Falling Sideways (27 page)

‘Why? What'd happen if I put—?'

‘Asteroids,' the man said. ‘Lots of small asteroids where this planet used to be. Look, perhaps it would be a good idea if you were to leave now.'

David thought about that. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I think I'll do that. What is this stuff in the bag, anyway?'

‘Sugar. Like it says on the label.'

David raised an eyebrow and tilted the bag very slightly.

‘But the stuff in the bowl isn't water,' the man added quickly. ‘I'd be delighted to tell you what it is, but your brain's at the wrong angle to understand. Let's just say you don't have anything like it on this planet.'

‘Fine. So you dunked me in it.'

‘For your own good,' the man said. ‘Otherwise you'd never survive the journey. We'd get home, and we'd be hard put to it to salvage enough of you to smear on a microscope slide.' He shook his head. ‘I'm afraid these elevators weren't designed with humans in mind,' he went on. ‘It's a simple matter of different gravities. Imagine a ripe tomato in a hydraulic press.'

The shock was disconcerting, to say the least. True, the man could easily be lying, though there was no reason why he should lie about this. If he was telling the truth, it meant that using the elevator and going to Homeworld (following
her
to Homeworld – no, yes, dammit . . .) was out of the question, unless he agreed to become a frog once again; and he didn't really want to do that, thanks so much for the kind offer. Yet another thing to hope for, reason for living, alternative to holding still and letting the police arrest him had evaporated into a cloud of twinkly dust. He was getting sick of it.

‘Well,' David said, ‘thanks for the tip. I'll be moving along now.'

‘Maybe not.'

‘I really wish you'd make up your mind.'

The man stared at him like a wolf in the hamster department of a large pet-shop but didn't move. This was presumably something to do with the fact that David was still holding the sugar and the goldfish bowl. Mental arithmetic, starting from a total lack of hard data: if a packetful of sugar added to the stuff in the bowl was enough to turn the Earth into gravel, how much damage would just one single grain do? David didn't want to blow up the planet if he could help it, but if he was going to bluff, it'd help to make his bluff as convincing as possible.

‘Put the sugar down,' the man said, ‘carefully, like I said, and we can discuss this like rational sentient beings.'

At least the one-eyed man's extreme anxiety looked like it was genuine. ‘Tell you what,' David said. ‘I'll put these things down if you'll stand away from the door. Can't say fairer than that,' he lied.

The one-eyed man stayed where he was. ‘I wish you'd just calm down and stop being so hostile,' he said. ‘After all, I'm on your side, whether you believe me or not. Dammit, we're practically family.'

David thought about that for a moment. ‘You're right,' he said, ‘you remind me a lot of several of my relatives. That's probably why I wouldn't trust you if we were standing under Big Ben and you told me the correct time.'

‘All right.' The man's sigh seemed to come up through the soles of his feet from the flat below. ‘If you want to go, go. No skin off my nose if you get caught by the police; after all, they're never going to believe you, and besides, I don't think I've actually done anything they can arrest me for.' He shrugged, and stepped a yard to his left. ‘Off you go, then.'

‘Just like that?'

‘What do you want me to do now, tie myself up and lie down in a corner? Either stay or push off, doesn't matter to me.'

‘Oh.' David took a step towards the door. The man didn't move. ‘Out of interest,' David said, ‘what happened to Alex? And, um, her?'

The man looked down at his watch. ‘Should be nearly there by now,' he said. ‘Unless they get held up in the docking queue, of course.'

‘They've gone to your planet? Homeworld?'

‘That's right.'

‘But why would they want to do that? There's no such thing as love there.'

The man nodded, and stepped back in front of the door. ‘True,' he said. ‘Now, how about telling me how you know that?'

Oops, David thought. ‘Someone told me,' he said. ‘One of you people. Truth is,' he added with a grin, ‘I try to be open-minded, but you all look the same to me.'

‘Very smart, yes,' the man said. ‘Please answer the question.'

David shook his head. ‘Here's another one for you. Alex is human, right? So how could he go to Homeworld on this elevator thing of yours without getting squashed flat?'

The man smiled. ‘You humans have a fairy tale,' he replied, ‘about the beautiful princess who kisses a frog?' He shrugged. ‘Seven hundred years' worth of back royalties that I don't suppose I'll ever see. Never mind, it's only money. All right,' he went on, ‘they haven't gone to Homeworld. It and Earth aren't the only inhabited planets, you know. As you'd have found out,' he added, ‘if only you weren't so damned bolshy.'

‘Oh.' David's arms were beginning to get tired, holding the fishbowl and the sugar. ‘They've gone somewhere else.'

‘Yes.'

‘Right. What's it like?'

The one-eyed man grinned. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘it's a lot like British Columbia. Only, in some important respects, better.'

‘Really? Less mountains? Better climate?'

‘No Canadians. It's not too late, you know,' he added. ‘Think about it. If I'm prepared to send my own daughter there, it can't be all that bad, can it?'

If he'd heard it from anyone else, even from a different clone of the same original, David might well have been convinced. ‘I'll pass on that, thanks,' he said, carefully putting the fishbowl down on the floor. ‘But if it's all the same to you, I'll go now.' He folded over the top flap of the sugar packet, tightly, twice. ‘Give Alex my regards if you ever see him again,' he added, with a very slight twinge of guilt. ‘He may be a total bastard, but he's my cousin.'

‘Sorry.' The man folded his arms. ‘I can't let you go. You seem to have found out rather more than you were supposed to do, and it's a matter of planetary security—'

David nodded. ‘I thought you'd say that,' he said. ‘Catch!' he added, lobbing the packet of sugar into the air.

From the fact that there was still a world at the bottom of the stairs by the time he reached it, he deduced that the one-eyed man had indeed managed to catch the sugar in time. Not that he'd been in the slightest doubt about that, naturally. Every confidence, and so forth.

Still there, that faithful old stolen car of his. He was getting so used to it that he was able to find the wires that went together to start it entirely by feel, without having to crane his neck down to see the colours. Of course, he didn't know where he was going – all part and parcel, he guessed, of having nowhere to go.

Eventually, without ever having formed the intention of going there, he found himself parked outside Honest John's. He wasn't able to get very close to the building, for fear of running over a hundred or so of the vast army of frogs that were hoppiting about all over the pavement and the road, like the lava flow from a green-and-yellow volcano. And somebody's got to notice that, he told himself, sooner or later. Like the plague of frogs in the Bible— He chewed his lip thoughtfully, thinking over what the one-eyed man had said about a certain fairy story, and other stuff he'd heard about this being the second time they'd been through this whole procedure. What a busy fellow that man seemed to have been, to be sure.

If it'd been spiders, nothing would have persuaded him to get out of the car. But he was OK with frogs – didn't like them, but wasn't bothered by them – and found he was able to pick a way through the rivetting, shifting carpet without flinching or feeling sick. Of course, he had a pretty good idea what they must be thinking right now – looming presence, black mountains falling from the sky – and in a sense he felt a degree of empathy towards them. Mostly, though, it was like having to talk to his less attractive relatives – just because they're your own flesh and blood doesn't mean to say you've got to like them. He tried taking big steps and making shooing noises.

‘Shoo yourself, asshole,' said a voice behind him.

For about half a second, he was sure he was going to lose his balance and fall over, which would've meant a nasty fall for him and the end of the line for at least a dozen frogs. Luckily, he was able to pull himself back into equilibrium by waving his hands about ferociously.

‘Yeah,' said another voice. ‘Go jump off a lily pad, tall bastard!'

Very cautiously, he looked over his shoulder but he couldn't see anyone. Nobody here but us frogs.

‘Yeah,' said a third voice. ‘Drop dead, spawn for brains.'

David took a deep breath. ‘Hello?' he said.

‘Screw you, scumbag with very big feet!'

Oh God, David asked of the universe at large, have I really got to do this? I can put up with most things turning out to be true, but talking frogs— ‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but who am I talking to, please?'

Strange, hoarse laughter, like the creaking of five thousand floorboards. ‘Guy wants to know who he's talking to,' said a voice; and try as he might, David had to face the fact that the voice came from somewhere in the bobbling carpet of frogs. Not fair, he muttered to himself, just not fair.

‘Excuse me—' he began.

‘No!' from the frog-mob, followed by more laughter. ‘Go on, get out of here. And take your big stinking feet with you.'

Suddenly, in a moment of appalling clarity, David realised what it must be like to be a teacher teaching a class of thirteen-year-olds. Then it occurred to him that if the comparison was at all valid, he had a superb model to work from. He closed his eyes, turned back his mental clock twenty-one years and visualised Mrs Parfitt, standing in front of the blackboard. Five feet dead in her Clarks sensible shoes, and beyond question the single most terrifying life form he'd ever encountered.

‘Quiet!' he snapped.

Quite suddenly the frogs stopped croaking. He had their attention.

Of course, he remembered, it hadn't been so much what Mrs Parfitt said as the way she said it. She could make
I wandered lonely as a cloud
sound like a Mafia ultimatum. ‘That's better,' he continued, digging under the scar tissue of his memory for the classic Parfitt intonations. ‘Now then. You. Frog. Yes, you in the front row.'

A smallish olive-green frog shuffled slightly. The rest were motionless. ‘What, me? said the frog.

‘What, me,
sir
,' David amended. ‘Yes, you. What's your name?'

‘Krdgdt, sir.'

‘See me afterwards. Right, then. Somebody'd better explain what you think you're doing. Otherwise,' he added, ‘I'll keep the whole lot of you in. Is that understood?'

A low, subdued rumble of ‘Yes, sir' from countless frog throats. ‘Please, sir,' said a frog. ‘We're here to inherit the Earth.'

All David could do was repeat the last three words.

‘Yes, sir. That man promised us we could, if we were good, and got on with our evolution.'

‘Ah right. And, um, have you?'

‘Oh yes, sir,' said another frog somewhere in the middle. ‘When we left our home planet, we were still just amoebas. We evolved on the way here.'

‘I see. And how long did that take you?'

‘Sixteen million years,' the frog replied. ‘'Course, we should've been here earlier, only we got held up.'

David had a shrewd idea of who ‘that man' was. For one thing, the
modus operandi
was essentially the same; not to mention the unusual level of patience. The one-eyed man might be a nuisance and a hazard to navigation, but he didn't rush into things; the sort of man who, having decided he fancied a ham sandwich, started off with a pair of newly snared wild boar and a single grain of emmer wheat. ‘That's a long time,' he said.

The frog nodded. ‘Well, you see, sir, faster-than-light travel wasn't invented then. And where we come from's rather a long way away.'

There wasn't much he could do except nod, in as close a facsimile as he could manage of Mrs Parfitt's very best ‘all-right-but-don't-do-it-again' manner. ‘When you say inherit the Earth,' he said, ‘what exactly do you mean by that?' A score of offside front paws immediately shot up. ‘You, at the back there,' David selected. ‘No, not you, you. Well?'

The frog in question sat up very straight, its throat bobbing in and out like a power-driven bellows. ‘Please sir,' the frog said, ‘the man told us, at least he told the amoebas we evolved off of, and they told their kids, and their kids told—'

‘Yes, I see,' David snapped. ‘What did he tell them?'

The frog thought for a moment. ‘Please, sir, he said that if we were really good and hard-working and, you know, meek—'

‘Meek,' repeated the other frogs. ‘Meek. Meek-meek, meek-meek . . .'

‘Then,' the frog went on, ‘we'd get to go to a planet of our very own where there's no storks or crocodiles or great big fish with loads of teeth, and there's just tons and tons of water and miles and miles of rivers and great big ponds with really cool islands and stuff in them, and there'd be nobody to eat us or push us around or tell us what to do. Is that right, sir? Is that what it's like here?'

‘In a sense,' David replied. The frog's eyes were so big and shiny and trusting that he couldn't really bring himself to go into any further details. ‘Um,' he went on, ‘did the man say why he was doing all this? I mean, was it just out of the kindness of his heart, or was there something he wanted you to do for him?'

The frog looked startled. ‘Oh, 'course we've got to work. Everybody's got to work, or they go to the bottom of the Pond.' Judging by the expression in the frog's eyes, it seemed rather taken aback to discover that David didn't know that. ‘That's why we got evolved, so's we'd be able to do the work that's ordained for us. Isn't that right, sir?'