,” said Jack. “And what I’ve seen. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” Which rang a bell somewhere.[27]
“Well, you wouldn’t believe this.”
“I’ll just bet you I would. Trust me, I’m an assistant chef.”
“Well, fair enough,” said the head chef. “After all, you are in the trade, and clearly destined for great things. But don’t pass on what I say to those Puerto Rican wetbacks – they’ll only go selling it to the Weekly World News.”
Jack raised his cleaver and prepared to bring it down.
“They are not of this world,” said the head chef.
Jack brought his cleaver down and only just missed taking his finger off.
“What?” said Jack. “What are you saying?”
“Have you heard of Area Fifty-Two?” asked the head chef.
Jack shook his head.
“Well,” said the head chef, “ten years ago, in nineteen forty-seven,[28] a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. The Air Force covered it up, gave out this story that it was a secret military balloon experiment, or some such nonsense. But it wasn’t. It was a UFO.”
“And a UFO is a flying saucer?”
“Of course it is. And they say that the occupants on board were still alive and the American government has done a deal with them – in exchange for advanced technology they let the aliens abduct a few Americans every year for experimentation, to cross-breed a new race.”
“Go on,” said Jack, his cleaver hovering.
“Half-man, half-chicken. Those aliens are chickens, sure as sure.”
Jack scratched his head with his cleaver and nearly took his left eye out.
“And I’ll tell you how I figured it out,” said the head chef. “Ten years ago there were no chicken diners, no fast-food restaurants. Chickens came from local farms. Shucks, where I grew up there were chicken farms, and they could supply just enough chickens and eggs to the local community. Like I said, the numbers are now impossible.”
“But hold on there,” said Jack. “Are you saying that all these google billions of chickens are coming from Area Fifty-Two? What are you saying – that they’re being imported by the billion from some chicken planet in outer space?”
“Not a bit of it,” said the head chef, oiling up another bird. “Well, not the last bit. These chickens here are being produced at Area Fifty-Two. The alien chickens would hardly import millions of their own kind to be eaten by our kind every day, would they?”
Jack shook his head.
“When I say that they’re being produced, that’s what I mean. Look at these chickens – they’re all the same. All the same size, all the same weight. Check them out in the supermarket. Rows of them, all the same size, all the same weight. They’re all one chicken.”