Wish You Were Here (10 page)

Me, though, I just look like one. Maybe, if I'd saved all that money I've frittered away on seeing the goddamn world and spent it on some really drastic cosmetic surgery; well, then I'd look like an egg with Sharon Stone's nose. Fact is, either you got it or you ain't; and I . . .

I get to see lots of countryside. Lewis and Clarke, and Jan DeWeese; to boldly go where no one with any sense has gone before. If I had any sense, I'd jump in this goddamn lake right now and do myself a favour. Oh, if only I didn't have a face like a prune. If only I was—

So musing, she stuck her foot in a tree-root.

Splash.

 

‘Hang on,' Wesley grumbled. ‘There's something in my shoe.'

‘That'd be your foot, surely.'

‘As well as my foot.'

‘Never mind. We're nearly there now.'

Wesley laughed, although the sound he produced had as much to do with amusement as an oven has to do with efficient ice-cream production. ‘I think you said that before,' he sighed.

‘I did. This time, it's true.'

This time, it was a squirrel saying it. On the previous occasions the words had been spoken by a beautiful girl, a whitetail deer, a wild turkey, a brown bear, a pheasant, an elm tree and a derelict 1974 Chevy. This perpetual flitting from shape to shape was beginning to get on Wesley's nerves, and he said as much.

‘Bigot.'

‘Oh come on,' Wesley replied, stopping where he was and sitting down on a rock. ‘It's hardly fair, is it? I mean, how am I supposed to have a sensible conversation with you when I don't even know what you are?'

‘Don't see the problem myself. And do you mind not sitting on me when I'm talking to you?'

Wesley looked down. ‘Oh, you're that now, are you? What was wrong with the squirrel?'

‘Heights. And besides, we're here now.'

‘Are we?' Wesley lifted his head and looked around him. It wasn't an enlightening experience; this patch of forest looked just like the patch they'd traipsed through an hour ago. He could even still see the lake below them through the trees. In fact, the lake didn't seem to have moved at all. Wesley voiced this suspicion.

‘Well, it wouldn't, would it? Be reasonable.'

‘Does you being a rock now have anything to do with us having arrived?'

‘Yes,' replied the rock. ‘Hey, you're beginning to get the hang of this.'

‘OK,' Wesley said. ‘Why, now that we're here, are you a rock?'

‘Because bears don't eat rocks.'

‘Bears? What bears?'

‘Hey. I'm in no position to point them out for you, being a rock and all, but if you stay there you'll see them soon enough.'

‘Oh, for God's—' Wesley jumped up, swivelled his head two or three times, then looked up at the tree above him.

‘Bears can climb trees,' said the rock. ‘Rather better than you can.'

‘Thanks a lot. What can't they do?'

‘Oh, all sorts of things. For a start, they can't play musical instruments.'

‘Apart from not play musical instruments.'

‘Well,' said the rock pleasantly. ‘I never yet heard of a bear who could pull a magic tomahawk from a tree and use it to defend himself with.'

‘Neither can I.'

‘Huh!' replied the rock scornfully. ‘That's what you think. Why don't you give it a try? After all, this is supposed to be a learning experience.'

‘Because,' Wesley said, ‘there isn't one. Not in this tree, anyway.'

‘What?' That's what a puzzled rock sounds like, folks. Now you know. ‘How do you mean, there isn't one?'

‘I mean there isn't one. Come on, I thought rocks were what they make silicon chips out of.'

‘But there ought to be . . .' The rock fell silent. ‘Oh. Sorry about this.'The rock vanished, and was replaced by the beautiful girl. Wesley took one look at the expression on her face and decided there were probably more ferocious things in the forest than bears, after all.

‘Talks!' the girl shouted. ‘Yes, you, Talks To Squirrels! Put it back!'

There was a
tchock!
noise directly above Wesley's head. He glanced up, and suddenly there was this sort of axe thing sticking in the tree, or rather hanging loosely from the bark. It had a stone blade and the haft was perhaps eighteen inches long and decorated with two threadbare eagle's feathers. It'd terrify the life out of you if you happened to be a small twig.

Wesley looked at it glumly. ‘Magic tomahawk?' he asked.

‘Magic tomahawk,' the girl replied, vanishing.

He reached up and managed to catch it before it fell out of the tree. ‘Magic,' he asked, ‘in what sense?'

‘Give it a top hat and you'll never want for rabbits.'

Wesley was just about to pass an observation on the appropriate timing of comic remarks when the bears arrived. There were seven of them, and the smallest would just about have squeezed into a Ford Fiesta if you took the seats out first.

‘If I were you,' muttered the rock, ‘I'd run away.'

 

 

S
omeone with rather less self-confidence might have found it just a trifle disconcerting.

Not Linda Lachuk. She had postulated submarines, as being journalistically right, and here submarines were. Naturally, if she ordained submarines, submarines would be provided. To have expected anything else would have been like Christ taking a hip-flask to the wedding at Cana.

‘Ahoy there!' she shouted.

The ship turned obediently, like a good dog, and sliced a deep cut through the lake top towards her. An otter popped its head up above the surface, took a good look and vanished again, leaving a circle of ripples like a cup-mark on a newly french-polished table.

‘Good morning, miss,' someone shouted from behind the dragon prow. ‘And how you can we be herlping?'

Linda caught her breath. That was no American voice, booming out to her across the meniscus of one of Uncle Sam's most secret military installations. That high, nasal, sing-song quality - instinctively she sent a search-and-correlate memo to the librarians of her memory, ordering them to pull the file on
Crocodile Dundee
.

An Australian . . .

Actually, he didn't sound all that much like Paul Hogan; but there were other similarities, too striking to ignore. The blond hair. The leather jerkin. The necklace of wild beast's fangs. The big knife strapped to his midriff.

Probably, she rationalised, it's some kind of regional accent. Adelaide, or one of those places.

‘Hi,' she yelled back. ‘Are you Australian?'

‘Your pardon begging?'

‘Are - you -
Australian
?'

She scowled. Perfectly simple question; but by the looks of it, either he didn't understand or he was playing dumb. He shrugged his huge shoulders and plastered some kind of dumb friendly smile across his face. She tried again.

‘From Australia,' she shouted slowly. ‘Down under. Um. Oz.'

‘Oz?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Ah!' The man nodded, with such overpowering friendliness that she half expected him to vanish and reappear a moment later with a rubber ball in his mouth. ‘From Oseberg. Yes, from there am I. Presently.'

‘Right. Now then—'

‘My name,' he went on, ‘is Lief the Lemming. To be helping you, in what manner?'

Linda breathed in. ‘Your subm—'

The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a horrible noise, as the ship seemed to trip over something. It shuddered, from carved wooden periscope to pointed duck's tail thing at the other end. From below the deck came muffled cries of ‘Excuse me, please,' ‘Drat,' and, ‘To be sinking, the ship!' They sounded surprised; but Linda wasn't.

They were being silenced.

Typical CIA trick. She should perhaps have thought about that, before she blew their cover with the direct accusation of Australianness. Still, couldn't be helped now. At least she'd be able to get some good shots of the boat sinking. Quickly she felt in her bag for her camera -

- And remembered. Damnit, no batteries in the misbegotten thing. Of all the rotten luck.

‘Hey!' she shouted. ‘Excuse me!'

Lief the Lemming froze in the act of lowering the ship's only lifeboat, and turned to look at her. ‘Excuse me, please?'

Linda smiled. ‘You wouldn't happen to have any batteries, would you? For my camera. Just plain old LR13s, if you can spare me a couple.'

‘Batteries?'

‘Yeah. You know,' Linda replied crossly. ‘Power cells. C'mon, you gotta have some on that tub of yours. Or does everything in Australia run on clockwork?'

‘Excusing me please a moment.' Lief left the lifeboat dangling six feet or so above the water and ducked down under the deck. From where she stood, Linda could hear a muffled conference but no distinguishable words. This was so
frustrating
—

‘Little Bjorn,' said Lief, popping his head up above the level of the deck, ‘speculating is batteries to mean instances of battery or common asserlt. To which truthfully answering, on a voyage long, tempers to be occasionally fraying but rarely in fisticuffs resulting, rather to be out of our systems got by exercise healthy and good and much of deck footberl playing. And now to excuse me, the ship . . .'

Linda folded her arms grimly. ‘Quit fooling around, will you?' she growled, and the severe expression on her face made her look like an angel who's just been given a dodgy cheque. ‘Don't act dumb with me. I want those batteries now, mister. The people have a right to—'

But at that moment the ship suddenly capsized, hit the reflection of itself in the still water and vanished into a bubble and an empty-bath gurgle, leaving Linda standing on the shore breathing hard through her nose.

Yes. Well. She'd see about that. Sooner or later, people were going to learn that the more you tried to put Linda Lachuk off the story, the harder she came back. OK, so it would have been nice to have gotten real live-action pictures of the sub going down; staged re-creations for the camera are all very well, but they lack that intangible spontaneity that you only get when there are actual people genuinely dying for real. Still, it wasn't the end of the world.There'd be other chances; and at the very least, she'd seen a palpably real submarine and spoken to a palpably real Australian. If they thought she was just going to shrug her shoulders and meekly walk away, they had a surprise coming.

She picked up her bag, shrugged her shoulders and started to walk (unmeekly) away. She had gone maybe ten yards when something warm and wet pressed against her ankle. She stopped.

It wasn't a wholly unfamiliar experience; but where she came from, something warm and wet rubbing against one's ankle usually turned out to be one of the guys from the sports page crawling back to his desk after lunch. She looked down.

It was an otter. It was long and sleek and cute, like a performing bratwurst, and in its mouth it held a packet of four LR13 batteries.

‘Why, you little—' Linda stooped and lunged for it with both hands, but it slipped through her fingers and waddled jauntily into the lake. A moment later, as soon as she'd dumped her bag and kicked off her shoes, Linda dived after it.

The last thought to cross her mind before the water closed over her head was,
God, I really want this story!

 

‘Chief!'

‘What now?'

‘Where are we, Chief?'

‘If I knew that, Twist, we'd be somewhere else by now. Shut up, there's a good lad.'

After half an hour in the tunnel it had occurred to all the smugglers, even the ones with oatmeal for brains, that something was wrong. A tunnel where a tunnel had no business being. A tunnel that hadn't been there before. A tunnel leading where?

‘Chief!'

‘So help me, Twist, just as soon as there's enough room I'm going to wring your bloody—'

‘Light, Chief. Straight ahead. Can you see it?'

‘Damnit, yes!'

‘It's the sort of white twinkly stuff, there, just a bit to the left of where I'm—'

‘Thank you, Twist, I have seen daylight before. Like when you're standing sideways on and I look through your ear.'

‘Chief?'

‘Forget it. Get a move on, will you? Let's get out of here, for pity's sake.'

A few anxious moments later Captain Hat scrambled out of a hole in the ground, looked round to make sure the coast was clear and hauled himself to his feet. His knees hurt; or, to be more accurate, his knees hurt most.