Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (23 page)

Our
sofa.

My favourite soft furnishing.

What Starkey did was not only inexcusable, illmannered and downright unpolitic—I believe it may also be illegal. That young wuthering wilder has ruined Mica’s most expensive item of furniture and expects to get away with it.

You see
,
there’s a smooth bulge down at one end, right on place where I normally find it most comfortable to sit.

Something’s wrong with my sofa.

I think it’s pregnant.

When I was in the RAF I worked some of the time for the Communications Intelligence.

I
t’s dangerous out there. It’s not even safe to step outside the doorway. Not since they started exploding like flying grenades. Not since our volatile feathered friends became feathered bombs. Not since cock robin was killed and they exchanged their little bows and arrows for internally detonated devices that can take a man’s head clean off his shoulders.

The reports have been coming in thick and fast, from other cities, from other parts of this city. I haven’t been out since they first said it was the sparrows. I don’t want to, though I may have no choice in the matter. There are heroes enough, without me. I mean, the last time I was outside, I heard the explosions, saw the mess afterwards, but I didn’t actually
see
any of them go off.

Now I know it’s the sparrows, I can see how suicidal it would be to go outside. I mean
,
there are thousands of them out there. They’re on the limbs of the statues in the yard. They’re clustered on the concrete. They decorate the overhead wires, the signposts, the
lamp posts
. They’re on the pavement, in the gutter. They’re everywhere. When are they not? You don’t even notice them, normally. You
take them for granted, consciously, even subliminally
,
ignore them
.

They’re there every day, but today is different, today they are what they are. Any one of them could be.
Potentially potent.
The
it
among the
they
could blow you to kingdom come and go, so they tell us. It’s been on the news, in the news, everywhere, word of mouth, word of print. I don’t know which of them are, and which aren’t. How can you tell? Looking at them they all look the same: they all look innocent and deadly.

You have to sit well away from the window, just in case one of them lands on the sill. I’ve heard, they’ve told me on the comm, that slivers of glass fly in like knives shot from a gun, to strip you to the bone. That’s what I’ve heard. So you stay away from windows, keep the curtains closed, maybe even wire-net the inside.

Why me
? This was the first, possibly very selfish, thought that crossed my brain when I got the call. Why me? Others have got the gift of
insight
, so why not them? Why not that dickhead Williams, or Danny Pugerchov? How come I was chosen to do the investigation? Who have I upset in the last few years? Who wants me out of the way for good?
Unless the other agents are already dead?
Unless they already have a hole in their torsos through which you could pass a football? Unless their heads are already decorating the town centre and suburbs as biltong and bone shards . . .

If I had any time, these questions themselves would be investigated. If I live through this, I will certainly seek out my enemies, and nail the bastards to the wall. In the meantime, I have to stay with it, stay on it,
stay
alive.

The first part of any investigation is of course easy. Pure research. Books can’t hurt you, at least in your own
living-room
. You don’t have to protect your eyes from splinters of bone and beak when reading a book, because books don’t explode, not yet anyhow. Maybe books will one day be the most dangerous articles in the office, but today at least they are innocuous. I have a substantial library in my office, which is where I live, eat, sleep and breathe. I don’t have to go out on the streets and risk getting my head blown off zipadee-doo-da-there’s-a-brown-bird-on-my-shoulder style.

‘
Sparrow
(spærou)
noun.
a
member of
Passer,
fam.
Fringillidae
(*FINCH) esp. the house sparrow [O.E.
spearwa
].’

Good enough.
So much for the dictionary.
I always like to start with the definition. I mean
,
did you know the sparrow was a finch? Maybe you did, but a lot of people don’t.
Me for one.
I thought a sparrow was a sparrow.

‘
SPARROW
. Though probably the most often seen of British birds, sparrows are not the most numerous;
they are outnumbered by chaffinches and blackbirds
. Sparrows appear numerous because they live in close association with man, building untidy nests in holes, in thatch and walls and in hedges. There are two species of British sparrow: the tree sparrow and the house sparrow.’

Hedges?
Tree
sparrows?
Walls and flagstones.
Bricks and mortar.
Concrete
sparrows.

Seed eaters
, it goes on to say. That was
then
. Now of course, there is no seed. No seed, no hedges, no trees. Not outside the greenhouses. Only concrete. Now they get what they can, where they can. They peck away at anything. It used to be the waste food in the trash: vegetable matter, offal, fat,
gristle
. Now even that is denied them, since the recycling of all edible rubbish, for domestic stock.

Enough of the encyclopaedia.
There is more to say that is unwritten. That is, there are millions of the little bastards, swarming around the cities. They like us, or rather, they like the food we give them. They are worldwide.
Sometimes so numerous as to be a hazard.
Mao Tse Tung listed them as one of the ‘Four Pests’ and ordered their extermination in China.
The year after the slaughter the country was invaded by insects
.

The comm.

‘Hello?’

‘Listen, we need an answer soon. How close are you to an answer?’

‘I only just got started.’

‘We have to know. Is it the government? Is it anarchists or terrorists? Is it the big corporations or financial houses? It has to be one of these three groups.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

The comm falls silent. Of course it has to be one of the big three. As a loner you poison a jar of baby food and demand a ransom. That’s cheap and easy. You plant a bomb in a supermarket for fun, because you have a warped mind and you are an individual. You shoot fourteen, fifteen people with an automatic weapon because you are a sociopath or you do a string of serial murders as a psychopath. These don’t cost a great deal, no big layout.

But to produce
genetically-detonated
little flying bombs—that costs money. Big money. You need to be a billionaire several times over for that kind of thing.

An explosive random killer.
Not a BIG
bang
, of course, but bigger than a feathered ball full of plastic explosive. What about nuclear fission, on a small scale? Is that possible? Can you control a chain reaction: limit it to pocket-sized boom? I don’t know too much about the science, but I know nuclear bombs need heavy elements to produce those enormous releases of energy. I know that much. Maybe the sparrows contain lighter elements? The explosion is large enough to rip apart a
good sized
room. If you’re inside with one when it goes off, so I’m told, they need a
finely-sharpened
razor to scrape you off the walls.

Something coming down the mail chute.

What’s this? Nobody writes letters any more. A parcel?

A live creature flies out of the tube and into the room and I instinctively dive for the space behind the desk.

After a second or two I see it’s not a sparrow, but a canary.

It’s got to be a joke.
One, or some of the boys in another department in the building, trying to get me going, now that I’ve been put on the job.
It’s probably that sicko, Jameson, in Dispatches. What the hell though, canaries may have started interbreeding with sparrows. Maybe it’s in the chromosomes and they pass it on, the deadly little sperm carrying the genetic code? A billion to one but
who
the hell wants to risk it? The heartbeat is rapid, pattering in the tiny chest. Shit, maybe this is the fuse?
A time bomb.
Not
tick-tock-tick-tock
, but
pat-pat-pat-pat-pat
, and on the eight-thousandth heartbeat, the detonation, the explosion?
A room full of bits of feather and flesh, bird and man mingling on the wallpaper, on the ceiling, on the floor tiles.

Using my
insight
I check out the canary, find nothing.

I call Jameson.

‘Hey, Jameson?
Did you send me a bird…? Oh, for my birthday? It’s not my birthday for five months. Remind me to do something nasty to you when I see you next.’

Now, what to do about the bird?

First I catch it, in the wastepaper basket.

Now, do I blow its head off? Shoot the thing? What with, a .45? Overkill. Stifle it then? Wait. If I kill it violently, maybe there’s a genetic device, a fail-safe primer hidden in the DNA, like a trembler on a conventional bomb? Maybe if I stop the heart, dead, it will go up automatically? Best to stop it slowly. Put it in the freeze compartment of the refrigerator, slow the heart beat down
gradually,
turn the poor little bastard to ice. This is survival after all. You can’t afford to be squeamish when you’re threatened with a nasty form of extinction.

I make another call, to the boss.

‘Are you sure this is real? I mean, have you actually heard one, seen a sparrow go off?’

‘There are people who have.’

‘Yeah, but apocryphal tales and all that shit? Everyone knows someone who knows someone who has, but no one has actually seen it for
themselves
. I mean, truth or myth? Is it really serious, or is it just rumour?’

‘
It’s serious
,
believe me
. Get on it.’

‘What about catching some, in a net, and looking at them under controlled conditions.’

‘We’ve done that. Pugerchov’s had a look at a whole room full of them.’

‘And?’

‘Zilch. Someone has to look at them in the wild, that’s to say, in their own environment.’

‘The concrete jungle?’

‘Okay, the only environment they’ve got left.
Outside
. Whatever you like to call it. Nothing shows up when they’re in captivity. It’s up to you.’

‘Why me?’ I ask the question at last.

‘You know why. You’re the man.’

‘One of them.’

‘One of those.’

I am proof that the Theory of Punctuated Evolution, which states that evolution is not gradual and regular, but punctuated by drastic leaps to meet extraordinary circumstances, is no longer simply a theory. I’m one of those: a drastic leap. One of the few who can read the
inscape
of other people, read their emotions like a map, feel their intentions, discover their design. Survival. I find the terrorist in a crowd. I find the psychopath, the
sociopath,
when I get close enough to smell the desire for death, feel the absence of emotions. The human race has need of me, in this overdeveloped world, full of neuroses, madness,
violence
. I read them, and all other creatures, any and every living thing.