Saucerers and Gondoliers - Chapter 19

Chapter 19
Wakey Wakey Rise And Shine

Ant opened his eyes. It was still Not All A Dream.

His feet were sticking out of the end of the bed. The bed had, after all, been made for an eight-year-old girl. But despite this, Ant was going to stay in it for ever.

A horrible image loomed into view. Ant focussed on it. It was the bright and breezy face of Commodore Drummond, who was already wearing a uniform.

“Good morning, young astronaut! Up and dressed, chop chop! We have to be off to the sickbay!”

“But I’m not sick”, mumbled Ant, as Mr. McNaught pulled him up and out of bed and manoeuvred him into a dressing gown.

“No, but those we know and love are”, said the Commodore, “and we must visit them.” Behind Ant, Mr. McNaught lifted Cleo, still fast asleep, clean out of bed, and deposited her into a pair of fluffy slippers. The slippers had mermaids and seahorses on them. Ant noticed the Commodore wiping a tear from his eye.

“Wha?” said Cleo in confusion. “I’m not in bed any more.”

“Observant child”, said the Commodore proudly. Ant noticed that Truman J. Slughound was gliding menacingly around Commodore Drummond’s ankles like a circling shark.

“Uh, sir”, he said, pointing at the officer’s boots.

The Commodore glanced down. “What? Ah, of course.” He pulled a trouser leg up to reveal a length of gleaming steel. “All metal legs today, you see. I fear nothing!”

“Poor old Truman J.”, said Cleo blearily, brushing her teeth using a brush produced by Mr. McNaught, “he probably thinks your ankles are still edible.”

“I think”, confided the Commodore, “that he might be after the tiddlywinks in my pocket.” He pulled a hand out of his trousers, revealing a bright green plastic disc held between his fingers. The sluggie pricked up his eyes in excitement, and he stopped his circling and followed the tiddlywink like a dog watching a biscuit. “Aha, now he is in my power”, gloated the Commodore. He tiddled the wink into the air, and the sluggie reared up and gobbled it down with a noise like a giant squid gargling with Space Dust.

Mr. McNaught handed Cleo a little girl’s dress, hand-stitched with flowers, seahorses, and mermaids, and hung a uniform shirt and trousers over the end of Glenn Bob’s bed. Glenn Bob was still snoring soundly. Cleo held the pretty frock at arm’s length, rather as if it had been a dead rat; then, she put it down carefully, picked up Glenn Bob’s uniform, and went off to the showers to dress.

“Extraordinary”, said the Commodore. “I see I have a good deal to learn about the changing face of pre-teen fashion. Mr. McNaught, another uniform if you will.”

“Rats”, complained Ant. “Can’t Glenn Bob wear the dress?”

“He doesn’t have the legs for it”, said the Commodore. “And come to think of it, neither do I.”

Soon, Ant, Cleo and Glenn Bob were all dressed.

“You two look like boy scouts”, accused Cleo.

“You,” said Ant, “look like someone who gets all her clothes from Army Surplus.”

“Just because yours don’t fit”, said Cleo smugly, and twirled for everyone’s benefit.

“No time for a fashion show”, said the Commodore. “Off to the sickbay. Quick time!”

“Who are we going to see?” said Cleo, struggling to keep up with the Commodore as he stalked out of the bedroom down a rough-cut, dimly-lit passageway spiralling downward. “Ow!” she added. Her head had hit the roof, which was so low that Ant and Glenn Bob also had to stoop. Mr. McNaught was almost bent double. The Commodore, Ant noticed, did not appear to be suffering from the low ceiling height.

“Pardon me, sir, but your legs seem shorter today”, said Ant.

“Thought I’d go for a short walk today”, winked the Commodore. “Aha, here we are.”

The sickbay was rather larger than in Croatoan, and also looked fuller. Maybe, thought Ant, people injured themselves more often on Gondolin. There was a man opposite Ant whose face had broken out in purple blotches, and another next to him whose arm seemed to have swelled up like a balloon.

“Nettle sting”, grimaced the Commodore. “He took two spines in the arm.”

Both men saluted, the Commodore, the balloon-armed man with some difficulty, though cheerily enough. The Commodore saluted back.

“Fine pair of chaps”, he whispered. “I don’t know a better pair of chaps. Nice to see them looking well, what?”

“What’s wrong with the purple man?” said Cleo.

“Gondolier’s Mug”, said the Commodore, waving his hand airily as if having gigantic purple blotches breaking out on your cheeks was nothing. “A harmless form of lichen that grows on your face. Everyone here gets it sooner or later.”

Cleo pursed her lips in a way that suggested she did not consider anything that grew on her face to be harmless, but said nothing.

“And here”, said the Commodore, “is our patient.”

The man in the final bed was a patchwork of dressings. Despite this, he was sitting happily playing with a plastic toy UFO which had INFINITE SPACE INVADER OBJECT MADE IN JAPAN printed down one side of it. He was making happy exploding and whooshing noises.

“Richard”, said the Commodore. “I see you are making a splendid recovery.”

Mr. Turpin looked up at the Commodore sharply. Almost in the blink of an eye, he seemed to weaken and wilt until he scarcely seemed able to hold his flying saucer.

“Oh gosh, sir”, he said, “I do feel so terribly ill.”

“Nonsense, you look perfectly able to return to active duty. You may be interested to know that Penelope Farthing has taken your Fantasm out for a spin.”

Turpin looked confused. “I’ve got a Fantasm?”

“You really don’t remember”, said Ant. “Do you.”

Mr. Turpin squinted at Ant. Ant noticed some of his fingertips were still bandaged. “I remember you”, said Mr. Turpin. Cleo glowered at him. “Ah, um. Yes, I remember both of you.”

“And you are very, very sorry”, said Commodore, arms folded, staring down at Turpin with a seriousness Ant had not seen in him before. “Aren’t you.”

The Highwayman hung his head. “Um. Yes, I am.”

“You took this young lady and gentleman light years from their homes and families and put their lives in danger. On top of that, I have had to Indoctrinate them.”

Ant blinked in alarm. “I don’t remember being indoctrinated”, he said.

“Um, ‘indoctrinated’ just means that you’ve been told flying saucers and colonies in space and Gondolin exist”, explained Mr. Turpin. “It’s quite a serious matter, actually. If you get indoctrinated and then don’t agree to breathe a word of what you’ve heard when you get back to Earth, then we have to -“

“And on top of that”, interrupted the Commodore, “you lost your entire consignment of unnaturally flavoured monosodium glutamate crisps. Memsahib Drummond is most dreadfully upset. We had heard that Walker’s were bringing out a Mango Chutney flavour.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry, sir”, squirmed Turpin.

“But you did bring back a Fantasm”, beamed the Commodore. “Though through no fault of your own, it would appear.” His beam disappeared. He pointed to Glenn Bob. “This young gentleman aided your escape from the Americans.”

Mr. Turpin looked at Commodore Drummond blankly. “Americans, sir? It, er, wasn’t Americans. It was the Special Operations first of all, then, er -“ his face went blank a moment, “Russians later on. For some reason.”

“Special Operations were the men we saw in the wood”, said Ant. “Weren’t they.”

“Yes”, said Ant. “Yes, that’s right. A top secret tentacle of the UK government. They’d pulled in one of our Irregulars, Quantrill, sir, and they must have gotten the place and time we were loading up the Astromoke out of him. Luckily for me, Drague still always turns up to a bust in that great big car of his. As soon as I saw it through the trees, I knew what was going on and ran, though one of them took a shot at me and wounded me in the hand.”

The Commodore frowned. “George Quantrill. A good man. A pity.”

“George volunteered to infiltrate Earth society for us and buy up goods we needed”, explained Mr. Turpin to Ant, Glenn Bob and Cleo. “That’s what an Irregular is.”

“But you can build flying saucers”, said Ant. “You’re miles ahead of anyone on Earth. What do you need to buy stuff on Earth for?”

The Commodore shifted from prosthesis to prosthesis in embarrassment. “Out here, there are many products we simply cannot, erm, produce”, he admitted. “No matter what replacement compounds we may synthesize, for example, there are still many purposes for which natural rubber is still superior. And there are also many complex electronic and mechanical devices which we just don’t have the capacity to build, but which we nevertheless still desperately require.”

“And you still like your malt whisky”, said Ant.

The Commodore looked at the floor guiltily, but said nothing.

“And your prawn cocktail crisps”, said Cleo.

The Commodore cleared his throat nervously. “I can see you understand us perhaps a little better than we would like. What happens, as you’ve guessed, is that we send out the occasional ship, under the command of one of our very best pilots, to run the gauntlet of the Earth’s defences and land a very brave man on Earth who then tries to acquire some of these items, these devices, these substances, these crisps, that we cannot manufacture here. George Quantrill was one such man. He was acting in the very best interests of his town and colony. I assure you there were items in that cargo that were sorely needed for our colony’s survival. George Quantrill was not lost for crisps alone.”

“Mr. Quantrill’s cover wasn’t good enough”, said Cleo.

“No”, agreed Turpin. “He was rumbled when he checked into a hospital after getting stung by a nettle. Earth people don’t do that”, he said, “erm, apparently.”

“What’ll happen to Mr. Quantrill now?” said Ant.

“If he’s lucky”, said the Commodore darkly, “they’ll kill him.”

“They can’t do that”, protested Cleo. “He has rights. Since 1969, Britain has not had the Death Penalty.”

“Mr. Quantrill”, said Turpin through gritted teeth, “doesn’t exist. He was not born on Earth, so no-one will notice if he dies on it.”

“We lose many of our very best men this way”, said the Commodore. “We land them outside some English town, and they try to get jobs and places to stay and beaver along just like any normal Earthman. But sooner or later, the fact that they aren’t Earthmen always catches them out. One of our Irregulars asked the stewardess in a British Airways jet why the plane didn’t just take off and land vertically. Another one only ever travelled by tube across London and held a heavy book over his head all the time he was outdoors in case it rained acid on him. Our level of knowledge of basic Earth life gets more outdated day by day. I, for example, believed until recently that young people would be seen dead in public wearing flared trousers.” He laughed at his own naïveté.

“Young people are seen in public wearing flared trousers”, said Cleo defiantly. “It’s called Retro Chic.”

The Commodore shrugged, smiled and spread his arms wide helplessly.

“We can tell you what young people would be seen in public wearing”, blurted Ant.

“Pardon?” said the Commodore.

Ant felt foolish. He could feel his ears begin to redden. “Well”, he started uncertainly, particularly since Cleo was glaring at him, “we are normal Earthmen, er, Earthboys, er, Earthgirls, Earthchildren. We know what Earth people do and don’t do.”

The Commodore’s expression lit up with joy, so suddenly that Ant had a peculiar feeling he had been railroaded. “Really?” He slid back the top of his cane and pushed one of his makeshift buttons, which Ant was disturbed to see was labelled SUMMON DEVERIL.

Cleo nudged Ant. “Maybe the Commodore’s a dyslexic satanist”, she whispered.

The Commodore tapped his feet impatiently. Occasionally, he rolled up his sleeve, looked at his watch, and tutted.

“Capital fellow, Deveril”, he said. “But not strong on punctuality.”

Eventually, the door to the sickbay opened and a young man burst in clutching a sheaf of papers. His hairdo, Ant noted with some alarm, was not a mullet, but a peculiar Style With No Name that grew long on one side of his face and short on the other. So long was this hair that only one of his eyes was visible, giving him the appearance of a sullen teenager. He wore what seemed to be a Volkswagen car badge around his neck on a chain, and a pink T shirt which seemed, bafflingly, to stop short of his navel.

The Commodore noticed Ant staring at the young man’s hairdo.

“Mr. Deveril is excused a sensible haircut on account of his Earth Familiarization duties”, he said. “He is our Earth Familiarization Officer.”

“Sorry I’m late, sir”, said Deveril, saluting and dropping several of his papers. “I had a number of nearly new copies of Vogue, Railway Modeller, and Soldier of Fortune to read.”

“Mr. Deveril”, said the Commodore, “may I introduce two genuine Earth people.” He indicated Ant and Cleo proudly.

“Hmm.” Mr. Deveril squinted at them critically. He walked round the back of them and looked them up and down.

“Not bad, not bad. The uniforms would give them away back in Blighty, of course. And these things”, he said, fingering Cleo’s hair extensions, “are just so Seventies. Does anyone on Earth still want to look like Bob Marley? I don’t think so!” He opened Cleo’s mouth with his fingers. She snapped at them. He jumped back and snatched his papers to his chest.

“Uh, the dental work is also far too good for England”, he said. “I would suggest poor quality amalgam fillings in some of the molars, and maybe ripping out an incisor or two. And the boy’s look is hopeless. He should really be back-combing his hair more, and adding maybe a touch of eyeliner. The New Romantics -“

“These two”, repeated the Commodore heavily, still smiling though through gritted teeth, “are genuine Earth people.”

Mr. Deveril stopped dead cold short in his tracks.

He stared from Ant to Cleo, and from Cleo to Ant.

“No”, he said, in wonder.

“But yes”, said the Commodore. “I thought it might be appropriate for them to spend an hour or two with you in order to discuss current Earth trends and fashions.”

“Oh yes”, said Mr. Deveril, gazing at Ant in awe, “most certainly, yes! Genuine Earth people, here!” He grabbed Ant’s hand and pumped it up and down. “It’s an honour, believe me. An honour!” He stepped a little closer to Cleo. “Tell me - how is the Quo’s latest album?”

“What”, said Cleo in annoyance, “is the Quo?”

Mr. Deveril stared at Cleo aghast, as if she’d told him England had sunk beneath the waves and was no longer commonly believed in by anyone but Charles Berlitz.

“The Quo”, he repeated. “The Quo - is the Quo.”

“I can see you have a great deal to talk about”, said the Commodore hugely.