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  'Now!' exclaimed Old Thrashbarg at last. 'Now you may work them with the towel!'

  Arthur advanced with Ford's towel, moving the way the hunter-matadors did, with a kind of elegant strut that did not come at all naturally to him. But now he knew what to do and that it was right. He brandished and flicked the towel a few times, to be ready for the moment, and then he watched.

  Some distance away he spotted the Beast he wanted. Head down, it was galloping towards him, right on the very edge of the herd. Old Thrashbarg twitched the bird, the Beast looked up, tossed its head, and then, just as its head was coming down again, Arthur flourished the towel in the Beast's line of sight. It tossed its head again in bemusement, and its eyes followed the movement of the towel.

  He had got the Beast's attention.

  From that moment on, it seemed the most natural thing to coax and draw the animal towards him. Its head was up, cocked slightly to one side. It was slowing to a canter and then a trot. A few seconds later the huge thing was standing there amongst them, snorting, panting, sweating, and sniffing excitedly at the pikka bird, which appeared not to have noticed its arrival at all. With strange sort of sweeping movements of his arms Old Thrashbarg kept the pikka bird in front of the Beast, but always out of its reach and always downwards. With strange sort of sweeping movements of the towel, Arthur kept drawing the Beast's attention this way and that-always downwards.

  'I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so stupid in my life,' muttered Ford to himself.

  At last, the Beast dropped, bemused but docile, to its knees.

  'Go!' whispered Old Thrashbarg urgently, to Ford. 'Go! Go now!'

  Ford leapt up on to the great creature's back, scrabbling amongst its thick knotty fur for purchase, grasping great handfuls of the stuff to hold him steady once he was in position.

  'Now, Sandwich Maker! Go!' He performed some elaborate sign and ritual handshake which Arthur couldn't quite get the hang of because Old Thrashbarg had obviously made it up on the spur of the moment, then he pushed Arthur forward. Taking a deep breath, he clambered up behind Ford on to the great, hot, heaving back of the beast and held on tight. Huge muscles the size of sea lions rippled and flexed beneath him.

  Old Thrashbarg held the bird suddenly aloft. The Beast's head swivelled up to follow it. Thrashbarg pushed upwards and upwards repeatedly with his arms and with the pikka bird; and slowly, heavily the Perfectly Normal Beast lurched up off its knees and stood, at last, swaying slightly. Its two riders held on fiercely and nervously.

  Arthur gazed out over the sea of hurtling animals, straining in an attempt to see where it was they were going, but there was nothing but heat haze.

  'Can you see anything?' he said to Ford.

  'No.' Ford twisted round to glance back, trying to see if there was any clue as to where they had come from. Still, nothing.

  Arthur shouted down at Thrashbarg.

  'Do you know where they come from?' he called. 'Or where they're going?'

  'The domain of the King!' shouted Old Thrashbarg back.

  'King?' shouted Arthur in surprise. 'What King?' The Perfectly Normal Beast was swaying and rocking restlessly under him.

  'What do you mean, what King?' shouted Old Thrashbarg. 'The King.'

  'It's just that you never mentioned a King,' shouted Arthur back, in some consternation.

  'What?' shouted Old Thrashbarg. The thrumming of a thou-sand hooves was very hard to hear over, and the old man was concentrating on what he was doing.

  Still holding the bird aloft, he led the Beast slowly round till it was once more parallel with the motion of its great herd. He moved forward. The Beast followed. He moved forward again. The Beast followed again. At last, the Beast was lumbering forward with a little momentum.

  'I said you never mentioned a King!' shouted Arthur again.

  'I didn't say a King,' shouted Old Thrashbarg, ' I said the King.'

  He drew back his arm and then hurled it forward with all his strength, casting the pikka bird up into the air above the herd. This seemed to catch the pikka bird completely by surprise as it had obviously not been paying any attention at all to what was going on. It took it a moment or two to work out what was happening, then it unfurled its little wings, spread them out, and flew.

  'Go!' shouted Thrashbarg. 'Go and meet your destiny, Sandwich Maker!'

  Arthur wasn't so sure about wanting to meet his destiny as such. He just wanted to get to wherever it was they were going so he could get back off this creature again. He didn't feel at all safe up there. The Beast was gathering speed as it followed in the wake of the pikka bird. And then it was in at the fringes of the great tide of animals, and in a moment or two, with its head down, the pikka bird forgotten, it was running with the herd again and rapidly approaching the point at which the herd was vanishing into thin air. Arthur and Ford held on to the great monster for dear life, surrounded on all sides by hurtling mountains of bodies.

  'Go! Ride that Beast!' shouted Thrashbarg. His distant voice reverberated faintly in their ears. 'Ride that Perfectly Normal Beast! Ride it, ride it!'

  Ford shouted in Arthur's ear, 'Where did he say we were going?'

  'He said something about a King,' shouted Arthur in return, holding on desperately.

  'What King?'

  'That's what I said. He just said the King.'

  'I didn't know there was a the King,' shouted Ford.

  'Nor did I,' shouted Arthur back.

  'Except of course for the King,' shouted Ford. 'And I don't suppose he meant him.'

  'What King?' shouted Arthur.

  The point of exit was almost upon them. Just ahead of them, Perfectly Normal Beasts were galloping into nothingness and vanishing.

  'What do you mean, what King?' shouted Ford. 'I don't know what King. I'm only saying that he couldn't possibly mean the King, so I don't know what he means.'

  'Ford, I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'So?' said Ford. Then with a sudden rush, the stars came on, turned and twisted around their heads, and then, just as suddenly, turned off again.

  Chapter 21

  Misty grey buildings loomed and flickered. They bounced up and down in a highly embarrassing way.

  What sort of buildings were they?

  What were they for? What did they remind her of?

  It's so difficult to know what things are supposed to be when you suddenly turn up unexpectedly on a different world which has a different culture, a different set of the most basic assumptions about life, and also incredibly dull and meaningless architecture.

  The sky above the buildings was a cold and hostile black. The stars, which should have been blindingly brilliant points of light this far from the sun were blurred and dulled by the thickness of the huge shielding bubble. Perspex or something like it. Something dull and heavy anyway.

  Tricia wound the tape back again to the beginning.

  She knew there was something slightly odd about it.

  Well, in fact, there were about a million things that were slightly odd about it, but there was one that was nagging at her and she hadn't quite got it.

  She sighed and yawned.

  As she waited for the tape to rewind she cleared away some of the dirty polystyrene coffee cups that had accumulated on the editing desk and tipped them into the bin.

  She was sitting in a small editing suite at a video production company in Soho. She had 'Do not disturb' notices plastered all over the door, and a block on all incoming calls at the switch-board. This was originally to protect her astonishing scoop, but now it was to protect her from embarrassment.

  She would watch the tape all the way through again from the beginning. If she could bear to. She might do some fast forwarding here and there.

  It was' about four o'clock on Monday afternoon, and she had a kind of sick feeling. She was trying to work out what the cause of this slightly sick feeling was, and there was no shortage of candidates.

  First of all, it had all come on top of
the overnight flight from New York. The red eye. Always a killer, that.

  Then, being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing your job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she was sure it was worth a few dozen points.

  It wasn't that the journey had been particularly stressful. It had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.

  Well that was pretty astounding wasn't it? Flying to the outer limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard-of form of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they agreed that it was pretty good.

  'But how does it work?' she had demanded excitedly. She was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.

  She found that part of the tape and played it through to herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves, were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make the ship go.

  'Yes, but what principle does it work on?' she heard herself demand, from behind the camera.

  'Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something like that?' they said.

  'Yes,' persisted Tricia. 'What is it?'

  'It probably is something of the kind,' they said.

  'Like what?'

  'Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You'd have to ask the Flight Engineer.'

  'Which one is he?'

  'We don't know. We have all lost our minds, you see.'

  'Oh yes,' said Tricia, a little faintly. 'So you said. Um, how did you lose your minds, exactly, then?'

  'We don't know,' they said, patiently.

  'Because you've lost your minds,' echoed Tricia, glumly.

  'Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight. We watch television. It is something we enjoy.'

  All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine viewing it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor. Tricia didn't know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultra-violet around which was mucking up the video camera. There were a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew the first thing about.

  So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly thin and discoloured people sitting around watching televisions that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice, slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.

  In the end she had decided to save her precious videotape for Rupert itself and had simply sat back and watched television with them. She had even dozed off for a while.

  So part of her sick feeling came from the sense that she had had all that time in an alien spacecraft of astounding technological design, and had spent most of it dozing in front of reruns of M*A*S*H and Cagney and Lacey. But what else was there to do? She had taken some photos as well, of course, all of which had subsequently turned out to be badly fogged when she got them back from the chemist.

  Another part of her sick feeling probably came from the landing on Rupert. This at least had been dramatic and hair-raising. The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and sombre landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars on the mind of an abandoned child.

  Lights blazed through the frozen darkness and guided the ship into the mouth of some kind of cave that seemed to bend itself open to accept the small craft.

  Unfortunately, because of the angle of their approach, and the depth at which the small thick viewport was set into the craft's skin, it hadn't been possible to get the video camera to point directly at any of it. She ran through that bit of the tape.

  The camera was pointing directly at the sun.

  This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away it doesn't do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all. You just get a small point of light right in the middle of the frame, which could be just about anything. It was just one star in a multitude.

  Tricia fast-forwarded.

  Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had emerged out of the ship into a vast, grey, hangar-like structure. This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge grey buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble. These were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?

  Well, as much as anything else they reminded her of a film set from just about any low-budget science-fiction movie of the last twenty years. A lot larger, of course, but it all looked thoroughly tawdry and unconvincing on the video screen. Apart from the dreadful picture quality she had been struggling with the unexpected effects of gravity that was appreciably lower than that on Earth, and she had found it very hard to keep the camera from bouncing around in an embarrassingly unprofessional way. It was therefore impossible to make out any detail.

  And now here was the Leader coming forward to greet her, smiling and sticking his hand out.

  That was all he was called. The Leader.

  None of the Grebulons had names, largely because they couldn't think of any. Tricia discovered that some of them had thought of calling themselves after characters from television programmes they had picked up from Earth, but hard as they had tried to call each other Wayne and Bobby and Chuck, some remnant of something lurking deep in the cultural subconscious they had brought with them from the distant stars which were their homes must have told them that this really wasn't right and wouldn't do.

  The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others. Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her shows on TV, that he was her greatest fan, how glad he was that she had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary from the stars or anything.

  Certainly, watching it now on videotape, he just looked like some guy in costume and make-up, standing in front of a set that wouldn't hold up too well if you leant against it.

  She sat staring at the screen with her face cradled in her hands, and shaking her head in slow bewilderment.

  This was awful.

  Not only was this bit awful but she knew what was coming next. It was the bit where the Leader asked if she was hungry after the flight, and would she perhaps like to come and have something to eat? They could discuss things over a little dinner.

  She could remember what she was thinking at this point.

  Alien food.

  How was she going to deal with it?

  Would she actually have to eat it? Would she have access to some sort of paper napkin she could spit stuff out into? Wouldn't there be all sorts of differential immunity problems?

  It turned out to be hamburgers.

  Not only did it turn out to be hamburgers, but the hamburgers it turned out to be were very clearly and obviously McDonald's hamburgers which had been reheated in a microwave. It wasn't just the look of them. It wasn't just the smell. It was the polystyrene clamshell packages they came in
which had 'McDonald's' printed all over them.

  'Eat! Enjoy!' said the Leader. 'Nothing is too good for our honoured guest!'

  This was in his private apartment. Tricia had looked around it in bewilderment that had bordered on fear but had nevertheless got it all on videotape.

  The apartment had a waterbed in it. And a Midi hi-fi. And one of those tall electrically illuminated glass things which sit on table tops and appear to have large globules of sperm floating about in them. The walls were covered in velvet.

  The leader lounged against a brown corduroy bean bag and squirted breath-freshener into his mouth.

  Tricia began to feel very scared, suddenly. She was further from Earth than any human being, to her knowledge, had ever been, and she was with an alien creature, who was lounging against a brown corduroy bean bag and squirting breath-freshener into his mouth.

  She didn't want to make any false moves. She didn't want to alarm him. But there were things she had to know.

  'How did you . . . where did you get . . . this?' she asked, gesturing around the room, nervously.

  'The decor?' asked the Leader. 'Do you like it? It is very sophisticated. We are a sophisticated people, we Grebulons. We buy sophisticated consumer durables . . . by mail order.'

  Tricia had nodded tremendously slowly at this point.

  'Mail order . . .' she had said.

  The Leader chuckled. It was one of those dark chocolate reassuring silky chuckles.

  'I think you think they ship it here. No! Ha Ha! We have arranged a special box number in New Hampshire. We make regular pick-up visits. Ha Ha!' He lounged back in a relaxed fashion on his bean bag, reached for a reheated french fry and nibbled the end of it, an amused smile playing across his lips.

  Tricia could feel her brain beginning to bubble very slightly. She kept the video camera going.

  'How do you, well, er, how do you pay for these wonderful . . . things?'

  The Leader chuckled again.

  'American Express,' he said with a nonchalant shrug.

  Tricia nodded slowly again. She knew that they gave cards exclusively to just about anybody.

  'And these?' she said, holding up the hamburger he had presented her with.

  'It is very easy,' said the Leader. 'We stand in line.'

  Again, Tricia realised with a cold, trickling feeling going down her spine, that explained an awful lot.