My Hero (26 page)

Well, quite.

FLUMP.

After a pain break and a brief pause for status checks, Hamlet crawled to his hands and knees and looked up. Directly above him, he could see a horrible, nightmare, cheese-just-before-bedtime vision, a huge reptilian head with gaping jaws and about twelve rows of inward-facing teeth. A thin ropelike tongue drooped from the lower jaw. It was forked.

Above the head, the serpentine body spiralled away upwards into the darkness for as far as the eye could see. The whole thing was huge; about the thickness of an Underground train.

And I, he realised, am kneeling on a thick, bouncy mattress.

I just fell down the snake.

Thinks . . .

Down the snake.

After that, it didn't take him long to find the foot of the ladder. It took him rather longer to climb back up to the top of it, and by the time he crawled, raw-handed and bloody-kneed, over the lip of the hole and back once more into Sherlock Holmes' comfortable bachelor apartment in Baker Street, he was feeling rather tired and sorry
for himself. All in all, he wasn't in the mood for the big framed notice inscribed:
which was the first thing he set eyes on as he emerged. Once he'd caught his breath, however, and had a chance to relieve his feelings by use of colourful and vulgar language, he was able to get a grip on himself and read the small print at the bottom of the notice; which read:

Ripping the notice out of its frame and tearing it into tiny pieces was, objectively speaking, a futile gesture and didn't prove anything, but Hamlet found it helped. A bit.

 

‘Woof,' said the dog.

Because her hands were numb, it took Jane an embarrassingly long time to unbuckle the dog's collar, pull the lid off the barrel and shake out the little foil-wrapped sachet inside. There was writing on the outside, as follows:

 

Emergency Plot
Get Out Of Trouble Free

Jane sat back on her heels and stared at the dog in wonder.

‘Hey,' she breathed. ‘Where have you been all my life?'

 

A sparkling shower of bits, like a shotgun cartridge loaded with glitter and fired by starlight. A dappled twinkling coruscation of tiny flickers, scrapes and flakes of colour, drifting and swirling. A glass snowstorm paperweight, based on an idea by Magritte, Dali and Bosch.

Reality is stranger than fiction. It can afford to be. Reality doesn't have to worry about getting letters that start off,
Dear Sir, Are you aware that on page 153 . . . ?

A million or so bits came together and formed the bounty hunter, all seven feet two of jury-rigged, solder-it-together-and-hope DIY genesis. The big boots. The crudely hand-stitched seam on the forehead. And, yes, the bolt through the neck. God, but every bit of him
hurt
.

Travelling through time by science fact, as opposed to science fiction, is rather like going by rail, in the guard's van, in the bottom of a big tea chest full of rusty lumps of iron, instead of flying, first class, Air Canada. It gets you there, and that's about all you can say for it.

The bounty hunter sat up. He was on Main Street; except that it was slightly different from all the Main Streets down which a man must walk where he came from. No horses tethered to rails outside saloons. No manly men and womanly women bustling about their everyday chores. No distant gunfire as the cowpokes celebrated reaching the end of the Lone Star trail. The houses were still timber-framed and the shops were dusty and board-fronted, but there were a handful of cars parked out in the street, and here and there a few TV aerials were sprouting through, like the first green shoots of spring. Across the way, a man in dungarees was putting
a new pane of glass into a cucumber frame; apart from that, he had the place to himself. Welcome to the nineteen-fifties, dateline Chicopee Falls, Iowa.

The bounty hunter grinned.

Temporal displacement theory: a time and a place for everything. If you take something out of its time and place, it leaves a hole, the kind of gap that Nature proverbially abhors. If you then disperse that something into its component physical and temporal particles, for example by bringing it into contact with an overloaded random particle accelerator, the extremely powerful natural phenomenon known as Force of Habit ought to return it to its proper place and time, just as the string jerks back the yo-yo, or the subliminal guidance system directs the racing pigeon. Doesn't always work, but the same goes for computers, lifts and expensive electrical appliances of all kinds. The effect had brought the bounty hunter back to the place and time where he had been created, Realside, by the pulp novelist Albert Skinner.

More or less. The margins of error weren't bad; he'd overshot the house by about seventy-five yards, and the time by a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. Doubtful whether it would make any difference, practically speaking. All he had to do was find the mirror window and go through, and he'd be back where he wanted to be. There's a special providence which looks after villains, particularly when they're needed in the last reel. It's like having a combination safe-conduct and bus pass, or being seeded through into the quarter-finals.

The body, he reflected as he trudged up the street, was a bit of a pain, but that was likely to be nothing more than a temporary problem. Thanking his lucky stars he wasn't really Real, he opened the gate and walked up the short path to Albert Skinner's house.

The second law of heroism, briefly stated, is that whereas all engineers are heroes, not all heroes are engineers. To put it another way, there's no correct answer to the question
How many heroes does it take to change a light bulb?
for the same reason that there isn't one to
How many elephants are there in the average can of giraffes?
It's a non-question. Heroes don't change light bulbs. Shoot them out, swing from them, unscrew them for use as improvised weapons, yes; change them, no.

Confronted with the problem of how to get back into Fiction, therefore, Regalian had to admit that he wasn't quite sure where to start. Jumping through the broken window had a certain specious attraction, but his basic common sense told him that it wasn't as simple as that; and he had enough on his plate without bruises, concussion and bits of broken glass embedded in his kneecaps.

Think.

Half an hour of rummaging through cupboards, drawers, the bottoms of wardrobes, trunks, chests and old orange boxes produced as diverse a collection of junk as you could possibly hope to find, but none of it produced the intuitive spark in Regalian's mind that would lead to a brilliantly innovative solution. Apart from the thought that he could hold a garage sale and live comfortably on the proceeds for quite some time, he was no better off than before.

Item: a hammer.

Item: a screwdriver, bent, rusty.

Item: a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Item: two saucepans with the bottoms burnt out.

Item: a hundred and six dog-eared paperback detective novels, long-distance rail travellers for the use of.

Item . . .

Some people, for example Leonardo da Vinci, James Watt and the Wright Brothers, must have felt this way all
the time. For Regalian, however, it was a novel experience; the weird, slightly hallucinatory feeling of being on the sharp end of a really spiffing idea. As he stood in Skinner's kitchen, staring at the heap of junk he'd piled up on every available surface, Regalian could hear the words
character bomb
throbbing away in the back of his brain like a sore tooth.

 

(CHARACTER BOMB: Regalian was, of course, rein-venting the wheel
^TM
. Character bombs have been around for a very long time; but they live in those big concrete underground playpens out in the desert where the military hoard their toys, so it's hardly surprising that Regalian wasn't familiar with the concept.

Consider the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings standing. The character bomb takes out derivative characters without wrecking the mainframe.

Confused? Try this. A vampire-dedicated character bomb would eliminate every vampire in literature, up to and including the works of Anne Rice, with the exception of Bram Stoker's original Dracula. Let off a spy-dedicated bomb, and once the smoke had cleared there would be holes in the works of Deighton, Le Carré, Forsyth, Clancy etc. through which you could drive a Mercedes lorry, with only
The Thirty-Nine Steps
remaining intact. The devastation that would ensue outside of Tolkien if someone exploded an elf-bomb defies even the most lurid imagination. And so on. Even the thought of such a device would have publishers queuing up to jump from upper-storey windows.

To make a character bomb, take the two most extreme and opposite divergences from the norm that you can think of, put them together, and hide under something solid.)

Character bomb . . .

Well, Regalian said to himself, it might work. He set up the tape recorder on the kitchen table, placed two piles of paperbacks on either side of the microphone, and drew up a chair. He took a book from the left hand pile, opened it at random, switched on and began to read into the mike.

 

‘Ouch!'

The emergency plot or novelist's escape capsule is one of the few truly revolutionary breakthroughs in the fiction industry since the self-calibrating flashback. Simply tear open the foil sachet, and a fully-fledged storyline whisks you up and away, high above any ghastly standstill you may have written yourself into. Suffering from a writer's block that makes the Maginot line look like a sandcastle? Just open the packet, close your eyes and grin.

As far as she could tell, Jane had landed in a large-capacity metal wastepaper basket. To be precise, she was sitting in it, with her legs hanging out over the side like fuchsias in a wilted hanging basket. So thoroughly was she wedged, in fact, that she wasn't quite sure how she was ever going to get out of it.

‘Ouch,' she repeated. She looked round. At first glance, she seemed to be in an office. A foot or so to her left was a big old-fashioned desk; behind that, a veteran filing cabinet, one drawer of which was open and filled with empty whisky bottles. There was a weary-looking chair behind the desk, also of antiquated design. Beyond the chair was a door with a frosted glass panel, on which was written:

The problem with emergency plots is that there's only a very limited number of them. This will, of course, change. As with every epoch-making new invention, the first generation products are heavy, cumbersome, gawkish things, the ugly ducklings which will eventually morph into swans shortly after you've bought one of the original models. Think of the early prototype photocopiers, video cameras, personal computers, CD players. Compare them with the sleek, compact, self-confident triumphs of design you get nowadays. The same will be true, one day, of the emergency plot. Until then; well, there are snags to be ironed out, minor technical difficulties to be dealt with and - here comes the relevance; all stand - only three basic storylines to choose from. These are:

They were out of stock of the other two. They usually are.

‘Help!' Jane observed.

 

Regalian paused, his eyes closed, his face wrinkled as if with pain. Did they have this much trouble out in the New Mexico desert, he wondered; Oppenheimer and all that crowd, when they were building that other potentially quite dangerous bomb? If so, they had his sympathy.

‘Freeze.'

What?

Oh. Oh for crying out loud.

‘You again,' Regalian sighed, without turning his head. ‘How in hell's name did you get here?'

‘Reckon I might just ask you the same thing, partner,' replied the bounty hunter softly. ‘Now, boy, if it's quite convenient, unbuckle your gunbelt and stand up.'

‘I haven't got a gunbelt,' Regalian said, as if someone had just implied he had some unsightly skin disorder. ‘Sorry.'