Sprout Mask Replica (35 page)

The
date was 17 August 1977. The place was Brentford. The time, eleven o’clock of
the evening. Clear night, full moon.

The
hatch slid open in the helicopter’s belly and disgorged three men wearing
silver one-piece coverall suits. A tall slim one with a prodigious red beard, a
middle-sized one with a nimbus of white hair and a short young one who was
scratching his groin. They were greeted by more men in uniform.

‘I am
Captain Vez,’ said one of these, offering a stiff salute. ‘And you are Sir John
Rimmer?’

The
tall slim figure with the beard flashed an official ID. ‘On secondment to the
Ministry of Serendipity,’ he said, ‘above-top-secret classification. Are all
the perimeter fences manned and secured?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘And
the drilling rig is fully operational?’

‘Yes,
sir, ready to go.

‘And
you are absolutely certain that the area has not been compromised, that nothing
has been tampered with?’

‘A few
locals were poking about earlier in the day, sir. But nothing was disturbed.
The entire area is now fully secure.’

‘Good.’

‘But,
sir— ‘Yes, soldier?’

‘What
is it all about, sir? What have we got here?’

Sir
John exchanged glances with his middle-sized companion. ‘What do you think, Dr Harney?’
he asked.

‘These
men have all signed the Official Secrets Act,’ said the good doctor, ‘and we
will need their assistance with the excavation and the containment. We have no
choice but to tell them.’

‘So be
it.’ Sir John stared down upon the captain, a man of no small size himself. ‘We
have an alien abduction situation,’ he said. ‘Seismic scans suggest that the
craft is still in the area, in a disabled condition.’

Captain
V turned about in circles, dragging his gun from its holster. ‘Flying saucer?’
he went. ‘Where is it? Have we fenced off the wrong bit? It isn’t round here.’

‘You’re
standing on it,’ said Sir John.

The
captain took a jump backwards and angled his pistol towards the ground. ‘It’s
buried?’ he asked.

‘More
like dug in,’ said Sir John.

‘I don’t
understand.’

Sir
John pulled out a map of the area and tapped at it with a finger shaped not
unlike a haricot bean. ‘The building that stood here,’ he said, ‘was the Sir
John Doveston Memorial Gymnasium, known locally as the Johnny Gym. The abductee’s
name was Nigel Bennet, brother of the boxer Billy ‘The Whirlwind’ Bennet who
won last night at Wembley.’

‘And a
bloody good fight it was,’ said Captain V. ‘I was there myself, local boy
making good and all that.’

‘Quite
so. However, while Billy was scoring great points in the annals of boxing, his
brother packed dynamite into the foundations of this gym and blew the bugger to
kingdom come.’

‘But
why?’ asked the captain, which was reasonable enough.

‘He was
compelled to do it. Compelled by something alien.’ Sir John tapped at his
temple. ‘Something made him do it.’

‘And
then he got abducted?’

‘You
have it.’

‘But
you say the craft is still here. Why didn’t it fly off into space?’

‘The
craft didn’t come from space, captain. It came from right here.’ Sir John
redirected his haricot bean. It pointed this time down towards the ground. ‘The
aliens we seek do not come from above, they come from below.’

‘Saints
preserve us,’ said the captain, whose mother didn’t like him swearing. ‘But
surely if it came from below and it’s returned below, we’ve lost it.’

Sir
John shook his long slim head. Search light twinkled in the lenses of his
horn-rimmed specs, and he smoothed down his beard as he spoke. ‘The Ministry of
Serendipity has been monitoring this area for years. Brentford is what is known
as a
window area
for
outré
occurrences and weird shit generally.
Ministry sensors are buried in the ground all over this borough. The explosion
last night set the needles rocking at Mornington Crescent HQ. The sensors
picked up the craft making its escape, they also picked up its collision with a
vast metallic object one hundred feet beneath the surface.’

‘Fascinating,’
said Captain V. ‘So what is this vast metallic object, do you think?’

‘It
could be anything. Victorian debris from the ill-fated Brent-ford Thames
tunnel, Second World War unexploded bomb.’

‘What?’
went the captain, taking another back-aways jump.

‘We
shall have to drill rather carefully,’ said Sir John.

The
captain took off his cap and scratched at his military head. ‘One thing puzzles
me though, sir, and that’s the size of this alien craft. We’ve located what we
were asked to look for, “a point of entry”, but it’s not much bigger than a
rabbit hole.’

‘Sounds
about right,’ said Sir John. ‘Dr Harney, show the captain the photograph. And,
Danbury.’

‘Yep?’
asked the lad.

‘Leave
your groin alone.’

Dr Harney
brought out a dog-eared photograph and held it up before the captain. ‘Scout
craft,’ he said.

The
captain stared at the picture, replaced his cap upon his head, then removed it
again. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘that is a picture of you on a donkey at Great
Yarmouth.’

‘No,
look, there.’ Dr Harney went point point point.

‘That’s
a Scotsman in a kilt,’ said the captain.

‘Yes, of
course it is. But what’s that
on
his kilt?’

‘It’s a
sporran.

‘It’s a
subterranean scout craft,’ said Sir John. ‘Manned by sprouts.’

‘What?’
Now there are many kinds of What? expressing various forms of surprise, horror
or amazement. The captain’s What? expressed, shall we say, a certain element of
doubt. ‘You are suggesting,’ he said, carefully, ‘that Nigel Bennet was
abducted by a sporran full of sprouts?’

‘Not
just any old sprouts,’ said Sir John. ‘These are very special sprouts, sentient
sprouts. A different order of sprout. A different order of being. Some genetic
mutation, or possibly something originally not of this world.’

The
captain took off his cap once more, then realizing that he already had it off,
he put it back on again. ‘Now just you listen here,’ he said. ‘I know I’m a
soldier and therefore not very bright. But I’ll have you know—’

‘Sir,’
a soldier came ambling up.

‘What
is it, Sergeant Lemon?’

‘We
have RUPERT fired up and ready to go, sir,’ Sergeant Lemon replied, saluting as
he did so.

‘What’s
RUPERT?’ asked Sir John.

‘The
robot digger and retrieval unit,’ said Captain V. ‘Stands for Remotely Operated
Bio-Electronic Recovery Tractor.’

‘Ah,’
said Sir John. ‘I see what you mean about you not being very bright. Shall we
set RUPERT off down the rabbit hole then?’

Captain
Vez scratched at his cap. ‘At the double, sir,’ he said. ‘But carefully. And
before we do, is there anything else of an above-top-secret nature you’d care
to share with me? Just in case, he paused, ‘in case we don’t come out of this
thing alive.’

Sir
John nodded his slender head. ‘We are dealing with a particularly cunning
adversary. Back in the 1950s the Ministry of Serendipity set up the Alpha Man
project, an attempt to discover society’s original thinkers, those who begin the
process of original idea to realization of original idea. They found
one.
A
chap called Larry, we have no record of his surname. In the cause of science,
doctors at the Ministry removed Larry’s brain and floated it in a nutrient
solution. Larry, unfortunately, did not survive this experiment. An autopsy of
his brain, however, revealed something startling. An implant. Larry had been
abducted at some earlier time in his life and implanted.’

‘What
was this implant?’ asked the captain.

‘A
sprout,’ said Sir John. ‘Of course. The sprout was still alive and it was
removed to Area 51 in Nevada USA for interrogation. It revealed, after some
initial encouragement which involved showing it a saucepan of hot water, that
such abductions have gone on throughout the course of human history. The
vegetable kingdom has
us
under surveillance, captain. They are a race
far older than man and with the growing trend towards vegetarianism we pose a
threat to them. Every time they locate an individual whom they consider
represents a particularly large threat, they abduct and implant him. Control
him, in fact. They are attempting to slow mankind’s progress. Not destroy him,
not yet, not until their hybridization scheme is perfected.’

‘Their
what?’
asked the captain (a slightly different What?, that time).

‘Hybridization,’
said Sir John. ‘A cross-breeding of the two races. A new order of mankind.
Half-man, half-vegetable. But mostly vegetable.’

‘Like
Philip Glass,’ said Danbury Collins.

‘I
quite like Phillip Glass,’ said Captain Vez. ‘Catchy tunes.’

‘Quite
so,’ Sir John inclined his head. ‘And, with all that said, I suggest we put
RUPERT into operation and see what we can winkle out.’

The
soldiers saluted and marched off towards the drilling rig. Sir John and his
colleagues followed, Danbury bringing up the rear.

‘What
do you reckon to this load of old toot?’ whispered Danbury to the doctor.

‘I
reckon it ties up pretty much
all
the loose ends,’ the doc whispered
back. ‘So unless you can think up something better, don’t knock it. And, Danbury—’

‘Yep?’

‘Do
leave your groin alone.’

‘Sorry,’
said the lad. ‘But talk of “tying up loose ends” always gets me going.’

‘Danbury,
the sight of me dipping my sausage in a boiled egg at breakfast had you going.’

‘It
certainly did,’ said the lad, grinning like a good’n.

‘Hurry
up, chaps,’ called Sir John. ‘And Danbury—’

‘I
know,’ said the lad. ‘The groin, leave the groin.

‘Good
boy.’

RUPERT was positioned at
the opening to the burrow.

‘I don’t
see how a grown man could have been sucked into such a tight opening,’ said
Captain Vez.

Danbury
Collins made sniggering sounds. Dr Harney biffed him in the ear.

‘How
exactly does this contraption work?’ Sir John asked. The captain did lapel preenings
to imply a great knowledge of the subject. ‘It’s a robot,’ he said. ‘With
tracked wheels, a light on the front with a little video camera and a pair of
extendible arms with moveable grippers on the end. We control it here, by means
of this hand-held controller, seeing what it sees with its camera on this video
monitor, here.’

‘Very
impressive, captain. So how do you switch it on?’ The captain made a baffled
face. ‘How
do
you switch it on, sergeant?’ he asked.

‘Search
me,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve got the instructions, but I don’t know if they’re
the right ones. They look more like something for the erection of a flat-pack
kitchen. An uncle of mine tried that once, he ended up eating his own foot, I
don’t know whether—’

‘Give
me
the controller,’ said Sir John. ‘Let
me
do it.’

‘I can’t
allow that,’ said the captain. ‘This is a piece of military hardware.’

‘Well,
get someone military to operate it.’

The
captain sighed and turned to his men, who were standing around with their hands
in their pockets. ‘Ten-shun,’ he shouted. The men stood to attention. ‘Now,’
said the captain, pacing before them, ‘does any man here know how to operate
RUPERT?’

‘I do,
sir,’ said a private, stepping forward, with a smart salute.

‘And
your name, private?’

‘l26765-zero
Robert McGeddon,
sir.’

‘All
right, McGeddon, operate RUPERT.’

‘I can’t
do that, sir, I don’t have the rank.’

‘What?’
(Another variation on What? but a subtle one.)

‘No
combatant on active duty below the rank of captain is permitted to operate a
RUPERT, sir. Section 14, paragraph 12, Army Field Command Orders.’

‘You
certainly know your orders, soldier.’

‘Certainly
do, sir. In my business, knowing your orders can mean the difference between
coming home smothered in glory and coming back home in a body bag. If you know
what I mean, and I’m sure that you do, sir.’

‘Could
we get a move on with this please?’ asked Sir John.

‘Don’t
interfere in military procedures, sir. Soldier, I am ordering you to operate
RUPERT.’

‘I
regret to disobey a direct order, sir,’ said Private McGeddon. ‘But I must
reiterate, section 14, paragraph 12. No combatant on active duty below the rank
of captain.’

‘Aha,’
said the captain.

‘Aha,
sir?’