kroth:  the rise

9: the return of dream

Stepping outside the Savaluk Parliament Building, into the windy magnificence of Wynond Park, I said to myself: relax now, you have tried all the options.
    As ever, the seasonless sprouting green, jumbled with brown-yellow leaves at the dying stage, had sprinkled its plus-sized confetti over the park.  Today this was further smudged with blobs of Savalukans, garbed in their best, swarming over the paths and lawns.  And why not pour myself into this picture that was so nice and final? You tried, Dunc, both ways. You tried modest self-effacement and it got you nowhere.  Pushing yourself forward, likewise, got you nowhere. Nothing works, so just watch and wait, for what will be, will be, as you bob along like a cork in a stream in this breath-catching moment of history.
    The outflow of MPs had mostly been swallowed up in the sea of other people, but I could still glimpse Uncle Vic as he conferred with a group of colleagues (or fans, or acolytes) who had tagged along with him in the hope, presumably, of picking up the odd crumb of reassurance.
    I for my part would have nothing more to do with him, except to conduct imaginary dialogues in my head:
    “Well, this is your hour, this is what you have worked for all along. Hope you’re satisfied, Uncle; hope you realize what you’ve done.”
    “Don’t blame me overmuch; you would have done the same in my place.”
    “Useless to say that. Doesn’t mean a thing. If I were ‘in your place’ I’d be you, not me, so what the krunk! Fact is, I’m blaming you for being you.”
    “Guilty as charged.”
    “Ah, spoken like the big man who can take responsibility for all. But where does that leave the people of this country?  Of this world? You’ve pulled them along… they never really thought things would get to this point. Let the record say, it is Vic the Manipulator who has led us here.”
    “And you kept quiet about it long enough, didn’t you, Dunc?”
    No escape.  That charge was true.
    And yet, my shivers were minor and brief, and I suffered no great fever of self-condemnation; rather, I was left amusedly astonished at how late I had left things. Why was I so calm?
    Doubtless, some credit was due to me for (better late than never) facing the truth.  But in the main I must admit my guilt, in that my speech in the House had come far too late to make any practical difference, though by some runnel of memory it might leave a footnote in the historical record.
    That was what calmed me.  The damage was done.  News of the Planck vote must have spread by this time beyond any possibility of recall. Therefore, if my understanding was correct, we had passed the tipping point. Unstoppable, now, the sweep of conviction, the expanding irrevocable certainty that Nature had been goaded to make a sure leap onto a frame of stricter law. And with that inevitable leap, which might happen at any moment, Nature would stand taller and firmer, a more reliable, predictable, exploitable source of power and greatness – which would mean the certain end of old easy-going Kroth.
    “Wow,” said a young male voice, “that girl’s got pnizkua.”
    “That’s a lot of fmobbong,” retorted an equally male, teen-cracked voice. “You can find pnizkoo-ier girls on our street.”
    I raised my eyes, rubbed them and saw what had happened. The big ship from Udrem had left the company of its escort fleet and had descended to touch, or almost touch, the park’s central mound, had extruded a gangplank, and was hovering at rest while the long-awaited figures of Rapannaf and his girl appeared in the opening.
    Many in the crowd were content to watch this on the news-screens which had been set up on several lawns, for you could actually get a better view on those, but some people were driven forward by an urge to get physically close to the visiting celebrities. I, similarly, focussed my direct sight upon the tiny distant pair, and edged gradually towards them. 
    I fancied that I could discern not only the pose of Elaine’s body but the complacent expression on her face as she, in her turn, gazed down at all of us.  It was as if some preliminary ripple or heave of extra clarity made my vision sharper.  Or maybe the sharpness came from the recent sluicing away of so much mental clutter, to leave more clear space in my head. My skin prickled as if myriad corpuscles of suspicion were circulating in my blood. They spread, they averaged, into the insight that, today, failure and success were going to be the same.
    Digesting this idea slowly, I mooched for the next two hours. I bought myself a meat pasty from a park stall and began munching it while, somewhere else in the vast concourse, speeches were made and Rapannaf and Elaine went walkabout, sometimes together, sometimes apart.
    Significant, more so than any event or non-event, was my shutdown. No more “please let this happen, rather than that”. Instead – erasure of the distinction between failure and success. Emotionally, to see Elaine only from afar – that was failure; to be close and chat with her – that would be success; but both failure and success alike became vanishingly small when viewed beside the Main Thing, namely, Finis, the swallower of opposites, the death of alternatives. Finis hove more weightily into view than any lonely lack of mine. Or indeed of others. I saw in their expressions, in their cut-off sentences, in their sad enjoyment of the gathering, the proof that I was not the only one who could taste that the change was nigh. After all here was I, a human being surrounded by other equally informed human beings, and my feelings and intuitions weren’t likely to be too different from theirs. Some ways my mind worked faster than the average, some ways it worked slower, but in the wash of events it all came out more or less the same in the end, and here, soon, was to be the end, so what would be the use of shaking this population by the collar and pointing out that the result of all their support for The Rise must be the end of their world? Why be furious with them? Their rashness, during the past few months, wasn’t their fault; it must be blamed on an astronomical event. Nova Perpendiculi had cooked our goose. The New Star had blasted radiation throughout the stellar neighbourhood, and a surge of it had hit Kroth. We had therefore found ourselves on a wave-front of inspirations, of renaissance energy. Not much point in complaining about stuff that size. Especially not much point in criticising people’s reactions if one’s own name happened to be Duncan Wemyss, whose cowardly complicity must invite the reply, “look who’s talking”.
    I came to a grassy bank, one of the turf-seats of the Park, saw a tall young woman who steered her steps to meet mine, and soundlessly recognized Elaine, who had been left alone and approachable by some chance shift in the crowd. The celebrity – allowed to wander alone!  So here was a little personal treat, a sniff of nice scent amid the gummy waft of fate.
    Elaine glanced down at the new-mown grass and said, “Doesn’t matter if this gets messy, I suppose,” – and by “this” I understood she meant her dress, and I was only languidly amazed at the way she had begun to speak to me without a proper greeting, for it seemed but a trivial oddness, overshadowed as we all were by the imminence of our world’s end. She sat and stretched her long legs beside mine and said, “Well, all we need is some eggs to roll.”
    I echoed her word trustfully, “Eggs?”
    “Reminds me of the egg-rolling at Cratherton,” she explained. “Sitting like this...” As she spoke, she picked absently at the fabric of her dress.
    I was prepared to follow any lead. “Every five years, isn’t it?”
    “Next one in 2017,” she nodded. “Down the grassy banks of Cratherton, Herts,” she quoted, her memory alighting upon some snippet about Earth, and sticking there, like a bird on a limed twig.
    With our sudden privacy and togetherness I felt as if I were under a magnifying lens, excluding the rest of the universe, and somehow it all seemed, for once, just right.  I took an unselfconscious bite out of my meat pasty. “Want me to get you one of these?”
    She smiled, “I’m not that hungry.”
    “Nothing puts me off my food, not even – ” and, all at once uneasy about completing that silly statement, I glanced up at the sky.

*

The airships had drifted out of formation.  That mighty escort which had accompanied Rapannaf’s lone vessel – an escort composed of Biri ships on loan to the Topland government – was, by the looks of things, floating haphazardly in the breezes up there. The captains must be relaxing too.
    For a long last moment I gazed at those ovoid hulls, and then the sight rippled and re-formed so that I was looking, not at any airships, but at the vapour trail of a jet.
    My mind, as it were, hit the ground running.  Information poured into me. Elaine and I were at Speakers’ Corner of Hyde Park, London, and what my teeth had sunk into was a Cornish pasty.
    More terminology poured into me from all directions. Gap year. Elaine had just come back from a gap year.  She’d been in Australia. I had run into her at this “do”, this save-the-whale rally. The rally was dispersing; I heard a good-humoured policeman say, “Have a whale of a time”. The placards were mostly being lowered.  I saw just a few whale-outlines still borne aloft, as if substituting for the airships of Kroth. If you leap and soar and hit the ground running you need to grab your bags as you run; not that anybody was literally running, oh no, the people in the park were keeping good order, though many of them looked to be edging away from one another, and I sensed what they must be feeling: I also wanted to be alone, to absorb, to digest what had happened.  At all costs, digest!  Elaine’s voice came to me: “Nice to meet you, Duncan; I’d better be going now.” She wanted to be alone too. She was going her own way, I mine. Whatever small progress I had made with her, it was nowhere near enough for us to be any use to each other at a moment like this. I did the best thing in the circumstances: I echoed her goodbye. If, as I say yet again, you hit the ground running, you must not omit in the same smooth movement to snatch up your cases packed with the right bridging equipment, the filler-adjustment to make it so that Earth has never gone away, has existed during the Krothan time. That’s what’s vital, not useless clinging and comfort-seeking.  I did nonetheless see quite a few figures clinging to one another. But many more, the majority, were standing apart with a “don’t interrupt me, I’m counting” expression. I probably looked like that.
    Quick, now, thought I, figure it out: where had I been, what had I been doing?  That’s to say, on Earth, what had I been up to all this time?
    Couldn’t summon it all just then, but it will come, I assured myself. No need to be jumpy about your personal C.V., Dunc my excitable lad. That ought to be the least of your worries. Remember the bigger picture, the threatening circumstances under which the Earth-“dream” has returned. That’s what you ought to be concerned with.
    I cast some precautionary glances around.
    While trying to think, I was shoved in the back. “Watch what you’re at, mate,” said the indignant voice of him who had pushed me, and who then recovered the pace which my dawdling presence had temporarily interrupted, so that he was gone from my sight before I could apologize to him for my existence. The reality of London was rapidly asserting itself. Perhaps Mr Shove-in-the-back had never experienced Kroth; many were like him; they perhaps provided the leaven to help re-confect this world. The Earth-only people. I remembered that the Krothan authorities had been slow and reluctant to concede that such folk existed; they hadn’t wanted to admit that anyone who existed on Earth would not also exist on Kroth; but the fact was, there were loads of them. Aunt Reen, for example, had never been found on Kroth. That’s why Vic had striven all along, with determination finally crowned with success, to bring Earth back.
    And the transition had apparently gone well. No obvious spillages, no mess.  But then – what exactly do you expect, eh Dunc, what are you afraid you might see? Shoggoths oozing down Oxford Street?
    I made my way along Oxford Street because I knew this part of London fairly well and it looked the same as before, and I could hope that it mostly was the same, but I had to persist with the question:
    How and when would I be able to tell what the Slimes might have mixed with the mortar of this universe?
    A hard question even to frame. Could only be thought through in crazy metaphors. Even if I had had somebody to talk to, it would have been of little use.
    My dread was that the Slimes had gripped, clung, adhered in some fashion to this edifice of reality at the moment of its construction. So then the question was: what difference had they made to it? Guilt at my responsibility for the outcome made me desperately keen to know the worst. Once the extent of the disaster was clear, I could try to face it and live.
    The first litter bin I came to, I threw away the uneaten part of my Cornish pasty. I had been put off my food.
    Things had been bad enough before, during my pre-Kroth Earth-life. I’d seen and heard more than enough cultural slime, even in those days, just by listening to the news. If all that yuk were to be somehow enhanced by extra imported dollops of slime – well then, I bluntly asked myself, what will you get? Extrapolate from recent history, and figure the result. School examinations in pornography? Laws passed to enable anyone over 21 to marry his pet gerbil? I might take some while to notice, for the euphemisms would fool me at first, for example if incest was now “cheerfulness” and bestiality “fun”, or maybe the formerly fantastic vampires and zombies had moved into mainstream reality as “nocturnals” and “somnambulists” respectively…. how soon would I know?
    But the chances were, I was on the wrong track, my extrapolations insufficiently disgusting and bizarre, failing to take into account entirely new avenues of horror which might be opening up even as I strolled; for these were the crucial early minutes as Earth busied herself with the retrospective manufacture of bridging memory, and the weave must be snaking into pattern all around me, sewing up the necessary, so as to leave no gap in history for the fifteen months or so when Earth was in abeyance. What a golden opportunity for slimes (of whatever species) to embroider more evil into the setup.
    Oxford Street is long, but I walked and walked; I did not bother to take the Tube – I wished to recover the feel of London. And if and when the worst became known to me, and I was walloped by some appalling truth, I wanted to be above ground when it happened, not trapped in the Tube.|
    Near the eastern end of the long avenue I came to a magazine stand. It was lavish, with newspapers and magazines on a tall frame of many racks, and a turbaned Sikh sitting in the middle of it all drinking some steaming hot liquid out of a mug. He was hunched and burly, with a dark lippy face. He ignored me as I ran my eye along the rows of mags.
    The smell of revelation was strong; I sensed I was close to a vital clue. Homey stuff like Country Living; hobby stuff ranging from Railway Modeller to Gardener’s World to Astronomy Now; the general science monthly Discover; National Geographic and a thing in French the same size and shape, called Science et Vie; other foreign stuff, Der Spiegel, Il Mondo, Oggi and Paris Match; then back to English with Readers’ Digest and Good House-keeping and British Heritage; the political weeklies New Statesman and The Spectator and The Economist… and yet more in each of the above categories... I fingered one of the science magazines and began to leaf through it and then realized what I was doing and hurriedly replaced it on its rack – kiosk vendors don’t like people browsing like that: in my excitement I had forgotten my manners, so jittery was I as a vast discovery hovered close. My head swam and I rested against the metal frame. I found myself short of breath.
    “You all right, mate?” said the Sikh, who had stood up to face me.
    “Gone,” I gasped. “No filth. Where’s the filth gone?”
    “Ah-huh. You the noticing type?”
    I raised my eyes. A look flashed between us. Here was a freak mind akin to my own. A ‘between’ mind, a world-straddler.
    The risk I then took was huge. “Left its mark,” I said, “that other world.”
    “Worlds do that,” he said, telegraphic as I.
    “Specially when so recent,” I offered.
    In clipped sentences we continued our edgy efforts to communicate. Both of us, I guess, had the same urgent wish to compare notes without voicing anything so open as to break a spell.
    “It’s not gonna be in the papers, or the news,” he remarked as he saw me glance at the dailies.
    “No, of course not,” I agreed. “Do many people expect…”
    “Nah. Watch – here comes one. He’s befuffled.”
    A bustling bespectacled little man scuttled up to the kiosk. He snatched a copy of the Sun and paid for it – looked at the front page and then at the vendor – who gently shook his head, and the man nodded in a vague, lost manner and wandered off.
    Befuffled indeed. In admiration I said, “That’s a brilliant word.”
    “I sensed a need for it.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “under the circumstances of the… er…”
    “Post-K residual confusion.”
    I contemplated this news-vendor who obviously had the brains of a professor. “I supposed you’re very well placed…”
    “Not at all a bad job to have on a day like this,” the Sikh agreed. “Or any day; so long as I can study at Birkbeck in the evenings, I’m happy.” This was a swerve in the conversation. It was his way of saying, I’m ready to talk but there’s no point in talking about It, the Post-K Change –
    Well, fair enough. Nobody was talking about It; you couldn’t do anything about It except get used to It, allow the change to sink in.
    “Birkbeck!” I responded, impressed. “What’s your field?”
    “George Eliot. Life and novels of.”
    Some probing instinct made me put on a droll expression. “Ah yes, George Eliot! I know something about him. Important writer, he is.”
    The vendor grinned and said, “The way women writers of that century used to put on male names – it’s a Some Like It Hot in reverse.”
    That did it.
    They come rarely, these discovery moments, but when they do arrive they’re unmistakable.
    His reference to the 1959 film, the last occasion on which cross-dressing disguises could be seen as innocent comedy, thrust the truth into my brain: slender though the evidence was (after all, I’d merely glimpsed some front pages on a news-stand), it was enough to confirm to me, with the utter certainty of dream, that on the human-dignity front things had got better instead of worse. Quite fantastic – the idea that things could get better.
    Not that I could yet dare fully grasp with my emotions that the slob-society might be no more. But suppose that terrific truth was real: my intellect already picked at the consequence, which was: there’s likely to be a catch.
    That was the next question for this busy day:
    If things have got better in one way, in what other way must they have got worse?

*

I thought whilst walking: let me soak in the huggable aspects of London, its soul-enriching iconography. For example the University Tower that’s mentioned in The Day of the Triffids, when Bill Masen, the hero of that novel, sees a light in the night from that Tower, some possible hint of hope amidst the double disaster which has smitten the world… I wandered closer to that tower when I left Oxford Street for the Bloomsbury / University / British Museum area, on my long trek towards Euston Station; I did not, however, actually need to look at the particular building where fiction and reality meet; in my reflective mood, to know of it was enough.  Likewise with Primrose Hill, where the narrator of The War Of The Worlds came upon the encampment of dead Martians…
    Fiction drew me, into the shining topic of heroes, of admirable decent people – could such beings now fit, perhaps, into reality?
    My hunch, that things had got better, spurred me to take the next risk.
    Granted that there probably was some kind of Law of Conservation of Evil, whereby if you get rid of one foulness you can expect to meet another in its stead, nevertheless a victory is a victory; I mean to say, if you escape from Dracula’s castle only to find yourself in Frankenstein’s, at least it’s a change, and probably, overall, a more than slight improvement.
    I dared, then, to open my own little door of the imagination, into what I call the Time Corridor. That is to say, while I ambled up Tottenham Court Road, I began to picture the centuries of history as a long corridor with doors into each era, and the inhabitants, though all confined to their own “rooms” (i.e., their own times), could nevertheless open their doors and poke their heads out, and maybe call and wave to each other up and down the corridor.
    You may demand to know what can I possibly mean by this. To be sure, we have memories and histories; in that sense we can say hello to the past - but (you’ll protest) the arrow of Time flies only in one direction, so you can’t look both ways along the Corridor.  So you can only gaze and greet past-wards, not future-wards.  So what can I possibly mean by this image of the community of the Corridor waving and greeting up and down its length?
    Ah, but in my kind of thought-experiment, when we poke our heads out of our little Time-door and look past-wards at the people of former eras, they look back at us.
    Yes, they do. At least, figuratively. That is to say, because we are aware of their values, we feel the approval or the rebuke which they would give us if we were directly in their presence. It is as if they are assessing us, because it is in the light of their example that we are assessing ourselves. And there could be more to it. Who knows, there could be some real time-transcendent resonance up and down the eternal corridor.
    So which is it: figurative only, or figurative-and-real? I never bother to work out which, because I can have it either way. Yes, whichever one believes, the mighty shimmer of past characters (both historical and fictitious) towers over the gunge of everyday, to provide endless material for comparisons, rebukes and re-settable experiments for to those who dare.
    Now to try that controlled experiment again.
    Re-set. Open the door marked of that room of mine marked “nowadays, 2015”. Poke my head out of it and into the Corridor of Time and look down, past-wards.
    Other heads pop out. A mixed bunch, fictitious and real. I see Sherlock Holmes with his pipe between his teeth, peering from the 1880’s door. Milton and Wordsworth stare at me from the 1660’s and 1800’s – Milton enjoying the use of his eyes, for in this special corridor light nobody is blind. Dorothy Sayers peeps out from the 1930’s and beside her, with a friendly arm around her shoulder, is her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. C S Lewis is similarly paired with Dr Elwin Ransom, Tolkien with Frodo and Bilbo and Aragorn. John Buchan and Nevil Shute lean into view amongst their vast company of admirable protagonists, varied yet united in a common decency, who could knock spots off reality any day. And more, more – an endless throng of writers and their subjects, from historians like Macaulay to ‘pulp’ masters like Edgar Rice Borroughs. Every one of them, from Sherlock Holmes to Frodo Baggins to Ned Leithen to Tarzan, helps to spread an atmosphere that’s bracingly clear of moral stink, so that my lungs breathe the relief. Not that I can really hope to meet these rescuers, but – I am now able to inhabit a land in which they could live without retching.
    Remarkable pairs of opponents can now appear: King Charles the First arm-in-arm with Oliver Cromwell; Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; Gladstone and Disraeli, and multitudes more, with every eye fixed to see through me into my room, for that is what happens in this corridor when you lean out through your door: you reveal not only yourself but the contents of your room; and because on this occasion I am the door-opener, my era (late twentieth, early twenty-first century) becomes the subject of scrutiny by all.
    I’ve done all this before – seeking approval for my culture; reassurance that it’s not beyond redemption; that it may even have something to be said for it.
    The experiment always begins well. 
    John Milton says, “Hm, a woman Prime Minister, eh? Who’d have thought it? I ought to revise my opinion of a woman’s place.”
    Jefferson Davis remarks, “A black President, huh? I can hardly believe it but since it’s true, I must admit the Confederacy was a mistake; our whole theory of the negro is wrong. Oh well, since evidently they deserve it, I wish ’em the best of luck.”
    This is as far as the goodwill stretches. Afterwards, a change comes over the expressions of everyone in the corridor community, as their glances probe further into my time-room. I see their faces start to wrinkle and distort as a look of shocked horror and disgust overspreads every one of them. Revulsion from the unspeakable unites each observer in a shudder of rejection. Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell in unison turn away, muttering in agreement. All the others, likewise, withdraw their heads from the corridor and close their doors. My era is left the lone disgraced one, the outcast among all the rest.
    But this time it doesn’t happen that way! This time the experiment goes differently. The faces continue friendly!  Nobody looks like he wants to puke – the good-will survives – amazing…
    My era, it seems, is no longer the pariah of history. Such is the wonderful result of my experiment in the Time Corridor. To be alive at such a moment is a wonderful state in which to find oneself; but can I believe it?  Can it really be the case that the pervocracy has fallen and reality is no longer spewy?
    My brain doubts.  The experiment was been based, after all, on impressions gained in only a few hours.  Yet my heart is already celebrating with certainty: Yippee – we have re-joined the human race –
    I am virtually walking on air as I enter Euston Station at last and buy a ticket for my home town, Crickham, Herts.
    Here at last is platform eleven and here’s the train and I’m finally on my way home… and now I have not only a home but a country, a society, a community I can believe in, no longer a travesty; what an eye-opener of a day! What a transformation, not only from Kroth to Earth but to a decidedly better Earth.  It must presumably be an Earth which has undergone changes that go beyond those mere image-processing adjustments that are necessary to bridge the Krothan gap year.
    Yes, this contemporary Earth, if it really is fit for the company of other times, must have sprung into being in such a way as to unfurl entire new streamers of past history… a revisionist Earth.
    I get out at Crickham Station.
    Everything seems like old times, only better.
    I stroll along the path that crosses the field near the station and leads you past the old church and into the town centre. Everything appears – because of the hopes in my head – more wholesome, more exciting than before. I am only eighteen and I have a life before me in a country and a society to live in, a culture I can respect. (And as a little bonus, as I dig into my new-old memory of the year-that-never-was, I note with satisfaction that I have passed my A-levels.)
    So then – what have the Slimes done? They must have done something. And that, whatever it is, is the catch.  The price demanded.  The compensation granted to evil.
    Like a slapstick comedian holding a pie ready to splat it onto the likeliest target, in my mind’s self-image I hold aloft a dollop of slimy evidence, ready to hurl it onto the right phenomenon, so to attach answer to question.
    I reach my front door. My front door. That’s a satisfying thought. I am eighteen now, no longer a minor. I can live alone in my house and no bureaucrat can insist that I need a guardian.
    I unlock the door and let myself in. Then, though I am tired, I do not flop, do not even get myself a drink – instead I rush to the room where I keep my laptop computer.
    As soon as I get onto the Net I waste no time in googling “H P Lovecraft”. In the old days before the Krothan adventure, the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, so far as I could remember, had begun with:
    Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction…
    What precisely do I expect, as I tap the keys? The outcome already billows in the nostrils of my mind, but I must make sure. I press ENTER.
    Wikipedia now says:
    Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American geographer and science writer…
    Oh dear God, save us all.
    …best known for his collaboration with Edward M. Dyer in publicising the latter’s findings on the epochal 1930-31 expedition to Antarctica, which revolutionised humanity’s perspectives concerning the history of intelligent life on Earth. Lovecraft summarised the key results of the Dyer expedition in a volume entitled At the Mountains of Madness, intended as a warning to the world. The book became a best-seller, familiarising the public with the newly discovered evidence for the pre-human civilization of the Old Ones, and their giant artificially created amoeboid beasts of burden, the Shoggoths… Most controversially, Lovecraft backed Dyer’s claim that some of the Shoggoths still existed underneath the south polar continent, and that they posed such a threat to mankind that the place should be shunned by future explorers. Here, unfortunately, At the Mountains of Madness failed in its purpose. Dyer and Lovecraft did not manage to dissuade or prevent the Starkweather-Moore expedition of 1934 from following the same trail of discovery. Ten planes and sixty people reached the city of the Old Ones, and, it now seems evident, were wiped out.
    With radio silence fallen upon Starkweather-Moore, and a Shoggoth photographed off New Zealand in 1936, authorities were finally alerted to the seriousness of Dyer’s claims, and Lovecraft shortly before his death in 1937 was satisfied to hear that the League of Nations had resolved to designate the whole of Antarctica as a proscribed zone…
    “Oy-oy,” I hear myself say. I exhale and slump back in my chair. I have my answer, indeed.
    The smart thing to do next must be to google “Shoggoths” –
    But that’s more than I can stand –
    No, you baby, don’t turn the computer off.  Learn the worst and face it. You know for a start that at least they’re not here in Britain. They’re still on the other side of the world, though encroaching… Here goes. Wikipedia – Shoggoths –
    The screen comes up and I scroll rapidly, noting sub-topics and fragments of text while my skin prickles. Origin of the name Shoggoth. Legends concerning Lovecraft’s involvement. The hiatus in contact caused by World War II. Shoggoths believed to have spread silently further North during that time. Sightings in the Fifties, and then –
    Early 1960: massive attacks upon the coasts of Chile, Australia and Sumatra. Naval and air defences cope with the invasions at considerable cost. Eisenhower and Kruschev then collaborate in joint nuclear retaliation: US-Soviet bombing mission to the Mountains of Madness…
    Since then, mostly quiet, with the entire Antarctic Ocean, as well as the continent itself, a definite no-go area. It is accepted that we share the planet with a hostile intelligence.
    The threat from this common enemy was not, apparently, enough to thaw out the Cold War. We still had the U2 spy-plane incident, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis… At first I’m amazed at this: how could East and West afford to indulge in such squabbles while the greatest enemy loomed from the south? But then it occurs to me that Lovecraft, when he issued his despairing warnings, could not have known about the advances in human power and weaponry which were to take place so soon after his death. Just as H G Wells’ Martians would not have had the chance to cause much bother if they had invaded a couple of decades later – the RAF would have dealt with them pretty smartly – so, in our nuclear age, the Shoggoths aren’t the invincible doom they must have seemed in the 1930s.
    They still have to be taken seriously. Their numbers are unknown but, on the southern ocean floors and in their subterranean lairs, they might well crawl in their billions. And they, too, like us, have the potential to develop their power.
    Hmm… A quite finely balanced situation. Society cannot risk an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude… and so, awareness of the Shoggoths must be a constant background to our lives.
    But what a contrast all this is, from my fearful speculations during the homecoming journey from Hyde Park Corner – those hours during which my thoughts chugged entirely along the wrong track, wasting time in wondering how the Slimes might have “translated” themselves to leave some sort of metaphorical mark upon the restored Earth. Forget metaphor! The plain literal truth is that Earth now harbours the Shoggoths. In their actual physical bodies they have leaped into our reality. Their history is written in with ours, making H P Lovecraft’s horror novel true.
    Horror?
    Joy! No wonder the culture of 2015 A.D. Britain appears to have undergone a rinsing! No wonder the sickie mags have disappeared from newsagents’ racks!
    I grab the Radio Times, riffle through it, note wholesome programme after wholesome programme, and gloat over the demise of nauseous TV: no wonder at that, either.
    I can tell what must have happened.  Evil has been externalised.  Not completely, of course. A matter of degree. Even in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth there were plenty of moral failings among the mostly-good-guys. But generally speaking, the more external, the less internal evil.
    The point is, just as Middle-Earth could not have afforded to maintain a population of pervs, yobs, fraudsters, jihadists, drug-addicts and libberoids akin to that of former Britain without succumbing to the orcs and the Dark Lord in double quick time, so neither can the the newly restored Britain avoid the re-writing of decency into its script – not with the Shoggoths awaiting their chance.
    Instinct must have told us all in no uncertain terms:
    Bye-bye to slob-land is the price of survival.

*

On a Saturday morning I was sweeping leaves from my front path when a small grey car drew up beyond the hedge.
    I gripped the broom, leaned upon it and narrowed my eyes at the two men who got out of the car. At the same time I sought to recall some exact words from a letter which had arrived yesterday by first class post.
    They may send you a pair called Bricker and Standish, Uncle Vic had written. If so, you’ll know to co-operate.
    The shorter of the two men walked round his car and unlatched my gate. It swung open and he stood in the gateway while his sidekick shuffled to his side. I returned stare for stare. The short man’s face was framed by a reddish beard below and a tweed cap above.
    “Mr Duncan Wemyss?”
    “Yes.”
    “My name is Standish, and this is my colleague Mr Bricker,” he added with a head-tilt at the six-and-a-half-foot giant who creaked into position beside him. Bricker’s lounge suit did its best to make him look normal, hiding the outside muscles that slid beneath.
    “And you’ve come to say something about Kroth.”
    “Not outside, please, Mr Wemyss.” Standish looked pained, though I had hardly more than mouthed the word.
    I let them in to my front sitting-room and waved them to the settee while I sat in the swivel-chair opposite. In a bid for the initiative I began:
    “I had a letter from my uncle warning me I might get a visit from the Secret Service – ”
    Bricker grunted, and Standish remarked with a snap in his voice, “Let me tell you, a very new and untried branch of the Service. Would you mind showing me that letter?”
    “I should have thought,” I said dryly as I handed it to him, “that you’d have opened it already.”
    Standish took the sheets from the envelope and frowned up and down each one before handing them to Bricker, who glanced at them more briefly, cracked his enormous face into a smile and uttered with a voice like a fog-horn, “Yes, it’s the same one. We just had to check in case – ”
    “All right, Eric, all right,” Standish quelled him, and then said to me, “Some ‘Intelligence’, eh? We’re new to this game – but we’ll improve – ” his eyes flashed straight at mine, “perhaps with your help, Mr Wemyss.”
    I heard my own breath rasp. “Help?”
    “Or even, participation.”
    “Er… slow down a bit…”
    Standish however was shaking his head and smirking as if to tell me, no, no, you can’t fool us. “No protests did we hear from you just now, when we admitted that we had read your mail. You obviously understand the necessity.”
    I made no reply. I must have known that the Service had got me. The prospect in some ways was attractive, giving off a sweet odour of belonging. Here were members of the tiny elite minority who could remember across worlds, and they were offering me the chance to work with them. As for the dangers, at this early stage they probably did not know much more about them than I.
    The voice of Standish continued to break against my ears:
    “Now then, we know, of course, that everyone has some commitments, but yours, at the moment, are relatively few, are they not?”
    “Few,” I echoed, knowing that I was not at college yet, that I meant to start next year, that I had enough in my bank account to live on while I looked around not too urgently for a temporary job…
    “You were holding a broom when we came here,” Standish continued, “but that was just for sweeping the leaves away. Unfortunately,” and I started at the snap in his tone, “there is no broom that can sweep away the threat to our reality – though we can sweep up the most dangerous individuals, hopefully collecting them for our side.”
    “I’m not dangerous,” I made haste to say.
    “Your uncle obviously is.”
    “Yes, but you can trust him now.”
    “Say on,” encouraged Standish, who thank goodness appeared willing to listen. Of course, he ought to listen, if he was any good, yet I increasingly sensed that we were talking at a windy frontier, where ideas blew in hurricane-blasts which might at any moment destroy the belief, the trust, the hope that sustained this conversation.
    I knew it would make matters worse if I allowed criticism of family to upset my equilibrium. Nevertheless, wobble I did, as I sought to explain why they could trust Uncle Vic:
    “His wife, my Aunt Reen, is an Earth-only type. She could never show up on Kroth. And so my uncle, being as you say somewhat dangerous, wiped out a world to regain her. Very romantic, I’m sure, to ignore the wishes of everyone else and just go straight for what he wanted, though it was a bit hard on those of us who liked life on Kroth.” Whoa, that was grumpy, get back on track – “Now he’s got what he wants, you can bet he’ll support the status quo. He’s bound to be on your side.  He’s now got what he wants.”
    “Whereas you… you would rather not work for us? You are perhaps too full of regrets, you hanker after Kroth…?”
    I smelled their distrust of me. It was entirely my fault that the dialogue had see-sawed against me. I must choose my words and adjust my tone with care. Resentment and indignation were out. And in order to counteract their suspicions I had better explain how and why my attitude had changed; I must give them the reason why I was now content with Earth.
    I therefore frankly revealed why I now believed in the revived decency of human society, thanks to the externalization of evil on this revised Earth.   It took me a while.  They heard me out, up to my conclusion: “…Much of our evil is no longer within us, having shifted outside us, into the form of the Shoggoths…”
    “You’re a clever lad,” said Standish in a doubtful tone which suggested that he still doubted my loyalty. To be clever, after all, is not the same as to be convincing. And this visit was all about loyalty and recruitment, not cleverness. As my heart sank, I moved over to the attack.
    “I’ve assumed so far that we have the best of the bargain, our cleaner society outweighing the danger from the Shoggoths, but this is only the case if the Shoggoths are the whole of it. I mean to say, the rest of the Lovecraft mythos had better not be true as well, because if it is, we’re sunk.”
    Standish coughed. “Quite.”
    “And on that note…”
    “Go on.”
    “Let me ask you something, Mr Standish…”
    “Yes, yes, go on!”
    I wondered if I were about to throw a debating bombshell which would dissolve the meeting.
    The narrator of Lovecraft’s greatest story, The Shadow Out Of Time, at one point refers to a doom more certain than any Shoggoth invasion: ‘What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.’ If all that was true, we were boxed in by horror and despair. Alas for my overloaded brain – this argument had only just become clear to me.
    I put the question:
    “Your department, or Section, has, I suppose, googled Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”  (Professor of political economy at Miskatonic University from 1902. Victim of strange amnesia, 1908-13…) I expected, and dreaded, that my question would elicit a serious nod in reply; but to my inexpressible relief, Standish and Bricker exchanged smiling glances.
    “We have checked, yes,” Standish replied.
    “And?”
    “It’s all right. There’s no such person. It’s still just a story.”
    I exhaled in a whoosh of relief.
    Standish smiled: “Lovecraft, you see, is somewhat of a fiction writer in this reality, too.”
    “Well, phew, hip hip hooray to that,” I said. “Shoggoths are survivable, but not the Shadow Out Of Time. So… humanity can get on and live.”
    “In this reality, with our help, yes! That’s why ‘C’ wants to recruit you.”
    “Does your boss know about the reality changes?”
    “Not directly, but ‘C’ is a remarkable person. One to whom indirect evidence is enough. I won’t tell you more at this stage. Look, Mr Wemyss, we’re all bumbling and floundering at the moment, but we don’t intend to abandon our plans to counter reality-threats. We need time, we need to accumulate insights, to get a grip on the problem. Insights – clues – leads – and you are as likely to get them as we.” He held out an almost blank card with a number on it and nothing else. “We are the few, the very few. Your abilities have no other outlet, and you won’t rest until you join our Section.”
    I took the card and replied formally:
    “Mr Standish, this is what I will do: I will wait awhile to see if I do have any insight of the kind you mention. Despite your prediction about my abilities, I won’t feel happy accepting employment with your…” (I stared at the card) “Reality Patrol, before I’m reasonably sure that I can do the job.”
    “Fair enough.”
    He and his silent companion rose to go. “One thing,” he added in the hall-way. “Why did your uncle write that letter? Why didn’t he discuss the matter with you by word of mouth? That would have been harder for us to monitor.”
    “You mean you don’t have this house bugged?”
    “We don’t dare. That might have put you off us for good.”
    “Well,” I laughed, “Vic probably guessed that, and wrote his message down so as not to make things too hard for you.”
    Standish’s answering smile wavered into a grimace. “I see that you are hinting once more that we should trust him, maybe even employ him.”
    “Maybe not go quite that far,” I said.

*

Well, that’s got rid of them, I thought when the grey car had driven off. A conditional undertaking: that was all I’d given them. A promise dependent upon my getting some insight first. Insight into the prevention of reality-changes, that’s all, haha!
    Really, a foolproof ‘out’.
    For it came upon me, overwhelmingly, as soon as I was once more alone in the house, that I was living a normal life in a normal world, and that the likelihood of me gaining the sort of hunch the Reality Patrol wanted was negligible; which in turn meant that I need not feel capable of working for them.
    And, inconsistent thing that I am, I managed at the same time to feel a vague pleasure in the idea that I could join their outfit if by any chance I got restless and dissatisfied with normal life… Not that I wanted that to happen, of course; even Vic had probably had enough world-wrecking excitement for the time being – he’d attained what he wanted, after all – and I was a lesser variation on the same theme. Not quite so fortunate, of course, in that whereas he had Aunt Reen, I had nobody. On the other hand I had youthfulness and time on my side.
    Idly scanning his letter once more, I came to the paragraph where he mentioned a particular change of mind.
    “…I was annoyed at first, but I soon accepted the 92-elements outcome. And that taught me a lesson. The trick is not only to arrange things how you want, but to arrange that they have always been that way. And of course it is now true that it has always been this way…”
    A little icicle slid along my spine.
    “…The routes are infinite in number. Rather late I begin to wonder whether all that emphasis on enacted ‘laws’ might not actually be unnecessary, blocking a more pragmatic universe of custom, in which the spread and survival of the fittest customs leads to a common-law rather than a statute-law universe… the science which Sung China might have given the world if it had persisted a few more centuries… Ah well, who knows what the next round will bring? If we slip, we can always fall down onto Kroth, for Kroth is never gone, it always exists in some basement of the racial awareness. Its own history continues, though for us its voice is stilled.
    “And if reality should again collapse down to the Kroth state – if the laws we passed should for any reason give way – our memories will incorporate that silent history, it will be re-ignited into consciousness and speak to us again, and we shall remember it retrospectively and thus catch up on all of the Krothan news in an instant. That’s how it’ll work, if it ever comes to that.
    “Maybe it happens repeatedly, the Collapse and the Rise, and perhaps it’s no bad thing for us to be thus jerked up and down, if we need our experiences to mix like drinks in a shaker, or like the ocean layers which churn and stir the plankton so that the deep fish can feed… Yes, if we’re the deep fish, all well and good. If we’re not – ”
    I put the letter down, having had enough of it. The merry way he wrote! The flow of metaphor went on and on, calculated to make the brain reel, intimating that we really were, as I muttered aloud, in “a right real reel”. No wonder the Secret Service were distrustful of him; even I, though intellectually convinced of his present loyalty, felt stained with doubts arising from an uncomfortable inkling of a randomness that tries to look respectably hard and yet, though it sets itself in stone, is unable to deny that a petrified flux is still a flux…
    Yet life went on, not too messed up. How was this so? It suddenly occurred to me to ask this important question. How could reality, in view of the recent wallops it had suffered, seem so coherent, so firm and not random?
    It was, indeed, reasonable to wonder how on earth Earth had cohered so well when it re-formed across a gap of over a year’s non-existence.
    Of course, millions of its people had continued to live across that gap, albeit as Krothans, not Terrestrials. But – ah, here comes that thought again – millions hadn’t. Aunt Reen was one; that was why Vic had not been able to find her on Kroth. And what should I believe about these Earth-only people: these people who never appeared on Kroth: during the Earthless gap year, were they simply nowhere and nothing?
    I pondered – metaphorically, because I had to – of Time’s straight arrow like a one-dimensional number line, and then of 2-D extensions of the number line, Argand diagrams and complex numbers, suggesting you can leap, as it were, above the line. In which case somewhere or in some state the Aunt Reens and the Elaine Derings of this world might have existed across the gap. In thus persisting, they might have helped in some way to preserve threads of reality unbroken, so as to sustain Earth when Earth was not.
    Call them Sustainers.
    Did this count as an insight?
    The kind of insight desired by Standish’s gang, the RP?
    I had the freedom, if I chose, to take action about this.
    I was in a good enough position to investigate at will. Vic had ended his letter with:
    “I enclose a cheque for a tidy sum, which should keep you going till you find out what best to do with your life. Let’s wish each other luck, though I’m sorry you can’t reply to this letter: I thought it best for Reen and me to disappear and lie low for a while so I can’t very well give my current address, seeing as the Secret Service are sure to intercept this, but you’re welcome to chat about me when they call. My guess is you can help them, but that’s purely up to you. Whatever you decide, I know you won’t waste your chances.”
    What had been at the back of his mind, I wondered. Wait a moment, let’s have a bit more evidence….
    I had a big thought just then, that perhaps Vic was way ahead of me as usual, that he was getting insights from Aunt Reen… learning from her about her tasks as a Sustainer…
    I wandered through the house and picked up an object which I had left lying on a shelf. It did not look exciting, it was just a wooden 12-inch ruler, but it was a possible excuse to make a daring call upon the first Elaine, Elaine Dering.   

                                                      *

In one of the last lessons which we had attended together, I had casually borrowed a ruler off Elaine D. because I couldn’t find mine, and then neither of us had thought about it ever again while school lasted. But now, long after our school-days were over, I had come across the object amongst my stuff, and I clearly remembered why I had kept it in reserve.
    Such a petty scene to toy with in my imagination: me going to her place and saying, “Oh, hello Elaine, just thought I’d pop round and give you back this…” Ridiculous, that a friend should need such an excuse for a visit. A wooden ruler! Pitiful!
    My moody stare returned again and again to the puerile object as the bus jounced along the road towards the village of Bovingdon.
    I had not even phoned to say I was coming.
    Of course, I had, in any case, intended to go round and see her sometime…
    With or without the ruler. Depending on how grown-up I managed to be.
    Stupid as it was, the ruler was just a prompt, really; a straw in the balance, that was able to tip it because the balance happened to be evenly loaded with other pros and cons.
    But things might not stay reasonable. When emotions began to lurch, plans swiftly became useless. And all the trouble I’d had with the other lesser Elaine was as nothing compared to what this one might do to me. Or rather, what I might do to myself, from today onwards, in her presence and in her absence, since the truer the love the more delusional the hopes it brings – especially when you consider my special talent for being wrong.
    In view of all this, were it not for the fact that I now had two excuses I would not have been on this bus at all. Rather than head so surely for a let-down I would have stayed at home to accumulate more guts before risking an attempt to visit a memory in the actual flesh.
    As it was, however, I did have the two excuses, so I could pair them up.
    Here’s the way to do it, I thought. As soon as I see her, give back the ruler, with a grin, to gain me a second or two of clownish confidence, and then, if she responds in a manner humorous and kind, I needn’t lurch and wobble with stupid hope – I can, instead, derive dignity from the larger, grander, aim:
    To research the Sustainers.
    That idea pumped some courage into me at last, as the bus came to a stop on the village green.
    Eighteen was the number of her house, according to the phone book. I could see it from the bus stop and I had no excuse to dawdle; so, since Fate was out to pressurize me, I would let the pressure push – I approached the door – I rang the bell.
    Concerning the biggest things, the ultimates, everyone believes that he himself must be right. But with regard to the intermediate, disprovable things, experience had taught me that I could be trusted to get it wrong. That is the thought that made me shiver as I heard footsteps in the hall and saw her shape, vaguely through the frosted glass. Mythic cuddlesome stooping shape, fumbling with a bolt.
    The door opened, she saw me and her beautiful near-plump face lit up. Enthusiastically she almost sang the word “hello”. She took the wooden ruler from my outstretched hand but did not glance at it, she was too busy staring happily at me, and I had no choice but to believe that she really was delighted to see me – a possibility which I had not envisaged – could not have envisaged on this scale –
    The way she drew me in and made me welcome, it was like being loved by a gentle whirlwind. Sentences bubbled out of her while her dark eyes’ fixative sparkle arrested me, hoisted my awareness of how clueless I’d been. “Now, don’t be annoyed, Duncan, there’s something I’ve just got to finish off. Five minutes is all it will take. You can come and listen if you like.” She was pulling me into the house as she spoke.  Into a smallish room, messy like a nursery, she led me and then she knelt on the floor, and I did likewise. “I have got to be strict with myself, I time my practice every day.” She picked up a clarinet. “I’m afraid I tend to bore people,” she added, “but if you don’t mind listening…”
    I somehow found the words:
    “You can bore me as often as you like, Elaine.”
    And under my breath I added – for there was no clash between my entranced state and the business I was on – “…for I have found my Sustainer.”
    “You what?” she said, interrupting her first few bars of music.
    “Play on,” I waved. “Compliments later.”
    “They’re sure to follow, are they?”
    “They sure are.”

FINIS