Wish You Were Here (33 page)

She was snuffling away like a chain-smoking baby seal when a soft cough behind her made her turn. There, damnit, were Murdoch, Skellidge and the Prince.

‘Excuse me,' said the Prince.

She looked at him warily. She knew what was coming; he had that dreadful pink-hearts-and-plastic-flowers look in his eyes that she had come, in a relatively short space of time, to know rather well.

‘Um,' she said.

‘I hope you don't mind me asking,' he said, ‘but, um, what are you doing for dinner this evening?'

Janice took a deep breath. Oh, she reflected, it would be so easy. After all, he was unspeakably attractive and his voice was like a violet-scented breeze humming in the neck of an empty milk bottle and all the cloudless skies of summer were reflected in his deep blue eyes—

‘Huh?' she asked.

‘Only,' he went on, ‘if you're not frightfully busy I happen to know this really rather nice Sumatran restaurant where they do this really authentic . . .'

And not only the Prince. Skellidge was gazing at her like a lovesick traffic bollard, and Murdoch was respectfully pining away before her very eyes. Aaagh! she thought.

‘Sorry,' she replied quickly. ‘I'm, um, busy. I'm meeting someone. My, er, boyfriend. Well, when I say boyfriend, really I mean to say husband. He's a prince too, you know; or rather, more like a king. An emperor, actually. Sorry about that. Another time, perhaps.'

The Prince gave her a smouldering look down the side of his perfect nose. ‘An emperor, huh?'

‘That's right.'

‘Anybody I'd have heard of? I know most of the emperors in these parts.'

Janice swallowed. ‘Oh, he's not from round here,' she said, as casually as she could. ‘Actually, our empire's ever such a long way away, in, um, Australia, but we're on a state visit, and there's this dreary old diplomatic function we've got to go to, so . . .'

‘I see,' replied the Prince. ‘In that case, I shall make a point of seeking out this emperor, putting him to the edge of the sword and claiming you for my own. Murdoch, mobilise the army. Skellidge, declare war on Australia. In fact,' he added, brightly, ‘we could all save a lot of time, if I abducted you now and we did the fighting later. Would that be all right with you? It's just as well,' he added, ‘that we've just finished upgrading our first strike capability, because that means my FT62s will have taken out Melbourne and Brisbane before we've finished our prawn cocktails.You do like prawn cocktails, I hope, only I've taken the liberty of ordering . . .'

‘Hold it,' Janice said. ‘Are you seriously telling me you'd bomb Australia and kill thousands of people just to get me?'

The Prince nodded. ‘It's traditional,' he added. ‘That's how a Prince shows he really cares. A declaration of war says more than flowers ever can.'

‘Ah.'

‘That's what all girls really want, you see. Well-known fact. Is this the face that launched a thousand bombs and burned the topless towers of Adelaide? That's psychology, you see. You need to know that sort of stuff when you hold the lives of millions in the palm of your hand.'

‘I see.' Janice nodded slowly. ‘You don't feel that killing thousands of people, as against the more usual bunch of flowers and box of chocolates, isn't maybe a bit . . . ?'

The Prince shook his head slowly. ‘For beauty such as yours,' he said softly, ‘what other tribute could there possibly be? You were born to be fought for—'

‘You mean, like the Gaza Strip, sort of thing?'

‘No,' snapped the Prince. ‘Like Helen of Troy, except that you outshine Helen as the sun outshines the furthest star. And we've got to make sure that the body-count reflects that.'

‘Right,' Janice said, walking slowly backwards. ‘I hear what you say, but—'

‘In fact,' whispered the Prince dreamily, ‘on reflection I can't see that anything short of an all-out nuclear holocaust wouldn't be a positive insult. Murdoch, the smart missiles, quickly!'

As Murdoch bowed and produced an attaché case that opened to reveal a miniature control console with a shiny red button in the middle of it, Janice couldn't help wondering why the sheep on the hillside opposite were looking at her and rubbing their front hooves together.

 

 

L
inda Lachuk opened her eyes.

So much, she reflected bitterly, for the ultimate scoop. At the precise moment when she connected with the live wire and felt a billion or so volts start to pump through her body, the thought uppermost in her mind had been that she was on the verge of getting the inside story on the biggest feature of them all; namely Death.
Hell
, she'd said to herself as she felt her heart stop beating,
if only there was some way to get my copy in, I'd die happy—

And here she was, alive and apparently none the worse for wear, and she couldn't remember a thing about it. What, she wondered, had happened to her during that unquantified lost time? Had she died and gone to Heaven? Had she been chucked out of Heaven back down to Earth for pushing her way through the crowd of angels gathered round the celestial throne and demanding that God admit to his complicity in the Vaticangate scandal?

Hmmm—

Nah. Not without something like corroborative evidence. She'd probably be able to sell it to the California papers, but it wouldn't cut any ice in New York.

She sat up and looked about her; nothing but trees, rocks and the lake, lying flat on its back like a giant mirror.

Query; if you fall into a giant mirror, does that mean seven years' bad luck? If so, it would explain the rotten day she was having. So close, so very close to a story that'd guarantee her the Pulitzer Prize, and yet there was something she couldn't quite . . .

She stood up. Overhead, a thick wedge of ducks circled, watching her. A stream of bubbles a few yards from the shore showed the passage of an otter like a vapour trail. For a fleeting, treacherous moment, Linda wondered whether she mightn't have been better off right from the start if she'd gone into nature features instead of current affairs. From where she stood she could see yards, literally yards of potentially award-winning copy: waterfowl clowning adorably, small mammals furrily fornicating, butterflies doing whatever the hell it is butterflies do. Goddamnit, Linda thought bitterly, people get up and make cups of tea while a man stands talking into a lonely lens in the middle of some East European battle; but let someone go creeping up on a bunch of gorillas and the nation holds its breath. So what? Where the hell's the
story
in wildlife?

And then she noticed something.

The ducks weren't circling because she was there; it was the small party of men in faded green cotton shorts, wearing wide-brimmed hats with corks dangling from them, that had flushed them off the lake. And the string of bubbles wasn't an otter. It was a periscope.

Instinctively, Linda dropped to her knees, grinding her shin against a pointy rock as she did so. She didn't feel the pain; all Pain got was her answering machine, because she was far too preoccupied to take any notice. As carefully as she could, she crawled downhill towards the water's edge.

‘G'day.'

Linda froze. Even the blood in her veins stood still.

‘I said, G'day, miss. Where d'you want it?'

Slowly as a lazy glacier on its way to the dentist's, Linda turned her head. She was looking at a pair of plastic open-toed beach sandals. Raising her head a trifle, she could see a pair of brown hairy knees.

‘Sorry?' she said.

‘This flamin' block of stone,' the man said patiently. ‘Where d'you want us to put it?'

‘I . . . I'm not sure,' Linda stuttered. ‘H-haven't made up my mm—'

The man gave her a long look, such as you'd use on a particularly stupid log. ‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘You just sign for it, here.' A clipboard moved down until it was on a level with her nose. ‘Then we can be on our way, and you can put the ruddy thing wherever you want, soon as you've made your mind up. Got a pen?'

‘Pen,' Linda repeated, trying to remember what a pen was. ‘Oh, right, yes. Thank you, I have got a pen, yes.'

The man sighed. ‘Then why don't you get it out and sign me flamin' chit? That's it, you got it. OK darlin', it's all yours. Careful with it, mind, it's all bombs and rockets and things inside.'

‘What?' Linda shrieked; but the man wasn't there any more. In his place stood a huge concrete block, out of which were sticking nosecaps and tailfins and small areas of side panel with DANGER stencilled on them. As Linda crawled over to it, she noticed an envelope Sellotaped to the side; she ripped it open, unfolded the paper inside and read -

- all underneath an official-looking crest with an eagle and E PLURIBUS UNUM involved in it. Linda folded the note carefully, as if it were God's signed confession, and tucked it away in her top pocket.

Tractor spares! Hah! That's what they always say!

Well now, she said to herself, running a hand down the side of the block just to make sure it was really real, you wanted hard evidence, here it is. Now there's just the problem of how the hell to get it back home and in front of a camera. Piece of cake? Well, not quite.

Indiana Jones, she mused, never seems to worry about this sort of thing; and neither does James Bond, or the guys in Westerns who discover wagonloads of Confederate gold buried in the heart of the desert. The camera fades out, and the next shot is either THE END or our hero snogging the girl in a gondola floating down the Canal Grande. There's a cinematic convention that allows you to assume that somehow or other the heavy lifting gets done, the treasure is all neatly packed up in tea-chests and shipped back home, without even a squeak out of the customs men. Getting back to civilisation from here
without
a twenty-ton concrete block was probably going to turn out to be a bigger adventure than anything Mister Bond ever did in his life; and even if she somehow succeeded in getting this infernal megalith out to the airport and onto the plane, the baggage handlers at New York would probably manage to send it to Fort Worth along with the rest of her luggage, the way they usually did.

Which was something of a nuisance, all told, bearing in mind that she was the only person standing between civilisation as we know it and global Armageddon.

A bit over the top? Not likely; because unless she could somehow get this evidence away, break the story and stop the shipments, there could only be one outcome. Because whatever His Holiness wanted with all this hardware, it wasn't to turbo-charge his Massey-Ferguson, and it wasn't to hang on the Vatican wall. So; newshound to the rescue. It crossed her mind that, for most of the time at least, Superman was also a journalist. Must sort of go with the territory.

She gazed up at the block. Portable it wasn't. Rather, it was the sort of thing the Pharaohs used to build pyramids with. Even in the centre of Queens you could leave it lying about in the street for ten minutes and be pretty sure it'd still be there when you got back.

This was going to call for some imaginative thinking.

She thought for a while. Her imagination, quicker than lightning and, as often as not, every bit as destructive, graunched into action. She had an idea.

She stood up and walked down the hill.

The men in hats were still hanging about, muttering among themselves.The periscope was now about eighteen inches above water level.The ducks had slung their collective hook, but a couple of whitetail deer were standing tentatively on the opposite side of the lake, watching and looking as if they were making up their minds to write to somebody about it. Enter Linda, walking briskly.

‘Hey,' she called out, ‘you.'

‘
G'day
.'

‘You guys,' Linda snapped, fiddling with the large bit of tree-bark she'd managed to make look something like a clipboard. ‘Quit loafing about there, and help me get the stuff on to the sub.'

Two of the hatted men looked at each other. One of them shrugged, and spat into the water. It was at this point that Linda reached in her pocket and brought out money.

‘Where's the stuff you want shifted?'

‘Over there,' she replied. ‘Careful with it, there's bombs and all sorts.' The money vanished from her hand as quickly and completely as the ham from your sandwich when the pub cat's taken a fancy to it, and a moment later the submarine had surfaced and the block was being winched aboard on a derrick. Although her face remained a mask of polite disinterest, deep in her heart Linda allowed herself a huge, smug grin. True, the money was everything she'd had; until she could get to a bank, she was as broke as a child's toy on Boxing Day. It was worth the risk, though; and besides, fairly soon, sums like that would be too small for her to comprehend.