“Yessir. Return ticket to England.”
Sable fingered the scales in his pocket. “Make that a single,” he said. “I’ll be making my own way back. Oh, and call the office for me, cancel all appointments.”
“How long for, sir?”
“The foreseeable future.”
And in the Burger Lord, behind the counter, the stout man with the cowlick slid another half-dozen burgers onto the grill. He was the happiest man in the whole world and he was singing, very softly.
“. . . y’ain’t never caught a rabbit,” he hummed to himself, “and y’ain’t no friend of mine … ”
THE THEM LISTENED with interest. There was a light drizzle which was barely kept at bay by the old iron sheets and frayed bits of lino that roofed their den in the quarry, and they always looked to Adam to think up things to do when it was raining. They weren’t disappointed. Adam’s eyes were agleam with the joy of knowledge.
It had been 3:00 a.m. before he’d gone to sleep under a pile of New Aquarians.
“An’ then there was this man called Charles Fort,” he said. “He could make it rain fish and frogs and stuff.”
“Huh,” said Pepper. “I bet. Alive frogs?”
“Oh, yes,” said Adam, warming to his subject. “Hopping around and croaking and everything. People paid him money to go away in the end an’, an’ … ” He racked his brains for something that would satisfy his audience; he’d done, for Adam, a lot of reading in one go. “. . . And he sailed off in the Mary Celeste and founded the Bermuda Triangle. It’s in Bermuda,” he added helpfully.
“No, he couldn’t of done that,” said Wensleydale sternly, “because I’ve read about the Mary Celeste, and there was no one on it. It’s famous for having no one on it. They found it floating around all by itself with no one on it.”
“I dint say he was on it when they found it, did I?” said Adam scathingly. “Course he wasn’t on it. ’Cos of the UFOs landin’ and takin’ him off. I thought everyone knew about that.”
The Them relaxed a bit. They were on firmer ground with UFOs. They weren’t entirely certain about New Age UFOs, though; they’d listened politely to Adam on the subject, but somehow modern UFOs lacked punch.
“If I was an alien,” said Pepper, voicing the opinion of them all, “I wouldn’t go round telling people all about mystic cosmic harmony. I’d say,” her voice became hoarse and nasal, like someone hampered by an evil black mask, “ ‘Thish ish a lasher blashter, sho you do what you’re told, rebel swine.”’
They all nodded. A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones™. (It had been agreed without a word being said that if anyone was going to play the part of any stupid princesses, it wasn’t going to be Pepper.) But the game normally ended in a fight to be the one who was allowed to wear the coal scuttle™ and blow up planets. Adam was best at it—when he was the villain, he really sounded as if he could blow up the world. The Them were, anyway, temperamentally on the side of planet destroyers, provided they could be allowed to rescue princesses at the same time.
“I s’pect that’s what they used to do,” said Adam. “But now it’s different. They all have this bright blue light around ’em and go around doing good. Sort of g’lactic policemen, going round tellin’ everyone to live in universal harmony and stuff.”
There was a moment’s silence while they pondered this waste of perfectly good UFOs.
“What I’ve always wondered,” said Brian, “is why they call ’em UFOs when they know they’re flying saucers. I mean, they’re Identified Flying Objects then.”
“It’s ’cos the goverment hushes it all up,” said Adam. “Millions of flying saucers landin’ all the time and the goverment keeps hushing it up.”
“Why?” said Wensleydale.
Adam hesitated. His reading hadn’t provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarian just took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up.
“’Cos they’re the goverment,” said Adam simply. “That’s what goverments do. They’ve got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they’ve hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets in to work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that’s happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them.”
“I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper,” said Wensleydale, who had on one memorable occasion during the holidays gone unexpectedly into his father’s office, where he had formed certain impressions. “And talks about what was on TV last night.”
“Well, orlright, but after that he gets out the book and the big stamp.”
“Which says ‘Hush It Up,’” said Pepper.
“It says Top Secret,” said Adam, resenting this attempt at bipartisan creativity. “It’s like nucular power stations. They keep blowin’ up all the time but no one ever finds out ’cos the goverment hushes it up.”
“They don’t keep blowing all the time,” said Wensleydale severely. “My father says they’re dead safe and mean we don’t have to live in a greenhouse. Anyway, there’s a big picture of one in my comic26 and it doesn’t say anything about it blowing up.”
“Yes,” said Brian, “but you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what type of picture it was.”
Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, “Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram—”