Chapter Ten
THE GENESIS, DEUTERONOMY AND BOOK OF TOBIT OF THE GARLEKS
It was a dark and stormy night on the planet of Skary. At the same time it was a bright and sunny day. That’s the thing with planets: it’s night and day
at the same time
on any given planet. Planets, with their offensive roundness, thumb their noses at the simple rule that
night follows day in chronological order
. There’s a reason for that chronological order, you know. It helps keep the timeline straight. This is one of the reasons why Time Gentlemen hate planets.
The TARDY materialised at dusk. It assumed the shape of a Skaryish Police Megaphone: a tube not unlike an alpine horn, although roughly twice as large. The Dr, Linn and I emerged from the round open mouth of the horn: it was like stepping out of an ivory cavemouth.
The air outside was cool. In the distance the landscape retained some of its beauty: purple-coloured mountains serrated the horizon; dark blue trees, tall as church spires, waved and hushed in the evening breeze. The sky was plum. But nearer at hand was evidence that a large scale war was being fought. We were standing upon a plain of churned mud, with so many craters that it looked like a stretch of brown bubble wrap in which all the bubbles have been popped. The stumps of wrecked trees, like burnt down fuses, poked up here and there. Away to the left a broken tank was half buried in dirt: one of those old style tanks on which the tank-tracks went all the way around the body in a giant parallelogram. Either it had been blackened by fire, or else somebody had gone to a lot of trouble with a tin of black paint and a brush. I assumed the former explanation was the more likely.
‘Well,’ said the Dr, looking around himself. ‘Here we are. The Planet Skary. The Skary Planet. A war has been being fought here . . .’ He paused. ‘Is that right?
Has been being
? It sounds a bit odd to me.’
‘No, I mean yes.’ I said. ‘I think that’s right.’
‘Perhaps it should be
will have had been being
? I get my tenses mixed up sometimes.’
‘It’s to be expected,’ said Linn, reassuringly. ‘What with all the confusions of time travel and everything.’
‘I suppose so. Anyway. Long war. Lo-oo-ong war. Between the Dhals and the Kababs. Over food. Specifically, over the correct way to
prepare
food.’
At this mention of food Linn scoffed. ‘Nobody fights wars over such a thing!’ she said, scoffish.
‘Your scoff,’ said the Dr, ‘is misapplied. There are plenty of worlds in this galaxy where wars have been fought over much less. And actually the peoples here on Skary have a genuine disagreement. The Dhals think food should be a bland, healthy pap. The Kababs think food should be highly flavoured, dripping with saturated fat and terribly
terribly
bad for you. The Kababs also smoke.’
‘The Dhals don’t smoke, then?’
‘Oh they do. But they smoke herbal cigarettes.’
‘Are they better for you?’
‘No. Worse. And foul-tasting. But, you know. They’re herbal. Anyway, so, it’s a radical clash of cultures. Centuries of war.’
‘Remind me why we’ve come here?’ Linn asked.
‘To make one of the largest corrections to the grammar of cosmic history ever to have been attempted by any Time Gentlemen,’ said the Dr proudly. ‘To undo the
greatest
of evils. Come - the Kabab base is westward from here. Destiny calls us.’ He put his head back and started striding purposefully over the wasted land. His left foot went into the mud and didn’t come out, even though his right foot was already advancing its stride. Accordingly he went straight down, forward, face-first into the mud, like a fairground target hit with a pop gun.
Linn and I helped him to his feet. ‘You need to take care,’ I said. ‘What with all this mud, you know.’
‘I do,’ the Dr agreed ruefully. He tried to wipe the mud from his face, but succeeded only in smearing it more thoroughly. ‘Am I clean?’ he said, looking up at us. ‘I have a date with destiny. Don’t want to meet destiny all grubby.’
‘Clean,’ I said, not wanting to discourage him. ‘Ish.’
‘Did you say Ish, or shh?’ the Dr queried, a little querulously.
‘I said ish.’
‘You see,
clean—shh
, would mean that I should shut up about being clean,’ the Dr said. ‘Which would in turn imply that I was pretty dirty, actually.’
‘Ish,’ I repeated.
‘Cleanish?’
‘Clean
esque
,’ I clarified. ‘Quasiclean.’
‘Cleanikins,’ suggested Linn.
‘Words,’ said the Dr ruefully. ‘When will somebody devise a less ambiguous mode of communication?’
I think we both assumed this was a rhetorical question, but after several seconds the Dr repeated it, adding ‘eh? eh? do neither of you
know
?’ and then concluding ‘in the year thirty-one-forty-four in the Gala Galaxy. Do you know
nothing
, either of you?’
‘Apparently not,’ said Linn.
‘Come on,’ said the Dr. ‘This evil catastrophe won’t avert itself, you know.’
We picked our way carefully through the craters and over the mud until we reached a low concrete structure surrounded by trenches. There we were greeted by several uniformed men carrying rifles. Or perhaps it would be more specific to replace the word
greeted
with the word
grenaded
. The first soldier tossed a grenade, which exploded a little way behind us and threw us into a heap at the feet of the soldiery. ‘Why did you do that?’ the Dr snapped at the tossy fellow, crossly. ‘There’s no call for that sort of behaviour!’
‘The grenade was by way of saying
how-do-you-do
,’ said the man who had pitched the thing at us.
‘Well,’ said the Dr, pulling himself to his full height. ‘This is my way of saying very well thank you.’ He slipped his hand in his pocket and pulled out the Moronic Screwdriver. ‘Hah!’ he cried. ‘Experience moronicity, you aggressive fellows!’ With a flick of his thumb he angled the screwdriver at the soldiers. ‘This will teach you to mess with the Doctor!’
There was a high-pitched whine. One of the soldiers seemed to cock his head. Not in the way that a person might cock a gun - which is to say, it’s not that he reached round with his thumb and pulled his head sharply backwards with a resonant click. That would, evidently, be silly. Rather he tipped his head to one side.
‘An interesting device,’ I said to the Dr.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘It focuses moronness into a coherent beam. I’ll give them a minute or so, and then these guys should be easily moronic enough for us to slip past them. Look! See! It’s working.’
‘You know,’ the soldier was saying, in a strange voice. ‘Hmm, Intelligent Design, yes.
That’s
a very sensible explanation of things . . .’
‘You fool,’ came a voice from the left. An officer was stepping through a concrete doorway into the trench. ‘He’s moronicizing you. Quick! Guns out!’
The Dr span about to focus the ray on this newcomer; but he was too slow. A pistol shot rang out. The bullet struck the screwdriver on its shaft, and the little device pinged out of the Dr’s hand to land in the pongy mud.
‘Hey!’ the Dr complained. ‘You could have had my thumb off there!’
‘Take them into custody,’ the Kabab captain ordered. The soldiers surrounded us at once, guns at the ready, bayonets pointing in towards us. The soldier who had spoken was shaking his head as if trying to dislodge something.
‘Take them to the Leader!’ the captain cried.
We were marched at gunpoint into the heart of the Kabab concrete complex. Though, now that I come to think of it, I had rarely been in such a heartless place. So ‘the heart of the complex’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Core’ maybe. We passed many military men marching in the opposite direction, Kabab soldiers marching onwards, marching as to war, with the cross expressions of men about to go into battle and maybe get killed focused on those marching on before.
‘I’m assuming this isn’t good,’ Linn said to the Dr.
‘Nonsense,’ said the Dr, unconvincingly. ‘It’s all going splendidly to plan.’
‘They’ve captured us! They have us at gunpoint!’
‘Us, yes. But not the TARDY. This is why I landed it on the wasteland out there, and not inside this complex. To keep it safe.’
We emerged into a large chamber. A number of cast iron and riveted doors were set into the far wall. The TARDY, still in its Skaryish Police Megaphone shape, was sitting in one corner. The Dr put his face in his hand.
‘That
yours
, is it?’ the Kabab captain said. ‘I thought so. My men found it in the middle of the battlefield, and brought it here. Good job they did, too: we’re about to begin a massive bombardment of the Dhal positions. Your . . . device . . . would have been smashed to smithereens. Smithered to smashereens. All smashed and smithed.’
‘There’s been a misunderstanding . . .’ said the Dr, stepping forward. A soldier’s bayonet jabbed at his stomach, and he danced back again.
‘Against the wall over there,
if
you please,’ shouted the captain. ‘The Leader is coming!’
We lined up against the far wall obediently. One of the iron doors opened with a clang. Or perhaps I mean clank. The air of expectation in the room was enormous. Enormous air. Expectationish.
A strange figure, seated in a motorised wheelchair, rolled through.
‘Stavros!’ said the Dr. ‘The real original Stavros - in the flesh!’
And what flesh it was. This Stavros, wheeling now into the centre of the room, appeared to have been most hideously disfigured. Hair sprouted in hectic profusion from his head, from his nose and his ears. His cheeks and chin had been scraped clean of hair, but still bore witness to their essential hirsuteness with a prodigious spread of fat black dots. There was more hair in one of his eyebrows than on my entire head. His upper lip bore a moustache of such dense hirsuteness that, had it been detached from its facial location and nailed along the base of a door, would have functioned as an extremely effective draught excluder.
It’s said that kissing a man without a moustache is like ‘eating a hard-boiled egg without salt’. Not that I’ve ever understood that saying, to be honest. Nor indeed have I kissed any men, with or without moustaches. Unless you count kissing one’s own reflection in the bathroom mirror for, you know. Practice. But, anyway, if we stick with that analogy, the egg-without-salt metaphor, then kissing Stavros would be like eating a hard-boiled egg whilst also consuming the annual production of the entire Siberian salt-mining industry.
On second thoughts, that’s probably an over-elaborate way of explaining that his moustache was extremely hairy.
But the most startling thing about Stavros was his
skin
: dark brown, leathery, wrinkled, it looked as if he had been baked in an oven for weeks. Like a conker.
Stavros wheeled himself into a central position in the middle of the room. Then he surveyed the small group gathered about him, placed a cigarette between his lips, lit it, inhaled deeply, and then he spoke: ‘hello ever-a-body peeps.’
‘Hail Stavros!’ cried his followers in unison. ‘Hello!’
‘Is good,’ said Stavros, stubbing out his quarter-smoked cigarette on the panel in front of him and immediately lighting another one. He nodded in our direction, his mighty moustache wobbling. ‘Ooziss?’
‘Prisoners,’ repeated one of his followers. ‘Prisoners, oh Greatest of Greeks. This one claims to be a Doctor.’
‘My cousin Avraam, he’s a Doctor,’ said Stavros. ‘Innit.’
‘I’m not that sort of Doctor,’ said the Dr, stiffly.
‘Oh, oh-oh-oh,
Time
Gennleman, izzit?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Ah! Enemy alien. They are opposing every-a-thing I stand for, peeps, these time gennlemen. They wanna maintain all the linear order of history and such, and I wanna mash every-a-thin into a big
stew
.’ He licked his lips, stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one.
‘I pooh-pooh you
and
your stew!’ defianted the Dr. Stavros looked at him impassively, as if this taunt meant nothing, and as if the word ‘defiant’ couldn’t be used as a verb in that matter.
‘And woziss?’ he said, wheeling himself over to the alpine-horn-shaped TARDY.
‘Leader!’ barked the captain. ‘This is the alien’s time-travel device! It has disguised itself as some kind of police communicator, but there’s no doubt as to its identity.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Stavros, ‘innit. Lucky day. You and you, carry this thing downstairs to my kitchen, er,
lab
. I am gonna wanna examine this in more detail. Find out how it works, take it apart and put it back together innit. Then I can build my own time-a-travel machine, and send the my evil cyborgs through the complete range of time and space.’
The TARDY was on a wheeled platform of some kind, and Stavros’ soldiers set about pushing it through a door and away.’
‘Hmm,’ said the Dr, watching his TARDY - our only hope of escape, and the key to Stavros’s domination of the galaxy - being hauled out of sight. ‘That’s probably not, on balance, a positive development. Stavros has always hated the Time Gentlemen, and sought to undo everything that we have achieved. And now we have, inadvertently, given him the technological power to do just that.’
‘Oops,’ I said.
‘Surely he can’t be
that
bad,’ said Linn. ‘I mean, looking around us, this is all pretty rudimentary . . . technologically speaking.’
‘You need to understand the full story of Skaryan history,’ said the Dr, sorrowfully. ‘Once upon a time it was a planet very like Earth. Blue skies, green fields, worldwide satellite television coverage. Stavros Pastapopolos was a celebrity on this world - a celebrity chef on Skaryan television. Then this world was ravaged by global war, and in the aftermath two things mattered more than anything else: firstly control of the food resources, and secondly control of the mass media. Food for the body, and food for the brain. A power-elite seized power: nobody could oppose them because they combined a tight control over food distribution with a propaganda stranglehold over all TV channels. The Celebrity Chefs!
Les Chefs du Monde
!’