Falling Sideways (19 page)

No sign of any fuzz hanging round Honest John's; oh, they had the place boarded up where they'd smashed the door in, but (typically, he felt sure) the nails they'd used were far too short to be anything more than a mildly amusing exercise in the physics of leverage. Cheapskate, he sighed as he pulled away the last plank. Waste of public money;
my
money, not to beat about the bush. Got a good mind to write to my MP.

They'd turned the power off, but that was all right, because David turned it back on again. At once, something started to hum in the background, and green lights started to glow in the hearts of the glop tanks. He smiled and moved his finger – eeny, meeny, miny . . . Having decided on the second from the right, he took out the little plastic packet of hair he'd bought at the auction and carefully teased loose one strand. Vaguely he remembered Honest John pratting about with various instruments and machines, calibrating the whatever and realigning the whatchamadoodle; but he couldn't be bothered with all that techie stuff right now. Hadn't he felt at the time that it was all voodoo, designed to impress the customer and make him feel more inclined to part with his hard-earned money, when all Honest John was really doing was dropping a bit of body into the Swarfega? The hell with all that; he wasn't after a Rolls-Royce job after all, just something that'd be close enough for jazz. Life was too short for persnicketing about.

He held the hair up in front of his face for a moment, like a conductor confronting an unruly orchestra. Light glinted on it, and he grinned. Then he let go.

He watched it drift down and settle on the meniscus of the glop – waiter, there's a hair in my green jelly; not so loud, sir, or they'll all want one. He smiled. As simple as that. Now all he had to do was wait until she was ready.

If he'd had any sense, of course, he'd have brought a book, or a pocket chess set or something. No good at waiting; he paced up and down for a bit, then decided to explore. But there wasn't anything particularly interesting in the workshop, just a lot of weird-looking microscopes and whirly things and gadgets that looked like old Super-8 projectors after they'd been assimilated into the Borg collective. Techie stuff. Boring. What he really wanted was something like a dart board.

He found a small door in the back wall. An office, he guessed, somewhere Honest John went to have a crafty smoke, fiddle the VAT and ogle the Pirelli calendar. It wasn't locked; a trifle stiff, perhaps, but nothing a smart drop-kick couldn't cure, as he proved by experiment. He groped for the light switch.

As the savage brightness hit him, David realised he'd been here before; not so long ago, either. The last time, of course, he'd been under the mistaken impression that he was on board a flying saucer, being whisked away to some distant star to be puréed by super-intelligent frogs. Amazing, the things you can make yourself believe. But there was the bed he'd been lying on, and the machine that had barked till he trashed it, and all the other bits and pieces. More techie junk; except, of course, that all of this lot was fake, film-prop stuff, made to look impressive but entirely non-functional and inert. It embarrassed him to think that he'd actually been taken in by all this garbage. Anybody with sufficient intellectual standing to aspire to membership of the animal kingdom could tell it was only cardboard boxes covered in Bacofoil. He sighed, reached out and pressed a random button on the nearest console.

All the lights went out, and the floor seemed to surge upwards, tipping David off his feet and slapping him hard on the back, like an over-boisterous friend. He tried to get up but that wasn't possible. Something was pressing down hard on him, giving him a rare insight into how a shirt felt when it was being ironed.

Just when he was wondering whether he'd had a stroke or died or something like that, the lights came back on and the pressure eased off; in fact it eased off so much that David could feel his feet lift off the floor. He tried pushing down with his toes, and suddenly found himself doing a very slow forward somersault – his feet rising up behind his back, his face gradually drifting down towards the floor. Naturally, he reached out with his arms and scrabbled, but that had no perceptible effect whatsoever. A small stainless-steel basin and the crust of a cheese sandwich floated gracefully in front of his nose, like exotic tropical fish in an aquarium.

Zero gravity. Not something you'd instinctively associate with this part of London. I wonder what's going on?

He tried a few swimming strokes, but that only made things worse; by the time he realised that, however, he was hanging upside down like a sleeping bat, watching his house keys drift away and out of his field of vision, like old-fashioned fishing boats in a Mediterranean sunset. Not that it mattered particularly (it wasn't as if he'd have had any use for them, any time soon); but there's a thin, subtle psychological tether joining a man to his keyring at all times (the keys we carry define what we are) and once parted from it he can't help feeling an instinctive pang of emptiness and loss. But going after them was, he decided, out of the question, if he didn't want to end up screwing himself into the wall like a Rawlplug.

‘Malfunction,' said a tinny voice somewhere below his left ear. ‘Artificial gravity field inoperative.'

Thank you so much, David muttered under his breath as his toes scraped the ceiling Artex, I'd never have guessed. An idea trickled into his mind, but he dismissed it as too silly. The football-sized amorphous transparent blob headed straight for his face turned out to be water.

It was at this point that the locket he'd kneeled on behind the sofa glided gracefully out of his pocket and spiralled slowly upward towards the ceiling. David didn't actually notice, but he was aware of some subtle change; all that confidence he'd somehow acquired (not like him at all) was draining out of him, like crankcase oil from a British motorcycle. Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing remained to be seen.

‘Malfunction,' the tinny voice repeated. ‘Artificial gravity field has been deactivated. Do you want to deactivate artificial gravity? Reply yes for yes, no for no.'

He hesitated. Too silly, he'd told himself just now, but what was there to lose? ‘No,' he said.

Entirely by chance, he landed on a large pile of surgical rubber gloves that had drifted out of an open drawer.

They broke his fall, at least to some extent; and he performed the same function for a number of small metal objects that had drifted as high as the ceiling. Some of them were surprisingly heavy for their size.

‘ . . . Has been restored,' said the tinny voice, but he'd guessed that already. When he felt up to moving again, he shook off the various bits of junk that were trying to bury him and crawled towards the door he'd come in by. Two filing-cabinet-sized machines had fallen across the doorway, blocking it, and when he tried to shift one of them it spat bright green sparks in his face and started humming. He backed away until he bumped into something else, and looked round for another way out.

‘Warning,' announced the tinny voice. ‘This program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down in five minutes. You are advised to go immediately to the life pods. Do you want to prepare the life pods for launch? Press any key to continue.'

He spun round – foolhardly, since his sense of balance hadn't quite recovered from the zero-G – and grabbed at a workstation for support. Press any key on
what
, for crying out loud? Sure, he could see a console; any number of consoles, but no way of knowing which one he was supposed to use. On the off chance that they were all networked, he reached for the nearest keyboard and jabbed a key at random. Nothing happened.

He had that silly thought again. Extremely silly: he made his living working with computers, and knew perfectly well that for the foreseeable future, nobody was going to be able to make a computer you could talk to. Shout at, yes; after a dozen years in the industry, he'd learned that computers need constant verbal abuse the way other machines needed oil. But respond to oral commands – no. That was pure science fiction.

‘Computer,' he said.

‘Standing by,' replied the tinny voice.

Oh well. ‘Computer,' he said, ‘is there a window or a porthole I can look out of?'

‘Lowering blast shield,' chirped the tinny voice. ‘Uncovering porthole.'

A panel in the wall behind him shot back, revealing a thick perspex plate. Through it, he could see stars, millions of them, above and below and on both sides. It was like drowning in a screen-saver.

‘Thanks,' David muttered in a shaky voice. ‘OK, you can shut the window now.'

The panel snapped back. ‘Computer,' he said, ‘where are we, exactly?'

‘Coordinates 345 by 297 by 199 by 26:13:92:07, Homeworld Standard Time.'

Not that that was particularly helpful without any points of reference; it could be a way of saying ‘Turnham Green' in base four-and-a-quarter. ‘Computer,' he ventured, ‘prepare life pods for launch.'

‘Please press any key to continue.'

Damn; that old Boolean logic strikes again. ‘Computer, which key should I press?'

‘Please press any key.'

‘Yes, fine, but on which keyboard? Tell me where I can find the keyboard.'

‘The keyboard is at coordinates 674 by 185 by 334 by 05:55:92:71 Homeworld Standard Time.' ‘Right. Thank you
so
much.'

‘You're welcome.'

Ah well. Serves me right for clicking on ‘Help' ‘Computer,' he said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing (first rule of cybernetics: never let the bastards see you're afraid), ‘transfer all functions to the console on my immediate left.'

‘Functions transferred.'

He stabbed the keyboard so hard, he nearly broke his finger. At once, another panel (door-sized this time) shot open in the same wall. He took a deep breath and dived through it like a dolphin— And landed in Honest John's workshop, right next to the door he'd gone in by. Before he hit the ground the panel had already snapped shut, and there were no marks on the wall to show where it had been.

‘Finally,' said a voice behind him. ‘There you are.'

He jumped up like a spring-loaded rabbit and looked round to see where the voice was coming from. Didn't take long.

‘You might at least have been here when I woke up,' Philippa Levens continued. ‘Simple good manners, if nothing else.' Gobbets of green slime were sliding down her legs and forming a pool on the concrete floor. He tried very hard indeed not to stare, and failed. ‘Now then,' she went on, ‘where's the shower?'

Was it his imagination, or was there something ever so slightly different about this one? Physically, no; he was in a unique position to confirm that. It was something else, something to do with her manner and tone of voice—

‘I said,' she repeated, ‘where's the damn' shower? Are you deaf as well as stupid, or just stupid?'

—And on balance, he preferred the Mark One version, even if she had cost him a fortune in delicatessen. ‘I'm sorry,' he mumbled, ‘I don't know. In fact, I don't think there is one.'

‘Oh, for pity's sake. Well, don't just stand there like a fossilised prune. Get me a towel and my clothes, before I freeze to death.'

‘Um.'

‘I'll try that again without the long words. Towel. Clothes. Now.'

David's mouth opened, but no words came out.

‘Forget it.' She pushed past him, smearing green glop down one side of his jacket, and pulled open a cupboard under one of the benches. ‘Here,' she said, ‘pay attention. This is a
towel
. This is a
shirt
. These are
panties
. Got that, or shall I write it down for you?'

‘Sorry,' he mumbled, ‘I didn't know they were there.'

‘Of course. The elves brought them. Silly me. Now buzz off while I get dressed.'

He turned away. On reflection, he wished he'd stayed where he was. After all, how bad can asphyxiation in the vacuum of space actually be?

‘Needless to say,' she went on, ‘it'd be too much to expect you to say you're glad to see me after all this time, or you really missed me and you're glad I'm back, or thank you for all the trouble you've been to. Or even,' her voice added, faltering a little, ‘“I love you”. Still, there you are.
You
haven't changed a bit.'

He froze.

It'd be true to say that David understood women the way a seventeenth-century Trobriand Islander would've understood Windows 98. Even so, he instinctively knew that this was one of those situations where there was an infinite choice of things he could say, and every single one of them would be wrong. Once he'd realised that, it all became much clearer and simpler.

‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but would you happen to know what's going on in the back room?'

‘Nothing,' she replied. ‘Unless you've been playing about with the guidance systems. I really hope you haven't,' she added, ‘for your sake.'

He turned round slowly. She'd towelled off most of the green glop and put on a shirt; one of Honest John's shirts, by the look of it, since it almost came down to her knees and the collar was frayed past hope of redemption. ‘I may have bumped into something,' he mumbled. ‘Accidentally.'

She advanced on him like a Napoleonic army, put her arms round his neck and kissed him for a very long time. It was a remarkable experience, a bit like drowning in rose-flavoured fire, even if she did taste quite strongly of green glop. Then she let him go.

‘You aren't him,' she said.

‘No,' he admitted. ‘At least,' he added, ‘I don't think I am. But surely you ought to know.'

She scowled at him. ‘Give me a break,' she said irritably, ‘I'm only fifteen minutes old. What's more,' she went on, ‘I'm pretty sure there's some very big holes in my memory. Before you put the tissue sample in the regenerative matrix, are you sure you did the DNA re-sequencing properly?'