Only Human (26 page)

The man continued to stare. From time to time his nose twitched a little, and he rubbed the backs of his hands together.

‘I expect you're wondering,' Zxprxp went on, ‘what my planet's like. Well, it's a bit difficult to describe, I suppose, in terms you'd be likely to understand, because it's - well, it's quite a lot different from this one. But that suits us, of course, because we're quite a lot different from you. Well, you don't need me to tell you that, you can see it for yourself. Can't you?'

The man stared at him, blinked, turned round a couple of times and sat down again.

‘Um,' said Zxprxp, ‘maybe it'd be easier for us to communicate in a meaningful way if I came up on top of that, um, thing with you. Would it? Yes? No? All right, I'll take that as a Yes. Is it all right if I stand on this thing?' he added, taking hold of a small Hepplewhite chair. ‘Okay, assuming that it is, here I come.'

He'd just looped a few tentacles round the top of the wardrobe and was about to pull himself up when the man cowered away from him, arched his back and started hissing and squeaking. Nonplussed, Zxprxp got down off the chair and put it back where it had come from.

‘All right,' he said, ‘that's fine, and no offence intended. I did ask, remember. Now then, more about my planet. Well, for a start—'

The door started to open. Zxprxp thought quickly. Chances were, this was some official or other with a message or the equivalent of some
op'rgesvxq
shells for the leader to suckerprint. That would mean having to explain himself all over again to yet another human. Too much hassle, Zxprxp decided, so he opened the wardrobe and slithered inside.

Through the keyhole he watched as a humanoid came in and walked over to a spot directly in front of the wardrobe door, so that his sleeve obscured the view. Nevertheless, he could hear clearly enough.

‘Prime Minister - Prime Minister? Ah, you're up there again, Prime Minister—'

(Great, Zxprxp said to himself, looks like I've found the Prime Minister. So that's all right.)

‘Sorry to disturb you, Prime Minister,' the voice went on, ‘when you're, um, sitting on a wardrobe, um, in Cabinet, I mean, but the American special envoy's here and he was wondering if you could possibly spare him a minute or two? No? Only he has come all the way from Washington to see you, and maybe it'd be a nice gesture if - no? Oh, right, fine. I'll tell him you're busy then, shall I, Prime Minister? Prime Minister? Oh—!'

There was a loud thump, and Zxprxp found he could see through the keyhole again. This was apparently because the newcomer had rushed forward to assist the Prime Minister, who'd fallen off his - what had the other one called it? Wardrobe. Fallen off or jumped; no, fallen off, obviously. No sane person'd go jumping off tall things for no apparent reason.

‘Better now?' the newcomer was saying. ‘Splendid. And you're going to come down and see the special envoy? No, I see. You want to climb back up again, do you? Oh, very well then. As you wish, Prime - ouch!'

The cry, presumably of pain, was the result of the Prime Minister scrambling up the other one's back and treading on his head on his way back up to the top of the wardrobe. Zxprxp couldn't help feeling a tiny bit smug. On his planet they had pairs of long metal strips joined together with rungs, called ladders, for getting up on top of high places. Clearly the humans hadn't tumbled to that one yet.

‘Well, if that's all for now, Prime Minister, I'll be getting back to my—'

Thump.

‘Oh for - perhaps you'd like to use the chair this time, Prime - aagh!' Zxprxp grinned, sensing a definite commercial possibility if they ever did establish trading links with these creatures. A few dozen ladders in the ballast hold, he could name his own price. Assuming, that is, there was anything on this planet anybody back home would want to buy.

He heard the door close, and came out again. ‘Hi,' he said cheerfully, ‘me again. Hope you didn't mind me disappearing like that, I thought it'd save lots of tedious explaining. Now, where were we? I was telling you about my planet. For a start, Prime Minister, we've got this device you might very well be interested in, which we call a ladder. I won't bore you with the technical stuff, but just suppose you wanted to jump off something and you were on your own with nobody to tread on. It'd be frustrating, wouldn't it? But with one of our—'

There was a blur in the air a few
ghtuyrg
in front of him, followed by a now familiar thump, and there was the Prime Minister, curled up in a ball in the middle of the soft, flollopy things, looking (as far as Zxprxp could tell) surprised and possibly even disappointed at something; almost as if he'd expected something to happen when he jumped, and it hadn't. This species, he muttered to himself, is going to take a lot of figuring out.

Nevertheless, he was here as an ambassador of his race, and politeness is the shuttle bay ramp of diplomacy. As the Prime Minister floundered back on to his feet, Zxprxp stepped forward and offered his head for the creature to tread on. As they said back home, when in Y'zhgyrstd . . .

Surprisingly heavy, these humans.

Taking a deep breath, he continued where he'd left off. A brief sales pitch for ladders, a polite enquiry as to why the leader of the human race should keep jumping off the top of a wardrobe (unanswered), a few random observations concerning his homeworld's mass, gravitational field, basic climatic and seasonal cycles, some introductory remarks about his own species and the fundamentals of their culture and beliefs - it was strange, but he got the impression the Leader wasn't actually
listening
.

Puzzlement. Then, as the Prime Minister flung himself into the air yet again and hit the deck in a flurry of scrabbling limbs, a ray of light broke through the fog in his mind. Stepping back quickly - there's politeness, and there's a squashed head - he assessed the theory and found it good.

This bloke's a nutcase, the alien decided. The leader of the human race is as daffy as a barrelful of
qpsrdyt'srhy
beetles.

Zxprxp stood for a moment, lower and middle mandibles agape with astonished admiration. Maybe they don't know spit about ladders, but when it comes to political and cultural maturity, these critters have us knocked into a cocked
dzandtpt
.

Back home, he reflected, as the poor loon scrabbled and clambered back up the wardrobe, we've had thousands of years of social and political conflicts, the result of which is that, every time around, some absolute nutter claws his way to the top and calls himself a leader. And then, a few solar time units later, along comes another soi-disant leader, also barking mad; we have a war or a revolution, the old leader is toppled and the new one takes his place; and so on, over and over again, until our economy and our very civilisation are in tatters, and everybody has a thoroughly miserable time.

But not so with these ever-so-sophisticated humans. They're through with all that, obviously. Their leader isn't some magnificently pompous figure, surrounded on all sides with advisers and hangers-on and fifty-seven varieties of functionary; no, it's some poor loony shut up in a room on his own, with a high place to jump from and something soft to land on, who spends his days endlessly playing out the fatuous cycle of leadership (scrabble scrabble
THUMP
, scrabble scrabble tread on people's heads
THUMP
) in a safely ritualised, utterly harmless fashion. And presumably, Zxprxp rationalised with growing respect, if there's ever a human so foolish as to start believing in the dangerous concepts that lie behind the idea of leadership, all they have to do is bring him up here and let him watch for a while, maybe get his scalp scuffed up a bit in the process, and he's instantly cured. Brilliant.

Now
that's
an idea worth paying a whole freighterload of ladders for.

 

There was a cold, determined light in Kevin's eyes as he pushed open the study door, not unlike the gleam a hedgehog might see in the headlamps of an oncoming lorry. What it had to do with the fact that he'd just been talking to a young female (mortal, but two out of three ain't bad) for the first time in his life, he wasn't quite sure. All he knew was that ever since this ghastly mess began, he'd been underestimating one crucial factor, namely himself.

Think about it (he muttered to himself, flumping down in the Old Man's chair and turning on the screen with a brutal flick). Of the two main players in this game, one of 'em's a dumb machine and the other one's the Son of God. Once this crucial factor's been taken into account, the expression
no contest
assumes a whole new spectrum of nuances.

‘Right,' he commanded, as the screen lit up. ‘You. Pack it in. You got that?'

Somehow his born-again attitude and authoritative tone of voice made a huge amount of no difference at all. All he got was that damn fool request for access codes. Access codes! I'll give the insufferable thing access codes!

Well, he reflected a moment later, actually I won't, because I don't know them. All I can do is get the thing up and running. Then it just sits there grinning at me like a Cheshire cat that's been at the cream. Well, I'm not having that. It's not respectful, and if you ain't got respect . . .

‘Computer,' Kevin said, ‘I'm going to give you a choice. It's not easy. It's not
supposed
to be easy. Ready?'

‘All right,' Kevin said, ‘here goes. Unless you loosen up and tell me what it is I've done and what I can do to correct it, I'm going to sit down at this keyboard and press fourteen keys at random. Got that?'

Kevin grinned. ‘You bet it is,' he said. ‘It'd be a shambles. There's absolutely no way of knowing how much havoc I could cause. Which is why you can't allow it to happen.'

‘Of course,' Kevin answered, as he lolled back in Dad's chair. ‘Think about it.' He picked up the letter opener, fidgeted with it for a moment, dropped it and sucked his fingers. Only Kevin's dad could have a flaming sword for a letter-opener. And all the theologians in the cosmos, working double shifts and weekends, would never be able to work out whence came the Innovations catalogue He'd ordered it from.

‘Doesn't it now?' Kevin shook his head. ‘I rather think it does. Because if you allow me to do this, you'll be every bit as guilty as I am. At least,' he added, smiling sweetly, ‘that's the way Dad'll see it. He doesn't much care for the old only-obeying-orders copout.'

‘True.' Kevin nodded ironically. ‘Because I've given you the one access code I do know, you've got no choice but to let me press those fourteen buttons if I decide to. On the other hand, you can't allow that to happen. Which means you'll just have to give in to my demands, doesn't it?'

Kevin sighed, and flexed his fingers like an extrovert concert pianist. ‘This one,' he said, feathersoftly stroking the edges of a key chosen at random with the pad of his index finger, ‘could be pretty well anything. It could be the Seven Plagues of Egypt, or Noah's Flood, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Who knows?' He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the burning-without-consuming screen. ‘Apart from you, that is.
You
know.'

‘Oops, too late.' Kevin looked up, trying to keep off his face any reflection of the horror that was sloshing about inside his mind like shaken-up fizzy lemonade in a plastic bottle. He had, after all, done something so drastically reckless as to be technically Evil -
a first in our family, I guess. So that's what it's like. It's all right, I suppose, but I can't see why anybody should want to do it for fun
. ‘Well, any hints about what I've just done? Any large holes in the sky where there used to be planets? The Aquascutum people suddenly relabelling all their stuff
Guaranteed frogproof
?'

‘You know perfectly well why.'

Kevin looked at the words on the screen and thought about the question they were putting to him. He didn't know the answer. He had a nasty feeling that his scheme wasn't going to work after all.There were still thirteen keys to go, and there was no way he could back down now.

‘I wonder,' he said, ‘what this one does.'

 

‘Wow,' said a voice in the darkness. ‘Did you feel that?'

There was an awkward silence, marred only by the statutory drip of water, the scuttling of the small, clawed feet of Dukes of Hell on dry flagstones, the sound of somebody shivering.

‘Would someone tell that young man,' observed the female demon, ‘that it's terribly bad manners to do someone else's job without asking them first. Not that we could ever pull a stunt like that,' she added bitterly. ‘If there's one thing I can't stand, it's talented amateurs.'

‘Not to mention beginner's luck,' growled a further voice, the demon called Bumble. ‘Some of us had to work hard to get to this level. Then again, some of us weren't born with a silver spoon gripped between our fangs.'