“I dunno, reely,” said Adam. “It’s amazin’ what you can do with knobs and dials.”
“I got a kit for Christmas,” Wensleydale volunteered. “All electric bits. There were a few knobs and dials in it. You could make a radio or a thing that goes beep.”
“I dunno,” said Adam thoughtfully, “I’m thinkin’ more of certain people patching into the worldwide milit’ry communications network and telling all the computers and stuff to start fightin’.”
“Cor,” said Brian. “That’d be wicked.”
“Sort of,” said Adam.
IT IS A HIGH AND LONELY destiny to be Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents’ Association.
R. P. Tyler, short, well-fed, satisfied, stomped down a country lane, accompanied by his wife’s miniature poodle, Shutzi. R. P. Tyler knew the difference between right and wrong; there were no moral grays of any kind in his life. He was not, however, satisfied simply with being vouchsafed the difference between right and wrong. He felt it his bounden duty to tell the world.
Not for R. P. Tyler the soapbox, the polemic verse, the broadsheet. R. P. Tyler’s chosen forum was the letter column of the Tadfield Advertiser. If a neighbor’s tree was inconsiderate enough to shed leaves into R. P. Tyler’s garden, R. P. Tyler would first carefully sweep them all up, place them in boxes, and leave the boxes outside his neighbor’s front door, with a stern note. Then he would write a letter to the Tadfield Advertiser. If he sighted teenagers sitting on the village green, their portable cassette players playing, and they were enjoying themselves, he would take it upon himself to point out to them the error of their ways. And after he had fled their jeering, he would write to the Tadfield Advertiser on the Decline of Morality and the Youth of Today.
Since his retirement last year the letters had increased to the point where not even the Tadfield Advertiser was able to print all of them. Indeed, the letter R. P. Tyler had completed before setting out on his evening walk had begun:
Sirs,
I note with distress that the newspapers of today no longer feel obligated to their public, we, the people who pay your wages …
He surveyed the fallen branches that littered the narrow country road. I don’t suppose, he pondered, they think of the cleaning up bill when they send us these storms. Parish Council has to foot the bill to clean it all up. And we, the taxpayers, pay their wages …
The they in this thought were the weather forecasters on Radio Four,51 whom R. P. Tyler blamed for the weather.
Shutzi stopped by a roadside beech tree to cock its leg.
R. P. Tyler looked away, embarrassed. It might be that the sole purpose of his evening constitutional was to allow the dog to relieve itself, but he was dashed if he’d admit that to himself. He stared up at the storm clouds. They were banked up high, in towering piles of smudged gray and black. It wasn’t just the flickering tongues of lightning that forked through them like the opening sequence of a Frankenstein movie; it was the way they stopped when they reached the borders of Lower Tadfield. And in their center was a circular patch of daylight; but the light had a stretched, yellow quality to it, like a forced smile.
It was so quiet.
There was a low roaring.
Down the narrow lane came four motorbikes. They shot past him, and turned the corner, disturbing a cock pheasant who whirred across the lane in a nervous arc of russet and green.
“Vandals!” called R. P. Tyler after them.
The countryside wasn’t made for people like them. It was made for people like him.
He jerked Shutzi’s lead, and they marched along the road.
Five minutes later he turned the corner, to find three of the motorcyclists standing around a fallen signpost, a victim of the storm. The fourth, a tall man with a mirrored visor, remained on his bike.
R. P. Tyler observed the situation, and leaped effortlessly to a conclusion. These vandals—he had, of course, been right—had come to the countryside in order to desecrate the War Memorial and to overturn signposts.
He was about to advance on them sternly, when it came to him that he was outnumbered, four to one, and that they were taller
than he was, and that they were undoubtedly violent psychopaths. No one but a violent psychopath rode motorbikes in R. P. Tyler’s world.
So he raised his chin and began to strut past them, without apparently noticing they were there,52 all the while composing in his head a letter (Sirs, this evening I noted with distress a large number of hooligans on motorbicycles infesting Our Fair Village. Why, oh Why, does the government do nothing about this plague of … ).
“Hi,” said one of the motorcyclists, raising his visor to reveal a thin face and a trim black beard. “We’re kinda lost.”
“Ah,” said R. P. Tyler disapprovingly.
“The signpost musta blew down,” said the motorcyclist.
“Yes, I suppose it must,” agreed R. P. Tyler. He noticed with surprise that he was getting hungry.