The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (40 page)

“Wilkins dived like a
bleeding Stuka,” yelled one belligerent fan now, as, many decades on from that
fateful day, a crowd of newly-invigorated Sunny Meadownians gathered to watch
the local youths (those not injured in the ExerThighsTM incident of two weeks
before, at least) kick a ball around an area of grass. The said Wilkins, did,
it must be said, go on to play a season and a half of professional football in
League Division Three, but his reputation as a divebomber followed him wherever
he went.

There were general
mumbles of agreement.

“So what are we going to
do about it, then?”

“Demand a re-match!”
cried one, and then several more. “And what if they refuse?”

“We’ll deal with that if
we have to,” said one ominously rumbling voice. “Just let ‘em dare.”

In which Gideon, the assistant,
gives a reasonable piece of advice,
which is eagerly rejected by Dr Bull

“Was I not right?” Dr
Bull popped a fat pink marshmallow into his mouth.

Gideon dipped his head
in acknowledgement. “Of course, Dr Bull. Your hypothesis has been emphatically
supported. The solution to the problem of our current malaise is merely a
matter of devising the appropriate biochemical stimulation. The experiment has
been a success.”

Dr Bull nodded. “Exactly!
Biochemistry, I tell you.”

“Do you not think that
matters have gone far enough, now?” asked the young assistant, rather
tentatively. “Do you think, perhaps, that these poor fellows should not be
excited any further? It would be a simple matter for me to re-set the parameters.”

Dr Bull had that look in
his eye again. That glint of the popular madness. “Just you try!” he growled.

In which it is once more proved that a distant
view can sometimes be all the clearer

Maddy drove Nicholas out
over the Queensbury flyover. “Do you think we should?” he asked nervously. “The
structure is unstable, you know. One day . . .”

“Then do something abo
^u
t it,” she told him. “You’re on the
Advisory Board. Take action. Until then . . . well, let’s live a little!”

He pulled himself up in
his seat. “I’ll have you know that the Advisory Board is looking into the
matter. And I’m going to advise them to take action, what’s more.”

He said it as if he didn’t
realize he was agreeing with her. He said it as if he was putting her right on
a matter of grave importance. Maddy glanced across at him, and wondered what
had happened to them . . . what had happened to her town. It was all very well
that people seemed to have a bit more drive about them these days, but you
could take a thing too far.

For a moment, from the
top of the flyover, they could look back over Sunny Meadows. Maddy couldn’t
tell which part was hers, where her street was, her little maisonette. It all
looked the same.

They found the
countryside. Maddy had seen countryside on the vee — she was a big fan of
The
Farm,
after all — but all these square fields and manicured hedges seemed
so wild to her. She wondered whether this picnic was really a good idea.

The car found somewhere
to park that was right by the river, so they didn’t have to go far to eat.
Maddy had been baking. She had made a quiche, and she had made a salad from
Wal-Mart; she had made eggs, too. Perhaps that was too much egg for one meal,
she had thought, when she was packing the bag this morning, but by then it was
too late. They spread a blanket, just like she had seen, and put the food out
on it. The ground was uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to complain. Nicholas
seemed to be calmer out here, and she didn’t want to stir up his animosity
again. It was peaceful, apart from the insects and the stones in the ground. It
was unlike anything Maddy could quite recall.

Nicholas had a small box
with him and, after they had eaten, he placed it on the blanket with a
flourish. When Maddy opened it up she saw that it contained a selection of
cakes, courtesy of NutriMentPlus. She could tell that from the way they were
square, to make packing and delivery easier.

He must have sensed her
disappointment. “Maddy? What is it?”

It was hard to put into
words. It was a feeling she hadn’t quite recognized herself until now. “I’m
sorry,” she said. “I thought we could do it differently today. Eat differently.
So I made everything. None of this came from the outlet.” NutriMentPlus was
supposed to give you everything you wanted, before you even realized you wanted
it, but Maddy had fumbled her way towards the realization that what she really
wanted was to be the same side of a hundred kilos as Tracy Wordsworth. And she
wanted this lovely man as he was now, in the flesh.

Spontaneity struck
again. Nicholas reached for a rectangular chocolate éclair and hurled it into
the river. A jam tart followed.

Maddy took a doughnut
and hurled it out into the middle of the flow. She collapsed back on her
elbows, laughing more than she could ever remember laughing. This was turning
out to be quite a memorable day!

In which matters go so far that the inhabitants of
Sunny Meadows, the reader, and even the author,
demand an immediate denouement

The Advisory Board of
New Town thought the demands of their neighbours some kind of practical joke.
Indeed, they thought it quite a funny one, and laughed each time someone mentioned
it. Then, a member of the Board, or perhaps a family member, looked up the
records and found that it was true that New Town Athletic had beaten Sunny
Meadows Wanderers 1-0 in February 1974, and that Bomber Wilkins had scored from
the penalty spot. They found it even more amusing that this absurd challenge
was actually based on historical fact! How charming a conceit! But a re-match .
. . Why actually
play
football when you can watch the sim matches on the
vee? Why play when you can see reconstructions of Pele, Best, Platini, Zidane
and the Nevilles battling it out on the big screen?

This response did not go
down well with the newly invigorated citizens of Sunny Meadows. “They’re
rubbing salt in the wounds,” one grumbled. “They’re scared,” said another. “And
what about the Challenge Shield in ‘93?” said another. “That was a clear
off-side!”

And so, the good people
of Sunny Meadows gathered before the rainbow-hued frontage of the Dewberry
Mall. Dr Bull had a good view of this, for the mall was just across the street
from the NutriMent depot, the very heart of his operation. He and Gideon went
out on to the street, to stand on the fringe of the crowd. He wanted to see how
far this would go.

“We’ll show them!” cried
someone near the front of the crowd. “We’ll march on New Town and beat the
living crap out of them.”

“Anyone got a car?”
asked a more sensible voice nearby.

“Fascinating,” mumbled
the doctor. “They’re really going to do it, Gideon. I may have to refine my
models. They’re really going to take action . . . Gideon?”

His assistant was no
longer there.

Suddenly, at the front
of the still-growing crowd, a young man stepped up on to something so that he
was head and shoulders above his fellows. “Stop,” cried Gideon, for it was the
doctor’s assistant who now addressed the crowd. “This should not be happening.
It has gone too far. You are under the influence of an altered biochemistry.
This must—”

He was going to say “stop”,
but the word was prevented from escaping his lips by Dr Bull’s very firm grip
around his assistant’s windpipe.

The crowd fell on the
two. It looked like being a good scrap, and they were all up for a good scrap
right now. Nobody understood what the fight was about, but they all started to
land blows and kicks when—

In which the denouement takes place

When a formidable
explosion blasted them into silence. They stood, and turned. What had been the
NutriMent depot was now a burning shell of a building.

And Maddy Wheatfen stood
just outside its hanging gates, looking rather self-conscious at having so much
attention focused on her. Her skin was blackened, and her blouse was in
tatters, which only compounded her self-consciousness. She hadn’t meant the
whole place to blow up, when she set fire to the outlet feed vats . . . it
just, kind of,
did.
In a particularly satisfying way.

“Let him go,” she said,
waving towards the biggest heap of struggling bodies and hoping they would work
out what she meant. “Dr Bull.”

Maddy had realized,
while throwing NutriMentPlus cakes at the birds on the river the other day,
what it was that had happened to her community. It was the feed, the pipes
carrying NMP supplies direct to the consumer, exactly what you need before you
even know you need it, wherever you are. What a sophisticated way of getting
other substances to each individual in exactly the right dosage! What a
marvellous means of experimenting on an entire population. She had done some
reading on the vee. Journals and stuff. She had understood enough to confirm
that Dr Bull was capable of such an arrogant act.

“He got carried away,”
she said. ‘We all got carried away.” She saw Nicholas in the crowd, looking
almost as shamefaced as he should for getting so worked up over a silly little
ball-game. “It’s good to get carried away sometimes, but just not too much,
okay? I think it’s time we all got back to reality, just a bit, don’t you
think?”

But reality would never
be quite the same again for the good folk of Sunny Meadows (which could,
really, have been almost anywhere). All had been transformed by recent events,
and Maddy found it hard to believe that a single person here would return to
the ways of old.

Released from beneath
the crowd, Dr Bull lost no time in slipping away, followed by his ever-faithful
assistant. Maddy wasn’t sure if the expression on his face was the chastened
one of someone who had learnt a hard lesson, or if he was simply planning to
claim the insurance and go off and set up elsewhere. To tell the truth, she
wasn’t sure which of those outcomes would be best.

She caught Nicholas’ eye
again. He smiled, and she smiled back. He came to her, and kissed her, and
wrapped her in an embrace so powerful that she had to rise on tiptoes and then
her feet even left the ground for a moment. Or maybe she imagined that part.

It was all chemistry,
she thought. That’s what Dr Bull would argue, and she was happy to believe him
for now.

Doubtless the satire of
Dr Ox helped recharge Verne’s own batteries for he now embarked on the book
that comes closest to rivalling
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea as his best known and most popular —
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
jours, or Around the World in Eighty Days.
The novel was serialized in the
Paris daily magazine
Le Temps
from 6 November to 22 December 1872, which
apparently tripled its circulation during that period as readers waited
anxiously to find how Phileas Fogg had overcome his latest problem and whether
he could meet his deadline. The book, published early the following year,
outsold all of Verne’s other titles during his lifetime.

The idea of
circumnavigating the globe in eighty days was not entirely original to Verne.
Several sources have been suggested, including the 1871 edition of
Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide,
which not only suggested
the journey could be completed within “78 to 80 days” but also described a
route almost identical to that undertaken by Fogg. Verne’s genius was not only
to combine this with a series of cliff-hanger adventures and fascinating
characters, but to add the twist of the extra day arising because of crossing
the International Date Line, a fact that Verne cleverly keeps hidden until the
end. The idea had first been used by Edgar Allan Poe in a short story “A
Succession of Sundays”
(1841), which Verne had
reviewed in 1864, but whereas Poe used it as a puzzle, Verne used it to
considerable dramatic effect.