65135X The Rapture

by KING FELIX

So, you disliked Mrs Thatcher, eh? See if you like her antithesis any better. But, of course, don't feel obligated to look for your own face in the mob.

65135X The Rapture

'This is the point where intelligent aid and interference from a mind or mass of minds is absolutely necessary. Such aid and interference was and is the fact, for nature unaided cannot do the work right. But I do not mean that God or angel interferes and aids. It is Man who does this. Not the man of the day, weak and ignorant as he is, but great souls of immense power. Just such as every man would now know he could become if it were not that religion and science have painted such a picture of our weakness, inherent evil and purely material origin, that nearly all men think they are puppets, or remain with a degrading and selfish aim in view of both the here and after'.

- William Q Judge, 'The Ocean of Theosophy', 1893.

David Bowie -just lately, from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning, to the moment she fell asleep at night, he was the only thing she truly concentrated on. Even now, through the half-shut bedroom door, Norrin could see the man's statue at the centre stage of her live-in workshop. The previous days coating of silver Spelterbraze, which stank like heavy industry and tinsel, would at last be fully hardened. Today she'd add another, and another, until the figure shone like some dizzy Arthurian dream. David Bowie, as the alien flipside of Thomas Newton in 'The Man Who Fell To Earth'; on first receiving the commission from the Bowie Museum in Berlin, they'd both been deeply surprised. It was hardly your man at his most loveable -the way Mary-Lou was so frightened she'd urinated through her clothes. Surely it would have made more sense to have a statue of Bowie in his iconic 'Low' cagoule, or as the polarising man-alone Jack Celliers?

Norrin's usual thought; as if I care. He wished only for the statue's completion, so the museum could take receipt and give him his girlfriend back.

It was 07.14. Soon she'd wake, put on her overalls and gravitate towards him. But for now she slept, and dreamed. The rapid eye movement told of watching a war reach its almighty climax, while the twitching of her jaw, if slowed down using a special camera, would have revealed a whole plethora of exhilarated smiles.

Once the alarm sounded, he was quick to ask, "Good dream?"

"Dick Laurent is dead". She smiled up at him, "Lucid. Narnia long. And yours?"

Norrin shook his head sadly. He hadn't yet told her what he'd read online, that a weird little side-effect of his D-Praecox tablets was an inability to lucid dream. So -unutterably sad, not being able to share the enthusiasm of the girl you love, although he didn't think his dreaming mind had the processing power to conjure a girl as beautiful as Shalla Bal anyway.

In the flexing of muscles, the attempts to leave the bed, their limbs crossed and, without much conscious effort, they were drawn into sex. Norrin only just noticed how the hairs on his arm were still on end as he padded through to the bathroom. It was one of those mornings where Routine Three of Three was adopted -opening the cabinet just a little and staring sourly at the D-Praecox tablets. Except for the first time he also noticed how, at a certain horror movie angle, the cabinet mirror also picked out The Man Who Fell To Earth staring directly into his eyes from the distant workshop. Rivals. He gobbled his goody-two-shoes medicine and made a diligent job of shaving his cheeks. His skinny throat. There was diligence also, the best of all, in avoiding his own stupid, haunted eyes. Glancing backwards, Bowie had a pretty good tactic: just go totally alien.

There were times, as he waited for the toaster to heat, that Norrin drifted into the workshop to stare at the house guest. Sometimes he spoke to him in a voice that was blunt, breezy. "I can't wait to see the back of you". The quality of the Spelterbraze was deep and impressive, but at this point it was still matte, the silver with a touch of grey. Shalla Bal reckoned that with the final coating, he'd shine and catch reflections like the most luxurious mirror.

At the breakfast table, she ate quickly. "These are some big tomatoes".

"But the juices are fairly well contained", Norrin pointed out.

With her mouth full, "I'm not complaining".

Norrin -made small cuts to the crispy bacon. Increasingly his eyes were drawn to the plume of smoke which flounced up from the cityscape. It was about four or five miles distant, in one of the old towns, maybe White City, which he loved for its long streets. On News 24, the rolling coverage simply gave a list of cities. London, Liverpool, Unity, Reading, Gloucester. From the scrolling banner alone, Joe Public would probably assume that the rioters were making a concerted effort to loot the city centres, and that was all. This was disingenuous. Norrin's eagle-vision approximated the plume of smoke to lie in Westgate Lock, which was quite a way off from any of the big shops. As Shalla Bal got to grips at the sink, he surreptitiously gasped away through the binoculars, picking out a wedge-shaped formation of riot vans between the swirling business park and the old department stores of St Paul's. They were unmanned, and once or twice he saw laughing, thin-shouldered monsters go sweeping past with what he took to be capricious smiles. Elsewhere, on Stroud Road and the speckle-paved yards of Tredworth, there were burnt out cars and sad-looking police cordons. It was -formless destruction. It was the End of Britain, clearly.

Heart pounding away, with the exact variety of horror a mystery, he was quick to hide the binoculars before Shalla Bal returned. The anxiety rested on something real: surely the owners of the Bowie Museum in Berlin were seeing Britain's months-long, escalating riots in their own media? How long would it be until they decided it was too risky to do business with such an ugly, violent country, and cancelled their order for the statue? He knew the thought hadn't yet occurred to Shalla Bal, but only because she was unusually optimistic.

She slipped back into the bedroom and donned her overalls. At the heavy dexian table, she set up the Spelterbraze mixing machine, which always reminded him of Harvey Keitel's assembly of 'Hector' in Saturn 3; all coloured, flowing veins against shining metal. Shalla Bal had never seen that film, of course, and he refused to let her, because it was such a mess.

And also, Farrah Fawcet, never feel the need to go to Earth.

With the radio on, he settled into the sofa a little way off from his girlfriend's working space, content to play around with the old yellow Viewmaster. He took in 'Mighty Animals of the African Savannah'.

"You should go surfing today, at Sharpy", suggested a distant Shalla Bal.

"The only reason I took up surfing in the first place", he stared at a brown, quizzical-looking lion, "was to show-off in front of you".

"That's not true". He felt she was smiling now. "I've spent hours watching you. You like the way the tide pulls at your ankles. Anyone else would think of it as a zen kind of thing. But you like fighting it".

Norrin neither confirmed or denied this. He felt he should keep his mouth shut for a time, so as to not distract her from the shining. But when you're in love with someone, you want to be in their attention constantly, at least in some form or another. To that end, he wasn't gentle in sliding down the Viewmaster lever, that funny, dusty, brittle-metallic sound.

"All I'm saying is, it's Saturday. I have to get this thing finished, but there's no reason you can't go out, feel the sun on your face".

Norrin took a sardonic-sounding breath, "You make me sound like a Japanese prisoner of war in his little punishment box".

She didn't smile at this. She really was concentrating into a delirium. "Go to Sharpy. Afterwards, have a pint without me in that pub by the sunken plane".

'Have a pint without me' -he liked that no end, because it suggested she understood the gnawing pathos whenever they were apart.

As a dusty, magical cave held fast in his hands, the Viewmaster turned to show a young giraffe and then a golden bird with a crazy hairstyle. Already a point had been reached where he was in deep thought, back towards sleep somewhere with his black coffee just a trickster tour guide. A snake in some bent grass, that was intriguingly flood-lit by the photographer, he looked strangely innocent. Meanwhile, Norrin sensed that his girlfriend was starting to get disillusioned with sculpting. Perhaps it was similar to when they'd first met, and he'd been a successful photographer. When you fall in love, and get deeper, and deeper, the fancy job you took to impress the world no longer matters so much. In time, it doesn't matter at all. Take a thoughtless, manual job. Your intellectual job is being in love.

It didn't help much that, when perspective customers scanned the web or the trade journals, features on Shalla Bal always came second behind Alicia Masters, Britain's other enfant terrible sculptor. If only the two of them were put alongside each other with top-trumps statistics. Shalla Bal had worked harder, and to begin with; she'd had a greater output. She was self-trained and self-financed, unlike Masters, with her millionaire dad and foreign arts academy, which she'd attended on a whim. Plus, bombshell: Masters was blind, and the general public, they love an inspirational novelty. For quite a few years now her 'studio' used an industrial 3D scanner-chisel to translate her subjects into bronze -the only real 'artistic' flourish Masters used was suggesting which pose they should adopt. Naturally, seeing Shalla Bal at the centre of a sea of photos, painstakingly molding away at a lump of clay over the course of months -it made Norrin want to go to Alicia Master's place and destroy it with a wrecking ball.

A zebra glanced up from his chewing, eyes ablazed at a very minor intrusion by the National Geographic camera man. He was looking to the left slightly: Norrin withdrew the Viewmaster to follow his lead. Currently the 310 celsius heat-applicator was being held a few inches from Bowie's face in the most dramatic tableau. Impossibly thoughtful alien eyes were blasted by wavering heat, bonded with impervious silver. Something in the shadows of his musculature suggested a real, living humanoid -tensed, just as Shalla Bal was tensed and self-critical. Those two unusually thick creases in her cheeks, which were ever-poised to go into a frown, but never quite did, now came dangerously close. She tip-toed around her subject. Fresh from the savannah, Norrin thought: gazelles are similar to deer, Blue Glossys are similar to Blackbirds, but there's no girl on Earth who's even a bit like Shalla Bal.

Behind the statue, the corner of the room was ten feet distant, up two rounded mahogany steps, though they'd hauled up a series of chipboards to prevent any excess Spelterbraze damaging the walls. Mr Kirby was a very thoughtful landlord, and from day one a natural alliance had formed. Besides. Waxed golden sheen against a low brown ceiling: it was a deeply cosy backdrop - Norrin felt he could stare into it for hours. Return-to-form sunshine was starting to fill-out everywhere. Highlighted: the crisp-flimsy-crisp T-shirt which Shalla Bal wore beneath her dungarees.

"Are you truly out of love with sculpting?", he wondered.

"Pick me out a CD to listen to. Faith No More. No, Sheryl Crowe -the one we listen to every summer".

Norrin walked to the bookshelf. Intriguingly, the slot where the Sheryl Crowe CD lived was filled by something else. He looked across to the one or two albums that sat atop their faithful old Linn hi-fi.

"It's above the player. Must have been there all year".

Shalla Bal gave a Rorschach-style 'hrmmph'. She deactivated the Spelterbraze blaster, walked around Bowie while flicking her eyes at Norrin. "You don't think I mean it when I complain about it all the time?"

Norrin said, "You don't complain about it all the time. And you don't seem truly disgusted by it, either".

"But-", she seemed hesitant. "It's because we're in love. We can't be totally unhappy about anything. Because we're in love, we brace each other, you dig?"

Norrin half-nodded. "I suppose you're correct".

"Actually, not Sheryl Crowe. The Miami Vice CD".

The man, he smiled, jogged to the book case. "I'm going to put this on before you change your mind a millionth time".

A heavy pulsing came from the heat blaster, which she angled steeply to Bowie's chin.

"You know, even if I have come to hate it, it's not laziness?"

Said Norrin in a firm voice. "I know that".

A steady, easy silence ruled the day.

"I love 'Crockett's Theme'. Did I ever tell you, when I was a kid, I went into Woolworths looking for the single, but I never found it, because I thought it was by Enya, and I only looked under 'E'?"

He nodded. "I remember the singles stand at Woolworths".

She deactivated the blaster again. "What was the first album you ever bought?"

"I never told you that?"

"You never told me that".

Norrin thought hard. "Cover Bowie's ears. It was The Fine Young Cannibals".

"The Raw and the Cooked?"

"No, the one before that. And what was the first album you ever bought?"

"I can't remember", said Shalla Bal, a beautiful little spring in her voice. "There was Pink Floyd, 'Dark Side of the Moon', but that doesn't count. I was buying it as a present for my dad. He had the record and there was the idea that it might be better quality on tape. The first album I bought for myself? I can't remember. Let me think about it".

His girlfriend worked. Norrin mauled his throat as if it was a hobby. After a time, though, he grew still.

"My point is, maybe we could take this as a junction to -retire, or at least, take it easy in the style of Adam and Eve".

He watched carefully. Shalla Bal absorbed the idea whole, more or less. She stood as motionless as the statue of King Alfred in Wantage, one hand swaying out on the hilt of the applicator, the other limp at her breast -introspection almost, almost timeless. The fumes from the Spelterbraze; just let them in. After a decade of industrial casting, she was almost invulnerable to the chromey atmos. She was a weathered alchemist.

She said, quickly warming to the audacity, "I'm thirty-six, you're thirty-nine".

"We're in a unique position. I'm not saying we've definitely got the money to see us through decades and decades, but we're not far off. We could go and live in the countryside. There are farms, and orchards, and reclamation plants that employ workforces that consist entirely of Eastern Bloc immigrants, just because no English people will do it. You know what that means? The first time a single one of them leaves, because of the equal rights employment laws, we'd be in there. We could move among them like giants".

"Living in the countryside", the sculptress became wistful. "You could say it's story-book. But is it? I can't even imagine what it's like".

"Start trying", Norrin gleamed away at her. "We'd just be coasting -through life, the way no else does because they're too busy with their mortgages and their kids and their careers".

Shalla Bal spread a palm and held it millimetres close the silver statue. The orange sunny haze was everywhere now and it hardly helped the drying of the Spelterbraze. Nevertheless, the figure seemed to belong there, seemed as if it had always been present -on the fine newsprint island in an ocean of yellowy floorboards, there in the cosiest workshop in Gloucestershire.

Barely seven feet from ceiling to ground, over where Shalla Bal and the statue stood, Norrin often imagined the expansive widescreen from the beginning of an old-fashioned cinemascope matinee. Only now did he associate the murky tightness with an ending. With a happy ending, of all things.

His girlfriend made a sharp turn and a girlish, delirious swirl. The smile was so sweet that, at first, he didn't take in what she was presenting him with. His surfboard.

"So get out of there and coast. Get some practice in".

"And you?"

Like a grave old NHS consultant, she fixed her stare. "I'm going to daydream so hard that I make a complete disaster of giving this guy his silver skin".

Track ten 'Clues' into track eleven 'The Talk'.

"I'll go", Norrin sighed. He said in a flat voice, "It's no fun without you, though. You do know that don't you?"

"I know. And the next time I'm in the pub, I want the barmaid to say, 'Your man was in here the other day; he looked so wistful we thought he was worshipping some bizarre new god'".

Smiling, Norrin went to the closet and shoved his wetsuit into the ruc-sac. He looked around for a plastic bag that would keep it all separate post-surf. He searched at quite a pace. He became mesmerised; the pace slowed. Soon he was deep in thought.

Through the hallway doors, they looked at each other and laughed at the enormity of what they'd just set in motion. A future that was deceptively idyllic - there for the taking.

He closed the door of the apartment, smiled and fingered his ribs. Down he went to the next floor, where Mr Days, a ninety-five-year old, lived happily in his mysteriously-shaped rooms. On the bottom-most level, there was nothing more than a slatted utility locker and a funny stone arch for their wheelie bins. The lid from their own had long-since been scavved, as best to become a sled but probably just for mindless kicks. The penetrating sunlight was making the plastic of their exposed bin bags smell. Or was that the fallout from the riots? Certainly there was a lot less traffic-noise than usual, no springy bouncing sounds as estate cars made low progress over the nearby speed humps.

This morning he had lead in his legs; usually he walked quickly, even with the board at his side. Out in the arena of vivid, biting sunlight, he turned to see Shalla Bal raising a hand from their window. Already she looked different, more beautiful than ever, with her black fringe so pronounced it was a stone-cold killer of all other women's hairstyles.

The square went a little way around a corner and then out onto a multi-lane, lazily-traffic-lighted crossroads, less like a British city crossroads and closer in spirit to an LA box-junction, wires and signs spaced so sketchily apart. One could cross there, if one had the patience, but Norrin instead passed through a link beneath the low, garage-like apartments. It was here, on workdays, that he met old men returning from the newso with their copies of the Mirror and the Racing Post. They said 'mornin'', something that made him feel awkward and grateful both at once. Across the other side, the broad pavement slabs and the yellow-wood flower turrets -curiously free of litter, always.

He looked at his watch, but only once. If Shalla Bal was with him, she'd pester him about checking it once, twice, three times, in order to train his mind to look for discrepancies in something that might or might not be a dream. She made him check road signs, billboards, news hoardings. And alas, not once, during a dream, had he remembered any of this training. Why should he? His waking life was a routine -a glorious routine of work-a-day bluecollaring, household chores, love and sex- whereas his dreams were like a cross between Dallas, a disaster movie, death, freeform jazz. To expect to be able to train yourself for something so bizarre, while doing something routine, seemed impossible to Norrin.

And also Shalla Bal was coming a long way back to help him: she'd been lucid dreaming for so long now that her trigger mechanism was incredibly agile. Her REM sleep state had done away with conventional dreams altogether. She closed her eyes in one world and opened them in another. Sometimes he wondered whether she was so incredibly content in life that she just didn't need metaphor-laden phantasies to set her mind straight -or whether lucid dreams were actually a new, superior form of internal therapy. Chicken, egg, if ever. Alone in the forest when the tree comes down, you're a ghost; still you hear the crash, the nuance of rustling leaves, every gasp of air.

Midway up in the sky, a grey-satin airliner made a pronounced curve, as if hesitant about landing anywhere near the riot-strewn city. Truthfully, Norrin reflected, it didn't seem that dangerous after all. The only sign of trouble was fewer people on the street, plus the 'move along' warble of a police siren once in a while. He hit the broad stretch of disused, girder-edged canal where his dad had once spotted a huge rat. To follow the snaking of the water was impractical, and so he cut through yet another courtyard. Quite lazily, he looked at the grubby curbs.

He saw it - that terrible thing - and the shock-value equaled dozens of horror films.

Hoping for an optical illusion, his eyes tried desperately to suggest that it was a length of brilliant silver garden hose that was somehow possessed. There was no denying the truth, though - alongside of the concrete lip: two or three inches of slow worm, with the head and the tail missing. Still alive with emphatic curving motions that took up the entire length, moving around in spasming circles and clenching, muscular folds.

Surreally, the head and tail were nowhere to be seen, even though he braved himself to look closely at the surroundings. The horrific sight was bold and inescapable. It also became a scene of nagging questions, nothing more - was the movement just an anatomical reflex, or did it reflect the creature's horror before it lost its head? Why was the creature so far from the undergrowth? What of the very precise pink cuts at either end? It didn't look like the work of a cat or a bird. A heron? He knew he was being romantic. In this area of Monk Meadow there was a deficiency of regular birds let alone anything that could cause such elaborate damage.

The world, high-frequency sunshine or no, became a timeless vacuum as he looked on. The twisting silver trunk refused to die. It didn't slow. It didn't mark a beat, any more than Norrin's reeling mind was aware of the passage of time. Nausea, hysteria and shock proceeded to play funny games at his throat.

Down the way, beside some Parisian-style walls that looked like bed rails, a platoon of hoodie twenty-somethings swaggered, walked backwards, kicked at cars so their alarms sounded. A teenage boy who looked very much like an unattractive girl dragged an Argos bag full of loot, while his friends played with a metal baseball bats as though they were soft toys. About to emerge from a T-junction, a Chelsea stopped dead to give them clearance. The housewife woman and housewife man were slack-jawed and blank.

Norrin couldn't face any of it. He hunched his shoulders, grappled his surfboard close and walked beneath the brown shadows of a towerblock. It felt eerie to be able to cross the road so easily. The painted green rails above the muddy canal had been so-decorated in the seventies. Harmless men who looked like Beethoven clinging to their desk-jobs, practically in bed with the punks and the skins they wrongly thought were their antithesis. A sense that people were out there in the sun, millions of them beneath the green-translucent window strips of a Ford Cortina, breathing. Breathing, because they all worked in factories.

Norrin continued to skirt the dying city.

Black glass and optimistically-painted apartment blocks hung above cacky garages, narrow, pointless railings, every bit of it a picture of scampering bourgeois prettiness. Soon the soft, mixed-stone walls grew emaciated. They seemed to be shrinking. In this ghost-world, he told himself he was on the home straights to Sharpy - while intellectually he knew it was still at least half a mile distant. Things were swept along by daydreams of surfing. There'd be a surging beneath his ankles, something writhing and eternal, and it would be a psychic explanation for the beheaded, betailed slow worm.

At the tall entrance of a private courtyard, some pajama-wearing teenagers were hauling a security-clamped moped across the silent dual carriageway. Norrin got the impression they were simply going to throw the thing in the canal. Still, with the heavy chain linked through the axle, it was far too much like hard work, and they stopped dead in the middle of the road to examine the lock. His decision-making processes, as he tried to decide whether to simply breeze past them, felt horribly delirious. This morning, there was no one else in the world; they were like 'Guess Who?' cards flipping up from a cosmic void, himself included. At one point, his boss had owned a moped. And rioters or no, he'd never seen a British child he would have trusted not defile and destroy something like a cloud of locusts, so just -Welcome Aboard. All these factors twisted dully in his mind. He walked briskly in the opposite direction, heading for the ornate green crown that marked the beginning of Kreeskrull Hill. Dampest-spring and hottest-summer overgrowth led the way with dark green ash leaves, brittle silver cartilage, highly uncommitted shadows on cream pavement. A daydream of being in the crevices of the Dealey Plaza, the Zapruder camera catching everything like God still paying attention while He had a photosensitive seizure -it came and went with his heavy breaths.

On the lumpy gap of a low stone wall, a boy of about sixteen leant on his forearms and spoke with a subtle urgency to his friend. Norrin suspected they were talking about him. He really didn't want to walk past, but it was ridiculous to keep seeking alternative routes just to avoid rough children. The blue-top one with fat, black eyes decided to break the murmuring.

"Look at that, that bloke nicked a surfboard".

"What a dick", smiled the boy at the wall, forearms still laid flat but with his legs bouncing rapidly up and down. He turned sharply and spat into the dirt. Norrin wanted to laugh; scum, scum-stereotype, scum, scum-stereotype, and around it goes in a whirlpool, the centre of which, a politician denying that horror exists as a concept.

Scum. It was here that a third teenager sauntered along the concrete bank. He had both hands in his hoodie pockets, as casually as anyone might hold their hands in their pockets. Except Norrin knew he probably had a knife. Certainly the boy was bracing his shoulders in preparation.

The other two proceeded to pelt Norrin with fragments of a smashed stereo.

"Oi, Alfie, just kick him in the balls and we can nick it".

"How are you going to sell that on Ebay, you f- faggot?"

"Oi, Alfie, just kick him in the balls and we can nick it".

Alas, Norrin wasn't convinced Puffy-Eyes was whole-heartedly suggesting this as serious option. It was forty-percent a serious option, certainly - sixty-percent vicious intimidation.

The tense-shouldered, pockets-hugging boy was incredibly close now. And at last he whipped out his knife, a neon-plastic affair from a mid-price camping set. Laughable, in a way -yet his expression promised the laziest, most wrenching collapse of a civilisation the world had yet seen. The Nazis? Succeeded in large part by being able to paint themselves as underdogs. This was something new. The seconds-worth of eye-contact told it all. And it was the same expression Norrin saw in the eyes of 'wholesome' housewives and housewife-men-office-workers. Our lives, our multiple children, our mortgages, our bodies that have never seen a drop of constructive, wage-earning sweat -we will be sustained. Just because.

It wasn't even proper evil, just laziness.

While the knife was still at an angle, Norrin used the single maneuver that Skully wasn't expecting. With his exposed side, he lunged into the boy and knocked him over. It was quite feasible, at that moment, that he could have taken a backwards step and brained him with an edge of the board, possibly even fracturing his skull. Halted only by a lack of time, and a funny sort of karmic fear that was nothing more than a smiling face in an magazine advert -he moved off.

"F- hell!", was the view from the sidelines.

Norrin looked at them with hatred. He gently walked backwards, eyes still locked, and then ran. The well-painted ponce-flats, the Parisian-style walls, the T-Junction: these landmarks became tight, flashing tracks delicately in tune with his racing heart. He considered dropping his board so he could sprint properly. He would have done so, except the fear and the need for escape clouded his judgement something terrible. No more than five sprinting paces behind, he heard huffing and the infinitesimal rustle of ultra-cheap hoodies.

Entering the low-hanging vestibules of the apartment block nearest his own, Norrin's breathing hit dramatic highs and lows, all aligned with his dithering mind. It wouldn't be wise to bring the gargoyles within even a hundred feet of Shalla Bal. Blue-silver shadow lapped his head and shoulders as the boy in the grey hoodie monkey-jogged through the sunlight. Beyond, his two friends were just visible as darting bloodhound shapes.

"Let's have a go on your surfboard, mate", said one of these distant figures.

The boy in the grey hoodie made mockingly calm footsteps towards him. The slackness of his eyes, even engaged in this undeniable evil, seemed no different to a boy called Josh, or Charlie, or Alfie, or Harry, being interviewed by a Points West reporter about his A-level results and the desire to go to university. Arrogance, as a form of unconsciousness, the name of the game. He raised his little fists in a boxing motion and made 'chuh!', 'chuh!', 'chuh!', noises with each swing.

"Go home", said Norrin. Generally he cowered before the little fists, both in genuine fear and as a reflex. He didn't know why, and it made him ashamed from second to second.

Said the blue hoodie from the right-hand flank, "How about we go to your home and get jiggy with your milky-ass mama?"

Maybe it was all coordinated somehow, subtly, by Mephisto. A little fist caught Norrin between the collar bone and chin. He dropped his surfboard and punched the boy between the eyes in a reasonable short-range upper-cut. The other two boys then fell on him. Damage was done to the one on the left, with a clumsy blow to his neck. The one on the right, however, was a vague, colourful shape giving forth painful and cramp-ridden punches all along Norrin's ribs. Prime Minister's Questions, waving his fist rather than jabbing it in the direction of some child's abdomen; it came to nothing all the same. Itchy, biting blows grew increasingly painful until an exciting new phenomenon took place. The neon-pink camping knife flashed at his side. Norrin felt himself stabbed, repeatedly.

The boys hung back and laughed. "F-ing dick with a surfboard!", said one of them, as though it was a brilliant-quaint anecdote to be one day shared with his grandchildren. Flies.

He picked up his surfboard, because it seemed like some kind of talisman, psychological. A desire to move away, a toe-line attached to his skull, drew him clear from the jackals. Ten feet, fifteen. Two of them laughed and hopped away in sprightly little springs. The one with the damaged eyes was doubled up, though his retreat was still sprightly, and soon he was laughing again, forty-five percent grudgingly, fifty-five from the heart, someone getting a cream-pie at a Christmas party. It truly was a ruined society; they did think of trying to remove themselves from the scene of the crime, but only by hiding in plain sight. They loitered at the metal-chip railings at the edge of the box junction. A woman with a dour face, an old-fashioned dress and huge breasts cycled past them -with impunity. A Chelsea waited patiently for the lights to change, its indicator flashing with a razor-defined precision that was wholly unnecessary. A gloss-black KA followed in super-sluggish fits, then a Citroen C5, the driver having bought it because he wanted to look like 'a character'. Norrin looked at this flowing cross-section of society with a loathing that was gentle -nonetheless undeniable.

But it felt precarious to look backwards, or rather -the lightheadedness broke its truce and came to the fore whenever he shifted position. Since the pack of teenagers, and the world they represented, were currently disregarding him, he decided it was safe to try for home.

The thought of Shalla Bal was magnificent. They would talk, and there'd be some kind involved discussion, though the feeling of it would be satisfying like a sigh, or a dream.

Unprecedented weirdness came in his ankles and thighs as he tried to pick out solid footsteps. Suddenly the link and the low-hanging vestibules came to an end. He saw their own apartment across a perfect diagonal to the north-east. The stone entrance would otherwise seem hideously stark, if it wasn't home.

Sunlight picked him up. Surprisingly, the swirling progress across the paved gulf was easy. Long shadows that looked like Basil Brush became short, cool triangles, once more cinematic widescreen. On the other side, he touched the stonework with his temple.

"The sea's not in there, you f-ing weirdo".

One skipped, one waddled. The one that Norrin had succeeded in damaging was squaring up and zooming forward. Note the jogging bottoms, of the type that only really suit World Heavy-Weight boxers and makes anyone else look like a pantomime Arabian princess. All this he saw from across his shoulder, from a blood-heated skull propped on a fused skeleton. An impressive burst of speed, perhaps his last, took him through the door. He braced it from the other side as best he could. The hinges made a tiny squealing noise as force and counterforce ebbed queasily against each other, unfortunately never getting close to the buzz-lock click. Way-laid at his side was the surfboard. He figured it might serve as a brief, make-shift prop to keep the thing from opening wide, or at least make them trip over themselves as they tumbled through. To instigate this, a lightning exchange was made -which failed, alas. All Norrin could do now was charge the stairs. He took an impressive number, travelled at least a third of the way up before he was knocked down and stamped on.

He stared longingly at his front door as the ball of his skull met with spindles of pain, or, worse still, an absence of any feeling at all. One of the children bodily walked over him, heading for the landing. At the top, his creature-from-hell legs made wide arcs to kick the door open. All of this was incredibly ironic, in hideous kind of way. He'd always known that some day his last thoughts would be of Shalla Bal. But for her to be the subject of such helpless, agonising fear?

Mephisto loves his curveballs.

The petty little annoyances, Cliff ignored, because he was that kind of man. Things like stealing bottles of coke, skiving in the far corner of the furthest greenhouse, throwing stock as it was unloaded from the lorry, so causing the driver to pull the droopiest look of dispassion he'd ever seen -these matters could be overlooked, just. Matthew was, after all, a nineteen-year-old, and Cliff told himself that he'd probably been just as irksome, back in 1965. There was one thing that couldn't be excused, though, and that was being surly to the customers. Small companies, especially parochial garden centres, must make a name for themselves by being particularly accommodating, by giving a personal touch that would otherwise beimpractical. So if a housewife gives you a ten-item shopping list, you should simply go ahead and collect the items for her, rather than puffing out, 'No, I'm not doing that'.

The trouble was -as Matthew sat with heavily-flounced shoulders across the back room desk- Cliff was utterly incapable of putting any of this into words. Perhaps it was because he was a man incapable of getting angry, since 1985, when he'd successfully purged all his bitterness through a series of unpublishable science fiction novels. Then again, perhaps it was a gentle, gentle sympathy: some people just aren't cut out for the service industry. And unfortunately, in the twenty-first century, the service industry is all Britain has left for any non-yuppie nineteen-year-olds.

Still another mitigating circumstance: Matthew was on the main-service checkout desk, a position which was usually taken by Oliver. Just recently, though, Oliver had been worrying that he and Cliff, as the two older employees, were treating the teenager as a dogs body. And so, through nothing more sophisticated than humility, he'd let the boy sit behind the desk that afternoon. They thought he'd sense the weight of duty, and feel entrusted. If only it'd worked out that way.

"I'm sorry we can't make you feel at home here". Cliff felt his eyes twinkle, though he tried to constrict his smile. He knew full well that his default stance was that of a smiling old fart, possibly a b-s as well.

"You're sacking me, right? Well there's no need to be sad about it, the money's s-, anyway".

This the boy said as though it was an absolute moral certainty, to the point where God on high or the Spirit of Truth was firm at his side, hand on shoulder.

"Well, bad or not, I'll pay you until the end of the day, and I'll be sure to write you a good reference. If I write it tonight, it will be in the post tomorrow and be with you by the weekend".

"What-", Matthew shook his head while keeping his large brown eyes steady, "makes you think I want a reference?"

It was daunting, to say the least, the way the boy simply sat there, neither storming out or specifically shouting the odds. It occurred to Cliff that, if he was the sort of man to dislike anyone, he would dislike Matthew. Instead, grandfatherly eyes that were not really his own stared out across the ultra-fake teak.

"I'll write you reference, anyway. It can't hurt to have one handy. And, do you know, if it was just me, I'd happily keep you here, I suppose -except that lady will certainly go away and start whining".

He looked squarely at the boy and tried a faint, tentative smile. Unrequited.

"What makes you think anyone cares about this place when they can go ten miles down the road to Leekes or Proper Job?"

"I don't know", Cliff shrugged. "It's a mystery. But ten miles is quite a long way, I think".

He would have said something more substantial, except he was horribly distracted. Just outside the office, a pretty red-head was conversing at length on her mobile, just beneath the swing speaker pounding out Smooth Radio's top of the hour news bulletin. HMV was under new management and U-534 was at last being welded back together and refloated. At the same time, the girl spoke in a similarly purposeful tone into her phone. It sounded as if she was discussing the fate of a character in a novel for which she was joint-author. The phone conversation and the news bulletin mixed together in Cliff's semi-consciousness. He heard, 'She - is - coming - for you -'

"As I say, some people just aren't cut out for this kind of work. I'm sure you'll do better and be much happier somewhere else".

Matthew's gawky teenage head wobbled in an exasperation that was almost tender. He got up, shouldered his way through the shiney wooden door and was out by the checkout in just a few headlong strides. By the wicker partition and the amassed soil bags was a stand of DVDs, slowly warping in the changing of the seasons. As a joke, whenever Cliff came in after a day off, he asked, 'Did we sell many videos?'

Matthew paused between the stand and the door. "By the way? These are called DVDs, not videos".

Slate-faced, he hauled the stand over with a jarring crash, spilling DVDs all over the paving.

Oliver placed his hands on his hips and shook his head.

"Don't be too hard on him", suggested Cliff.

"What do you mean, 'don't be too hard on him'? I hope we never see him again".

The two old men huffed and puffed to haul the wire stand upright once more, Oliver giving a 'one, two, three' that Cliff found faintly amusing. The DVDs were everywhere, though. Cliff opened out a cider carrier to kneel down on. It was a vaguely satisfying job, and he found it made for good camaraderie, the way Oliver was comfortable enough to just sit behind the cash register and stare at him as he worked. On the radio was 'Stop the World and Let Me Off' by Patsy Cline. He was certain it was quite a long song, but as it faded out, he realized: something was going on. No sooner did Peter Rowell say 'We're going interrupt this song to bring you a news bulletin' than Cliff's mind raced. Terrorist attack? Dead Queen? Dead Philip?

'It's been verified by thousands of eye-witness that what appears to be a real life spaceship is descending low over Scotland and Western England. The object, which is described as glowing and a classic flying saucer shape, has also been analyzed by Goonhilly and RAF Fylingdales as travelling at between 60 and 75 kilometers per hour -and moving in such a trajectory as to touch down in North Weltsbury at around 3.15pm. The public is advised not to panic as a trained response unit is en route to intercept the object should it touch down. There are-'

"North Weltsbury, that's us", gaped Oliver. Already he was off the stool and craning his neck through the automatic doors. There was little scope, and it was fanciful to think that the infinitesimally windswept sand in the car park could be caused by the saucer.

Fantasy became reality, however -once they'd taken a few steps outside. The fact that it was upon them. Upon the hanging baskets and the pretty log porches. Upon the whole of Aalmeston.

"Good God!", said Cliff.

"God almighty!", said Oliver.

For the ominous hum, there was no exact reference point, even if it was reminiscent of the way Hercules had flown over them in the days of RAF Linneham. That steady, all-powerful anti-gravity process seventy feet above their heads: it was just a thing to be accepted. The yellow glow across the flat underside could easily be read as 60 watt, except for the way it pulsed so expectantly as if in connection to the gasping heartbeats of the humans below.

Oliver said, 'It's coming down, in the fields past the petrol station!'

Seen partially in profile, and what an honour, the saucer had a funny kind of rise like a deflated big top made tantalizingly solid. 'Unashamedly awesome' was how Cliff would have described it, if he'd been pushed all the way to introspection. Staring up, his stiff old legs made him waver. A glowing, sonorous flying saucer with a flat underside and a light dimple above -it moved straight in as the centre of his nagging aesthetic -and about time since the pull of naked women had long-since disappeared.

They stood and stared as the object levitated with indeterminate ease above the little Alder trees which hotch-potched the bypass. Now it was barely a thousand feet away, while the feeling of an awesome, imminent history-change was punchy, palpable.

"Well, what do you think of that?", Cliff said.

Oliver tapped his sides -a comedy character, but with a purpose. He moved to the pseudo-pine shelves which lay across from the till.

"Go on, get over there. Take them some cider as a welcome gift".

Cliff frowned. "I'm not sure Martians like cider".

Oliver's hands quivered over the deep-coloured bottles. "Well, take them some ginger wine, then. You've got to go over there and give them something. It'll be excellent advertising for this place. Also, you'll be famous. Think of telling it to everyone".

From the heart, "I don't want to be famous. Why don't you go? You're the one with the grandson".

"I would go", said Oliver in a reasonable voice. "But there's no way I can run with this hip. Go on, Cliff! Do you want that kid in the petrol station to think of it first?"

Cliff took the wine and sidled through the automatic door. All too true: the hum was exciting. It made him feel as though he was part of some pivotal junction in world history.

What did the chap from the petrol station have to offer the Martians? Some plastic knives and forks? A jazz mag of women with perms?

The cars on both roundabouts had stopped in a mindless cluster, though every now and again one of them would nudge forward. Huffing and puffing, Cliff just had time to glance to one side and muse about whether the drivers were watching him, wondering what he was up to. The ambassador of Earth, handle-bar moustache and a torso more barrel-like than not.

Oliver had been right, too. It was a mad, pleasant, childish little race. The boy from the petrol station was indeed scrambling down the roller shutters of his cave, though Cliff knew from watching him open up in the mornings that it was a complete straggle. Onwards and onwards atop old legs like pogos, forgetting everything that lay behind, he knew full well that he was hooked. It wasn't just the saucer itself. There was a type of rhythm, it seemed, in all of the landscape. Off towards the 40 acre, bypass-eschewing field where the thing was hovering, the miniature Ash trees were swirling and bowing wildly. Yet towards the other edge, the Beech trees were beset by gusts that were smaller, crisper, a guerilla front.

On the main slingshot of the bypass was a lane-to-lane crossroads, usually sealed off by sixty MPH estate cars. At the best of times it was a surreal juxtaposition between pedestrian sauntering of the town and speeding, numb-minded drivers -only now had the world had been reset. Along the dirty trough which led away to the other big roundabouts, each and every car had stopped dead. People drifted between them in proper shock -Cliff could tell this by the way not every one looked at the glowing ship all of the time. Housewives in particular looked numbly back towards the world, as if the explanation lay in the boxy, blueish architecture of Aalmesbury. Against the thick wooden gate -still an outer-ring removed from the field itself- a line of dirty fleece and shirt-wearing townsfolk were muttering or filming the descending ship with mid-to-high range smart phones. Cliff tried not to frown, given the fact that, weirdly, he now considered the flying saucer to be his own personal property.

Things were excitable on the ground; uncoordinated, dizzy, not just because the saucer was delivering a quickening high-pitch whistle as it moved inexorably down. Cliff took advantage of the staid limbs and gasping breaths to slip between the onlookers and clamber over the broad gate. Patches of straggly dried mud, something eternal in this neck of the woods, looked as artistic as ever. In a way, it was a pleasure to loaf through and kick clear -unimposing check-shirt farmers existing in the same world as space aliens, who'd have dreamed it?

Following the object was relatively easy now. The sizeable footpath, with its broad banks of foliage, was surprisingly clear of Joe Public, leaving him utterly alone with the traveler. The shadow and the relayed light played sharply on the flat underside as the glowing grew subtler. It was a matter of feet above the golden grass. Nothing in the world could halt such a steep descent.

And Cliff wondered. Perhaps Oliver knew him better than he knew himself, that he would make a good ambassador for Earth. In any case, he felt an abrupt passion to make history, to take the weight and smile.

Cliff hauled himself over the five rungs of the final gate and started across the field to the object, now just a platinum-coloured husk. Silence prevailed, more or less. Army four-bee-fours and a windswept news van made progress along the lane, coming up far too short. He walked in an amble, happy to let them fall into a bottleneck formation at his back. Dimly, he was aware of oddly-moving helicopters, the noise of which was completely and triumphantly overpowered by the saucer's solemnity. The slight baying wind, too.

Close by, he decided to move in a slight circle around the fifty foot radius. There was no sign of a hatch. Just as he turned his feet, however -

There was a kind of gasp in the collective unconscious, maybe an actual sound, too: the ship was opening.

He felt his fat old eyes blink as a beetle proboscis acting daft on the ground. It seemed the ability to follow his nose was all shot to hell, and when he turned around, he moved slowly to avoid looking foolish.

Exactly as he swiveled, he saw her. He wasn't sure how he knew it was a woman, as opposed to a faintly voluptuous man, and he wasn't sure how he knew that she was old, in her sixties at least. The crinkled jumpsuit dented and swelled like tin-foil as she placed each careful footstep in front of the other. The golden helmet was smooth, a medieval affair which gave no clues whatsoever; one slot for the eyes and the type of breathing holes a child might pierce into a plastic bottle for his pet beetle.

Many vinegary-adrenalized soldiers were at his side. It was wishful thinking indeed that they were moving so slowly on purpose, letting their training slide in the mass of awe. Hearts beating slowly and cracked mouths drawing no more than life-support breath, they could still bring their rifles to bear in a snap - at the calmly moving woman. The calmness meant something, everyone knew that immediately. It suggested to Cliff that, throughout their whole lives, humans always move too quickly because, through no fault of their own, they're jittery, neurotic animals. Perhaps the soldiers were hypnotised by this weird little nuance, too, and that was why they let Cliff lead the way inch by dwindling inch. The terrible tension moved quickly, slowly, slowly -though it never faded completely.

The tide of Earthlings jerked as the woman halted and knelt down. The idea that she was middle-aged-to-senior was reinforced by two fragile clicks as her joints folded. And finally the proof came. With the helmet lifted clear, the world was introduced to a very sprightly old lady, early sixties if a day. Her eyes glistened; it seemed they wanted to smile, if only the whole scenario wasn't an airless ceremony.

Directly in front though he was, Cliff never once got the feeling she was kneeling before him personally. She was opening herself up -to everyone. He wanted to reciprocate the humility and kneel down also, except that would be weird, and he didn't have time, anyway - the woman unclipped something from her belt. A small cylinder was placed on the grass with quite some reverence. A gift?

The crowd stirred uneasily. Gradually, Cliff understood why. The woman was, after all, kneeling. Western man kneels for no one. The only people who kneel are Muslims, and people who adhere to a demanding religion are, if not monsters, then certainly dangerously insane. Cliff, for his own part, had never believed this for a second, yet he knew it was the prevailing view of most English people. The soldiers had kept their guns trained on her throughout, only now they seemed infinitely fiercer as conscious thought took hold. Target locked. Previously they'd been breathing steadily through their noses; now, all of a sudden, the lung-coasting was accelerated to wild snorts, fearful.

Pragmatic to the point of godliness, the woman looked narrowly over her brow at the jerking squaddies. She looked either side. Cliff liked to think, she didn't pause on him, because she knew he wasn't a Roman soldier with a spear, a gobshyne at a town council meeting, a tiny child about to have a fit in a supermarket. No one knew what to do, and the silent meltdown was exacerbated as the cylinder buzzed, unfurled black leaves giving a sequence of lights flashing tip to stem. The lights were red. They quickened. It seemed reasonable to assume that this was a countdown. Picked up, as clear as day - the itchy thought-processes of the soldiers: the lady is kneeling like a Muslim. If a Muslim were to produce an object that seems to have a countdown -

"Miss, deactivate that machine", said a desperate, home-counties drawl.

Everyone was starting to sense that, on top of everything else, the units in the countdown were unequal. The sequence of red lights grew quicker, suggesting that any last minute doubt or deliberation had to be speeded past, probably the way a suicide bomber raises the forearm of his trigger hand as if in a victory punch.

It was all of it destiny, anyway. Low on the ground, the woman peered up quizzically from beneath a placid, leathery forehead. In those climatic moments, Cliff reflected how she seemed merely not-quite innocent. For him, that would probably have been enough for a stay of execution. After all, 'not quite' shows complexity, and complexity makes for good odds.

"Miss, please deactivate the machine or I will destroy it!"

Cliff forever felt a kind of trust towards her. For the soldiers, though, it was all over.

A rifle to the left made a tap-tap noise. Even as the woman moved her arm, she was flung backwards. A further tap-tap noise from another rifle shredded the cylinder to pieces. It had been quite fragile after all.

"M A Squad, go-go-go!"

"Standby Ringmaster Teams, M A Squad moving to Westside exit!"

Two or three soldiers mauled at Cliff's shoulders to move him back, though they were undisciplined and staggered to a stop a mere forty feet away, allowing him a continued line of sight to the saucer edge. The woman had her pulse checked by a chisel-jawed soldier in particular orange khaki before the rest of them converged to ease the rag-doll bundle onto a stretcher. There was no ignoring the way a sizeable formation kept the seamless hatch of the saucer as a constant target for their sub-automatics. It made Cliff feel queer, the way the tips of those fat, grey guns hardly wavered at all. Because the troops didn't even feel excitement. Just gun-toting neurosis.

The woman was moved away at the centre of a crab-like formation of 360-degree-swinging gun-muzzles. That was that, apparently: the stretcher was slid into a heavily fortified humvee hatchback, which dithered for a moment, then trundled away. People proceeded to chatter and hum in whiney hand-wringing.

It was then that the saucer hatch opened a second time.

Enter the robot.

Not turning its head at all, though there was now a hundreds-strong crowd to behold, the giant proceeded down the slope and onto the dirty grass. People gasped and felt a funny foreboding. Cliff was confident no one had ever envisioned a mechanical creature quite like this. He was tall, at least six-and-a-half feet, maybe even seven. The musculature was stocky, but agile. In terms of precise physical appearance, however, he was -incredibly -

The statue of nineteen-eighties coal miner. Every detail was there. The boots. The braces. The tight vest atop a stripped-down boilersuit. High on his waist, there was a skinny belt that would have been just man enough to hold the pick-axe and a heavy coil of rope -if these weren't already part of the prefabricated mold.

A second before the drama took place, Cliff's intuition told that most of the robot's power resided in the lamp which was built into his McCloskey helmet. While everything else across the huge figure was a steely grey, the hand-size circle of the helmet lamp was dark red. Becoming a glow. Becoming an atomic furnace, fathomless.

The hum wasn't quite enough to vibrate the ground, still it was disconcerting beyond all reason. And just as it seemed no one could take the tension any more -

Multiple laser beams spiked outwards to strike every rifle and machine gun across the front half of the landing site. They flared into a glowing red outline and vanished from the soldier's hands. As a tornado blur, hardly even changing the rigid pose of his thick limbs, the miner stepped longwise, turned his head -and similarly obliterated the weapons of all the soldiers who lay behind.

Ruffled only slightly, Cliff felt the barest compulsion to fall in with the high-gasping civilians who rippled out towards to the lanes. The de-fanged soldiers dug in their heels, though he guessed they might as well have run away with the rest. The grey face of the man nearest him assumed a look that was shock, cowardice and bravery all blended up by a trendy artist. It was an expression shared by a lot of the others as well, not least the smooth-faced twenty year old who grabbed his arm.

"We're to make a wide perimeter!"

This he said in an exasperated, patronising tone, as if Cliff was somehow being difficult. The older man swept him off, before a handful of more autocratic-looking soldiers were clustered into their midst. Brows so clenched they could only be handling crowd-control in a fever dream. Cliff was convinced he was not dreaming. As he wobbled across the gate, expertly keeping hold of the ginger wine, his eyes were fixed solemnly on the prefabricated ripples in the robot's 'clothing', the steely expression in his close-together eyes.

Good old high-viz coppers waved their hands to indicate a neat escape route along the fluffy verge of the black-blue carriageway. Reluctantly -overwhelmed, also, by daydreams- Cliff took the cue. Clearly, daydreaming was vital, because there was simply so many emotions to dwell on. The robot's face had been unchanging, it seemed rough and ready, Churchill-esque. Say -'brave'. The lady had looked brave, too, but there'd been a white glint in her eye, a main-passage asterisk.

What was the footnote?

A Sky News reporter flung his mike around, Vegas Elvis, and entered Cliff's path as he clumped back towards the garden centre and Oliver.

"Sir, can I ask your name please?"

"Cliff Carpenter", earnestly. "I work at the garden centre yonder".

"You were one of the people who got closest to the alien woman. What were your impressions?"

"She was OK", he shrugged. "She seemed to be taking it all in her stride".

"And Mr Carpenter, were you, at any point, afraid?"

"No", said Cliff.

"What are your feelings about how the Army Response Unit met with the aliens?"

Smoothing out his moustache with a thumb and index finger, something he hardly ever did normally, clutching his elbows as if wearing a T-shirt alone on a winter's morning -he moved from foot to foot and wondered how to play diplomat.

Mercifully the reporter was forced to surrender his feed to a high-ranking interview back in the studio. Onwards trudged Cliff, until the concrete water tower and the cacky edge of hazels loomed high. There in his churned-up gateway was the reddish horse with a puffa-wearing spinster. He'd be getting a lot of fuss in the days that followed. At the very edge of the roundabout, the turn-off to the landing site had been obscured, half in a concerted effort by army lorries to seal the place off, half by a naturally-formed cluster of abandoned cars. Ant-hill clouds of khaki-wearing soldiers swirled and discussed how to proceed. It seemed odd, unnerving, eerie, that they were forming even a make-shift command post while so many civilians were still milling around in front of them in the excitement zone. Cliff wondered if it was as undisciplined as it seemed, or was the saucer touchdown so unprecedented that the whole town could be deemed collateral?

Snowing down on top of the intrigue came the stress. The main entrance to Cirenwald Hill Garden Centre lay just past the T-junction of the main road and the bypass slingshot. Infuriatingly, the police had set up the road block in such a way that their entrance was sealed off also. Still available: the bumpy, witch-ridden back-entrance, spitting out onto the dusty Lochreton road, but who used that? Only farmers and savvy old men. Cliff discussed the matter with the flicky-eyed constables, and they promised to refer the matter to their sergeant. It would have to do. His whole upper body ached with tension as he wobbled towards the neat little sales room, the sand-coloured connector between so many pint-sized greenhouses.

"Are you OK?", asked Oliver with a start. "You were on TV, twice".

"Yes!"

That old man brightness - it was the only thing still operating with any degree of certainty, the very last characteristic exchanged between himself and a Satanic world. How he hated himself, quietly.

Oliver, on the other hand, was not a man given to awe. He was simply excited. "What was she like? The space-woman?"

Cliff replied far too quickly, "She had quite a pleasant face. And she's definitely here on some kind of big mission, I would say".

"But did she look human? Could you tell?"

"I don't know. But here's what we need to do-"

He brought out the ginger wine bottle and poured a sizeable measure into their two coffee cups. There was something funny about it.

"I forgot to say", Oliver frowned, mostly to himself, "they think the Martians have done something to all the booze -everywhere. Everything alcoholic's been turned to water".

Cliff -nodded, sat back in his cheap little chair. As if the Martian lady had to worry about being washed clear from his mind by liquor. Those eyes, looking up at them, secrets and inner-mosts being punched like volleyballs. He was old, why couldn't he look so purposeful? We are all of us, after all, alive.

"I think I've got Post Traumatic Stress. Can I have the rest of the day off?"

This he said to himself as a joke, as he was the manager. And the answer was no.

When Norrin came around there was only confusion and grogginess. The grogginess outweighed the confusion by a good margin. Again, his reason d'etre was a black pounding, a memory of the teenager's spiteful fists striking away at him; get to Shalla Bal, and no need to be slow or considered as you go. Every dark, subconscious-skimming blow took him back there.

Except -within the cold light of day, there was no fudging the issue. He was currently alone and the monsters were gone. The stairs were gone -he was resting on a verge that was covered in frost, ice, something intriguing beyond conception because it was the middle of summer. For a few seconds he could afford to regard the frost as a picture in a coffee table artbook, even as the gaping possibilities queued up steadily in his mind. Probably, while unconscious, he'd been transported to a hospital that was adjoined by a film-set rushing out some overly-solemn kid's film. An ambulance had picked him up from the stairwell -but en route to the hospital, it had crashed during some kind of global catastrophe, the earth spinning too lazily, the sun suddenly fizzing out to nothing.

When he got to his feet, there was a surprising lack of discomfort, owing probably to his effervescent limbs, a plasticky durability running the length of his bones. And in spite of the unknown factors, as soon as he looked down at his body, his gut-instinct gave a verdict. It was something to do with death. And all those musings we have from childhood onwards -death could be something simple, or it could equally be something elaborate. Here, finally, was the end-of-time thrash-up daydream. His shoulders, chest, legs -everything was silver. Dimly, he still sensed his genitals, but it was as though they were inside some underpants fused to his increasingly numb torso. All silver. He looked down, his mind struggling to cope with the ever-growing alarm.

In this suburban encampment, as everywhere, people were constantly on the move to parochial destinations. Even so, there was a cross-section, and the sum of the parts stopped to look at him, interrupting his crotch-examination in a way that was obscurely annoying. Aliens. He wanted to think of them as grotesques, but that wasn't quite right. In another time and place, their long limbs and necks would seem naturally elegant, only here, now, every move they made spoke of jittery housewives, too self-assured, too bustling. Most of the face and neck-formations were much like a modern human's. As such, even the aliens that were relatively fit and athletic had slants of skin between their jaws and the middle of their necks. One 'man', whose voice was loud, wore thick-stemmed glasses, poncey. He addressed Norrin in a pretentiously magnanimous voice, easy to ignore.

The horizon was low, hard to look for amid the entrenched cottages and battle-rampart rooftops. Whether he'd found himself on the side of a main road or in the diced zig-zags of a housing estate, it was impossible to say. Perhaps there was no differentiation here. Always it was agonising, though: for an alien world, or an alien hell, the steely-white shade of the sky was tantalizingly similar to Earth.

The boorish alien spoke on. He flapped his arms in the direction of his fellows, as if his natural authority as a loudmouth would keep them all at bay. Norrin -shook his head, blinked his broad silver eyes. In a brain that was simultaneously running a dozen off-the-cuff working theories, it was easy for one idea in particular to come to the fore: this alien, he was the caricature of an office-working, weekend-shorts-wearing Englishman. The language he spoke had the same broad syllables as English, to such a degree it was infuriating. It would have been so easy for anyone else to speak the language and sound naturally soothing, even if he didn't know quite what they were saying. And Lord, Norrin needed soothing.

"Is there anyone who speaks English?", he asked, more than a little desperate. The traumatised slant in his brow, he felt, was a canyon, or a tuning fork, an avenue through which this meaningless world played. As he clenched his jaw, further mockery arose: while the inside of his mouth felt as wet as ever, it was a subtle illusion. The texture was just an inhuman smoothness, like marble, and once coupled with his body heat, there was an approximation of saliva-on-gums that was maddening.

"Please. Where am I?"

A heedless vicar playing right into the hands of Richard Dawkins, the lead alien took Norrin's attention for granted, rather than working for it second-by-second. He'd taken a tiny business card from his wallet and was drawing on it with some kind of snappy, futuristic pen, something like a thermal printerhead. Hastily depicted was a crowd of tall aliens with smiley faces, above them a human-shaped figure with a -

It was like reaching for the switch of a bedside light, or a lifelong short-sighter adjusting his bottle-base glasses for the tenth time in a minute. His crutch - it was just there. The surfboard. Also silver. Hovering at waist height in mid air.

"What in God's name has happened to me?"

The tarmac of road before him was not particularly well-packed, yet it was given a smooth look by the cold atmos of a recent deluge. Just like the roads in Gloucester. Above, the surfboard acted as if under the will of some languid telekinesis. It tilted in the air, moved into his arms, whereupon he was grateful to cling to it as a symbol of the illusory other world. It seemed to be his surfboard. A thing which had once been touched by Shalla Bal.

The aliens looked at Norrin with very underwhelming sympathy. The boorish housewife-man quit his jibber-jabber, then resumed. All a poetic-justice test, set up by the God of this bizarre inner-circle, who knew well that Norrin had lived a large part of his life trying to side-step all things 'society'. The growing crowd of this frosty world was a tailor-made hell, which he could speed past simply by facing his inhibitions and grasping the nettle. Surely? He staggered slightly before a mild-mannered lady alien. She was at least a foot taller than him, not that it stopped him clasping her shoulders urgently, squeezing them in a way that was almost sleazy. Her purple eyes, they twinkled, ever-bemused.

"How did I get here?"

"Trest-on... Sol. Ink trall... ot brell ho... whell... yi".

She was trying to annunciate the sentence as clearly as possible. Bless her for that, he thought, while trying not to focus too much on her mouth as it edged ever-nearer to a smile. This funny little novelty. His own point of view, immutable and immaculate: If I was in the vicinity of a distressed silver alien, I would either solemnly try to help him -or else I'd leave.

The houses, most of them slanted along the same diagonal grid, had frost-resistant walls, green and brown accoutrements, all of which gave away nothing whatsoever about the type of landscape which might lie beyond. He was reassured by this small measure of order and delineation. It was a suburban hamlet which leant itself to daydreaming. And all well and good -before he remembered that he didn't want to daydream or be reassured ever again, until he was moving towards Shalla Bal once more.

It was a place in the countryside, perhaps. Alien John Constable had doted on it for a time back in the alien 19th century, and since then it had been birdhouse for retirees, plus aliens who, nowadays, were pottering retirees from birth. Cars came; they were indeed different from Earth's, but not so much that Norrin was interested even for a second. There were broader wheels and bonnets far more angular, none of which went any distance to allaying the same old philosophical weakness: fuel-masturbating scurry-wagons.

A choice was taken to follow the tightly twisting arc in the road, though really it wasn't much of a choice. People looked at each other and followed him, talking, always talking. His mannequin feet felt like they were wearing rough-and-ready sneakers, ideal for a pavement that was heavy, gritty, overly tactile. And unfortunately it was a constant necessity, side-stepping the quietly-talking, quietly selfish-looking aliens as they unloaded themselves from cars and works vehicles. This was a twee, magical moment in their history, and they must stake a claim for their dour, unresponsive mouths, their eyes which flickered between chattering gossip and full-on mindlessness. Norrin frequently found himself heading for the convergences of garden fences, scrubland and stoney vents, then edging outwards to stick to the unmarked road. The aliens drifted around him, macrocosmic dustmotes with an element of something gleeful and stupid. The default expression of their smooth faces, a conspiracy by Mephisto himself to make mortal beings look proudly vacuous, snuck in whenever they went more than a week without being self-aware. Call the midwife. The synapses of your brain: characters in Midsommer Murders, the electrical charges: the flatulence of the ITV commissioning editor. As if being vacuous is something gentle, homely, eternal: hard-working families -it's tax-deductible. On someone's phone came a voice much like Adele's. The alien Adele. Admittedly the first few bars of the song were catchy and well-written. But you know. You just know, with the certainty that horror exists: she will start screeching. It's what she does, and you love it.

"We have to get organized", Norrin mumbled to himself.

There were tall figures wearing high-viz ponchoes, fastened by deadly-looking utility belts. Some held their palms high to the head-swinging crowd, others spoke into squawk-boxes or tried to petition Norrin to go with them. Ironically, it was the only time he'd ever felt the need to disobey a police officer. There simply wasn't time to be a good citizen.

Norrin decided he needed to go directly to most business-minded member of the alien government, who would understand the urgency, who would show him satellite footage of the moment he'd arrived, find a way to translate, have a spaceship and starcharts to Earth all ready to go.

He understood the importance of getting to the upper echelon, but he also knew -he was in shock, and it was getting worse. His eyes crawled across the grimey pavement as if he'd taken his punches from the Earthly teenagers just seconds ago, just a heartbeat ago. The need to know what had happened to Shalla Bal was unbearable.

"Ot yi camma. Ot yi camma, len", one of the alien policemen tried so hard to calm him.

Norrin stopped dead and stared into the creature's eyes. "Ot yi camma?", he said, as if he understood what it meant. He shook his head mournfully and let his pain shine through.

A new police-creature mumbled to his dressed-down colleague, and, regardless, they followed along.

It was on instinct that Norrin angled his body, raised a side-long palm in a funny expression of ire. Perhaps -angry messiah. All through their lives, an invisible priest had been giving them the last rites. Norrin was simply giving the final stroke. Around his silver hand, a brilliant white glow was established, an insanely powerful force which, if directed, would blast them a hundred feet into their parochial little suburb.

They understood, and withdrew, at the same time deciding to make far braver attempts at crowd control. Even as Norrin breezed through the blotchy grey atmos, though, the throng was oppressive. It was like those news reports about the unemployed, and there's always a point during the reporter's voiceover narrative that you see them -for several seconds- laughing as if they don't have a care in the world. Playing with their children.

It was like that. It was worse than that. In the early noughties, when Norrin's dad had been skimming in and out of hospital, he'd often had to go to a mixed ward, despite the fact that he was every inch an eighty year old man. In one particular ward, named after some kind of bird, there was both the old men, the blobby men with animal eyes, and the teenagers. Alive in Norrin's memory: the time an old man, in a very bad way, was attended to by the nurses. They'd pulled the curtain around his bed and he'd proceeded to fart himself to death, weeping.

The teenagers had laughed. They'd tried to stifle it, but in the end they all laughed aloud. Then the adults had laughed with them. And that was it for their souls.

Norrin slid his surfboard across an oversized stile, such a decisive movement even as his eyes were in freestyle meltdown. It was a beautiful world, though, in terms of landscape. Seemingly black conifer trees had grown into a slant, following a wind that scooped out the entire tank-green valley. Today the wind simply jazzed around with the playful little tips, leaving the trunks as daydreaming yetis. Garden-sized hedgerows gave an impression of deep solitude, colourful all the same. Creme red, tortoise-shell, perhaps bordering a dozen tranquil gorges between here and the zig-zag horizon.

He would head for high ground and proceed to the nearest city, and on and on until the alien government was forced to help him -one on one with no satanic gawkers.

His feet took him forwards across the ice-chipped mud. They felt remarkably solid and bracing, compared to how the rest of his body was wracked with quaking tension.

He listened to the natural hiss of the sweeping countryside. And then he listened to the ambient noise which lay inside it. He dimly remembered some late night radio arts program, where they'd talked about 'the music of the spheres', the sublime symphonies caused by the rotation of the solar system, usually inaudible to crass human ears. There was also those pop quantum physicists who insisted that, if sub-atomic particles made a noise, it would sound like free jazz. Norrin let his senses become de-focused. The secret noise of the universe did in fact sound like-

Surf. A colossal, dog-boys style wave, possibly even a tsunami. He threw down the surfboard in front of him; it chomped at the bit. He climbed aboard and within a second was fifty or a hundred feet above the world, all its stupid conventions, its bitter lack of any measured emotion. Not that the spirit of the Youtube La Bruja left him, either. People would see him and be scared to death, there being nothing in Heaven or Earth that could come close to explaining.

Tiny cars made speed along miles and miles of clean, uniformly grey motorway. Some instinct told him it would be easier to move as the crow flies across open country. This he did with a vague feeling of hope. Granted there was nothing on the horizon that looked like a city. Granted, at one point, he saw a segment of sewer pipe waiting to be embedded in the ground, and in rushed the memory of that headless, tail-less slow worm, twisting.

Increasingly he noted how electricity pylons were a lot more prevalent on this world; they intersected and criss-crossed in a way that would have been out of the question on Earth. It was just another pretty little difference in the World From Hell. Until, that is, they started to come in handy. Black pursuit helicopters, more like UFOs, really, tried desperately to converge above him. Norrin coolly landed and walked beneath the power lines in such a way that they provided a natural barrier between himself and the military insects. Overhead, the whole of the white-grey sky was something too distant along the alien colour spectrum for his eyes to deal with; it pulsed, and fizzed, and never settled down. Because he was on a headlong course now, he was happy to become one with the darkness of the landscape. Late afternoon in winter: being on an alien world gave it a kick but it was basically the same.

He thought: the trunk of the slow worm had shone such a luxurious variety of silver, there beneath the vivid Australian-style sky. It had thrashed so energetically, and perhaps there was comfort to be drawn from that? Even without a head -emphatically a thing that was dead- it still had a noble reaction to being in Hell. Thrash. Resist. Show Mephisto that your soul is nothing but power.

'I am either in Hell, or dreaming', Norrin thought. 'Either way, I must make a nuisance of myself, transgress, be expelled'.

He passed over a raggedy crest, towards an expanse of estuary grasslands, none of which could be mistaken for farming pasture even though it was well-and-truly the middle of nowhere. He squinted into the darkness and saw that the mighty web of pylons were flowing together, sometimes through cigar tube transfer bridges, sometimes directly, into a vast power station. Cooling towers, globe-shaped chemical tanks -these were familiar enough objects. But the kernel itself was unknown, some kind of tall building shaped like an up-coiled snake.

He walked at a calm and unshakeable pace. At a distance of maybe five hundred yards, the greyish power lines seemed dangerously close to the ground, meaning the alienesque helicopters could only hover in the far distance now -the vibe of strangely innocent policemen watching a horrific crime through binoculars. Soon, however, fate threw up another line of defence in the form of the power station's own security marshals.

By now twilight had betrayed everyone by bringing down gloom and ennui; the alien joes gave only the impression of sidling towards him, while clearly relishing the chance to curve around in the grainy shadow. They pointed double-decker handguns at Norrin's chest. His will was put forth, causing the weapons to implode in a spearmint-coloured flash of cosmic energy. The opposition waned.

Time to investigate the core of the power station, then, hopefully a place of hideous energy, a mere touch of which would bring either death or waking, but either way - an end.

He walked through the wall of the snake-shaped building, miraculously, and stood before the throbbing reactor which rose through computer-riddled floors and amassed coolant pipes. Scientists and maintenance workers in bulbous collars fled through a tiny door. Two or three stood their ground and pleaded with him to stop. Evidently, breaching the thrumming reactor would destroy not just the building but quite a radius of the countryside. Possibly, thought Norrin, reading the gaping dread in the eyes of a wax-stubbled spod, the entire country.

No deliberation. Nature filling a philosophical vacuum: that was the key thing now. Once again, through a motion that felt as easy as breathing, his hand started to shine, brighter than the shockingly white floodlights of a night construction site, brighter than a full moon dispelling fog. If there was fog, it was the macrocosmic landmarks of the physical world, things he'd previously imagined to be wholly godless. The black plasticky guard rail and the floor panels jumped across quite a distance, as if refusing to be aligned with his divine line of vision. So -partially outside of reality. But not all the way. A fat, high-cheekboned creature was imploring him to stop, and it seemed a matter of natural solidarity to offer him some kind of explanation. It spiraled, it led to a terrible moment of doubt. Nevertheless, Norrin raised his hand in preparation to thrust it inside the reactor, all the while staring at his silver-coated muscles-and-no-veins.

There was a reason they were silver. How had he failed to make the connection until now?

Report any fears that you're being watched, his mental health nurse had told him. The mind is like a muscle, an amazing muscle, but a muscle nonetheless. If you touch it, if it gets teased, then it reacts. In relation to his fear of the gang stalkers, this made good sense to Norrin, at least to begin with. The convergence of all those people possessed by Mephisto -it always started with a white car and a red car pulling up beside each other. That was their signal to begin the persecution. And actually, for a while, with Harper's help, he'd started to at least acknowledge the possibility that it might just be a jagged collision between raw coincidence and his mind playing tricks on him. But then. Increasingly the white car started to be parked at an ever-so-slight angle against the red car, and slightly in front, too. This couldn't be a coincidence.

Martin was a good man, of this much Norrin was certain, but Mephisto only ever needs to take control of two-or-three percent of their minds for his work to be done. A black-and-white system was resumed: he would stop taking the D-Praecox tablets -his emotions would simply have to close ranks against the gang stalkers as long as they could before he was finally dragged down to Hell.

It was then that he met Shalla Bal. That precise junction.

They fell in love almost over night. Everything about her was light, soothing, wonderful, permanent. Also, blessed; that very first week, they were en route to one of the little cafes in Cinderford, and Norrin had suddenly stared across at the slide-in parking slots. A little red Polo moved up, slightly erratically, to come to a stop a few feet shy of the curb. Sure enough, it was joined by a car which parked at an ever-so-slight angle and a few inches in front.

But this car was silver.

Arm-in-arm with the centre of his universe, he walked on -thoughtful in so many ways. Gang stalkers appeared at most if not all points of the compass, except today they were in the strangest mood. Some smiled, some just looked wistful. For once, none of them seemed particularly insidious.

In the cafe, meanwhile, Norrin had never known joy like it. They slowly got drunk and most of the information on what gave them eternal souls was exchanged. Towards the end of the afternoon, as it started to get dark and Christmassy, they simply stared into each other's eyes. Shalla Bal, she played footsie.

On leaving the premises, they were confronted by two empty parking bays. One was filled by a Ka. The other by a Honda Civic. Slight angle. Inches in front. Both cars -silver.

Shalla Bal asked him what he was looking at. 'Nothing'. He well remembered the slight smile that played at his lips. A gang stalker passed within inches of them and Norrin momentarily had direct eye contact. He read: passivity, and not the sinister mind-game passivity they usually employed. This was -release! Perhaps Mephisto was afraid of romantic love. Perhaps being in love made Norrin's soul less of a prize. He couldn't care less. The point was, he was fundamentally, existentially free. Henceforth he would gobble down his morning and afternoon D-Praecox tablets, because if he was back to the land of the living, and if the only side-effect was that a few people deemed him mad, so be it.

He laid his palm over the reactor and paused to appreciate the immense sub-atomic fusion.

The alien scientist looked at him hopefully.

Norrin explained. "Shalla Bal needs me, and I must wake".

He immersed his hand. Interestingly, the alien hardly even had the chance to think of a scream before the world was consumed.

A Basenji and a Flat Coat Retriever, both wearing business suits with no jackets, moved steadily through the sickbay door and stood before Klatuua. The Flat Coat Retriever licked his lips and moved his eyes furtively. The Basenji licked his lips and panted.

"My name is Howard Millibane, I'm the Prime Minister of this country. This is General Sir Marlon Jackson, head of our armed forces. I'm told by the doctors that you're fluent in our language?"

"Yes", said Klatuua softly. She liked speaking to dogs.

"First of all then, naturally", the Basenji paused to stare into the corner, possibly at a shadow that looked like some sausages, "I should say how much we regret what happened to you".

Said Klatuua in a mild voice, "That's fine".

The canine Prime Minister moved his eyes disarmingly. As disarming as a gun dog ever can be. "It really isn't. But I'd like you to understand why it happened. As you may or may not know, our country is in the middle of a global wave of terrorist attacks. Our enemies now are as insidious as any who've ever lived. You need to know that, as individuals, as a society, we are good and honest people".

"Mmm", Klatuua nodded her head. "And what have you to say on the subject, Mr Jackson?"

The Flat Coat Retriever quivered his head low and made his slavering lips form a line. "The Prime Minister speaks true. My men reacted, I believe, as any army in the world would have done".

Klatuua sat back on the raised medical couch, moved her head quite slowly, soaking up the velvety atmosphere of the windowless room, goading the two males as if she was a precocious girl again. Radiators, plus a reasonably well-made wooden coffee table, made a nice little horizon to run her eyes along. The side of the room, she doted on, simply because the novelty of two politician dogs was beginning to wear thin.

After scrunching up his black mouth, the Basenji said, "Well, I'd like to start again, if we can".

"Starting again", said Klatuua, "is the name of the game".

The dog moved his thin white eyes at the ceiling, then raised his ears.

"What was the device that you laid out before you?"

"It was-"

Something, perhaps God in His hatred of her coy behavior, was making the bridge of her nose itch wildly. She knew at once she'd have to remove her scramble glasses and see the politicos as they really were. Human. This would be a brave-tho-ugly new world. Dogs are inherently honest, loveable and exciting; humans were deluded, harsh and boring. And it took but a moment for her eyes to focus -on the rough carpet and her NHS-gowned knees. Boldly, when she looked up at the punters, she saw -

The man with spikey black hair, every sixth former and every junior travel agent who'd ever lived, vaguely fat -the Prime Minister. The man with a slate-shaped, echoey-neurotic brow -the military chief. All these things quantifiable, there was a feeling midway between optimism and entrenched hopelessness, an ambience she knew of old.

"The object, which I placed on the ground, was an omni-media transmitter. It would have relayed onto every television channel, every website, footage of my homeworld. It would have shown you -utopia".

Millibane sucked the air into a confused smile. "Is that the name of your homeworld?"

"No. I only meant to say, the place I come from is paradisal. As close to being perfect as any mortal realm can be".

"What's it called?", the PM smiled as he played with an ostentatious ball-point.

Klatuua cast her eyes onto the table. Increasingly it was a constant battle not to seem coy. "A lot of the questions you want to ask me, I can only answer at the press conference".

"You're planning to give a press conference to the public?"

"Yes", she smiled.

These people; she was old enough to be their grandmother. Sometimes this fact was acknowledged on both sides, though she was never really happy when that occurred. There should be no shorthand, not in this life.

"I hope we'll all get a chance to see your world at some point".

"I hope so, too", she shrugged.

"From what we can see of the device, shot-up though it is, it seems to be the type of technology we can't even imagine yet. But no doubt you've got a replacement aboard your ship?"

"No", said Klatuua darkly. "If the British public want to know why they've been deprived of the chance to see my home -that's something General Jackson here will have to explain to them".

Just like an old woman, wistful in her overconfidence, she glanced down at her giant knuckles. She quietly pictured Jackson standing there, frosty-eyed, too institutionalized even to properly sense shame or neurotic anger. The room was indeed very small, and if only the finish was life-affirming gloss rather than matte.

Conciliatory, Millibane gestured, both hands moving in different motions, still nowhere near as bad as Tony Blair. "You don't like the military, and that's fine-"

"Thankyou".

"Just like everyone, they only wanted to see the meeting of our two worlds run smoothly; it's really nothing more sinister than that. What happened was an accident. And we're more than willing to arrange an international press conference".

"But?", she prompted him.

"But nothing!", said Millibane open-heartedly.

She smiled at him. "I have an air of being difficult that hangs around me".

"Anyone's entitled to be difficult", said the Prime Minister cleverly. "We're just glad to have you here".

They locked eyes. She almost had control of her own expression. Old, hollow cheeks did their thing around a chin-dimple that still existed.

"I apologize, Prime Minister. You'd be forgiven for thinking I still have a sliver of snidey female hormones inside this bag of arthritic bones. The fact is, I'm a diplomat. I've been a diplomat for over fifty years now. There's no excuse for my being so coy".

Both men took a small breath which loitered in their lungs as she swung her legs from the medical couch, moved curtly to stand before them.

"My name is Klatuua. Well met".

Millibane shook her hand warmly; at that point, he wasn't even thinking about the history books. He was in no rush to retrieve his hand, either: she grasped it, grasped them both, turned them over with nimble, agile fingers. A close examination was made.

"Where I come from, there's an old custom when two prospective business partners meet. We each check each other's hands for scars. The more scars someone has, the more valuable a comrade they are, so the myth goes".

Millibane smiled, not quite stupidly. "God, I've got to think, now. I fancy I might have one or two, from childhood".

"I wouldn't worry about it". Klatuua -was pleased at how studious her voice sounded. It was ambiguous, but you'd have to be a DeNiro-standard method actor to pick up the edge. "My eyesight really isn't what it used to be".

"No", breathed Millibane. "Whose is? But with your amazing technology, you still have to rely on eye glasses?"

The diplomat smiled to herself as she thought of the dog-projecting glasses and the way they were so handily indistinguishable from regular specs. Originally they were a novelty designed for children, and yet everyone loved them. For relieving stress, they were second to none. And surely, stress was coming.

"We do have to rely on them".

"Shall we sit down for a moment?", Millibane gestured at some small, brittle chairs.

Klatuua looked at the man Jackson. "Would you like to sit down, General?"

The man sensed her hatred of him and just dealt with it. "I think it would be nice to sit down".

The Prime Minister started, "Now, regarding your wound-"

"It's completely healed, I assure you. Water under the bridge".

"But how was it healed so quickly?", said the PM in a loveably hurried voice.

"I'll reveal that at the press conference".

"What about your robot, then?"

"The press conference, I'm afraid".

A sharp breath of controlled exasperation was taken, re-deployed, "But a lot of our military analysts seem to think that what it did was some kind of automatic response. I mean, is it safe?"

"Is any conscious being 'safe'?" She looked pointedly at General Jackson and was visibly overjoyed at the irony.

"'Conscious'? So -this robot is actually alive?"

Klatuua chewed her lips, smiled, chewed her lips. "I'm not a philosopher, Prime Minister. But considering the complex methods by which Gort was created, I would say -we should think of him as a spiritual being. If that's what you're getting at".

Millibane looked excitedly at the General, then back to Klatuua. "You can't leave it at that!"

"I don't intend to. I'll tell you everything. At the press conference. Please, Prime Minister, I'm sure you understand -I can't be seen to be in collusion with your government. There will be enough conspiracy theories as it is. I am fanatically bi-partisan".

"Well, I can appreciate that, I suppose", the man springily leaned forward in his chair. "We're keen to avoid any awkwardness. What do we need to do to accommodate you?"

That slight lisp he had; it was such a nice little characteristic, thought Klatuua. A flourish of something utterly quaint in the face of unremitting capitalist strain. Unfortunately, it counted for nothing -almost without exception the man's policies were inane. At PMQ's, he usually prevailed, but only because it was tittle-tattle or populist oneupmanship, wholly meaningless.

His fate would be difficult, tragic and abrupt.

She twisted her arms into a model of repose across her lap; her shoulders feeling insulated against the poorly air-conditioned recesses, the pleasing smell of Mr Sheen Walnut.

"There is one thing you can do for me, and I think you can help with this, Mr Jackson. It's been irritating me for quite some time. I've been monitoring your television stations, as you can imagine. Regarding your army recruitment adverts. Do they use actors or real soldiers?"

A simple question, yet General Jackson didn't see the relevance, therefore he was confused.

"We can't really show currently-serving members, but their voices are synched up over an animated version of their faces. I believe it's called 'rotoscoping'".

"Mmm", said Klatuua, looking wistfully at a disused felt noticeboard. She made a point of looking into Jackson's eyes for several seconds, then looking firmly back towards the clinical-tho-shadowy wall.

"There's a certain young man who says words to the effect of, 'When I left school, I went to work in a supermarket' -and then he makes a snide expression and sourly imitates the beeps of a supermarket checkout. I think, General, it might be a good idea to have this young man make another advert, apologising to all your country's supermarket workers for this -hatefulness".

General Marlon wasn't the sort of man to apologise, though he was quick to take a breath and plunge in. "We meant no disrespect towards supermarket employees, only that it's not a job for everyone".

Sometimes the tightness in Klatuua's arms felt terrible, alleviated only when she ran her hands over her knees. A tingle followed. As she spoke, she did not bother to connect her eyes with the General.

"I understand your point of view. It's not a job for everyone. It's not really a job for anyone considering, 'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures'. Unfortunately, your country's economy offers few vacancies besides shop work. And shop work. The clue to its inherent nobility is in its title. Besides, everyone uses shops. The only people who use Afghanistan and Iraq are the Afghans and Iraqis".

"And murderous terrorists", said Jackson, uneasily.

'Grow up', was what Klatuua desperately wanted to say.

Instead, with a shrug, "At the press conference, I will show you how to neutralise once and for all the terrorist threat against your country".

The military man attempted to hide his churlishness with a, "Well...interesting days are to follow", though his voice was still artificially deep, entrenched in order-giving mode.

To the PM's credit, he was brave in rushing his 6th form gentility into the breach. "I just think it might be counterproductive to have a single British soldier apologize on national television for such a brief lapse in respect, serious though it was".

Granny smiled. Her gnarled cheeks smiled as though she was being presented with a puppy. Her eyes: glazed. "I think -you might have jumped to the conclusion that I've taken a moral stance! I simply meant that, with my arrival here, you'll no doubt want your army to play a role in controlling all the people who flood to see Gort. I'd hate for there to be any animosity between them. After all, your brave boys are the very image of nobility while fighting the mindless evil of dogmatic religion -but now, for the first time in hundreds of years, they'll be forced to control their own countrymen. What a thing!"

Now the two men looked at her fearfully while her smooth-cracked eyes -old age meant she couldn't really reshape them quite as she wanted- floated insouciantly above.

"Did you really think the first civilization sophisticated enough to visit you would have politics which matched your own? Would have politics as uncoordinated as your own?"

"I suppose not". The PM's smile was now, officially, stupid.

"There is going to be animosity between us".

The Prime Minister and General Jackson both spoke at once. Millibane clasped his hands as he bid his military advisor to proceed.

"You do come in peace don't you?"

"Yes", said Klatuua in a tone so beautifully honest it was a catharsis. "And I won't be responsible for anyone's death. In fact, it may reassure you to know that it's in my own best interest that no one dies, and Britain is left a better place than when I arrived".

Millibane leant forward. The small, brittle chair might well have been a plush sofa for the way he swerved around his puppy-fat legs.

"How so?"

"This I will tell you -at the press conference".

"But you keep mentioning Britain as if it's the be-all-and-end-all. I mean, you might believe our political system is uncoordinated, but there are countries on Earth that are so -rigidly undemocratic, they won't respond to anyone. Are you saying that, as time goes on, they'll each receive their own alien visitor?"

For the last time, Klatuua cast her eyes down thoughtfully. "Press conference".

She stood up to leave. The two men gasped. There wasn't the slightest modesty in killing the NHS gown and slipping back into her original flightsuit. Miss Hedren's wardrobe supplied by Edith Head and NASA.

It was only as she aligned herself centrally between the armed guards in the outside corridor that the PM hurriedly asked if that was it, if she was truly leaving them. The corridor, subterranean but only just, was a velvety nightmare of well-painted walls, security procedures framed like art prints, industrial wire trunking. Altogether a bureaucratic bolt hole, though she fancied she could find her way her alone if she had to.

"I'm going back to my ship. Tomorrow morning at seven is when I'll walk out and make my address to the people".

"I'll arrange some transportation", said Millibane -the bizarrely good-natured schoolboy, forever accommodating.

"I'm going to find my own way". Klatuua was subdued. "Along the side of the road, through fields. Perhaps hitch-hiking. You'll remember what I told you about not being seen to collude with your government. Besides, I am a woman of the people or else I'm nothing. I have to be able to move freely among them".

"It's not that", said the military chief understandingly. "I appreciate the principle involved -but it's nearly a four mile route back to your vessel. If you walked, it would reflect badly on our hospitality".

All along, Klatuua had wanted to keep her expression level, mysterious perhaps, though never oppressively so. The secret preparedness for evil bureaucracy. The lifesblood of irony which ran through her ugly old veins. These things must be veiled at all times. But sometimes, just sometimes, it burned clear from her eyes.

"It's interesting, gentlemen. I examined you carefully, but you never stopped to see what sort of scars I might have".

From her wallet -and they were surprised enough that she carried such a terrestrial-looking leather slab- she produced an equally terrestrial-looking polaroid photo. She coolly handed it to the military chief and the two men immediately gasped in distaste.

Her second mission off-world, and here was Klatuua, age thirty-one. From the shoulders up, she was quite beautiful -aesthetically, spiritually. Juxtaposed so sharply to the way her body was tied to a chair, arms strapped flat on a plasticky tabletop, the fingers of her left hand snapped upwards at stark right angles. The fingers of her right hand: missing altogether.

"Bear in mind that I'm a diplomat. An intermediary. That's all I've ever been. What you see in that photo was authorised by heads of a democratic state, by good men who'd otherwise be kind and lenient. Gentlemen, my parting words to you are these: aim for full employment. Lead your people. Don't allow them to lead you".

She swept forward past the guards, for the first time noticing how they were dressed in outdoor fatigues with bulky accoutrements, as if the building itself might dissolve into a battlefield at any moment. Dullards. Just a few paces away from the double doors, the PM hurriedly nodded for the guards to open the door, though he combined this motion with long strides to get level.

Klatuua said simply, "Don't delay with that advert, General".

As she'd predicted from the queasily-curving road on the way in, they were situated at the far end of a barren airfield. Still more intriguing, the distant end of the landing strip was home to a dozen civilian aviation companies, a go-karting cavern and a stop-over for huge piles of industrial grit. The direction home looked easy enough to latch onto; a tiny section of the B-road looped into view before being snapped straight on a rat-run towards Aalmesbury and her saucer. The technology-cramped humvee had no windows, and yet Klatuua had charted their course by the swings in the road and the inclination of the land. In her mind, she'd measured out the hiss of hedgerows against the doughy sound of houses, and visualised a map with no small excitement.

But the excitement was just a form of hysterical tension. Outside in the early evening gloom, life-affirming, there was still the nagging oppression of being watched by dozens of goon soldiers and a gulpy prime minister. Quite close to her shoulder, two Apache helicopters rose up, one of them rushing north in the pose of a croupier mechanically sliding chips, the other hovering overhead to carefully track her movements. It was gently, persistently annoying, mainly because all she wanted was five minutes alone to scratch her shoulder -though by now all physical signs of the bullet hole were vanished. Also -God almighty, the weird horror of it all- the fingernails of her right hand had grown at least five millimetres, a side-effect of the Kneipporite gel. All she wanted to do was to maul them.

Giddy, here-we-go-again tension moved hand-in-hand with more gentle concerns. She had a dehydration headache, yet time and again she'd refused their offers of a drink. Nowadays just a single cup would overwhelm her aged bladder, and sometimes there just wasn't the opportunity to play dare with finding a toilet.

It was strange how her mind picked out such a higgledy route across the grass, using far too much concentration. She forced herself to look up at the twirly, slanted trees as they intersected road, lane, rail line, plus the stubby greenhouse ranks beyond. It really was a beautiful world. On close inspection, it was perhaps nothing more than thorn bushes, then rippling fields just sharp enough to hide the mysterious dells between villages -home for cows and escape convicts, tumbleweeds and pill boxes.

On reaching the road-in-earnest, she was phased by the lumpy grass verge. So, too, was the Apache and the military chaperones who followed at a discreet distance. Time was found to stare along the shiney road.

Though it was the tail end of a bright afternoon, the texture of the asphalt reminding her of that particularly languid day during the blizzards of 1965. What a memory. Due to the sheer weight and speed of the snow -a foot in just two or three hours-, her class at the Politahouse had thrown out early and her ever-jumpy determination rushed into play. She would walk the thirteen miles home and, with her little radio, there was even a chance it would be enjoyable.

Actually, like anything, the walk brought highs and lows. Take the record review show with a host who floated exactly between motormouthery, gentle insight and slurping enjoyment at his co-host's elan. Then, wobbling along the hard shoulder of the motorway, she'd stopped to take a photo of the distant white hills of West Kennet, only to find that, within her ruc-sac, the hatch of her camera had popped and all the film had been spoilt.

At the end of the dualie was the 'Commuter of the Day' board, but no one had bothered to change it because, obviously, clearing the snowed-up lanes took priority. The sight of the previous day's winner -it was something elaborate like 'Mike Slilly' or 'Richard Glaybow', still up there, entirely meaningless now, filled Klatuua with a definite apocalyptic feeling. True, any ideas she had about one day seeing her own name were by now hopelessly masochistic. She'd been entered from the very first day she'd attended the Politahouse after leaving school. It was a random selection, apparently. Or -no it wasn't at all. To start with, she'd believed she'd have good luck, or that God would secretly acknowledge her as the most idiosyncratic traveler along that thorny route. But month upon month her name failed to make an appearance on the board, and soon a weird shift in polarity took place. She'd still peer up at the board as the bus powered along beneath, though she was no longer excited about the possibility that one day she might be up there. Rather, she was excited that her name wouldn't be up there. In the unlikely event 'Klatuua Shmi' had been selected, she'd have felt horribly singled out to the point of God Himself mocking her, doing an impression of her grainy voice, openly scorning her stupid self-image, stupid lies, stupid daydreams.

The sky had been bright. Not with a pervasive glow, rather as a matte blanket that played down across everything. As if the sky itself was concentrating, fiercely. Post dualie, the attempt to clear the B-road after round two of the snow was only just beginning. Locals and Council joes were doing their best by parking their vans and lorries in the little lane beside the linen factory and then carrying their shovels and paddles across to the afflicted road. Presumably, in the next little village along, Roston Flats, the locals were working outwards and at some point they'd meet up.

It had occurred to Klatuua that, after already walking nine miles, it would be OK to breeze past their efforts without helping: they'd look at her and not expect it for a second. Probably, the only reason she'd joined in with those leather-shouldered giants was on -a whim, a crazy longing to be useful.

"I'm falling in", she'd told the foreman.

"Hello!", he directed her across to an open-plan lorry. All that was left was a paddle that was loose at the joint, a regular steel shovel and a neon-pink paddle that was weirdly small. Steel it was, and she was grateful -her thighs had started to go rigid, and she guessed that handling a heavy old shovel would redress the balance by making all her limbs feel the same. Along the line of grasshopper muscles flinging snow-patties far and wide, she headed for the most congested point, where the sea of snow was absolutely silent, abstract, bitterly isolating. There, the playful whistle around her legs seemed to come, not from the snow itself, but from the zig-zagging motes of snow. Still, all the same, the sky was now brilliantly bright.

"Hiya, welcome to the wonderland", said the boy alongside her.

He worked not particularly quickly but with a kind of delighted logic at which shovelful should go where. He had a friend, a little way off, a slack-jawed girl with straggly hair, who'd frequently drag her limbs to a standstill. "I really want a can of Okola now".

The boy alongside Klatuua stopped and hugged his paddle. "Scrape! Scrape I tells ya!"

The straggly girl rolled her eyes.

Clever lines tumbled over themselves in Klatuua's mind, in the end landing on, "You do know we're digging our way across a field, to the edge of a cliff?"

Quite a deep burst of laughter came from the straggly girl. And the boy laughed too, in that abrupt, shining way of his. Parallel toy-town trees were a sign that they were, in fact, scraping away in the right direction. Toy-town trees that were shrinking and getting blacker even as the rest of the world was an incorruptible white. And meanwhile the boy made his energetic moves in a way that imprinted Klatuua's mind absolutely; he humped his back against the excavated snow, causing a giddy, tumbling mess, all but silent.

The team appeared from Roston Flats, though there was never a chance to slow down, mime, let the other half do all the work; by now a fleet of cars and lorries were waiting impatiently for the

breakthrough to be made. In the end, though, their excavation tools were lolling easily at their sides.

"Do you reckon that's it for today?", asked the girl.

"I want to dig out the world! Or, actually, I just wanna go back to that service station and get hot chocolate". He looked almost-shyly at Klatuua. "I'm Mikey, by the way. This is Tilly".

To her astonishment and trembling heart, Klatuua decided to head the mile out of her way, taking the back seat of the first car that passed along the snow-free road. She remembered the way the pole of Mikey's paddle hung tensely between them as the head end dangled clear from the window. It was a phallic coincidence sure enough; sexy, funny, funny, sexy, sexy, outer space.

The roadside garage had the smallest cafe she'd ever been in, and the row of stools overlooking the snowbound valley was miraculously vacant. There they'd sat, pupils dilated. It was around five o'clock that Tilly had left to go home, gooseberries extinct. While Klatuua and Mikey stayed on, laughing, scared, perhaps not as scared as they should have been, but happy, warm, coy, gentle, dizzy.

In love.

Married within four months.

Destroying each other, with the certainty of two planets colliding at a cost of all sentient life. Such a horrible thing to happen, and yet why, every now and again, did the whole cursed memory seem so crazily satisfying?

Eyes returned to life and ranging around. There was no Shalla Bal, and there was no murky apex of life-after-death reality-jazz. There was just a grainy, globe-shaped wall, which he proceeded to follow once he'd risen from his silver knees. Through floor-to-ceiling panels of glass, probably pretentious, the place was illuminated by a browny-browny-orange sunrise very close by. What of the outside? It was somewhere at the coast; he saw elements of a sea wall, but beyond that, he could equally be in a city or at the wildest tip of Scotland.

Usually bungalows struck Norrin as being entirely hateful, due to the squandering of a chance to build more substantial, utilitarian houses. It was not an allegation that could be leveled against this place. As far as he could see, the old-fashioned glass and mahogany sides came together through the course of several rooms to form a perfect sphere, which was huge. He crept along the edge. Murky brown sunlight blasted him. There were tables, chairs, stylish layers of carpets and rugs, crockery displayed proudly, or perhaps just imitating satellite dishes. Really, nothing in particular that gave the place an idiosyncratic touch. Lived in? Inconclusive. Still Norrin moved uneasily.

Aligned centrally was a kind of long, dusty living room. At the brittle window pane, a slanted view of the broad heavens was granted. It was unnerving, because while he was sure this was a sunrise, the light in this particular spot was dark, dimming, the consciousness of all time and space flickering low. At the core - a man, in what Norrin took to be samurai armour, surveying the velvety sky as a battlefield general slowly going senile. His helmet presented a stark silhouette -tall, with ornate embossments and obtuse triangular horns.

Without turning to face him, the man said, "Alright, then. You're here. The Silver Surfer. Do you know who I am? Can you sense it?"

"Mephisto", was Norrin's sour suggestion.

"Mephisto", the strange figure shook his head slightly, "doesn't exist, except as a figment of your imagination".

"As opposed to you?"

"As opposed to me".

"How do I get back to Shalla Bal?"

The man turned in favour of Norrin. His face was broad, with heavy creases leading to thick cheek bones. When the semi-light caught his eyes, Norrin instantly recoiled: the pupils were not round but square. Fierce white squares, blazing.

"You're afraid of me. That's good".

Numbly gripping his surfboard when all he wanted to hug it for support, Norrin stepped forward. His saliva-free mouth gaped wider.

"I just want to get back to Shalla Bal. You seem to know what's going on. Can't you help me?"

Said the strange man, the demi-god, "We will help each other. But first you have to understand who I am".

Some of the carpet in the main room floor was old and thick, other sections were old and threadbare. Norrin felt a terrible weakness in his thighs and ankles as he paced around, twisting, fidgeting.

"I have no idea who you are. God?"

It wasn't much of a smile, but it spread across the man's face as if it was there to stay.

"Perhaps I am a caretaker god, between the incoming and the outgoing".

"Explain", said an effete Norrin.

"Think of the scene in 2001 A Space Odyssey, where screentime is shared equally between young astronaut David Bowman and decrepit David Bowman on his deathbed. Think of the intensity with which they stare at each other".

"How", Norrin felt his silver temples slope, "do you know I've even seen that film?"

The triangle-horned man walked forward, leaving behind a valley of brown-orange light, at last growing brighter. Very close to Norrin, he turned his head, emitted a smile that may-or-may-not have been healthy. "You hardly remember it consciously, but when you were seven, you were due to go to the circus with your mother and father. In the afternoon leading up to the trip, however, you grew sick and fragile. Later on, you were recovered, but by then it was too late to set out to the showground in Etterton. As a way of giving you a treat all the same, giving you a chance to see something remarkable you'd never seen before, your parents allowed you to stay up late under a blanket on the sofa watching 2001 A Space Odyssey. David Bowman as he went about his transcendental suffering".

Norrin -dimly- remembered this episode. He stared hard into the square pupils.

"David Bow-man", he said ponderously. "And who are you?"

"I am - Galactus. I am the raw exchange between your small, pathetic soul and -reality".

"There is no part of me in you, Galactus", Norrin struggled not to reel. "If there was, you would know how much I love Shalla Bal. She is in such danger, and I need to get back".

A clear challenge, and yet Galactus decided he'd stood level with Norrin long enough. He walked calmly out into the room. A fireplace that seemed never to have been used provided the spot for his next eulogy.

"Never lecture me about love or necessity. It's a cliché, but believe me when I say, 'I know you better than you know yourself'. And you know, Silver Surfer, you would do well to call me 'Master'".

Did he still have a pumping heart? Was it silver, and pumping silver blood in wild hatred?

"My master - is out there! Her name is Shalla Bal! She is out there in the real world, being -murdered, or worse! You must help".

Now, it was the strangest thing. A tiny part of Norrin that was still lucid could feel the hysteria wash through him as an unquantifiable force, all via his writhing, phantom heart. Surely it was enough to wake him a dozen times over? Why did he remain in this accursed dream?

Galactus seized both his wrists and forced him down onto the floor, thereafter into a tight little ball. Suddenly there was nothing in the world except those heavy, dry hands placed on his plasticky shoulders. They kept him firmly in place, bracing him for -something.

"Do you believe in other people? Do you believe they are conscious?", whispered Galactus, somehow combining urgency and brooding.

It was a question Norrin had asked himself many times before. "Yes".

"But they shouldn't be. For all the harm they do us. The humans surrounding us are sacred because they represent absolute psychic freedom, beyond God, beyond law, beyond any kind of love or fairness. And this gives them carte blanche to build a society which is -Hell. A meat grinder of arrogance and foolishness".

Norrin shook beneath the mighty hand. The line of vision which ran between his smooth chest and the hard carpet felt horribly queasy. "You have a persecution complex".

"Tell me about Shalla Bal's predicament", countered Galactus, "and then talk to me about persecution complexes".

As ever, Norrin struggled to rise and failed utterly. But perhaps, in a funny kind of way, Galactus was trying to comfort him.

"This is the way it has to be. Human freedom is a cosmic phenomenon, and we are at its final junction. Good and evil, if they exist at all, have to be redefined and fused with eternity".

When Galactus spoke next, his grasp grew subtly tighter, because he knew Norrin would be mortified. If ever they did, the square white eyes showed pity now.

"You want to return to the waking world, and this is to your credit. Your fears over Shalla Bal are justified. She is in the hands of horror, and the ordeal will destroy her. She will be -horribly humiliated. She will be maimed and she will lose her mind. You're on the landing, unconscious. When you finally come around, you, in turn, will lose your mind. Your soul. You must accept, Silver Surfer, these things are inevitable. The destruction of your ability to see reality as anything other than -an over-elaborate breeding ground of anguish, sorrow, insanity".

If only there was a way of building and releasing tears. As it was, Norrin's featureless eyes could only burn and smolder at the direction of the ground. He would have settled for being able to vomit.

"Help me wake -Master".

"I can't. But I will help you in other ways".

Whimpered the Silver Surfer, "How?"

It was then the giant allowed him to rise. They stood alongside each other, the fearsome dynamism of his captor's face coming into full force once again, streaky lower eyelids stretching tight, raw, full of empathy. All on a businesslike schedule, mind.

"Other people allowed this world to become a hell, that's the nub of it. That vile, bourgeois disregard for other people's lives; we mustn't deny it. It's just a feature of this sphere of hell. When at last you wake, and go to the broken Shalla Bal, your sorrow will be so all-pervading it will curse everything, even when you arrive in Heaven. We can't allow that. We have to think about the psychological damage your eternal soul will suffer. There's a way to repair that damage before it even happens".

Implored the Silver Surfer, "How?"

To all intents a mortal man wracked with such numb, breathtaking ideas, Galactus paced. He ran his sphere-knuckled fingers across a low, green-pewed chair. His hands fell loosely alongside his wide torso. From beneath his brow, a capricious fox marauding chickens, he looked towards Norrin, yellow sunlight squaring them both.

"Take charge. Examine the core of sorrow. It's guilt. Guilt that you've allowed yourself to live in a world where God or fate has placed such emphasis on destroying the things you love, no redress, no understanding, no reason. I'm here to tell you there is something that can redress the horror that's been visited on you".

"Master", said Norrin, "tell me".

"Greater horror. It's greater horror. On a scale that those petty monsters couldn't imagine, that almost makes them seem innocent by comparison. In this way, we will wrest back control of our emotions, our sense of balance. We will 'use up' horror. We will expend it".

He swept past Norrin, partially disregarding him. It was strange; the glass of the tall windows was specked with heavy brown dirt, though it didn't affect the quality of the light at all. In one big slant of life-affirming orange, Galactus surveyed the beach. There was a jogger. A little way off, there was a half-woken prepubescent girl and her dad, talking away in a bleary tone.

"Parallel universes. A chain of worlds leaning against each other, so prim, so well-designed. We will decimate them all, you and I. We'll become the very spirit of unfairness, and horror. We'll be their masters, rather than the other way around. And after that, horror will hold no value at all. It will, of course, take millennia, possibly eons -but the elongation of time is one of the last miracles we have left. Just say, 'Yes, Master'".

Evidently, as he opened the juddery beachside doors, the desire to cry was gone from Norrin. The grey-and-blue strip of water was still a hundred metres off, though even from this distance, the irony of presenting the earthly sea to a man with an alien metal surfboard was vast. He noticed this irony, just for a second. The Beach Boys commit suicide. The girl with the sun in her hair, on the cover of Cooler magazine -weeps.

He stepped onto the packed sand. For a long time now, thousands of years of intermittent consciousness, or however long it had been going on, he suspected that the temperature within his silver skin was maintained at an effervescent 37 degrees. Where there appeared to be a change, it was no doubt psychosomatic. Except now the orange-tinted sand at his feet was cold. Every atom destitute. Sand he shared with a middle-aged man and his metal detector. Warm inner voice bumbling away, seemingly harmless, innocent, eccentric -then on closer inspection, nightmarish. A little girl and her young father, on holiday, building up an appetite before they returned to their tiny boarding house for marmalade or Shredded Wheat. She like Duck Amuck, Daffy abused by the capricious god Bugs Bunny, made to look gaudy -and digging her own grave by being quite so loud. She ran at a seagull, who had seen all this petty horror before, even if he did have to lurch quickly upwards in fear of his life.

Memories of that last day. At the Sharpy breakers, pre-surf; he'd planned to listen to 'Amoureuse' by Kiki Dee and just meditate on being in love. Afterwards, he'd planned to listen to some disco-nonsense Jamiroquai bliss and just meditate on being in love -for his thoughts of Shalla Bal really were that dynamic. Now he would never listen to music again, or at least, if Galactus was to be believed, not until he'd become a mass murderer, the standardized spirit of horror.

It came as a tickle around his fingers, that glow of spearmint-coloured energy, cosmic. He imagined lifting the joggers, the metal detector, the young family -high into the air via telekinesis, mutilating their stupid bodies, caressing their screaming mouths, blasting them down to component atoms and synaptic bursts of bourgeois guilt, nowhere to go.

As it was, he walked a little way along the beach towards some black rocks. A beardy, slacks-wearing man had been doing a water colour painting, the A-3 pad balanced expertly on his knees.

The Surfer wondered if he could take that pad and sketch Shalla Bal's face, just to prove she still existed, or could ever exist, with a smile, with that invincible glint still present in her eyes. Become a God. He'd read somewhere that the walls at the edge of the universe were curved, self-sustaining, a kind of reactor or maybe the comic book thought-balloons of God himself. But we're not gods.

All this thinking. What was wrong with him? It was a vile self-indulgence, while she was out there, alone and in pain.

It was intolerable.

Dimly he felt the eyes of the crowd follow him as he waded into the surf, within a minute or two submerged beneath the waves. This silver man and his silver surfboard, and the irony involved -that was just the beginning.

In the darkness, he tried for some time to drown himself.

Sometimes he felt he might be succeeding.

Until he looked upwards at the rippling gulf of light, saw the silhouette of that damnable tall helmet and obtuse-triangular horns, looming forever. Then one thing was for sure.

Kiki Dee had never dreamed 'Amoureuse' could be quite so shattering.

It's good to worry: Klatuua had always believed that. When she was a schoolgirl, then when she first started work, she remembered worrying about not being able to get to sleep at night, it being one of the worst things in the world. To not be fresh. To not be able to think clearly. When had all that changed? Was it, heaven please, the political certainty, right there in every breath she took, every blink of her eyes?

Or was it just that she got enough exercise that sleep was always an ocean to gratefully drown in?

Immediately on rising from her small bunk, she crossed to the console and activated the external mikes. The vast crowd building around her ship was surprisingly quiet. There was a voo-voo-zela, a sound she didn't much mind, though the authorities would soon put a stop to that. Beyond, she picked out the stirring of the warm hamburger breeze on scraggy hedgerows: pleasing. There was a whistle, a loudhaler, but the voice was calm, decisive, for once a sign of good government.

On turning away from the console, there sat Thanos. His stylized grey brow fell mightily over his tiny eyes and he meowed. Probably, he wanted feeding, or just wanted Klatuua to feel perturbed that he wanted feeding. He wasn't the sort of cat that liked being stroked, but she niggled the tip of his permanently snarling nose. Tuna and corned beef. Disgusting.

"Don't get any mess on the gems of your collar", she told him. "I don't have time to clean it".

Except she did. It was only a quarter to six. A good knowledge of anticipation said that the time would go quickly, or at least in quantifiable fits and spurts. She sat down at the small writing desk at the centre of the PARDIS control room and stared the 360 degree computer screen, ten feet high, constantly rotating passport-sized photos of every one in Britain. Quite often she wondered how many hours of staring it would take to have glanced at everyone. On first boarding the ship all those decades ago, the novelty had been compelling, and only very slowly did Klatuua realise that she didn't particularly enjoy looking at the faces. It was just -a terrible, mysterious sense of responsibility. Psychic shock, too -if one believed in godless evolution, are we wired up to accept even the existence of a post-industrial society? This apeman hunts and gathers. This apeman works behind a desk, adjusting loans. He wears a stripey T-shirt, and his fat face smiles. What, is he some kind of ghost? Some kind of ghost who believes he's a god?

The little black girl tilted her head at the phototaker, the bridge of her nose screwed tightly and her eyes glancing steeply to one side. Whatever it was that exasperated her was doing so on several levels. A twenty-something man with a thin face was privately sneering at -something. He'd encountered a thing that he gently hated, and then that thing had been weirdly compounded in the most fluttery way. A gingery man with flared nostrils and a pronounced upper palate seemed to be aware of his own striking face, and he was luvin' it, luvin' it, in the moment, not even drunk.

Klatuua sniffed, exhaled, as the final straggler tears burned free. About half an inch of coffee was left, but it was so strong, the look of it so stark against the white china, drinking it down still made quite an impression. Her bladder was crazier than usual, not that she really minded, since the bathroom mirror provided an extra little check of her fashion-skimming Hillary Clinton look. It was Six-fifty, now. A chance to be respectfully early, rather than neurotic or over-eager. She moved to the hard-light generator and brought forth a 'live' rat which would scurry the length of the ship while she was gone. Thanos would be delighted, and only partially phased when the tiny creature dematerialized from his heavy grey paws.

Forebodingly, the control panel was directly alongside the main hatch, and she knew there was no need to go back inside the main sanctum now. This, truly, was it. On the wall was a small canvas, the stark, green-on-blue outline of Britain. As ever, she touched it, conjuring good luck, never any maudlin desperation. Sometimes, at a glance, one might mistake it for a small country. Except -look at the raggedy edges. Klatuua loved those raggedy edges.

'Be lucky, then', said the driver of the off-duty cab who'd given her a lift back from the Air Force holding facility the previous day. A gentle kind of man in a thin grey sweater, a Beethoven hairstyle, he'd asked her for an autograph. She'd ummed-and-ahhed about giving it. Then, as she'd considered how he'd probably spend hours being debriefed, and have his cab confiscated for DNA sweeps, it would be the least she could do. Besides, his wish for luck, she took.

The hatch started to descend, almost in time with her buzzing thoughts. Sunlight that was bright, somehow mundane, spiked inwards and swirled on the squeaky clean surfaces. The authorities had built a podium that was only a few paces high, and she gratefully headed towards it, even at the risk of seeming darkly urbane. Journos, punters, internet cretins alike took near-silent photos. To her left on the ruddy grass: Gort's mighty shoulders, insouciant, omniscient -or merely in evil-minded standby mode, it was hard to tell. All of the above? Truly it was a kind of henchman hell.

"People of Great Britain. Greetings. My name is Klatuua".

Over the years, she'd become skillful in sensing the right distance to keep from the microphone -the technology always became more receptive as time went on. If only there was also a non-smug standardized tone she could use for her opening gambit. The words seemed loopy and over-eager in her mouth. At the edge of the field, a cliff-face of chancers and plebs whooped and cheered. Inwards slightly, women in ornate jackets and Martha Wayne pearls clapped away. Their husbands, pastel-shirt wearing and with eyebrows held aloft by very strong wool, looked backwards and forwards like dogs. Mingling, there were the zombies of working class men, their salt-and-pepper eyebrows streaked in weirdly surly attention. There were kids and twenty-somethings, messing around as per. Klatuua casually moved her eyes to assess the formation of riot shields around her waist.

"I come -not from outer space, but from a parallel universe. And I think the idea of parallel universes is very much a part of your culture now. But some of you will hate science, hate science fiction, find it boring or irrelevant -and perhaps you're right. For such people, let me explain about the place I come from. When picturing the subatomic principles, think of a battlefield with vast, opposing armies. The thousands of archers -or, more accurately, the infinite number of archers- unleash mighty black clouds of arrows, which somehow cleanly pass through each other. Your world and mine. Except science -it's allowed a single arrow to turn, gravitate, and fall in with the cloud of arrows from the other side".

Klatuua took in as many of the faces as she could and, so far so good, the majority were engaged. She spoke on. In the corner of her eye there was a flare of starlings or blackbirds; she traced them, just for a second or two.

"I come from a version of Britain which is radically different from your own, still close enough for me to think of you as my brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Believe that. Furthermore. I come here by the will of my British government alone; the international community, on my side, have no involvement at all, apart from an unspoken acknowledgement by some of the other superpowers".

A heavily bearded man with non-pretentious glasses and a beautiful daughter on his arm narrowed his eyes at Klatuua. Short-haired yuppies and their cook-book wives still had no idea quite what to think.

"Conventional thinking on a visitation by flying saucers is that they've come to invade, or integrate ourselves into your community, eventually, perhaps accidentally, wiping out the natives. But I won't talk to you about immigrants, dziekuje".

Yes, that got some laughs, some pleasingly lop-sided smiles, too. But it was just a topical aside; she could equally have just put in a horse meat joke. Well-noted, the way that, over here, they dote on bland comedy panel shows.

"Rest assured, when my mission is completed, I will leave, and you'll be free to see as little or as much of my people as you want. Though I'd hope we have good relations. My people are thoughtful and hard-working. Considerate, loyal. Just like you really, except maybe a bit quieter. And, of course, we can see the big picture. And so -the sweetener. Into your medical databases, we have transmitted the cures for cancer, profound deafness, heart disease, diabetes, a dozen other ailments. The ability to spontaneously regenerate certain internal organs -

This to gasps, cheers and applause, which her awareness of fickle human nature prevented her from hearing.

"Many of your other medical grievances, hepatitis, AIDS, profound blindness, motor neurone disease, alzheimer's -are just as rampant in my dimension. I myself am an arthritis girl.

"But your science fiction stories tell of parallel universes that differ only slightly from your own; they still have the same cast of characters, the same historical highlights, but mixed up together in odd combinations. The truth is less obliging. We had our own version of World War One, but after that, the drive of fascistic nationalism in Germany, Spain and Japan wasn't nearly strong enough to raise inter-continental armies. There was no Jewish holocaust. Like a breath from God, the truth just came to us: military expansion is lazy. In every country on Earth there are vast sections of uncultivated land, cities and farms just waiting to be built. Certainly, we had our uprisings and our insurrections, but they were always on a smaller, simpler scale. Political rhetoric, or the rhetoric that goes on quite naturally inside your capitalist society, really isn't necessary. We've learnt that there's just one unit of measurement that's needed to spur and regulate human endeavour: hard work".

There it was, the elephant in the room. The elephant the size of a country, and my flying saucer has made a limp little approach vector and landed right between his feckless eyes. She looked out at the amassed faces, some paralyzed by guilt, others by awe-struck incomprehension, stupidity. Of her own stupid, sketchy emotions there was no two ways about it: she felt terrible for what they were about to go through.

'Be lucky', the off-duty cab-driver had said.

"All foreign lands are sovereign", Klatuua breathed into the mike. She turned at the waist and pointed to a valley-top field, perhaps half a mile distant. The texture started to change. From nowhere came a mass of individual objects, thousands of green and beige-red clumps of matter. Only after focusing and refocusing the eyes would the crowd be able to confirm. Human figures, slow-moving, astonished.

Everyone gasped. Sometimes there was a sound almost like tittering laughter. When Klatuua leaned into the microphone, the rustle produced a tiny little whine. Every little helped when it came to focusing their attention.

"I give you the complete number of your soldiers, returned from all foreign operations. Likewise, your aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines are back in their pens and drydocks. Our matter-transportation techniques are one hundred percent reliable, of course, and there's no need for any existential ennui: it works by the direct subspace lifting of quantum imprints, rather than destruction and reassembly. The people involved have in no way been interfered with, beyond physical relocation.

"The fate of the countries they were -helping- will once again be returned to the native population. If there are people being persecuted or oppressed, the impetus will be on them to either rise up or suffer on. It's one of the simplest equations there is. Surely it hasn't escaped your notice that your society is in exactly the same stranglehold as theirs -you think of freedom only in terms of being able to raise large families, taking whatsoever job you wish. You believe that small section of freedom is sacred beyond all else. It's not. There is a greater freedom you've forgotten about. The freedom of living determined, practical lives".

It was -the minutes silence before a World Cup kick off, converted into pure political dread. Certainly there were a few drunks talking as loudly as they could, a few children crying in the most orchestrated fashion imaginable, but mostly there was only that heavy, breathless fear lapping through huge gulfs of air. People at all points were brooding, the same warm pressure at the side of their temples. Hypnotised by history, the fleshy bourgeois eyes looked at Klatuua so questioningly it made her head spin. Luckily, the next section of her speech was one that always made her feel good, faintly.

"People of Britain. Essentially, you're noble. If Britain faced a land invasion tomorrow, you would fight to the last man to protect your neighbours. Go into any corner shop in the country; at the till, a feeble old lady, half blind, drops her coins on the floor. The people behind spring into action, and she gets back three times what she started with. And your welfare system. Created to kill destitution as a concept, and you allow it to continue, even when 'destitution' nowadays reads as not having Sky TV. A meal of supermarket own-brand basics? Costs less than a pound, and yet you gift the unemployed hundreds of pounds each week.

"Is there such a thing as altruism? There is, but it can't exist just as a small, psychological denial of your own bourgeois fragility. As a people, you have it in you to be invincible, endlessly resourceful and self-sufficient -but you've fallen victim to a form of mass schizophrenia. Greed, masquerading as everyday family unit propagation. Go on, hands up. Hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right".

Mid way off in the crowd, a thin-sweatered grinner raised his hand.

"Yes, there's always one. I can see you", said Klatuua darkly. "You pat yourselves on the back at how you've extinguished all the most obviously unfair aspects of your society. Racism. Slavery. Inequality. The Death Penalty. But are you sure there's not one last obvious thing that you've forgotten? There's that quotation from the Bible that everyone everywhere agrees is the most flawless, honourable way to live, 'Do unto others as you would have done unto you'. And yet you've sleepwalked your way into a society that says to the manufacturing industry, 'We -need- you to live as we wouldn't' -committing to nine-to-five manual work; 'We wouldn't do it ourselves, but we need you to do it, as swarming immigrants, as minimum wage slaves -so that we can even exist'. Your nearly-extinct manufacturing workforce -you think they must be stupid, or have an unbelievably high boredom threshold. Well, they aren't and they don't. They work in these boring, practical jobs becausethey recognize that the route to a bountiful society is to physically build that society, not sit behind a desk, training, designing, administrating, bankers shifting money around in ever-decreasing circles.

"Everyone has a role to play, no one is expendable, but to imagine that more than a handful of people are necessary for the non-manual, academic and administrative jobs that your country bases its economy on - is to make a prayer to decadence and invite the destruction of civilisation. The only way to grow up and acquire a sense of fulfillment is to do something that's undeniably useful. Blue collar employment is the once and future saviour of your country".

Head drawn back as if tingling in high gravity, Klatuua could smell side-wagon burgers very nearby. No real hunger. Her knees ached, practically crying out a need to sit -a need denied, since to edge down onto the podium would bring her far too close to the clay-faced men, invincible bourgeois arms folded, eyes like slapped meat. Bizarrely, they murmured with such opinionated force.

And bizarrely, someone somewhere was producing such eerie, protracted notes on a Theramin. It had started as an open-hearted wink at flying saucer noir. Now it had become the high-throated humming of a crazy person held fast in this political no man's land. She noticed a fat child who'd normally be crying. She noticed a beleaguered-looking Greyhound, twenty metres away, just - staring, anxiously.

"Understand that I am just a mediator. You could kill me now, but the power my people have over you resides completely -", she gestured, queasily, " -in Gort, who is indestructible".

Predictably, the huge, miner-shaped robot made no reaction to its name being spoken. The head unit was cast low, and it seemed it wasn't even looking into the crowd. Through modest daylight, the coating of his sculpted figure seemed almost like the rubberised, anti-sonar plates of a submarine hull. Subdermal sensors, raw, angry nerves -alive.

"You've had a demonstration of his power". She struggled not to look wry. "It was a small demonstration. The red device built into his head unit, or 'the lamp', is called The Ultimate Nullifier. It has the capability to produce a force anywhere between a gentle whistle of air and a destructive ray thousands of times fiercer than your deadliest atomic weapon. Beyond that, his mind consists of a quantum super computer; think of the sum of your World Wide Web but multiplied hundreds of times, spread into layers that are constantly cross-referencing, constantly alert for the smallest pinpoint that might have relevance to his mission. His processing speed -beyond measure. All but omniscient.

"I don't much care for George Orwell as a writer, but I'm sure many of you will be tempted to use his terminology. Gort -the ultimate expression of a totalitarian Big Brother state. But he's not, not really. For a start, his mission here will last only ten years, and he has no personal interest in whether it succeeds or not. He doesn't own you. You can choose to ignore his presence, or you can fall in.

"But already he knows the complete history of every living soul in this country. He has divided you into categories. The people among you who have been designated 'Negative Minus One', and this is the vast majority, are the ones to blame for your country's precipice quick-march. You're the ones who drifted from school to university to office-based yuppiedom, with not a single thought as to what the economy actually needs to be a robust whole. You hang precariously in non-manual, administrative employment which has only the smallest impact on the running of the country. Physically, twenty-first century man is no different to the Neanderthals who needed to hunt, grow and build -what makes you think you can simply opt out of something that's a fundamental necessity of life?

"The classifications either side of the Negative Minus Ones are the Negative Minus Twos and the Positive Plus Threes. Negative Minus Twos are the long-term unemployed, the recipients of wholly undeserved state benefits, also listless students. Actually, this section of the population, in relative terms and contrary to current thinking, carries no more stigma than the Minus One yuppies, who believe that, if nothing else, their payment of tax denotes social inclusion. Alas. The academic and administrative jobs which supply that tax -are wildly unsustainable. For both the Minus Ones and the Minus Twos, their crime is greed and laziness, and whether that's knowing or unknowing -my people simply don't care. We hereby give you an amnesty on arrogance and fecklessness.

"Regarding the Positive Plus Threes -you, really, are the blameless ones. You are -the underclass, slowly being exterminated. You work in an industrial job, or in the service industry, in all likelihood for the minimum wage. If pressed, you would probably admit to yourself that you wish you had a different job -but that it doesn't matter because you're grateful for the concept of work, grateful for being able to fit in.

"Henceforth, the wage structure of your society will be turned -sane. Pay will be given according to how desirable or undesirable a job is, and watch your economic troubles vanish over night. For instance, everyone wants to work behind a desk, as an artist, an administrator, a 'specialist'; there is no market for it, and so these are the jobs which will be paid the bare minimum. Perhaps, if you're an artist, or an administrator, you might like to argue that you work 'hard'. This is a moot point. Ancient wisdom tells that if you derive satisfaction from something, it simply isn't work. Skills and learning are easy to come by, and as a society, you have to stop pretending otherwise. Besides, if you have a skill, that skill doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the society that created you, or simply to human solidarity. Those who clean toilets, who physically sweat, who sit on production lines for twelve hours as if lobotomised -it is to these people who sacrifice that the huge salaries and bonuses will be given.

"And so, able to breathe again, your manufacturing and farming section will expand massively. Into the computer databases of your top five hundred businesses, Gort has transmitted design patents which will make your products both vital and desirable to the rest of the globe. It might interest you to know these innovations were donated freely by the largest companies of my Britain -innovations which were, incidentally, researched and developed by people on the minimum wage. All we ask of you is that you repatriate the manufacturing of British goods from overseas.

"Understand that free enterprise and the drive of entrepreneurs is as important as ever. If, traditionally, you were a Negative Minus One inclined to start your own business -this inclination is as vital as ever. Business leaders will be permitted to become as rich as they see fit, but their revenue will be completely separated from their shareholders and their department heads. In other words, you will be honoured, but you cannot simply start businesses as a twee hobby, or as an exercise in yuppie nepotism.

"As any civilisation progresses, there is an overabundance of people. Therefore, while it will remain basically free and democratic, it becomes necessary to run the whole of the economy as a production line, not just in terms of physical labour but also in the case of the innovators and the administrators who run it. We've found there isn't a job in existence that can't be trained on-site, or with only one or two days in a classroom.

"The bulk of the money flowing into your schools will be suspended. Children will be taught to read by their parents. Shortly, you'll each receive a small, indestructible handheld unit which will guide you through any mathematical problem you should ever encounter. After that, your children will start school at age ten, and concern themselves only with tests of their social empathy, their work ethic, speed, common sense, lateral thinking. Parents: you either know your children or you don't. If you think they have a passion for something academic or managerial, and a realistic chance of finding a job in that field, then by all means send them on to further education. To aspire thusly is noble, and your society will endlessly thank and honour you -but it will be entirely at your cost, because, as I've said, these jobs are satisfying, everyone wants them, there is no market for them.

"This restriction will apply to every vocation bar the fields of surgery, medicine, medical research, nursing -which the state will gratefully pay for. For people in those -fantastically- noble fields, you'll at last be rewarded as you should. At pensionable age or at the onset of a serious illness, you'll receive a monthly payment five times the size your monthly wage, assuming a minimum ten year service.

"With the disintegration of your economy, I'm fully aware that few of the Negative Minus One citizens have any savings, but for those who have, anything above thirteen thousand pounds has been removed from your bank accounts and placed into a fund that will benefit everyone. Your mortgages have been undone. For any Negative Minus One family who owns or is in the process of buying a house that's valued over 150 thousand pounds, you'll be required to vacate and start to rent".

A gasp at that, plus some angry, warbling shouts, if only the rigidity in Klatuua's bones didn't translate to a zen-like drive to continue.

A woman with black, straggly hair and a raincoat was quaking with rage as she turned to address her fellow Brits, "Will you shut up and let her speak?!"

In all likelihood, the woman was mentally ill or neurotically angry -though not fundamentally so, and not to the point where she wasn't useful. Klatuua surged on.

"Let me tell you about houses. Rolled-in sewer pipes. A concrete foundation. Bricks, iron tacks and buttresses, easy to assemble. A dozen walls. Soundproofing. Two-by-fours laid vertically. A roof that's four triangles-within-triangles. In my Britain, it takes less than a month for a hundred-strong estate to rise up. The financial and emotional value you people place on owning your own houses is -strange and pretentious. In any case, you can't be allowed to tie up so much of your money in something which is of such precarious value to so few people. All of you, from now on, will rent. No one will ever be evicted unless they fall dramatically behind on their payments. No landlord will be allowed to charge so high a price that they can live by renting houses alone. And all houses and apartments built from now on will be luxurious, spacious, with a maximum of three bedrooms, standardised central heating, one garage.

"And here-", Klatuua became hypnotised by her own voice, the way it sometimes sounded quick, sometimes slow, always rudderless. The gruff murmuring which emanated from the shifty-eyed masses was an ocean, vast. "Here we come to the core of your difficulty. You have to start thinking, properly, for the first time. It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something. If you believe in God, and a better life to come, you must make fewer demands of the imperfect world you occupy now. There is no need to live vicariously through children. Alternatively, if you sense that there's no god, you have an obligation to fuse evolution with conscious discernment, or else be hypocrites with every piece of self-insight that passes through your minds. Disobey your biological inclination to have as many children as possible. If evolution relates to survival, it has no choice but to acknowledge that decadent overpopulation will soon destroy everything. A war will come between welfare thugs and yuppies. Whoever wins, none of the survivors will have the work ethic to drive off famine, violence, constant desperation.

"Taking into account your resources, Britain has -just- enough to ensure full employment and a bountiful future, but only once the gap between births and deaths narrows to within a few hundred. One set of parents, one child. It's reasonable to hope that some people won't have any children at all, and if they want to be remembered after they've died, they'll simply live noteworthy lives. But equally important to your survival: you start building new cities and suburbs right now. All planning deliberation by councils and local authorities are hereby suspended. If there's wasteground, if there are fields neglected by farmers, they must be used for construction. And there will be fracking, wind turbines, as many as necessary, water turbines, as many as necessary. Gort has uploaded to all engineering and construction companies the plans for kinetic-plate technology, a power-generating mechanism which will be able to act in trinity with solar and turbine, replacing nuclear power altogether".

Altogether -she appreciated the faces before her. They were all reeling, dizzy. Some were in shock, some were smiling. The majority showed rage. Fortunately, Klatuua was locked firmly onto her course.

"There will be full employment. Or rather, unemployment will cease to be an issue. Industrial, manual jobs will be there for whoever needs them, but we recognize that certain people are absolutely, psychologically resistant to authority and utilitarian action. Perhaps this is a vile characteristic, perhaps it isn't. People are stubborn. No one will be forced to work, but at the same time, state welfare payments will no longer be available. Your taxes will hit an all-time low, but one of the uptakes of your contributions will be state funded farms, where the raw constituents of life will be available at no cost".

Now the murmuring was loud, jumpy, like a tide. Klatuua was equal to it, or at least, the amplified ghost of her voice could pick up and carry -anything. The message was at least ninety percent done; with it her aged mind was winding down.

Quietly, "'Do unto others as you would have done unto you'. The foreign workforce which has arrived up to this point will be honoured, but as of this date, no immigration will be permitted beyond those who are rich enough to support themselves indefinitely. There will be no political asylum seekers and all overseas aid will be discontinued. People must stand on their own two feet. Again, I'll say this: you have to start thinking, and it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something. If you believe in God, you have to accept that He gave you a localized consciousness for a reason, that you were born in this country for a reason -to fall-in and help your countrymen, all the people who grew up watching the same cartoons as you, who roll the same words around their mouths, remember the same summers and winters, see the same birds and squirrels. If you're an atheist, a not-so-dissimilar philosophy applies. You have to commit to logic. If you want to help the world, do it methodically. Make yourself a paradigm and then work outwards. Get a job that supports your fellow man, and if you want them to think of you as special or idiosyncratic beyond being a bluecollar -in your spare time write novels, or become an artist, or a musician. Above all: put an end to your parochial, insular lifestyles. You have the capacity for a single-minded tranquility that would put Tibetan monks to shame, plus all the honour and chivalry that marks each and every one of you as Arthurian knights".

"You're going to start a civil war, you stupid b-!", shouted a man in a flat cap.

Klatuua continued her summing up. "Think on what you're being ordered to do. You're losing none of your freedom, except the freedom to be selfish and thoughtless. And although we're giving you an ultimatum, we're treating you with an inordinate amount of respect. Understand that we have the technology to sterilize a random ninety percent of your women. Or we could remove the yuppie class with such a clean stroke it would be as though they'd never existed. But we believe you have the right to retain as much of your freedom as possible. As long as you're aware; the edicts I've given you must all be followed. Any deviations will lead you back to ruin. Know that I've been to half a dozen versions of Britain, all of them in as ruinous a state as yours, and they've all been saved. Beyond that, you have ten years. If you refuse to change, Gort will raise every square inch of this country to a sea-lapped plain of rock".

Angry shouts. Shrieks. Klatuua allowed the quaking of the air to carry her back up the slope. When the heavy platinum door separated the world, it was like taking a breath after drowning. And crying. We all get more sensitive as we get older. Walking uneasily across the deck, a wave of dark intrigue came; the way the hard-light mouse scurried along the kick plates. It was just -free, directionless, ignored completely by the fat old cat. Eye contact was maintained, and apparently Thanos knew all about the End of the World. As much, easily, as the madding crowd outside. On activating the external mikes, panicked cries flourished as the onlookers, for the second time in as many days, fled the landing site as fast as their decadent legs could carry them. For Gort was growing. A hundred feet. A hundred and fifty. All to survey the doomed, beautiful countryside of Britain 65135X.

Straw-coloured foliage that so stubbornly clung to life gave way to red lowland. It was bordered by three or four scattery wonderboom trees, the trunks giving small protection from the sun, the thin coppery leaves none at all. Scrub was everywhere; it could be kicked through with just a little effort, en route to the pack-mud gulleys and the carpet-colour sands. None of the terrain was particularly harsh. It should be a natural course for any springy-limbed antelope.

But the gazelle with the astonished, slanted brow was incapacitated. His front left leg didn't flex at all and his ambulation was weird. He didn't seem to be in pain, as, from his well-fed flesh and lean muscles, it was likely the leg had only recently stopped working. Surprise more than anything shone through in his satin face, and it presented itself like a psychic wall against the broad savannah-scape, a sun rising from the west. In a way, it was beautifully refreshing. If a human suddenly found that one of their legs wasn't working, they'd get hysterical. The gazelle, however, would simply coast along in his surprise, right up to the point where he expired.

He stumbled alongside the flank-high weeds, and considered stopping to eat some before his gulping throat said no. He blinked a little and jerked his head at the approach of the big cat, already in a commando-crawl and ready to make the rush.

Norrin entered briskly into the fold. The lion had no idea what to make of him, but did not retreat. For the Silver Surfer was -cool. He stood between the hunter and the prey and rotated the surfboard in his grip. It was easy to catch the sunlight and angle it in the lion's eyes. The cringe as he turned and slouched away was antropomorphised ire.

"Hello, animal". He tried not to loom above the weak-footed gazelle. Though he guessed he must look like one of the most striking creatures alive, there was no way his lithe silver frame could ever really loom or threaten.

Not that the gazelle could run away even if it wanted. Norrin knelt and seized the creature by its tufty shoulders, both of them so incredibly cool given the heat of Africa. Or perhaps it was just the barrier of silver.

Prim, clear eyes darted wildly. Once again, the spearmint cosmic energy was summoned, but by now Norrin was starting to realize that the content was something directly from his consciousness. It seemed ridiculous to think of it as 'psychic energy' as it was something so real, so tangible. He watched it ebb inside the wounded leg, pulsing and shining much like the diagram from a toothpaste advert.

"Well", said Norrin. Messianically healing another living creature, it seemed, could be emotionally awkward. Eye contact would only have made it worse, or spoiled the small satisfaction, the daintiness in his tapetum-heavy eyes as he sprung away. Once more into the highly integrated community of lions and gazelles.

Before he could think much about the implications, Norrin turned to go. It had slipped from his mind, just for a while. The idea that hatred was the key. One might have assumed that it would be enough just to kill every living thing on the face of the Earth for himself and Galactus to progress. But the words of his master: they rang in his ears and they rang true: 'All of the horror that could ever exist must be expended, and expended through us'. And no horror was complete without human passion.

The cosmic tide roared and his board took him at a steep angle into the ionosphere. Ice and some minute crackles of electricity played on his shoulders as he glided above the coy strips of continent, the ever-heaving clouds. What a feeling. He tilted his head, fighting an intense three-way battle between remembering his geography, bizarre vertigo, apocalyptic deliberation.

For a while, to start with, his intention had been to start a nuclear war between China and the West, perhaps by going to one of the British silos and using his own body to imitate a warhead launch. By the time he reached Beijing, skipping their countermeasures like a pebble on water, the Chinese would already have launched real missiles directly at Yuppie Land.

And even then there wouldn't have been enough horror.

Occasionally there was a ghostly feeling of hope as he mulled things over. Galactus said he had to become the very spirit of horror. He also said that Norrin was lying unconscious on the stairs even as his astral self was visiting real parallel universes.

But what if Galactus wasn't real? What if Norrin wasn't visiting parallel universes, but was merely trapped in a succession of unprecedentedly visceral lucid dreams? If so, what was all this 'you have to become the very spirit of horror' trying to tell his subconscious?

In a nightmare, we only ever wake at the very apex of the horror, the very peak of the hysteria. Perhaps it was the case that his mind had an incredibly high threshold for hysteria and nothing less than the revelation that he himself was The Ultimate Horror would shock him awake?

It was possible.

He glided down across the red-tartan plains of Aguascalientes. He coolly beheld the mighty granite buildings of Mexico City and was grateful when finally he picked out a number of Sooty van ambulances edged in around the green overhang of a mighty metropolitan hospital. Touching down just short, he was darkly excited by the gasps of onlookers, at least a little. One man with a funny moustache could only exclaim, 'Merciful God!'

To one of security guards in the main foyer, Norrin asked, "What language am I speaking?"

"Spanish!", the man shivered.

Norrin nodded. "With what kind of accent?"

The man shivered continually. "I don't know".

With that, the Silver Surfer launched himself with gusto; "I am an angel, and I have come to heal your sick and dying".

The guard screwed his eyes shut and clambered down onto his knees.

"Compose yourself", insisted the angel.

Into the broad foyer and beyond, he walked casually. Several pensioners gave peculiar gasps, sonorous 'ohs!' which hitched their throats to indicate a special kind of wonder. The sound, to Norrin, juxtaposed badly against the framed abstract paintings. Abstract water colours in cheap and cheerful primaries: you couldn't get much lower. Casually, as casually as he walked, he wondered how the old people beheld his silver skin. It was misty like chrome but far less fragile. The brightness was deep, open, never quite reflective, though. Clearly no message about society and the abyss, no faces to Edvard Munch in his biceps.

The Silver Surfer followed the department signs, written in Spanish but somehow intelligible to his alien eyes.

The maternity ward consisted of a series of tight, NHS-style corridors turning sharply onto private rooms, then a broad chamber holding dozens of incubators. A wall-length screen of glass conjured images of a police interrogation room, except here it was two-way. A cow-eyed senorita stood staring from the public side.

"Cuantas beniciones tenemos!", she said.

Well -he was fascinated by the lowness of the cots, which just about reached to waist height. Each one magnificently picked out the broad slants of blue light, the tiny movements of the raw-pink creatures, almost anamatronic in nature. In one of the rare moments when he wasn't thinking about the 'realness' of the scene per se, he was angling his neck to peer down upon the tiny black eyes. All the babies that were awake seemed already to be conscious, brooding, meditative. There were twelve in total.

Snowdrops in a blizzard of horror. God hurriedly thrusts awareness on them, just enough to make them sacred, but never so much that they can appreciate how nightmarish their lives are. You could almost be angry with them, their eyes slanted in some warm, timeless bliss. Complacency.

"Do you understand me?", he asked of the sow-faced woman.

She replied in Spanish, in a tone of incomprehension. Evidently, he was now too self-aware for the zen-like internal translation to work. Just as well.

"I am to become a creature of vast horror. I came here with the intention of walking through that wall, having my surfboard break the glass and then using telekinesis to dangle the shards over each one of those cots. I cannot die. Embracing horror is the only way forward, so my master tells me. Why, then, do I hesitate?"

The woman looked at him as if he was a saint. Beyond anything, he found her face boring and, conversely, the heavy vase of bushy red fens which lay alongside them - so strangely compelling. The babies limbered around in their incubators, the hospital ambience grew vivid through the gentle beeps and sqweaks of the mechanized rooms, all suddenly haunted by policemen, guards, flickery-eyed nurses.

The Surfer turned to the side and walked through a wall. The sensation felt like passing through a velvet curtain, yet when he looked down his body had assumed a texture of mercury sieving through pitted concrete. It would have been ridiculous to go back the way he'd come. Apparently, if he now had philosophical clearance to be a mass murderer, he at least had the right to walk through walls.

In a creme-coloured private room directly squared-up to the right-hand edge of the building, a man in a green tunic was breezily going about his death. His red-cheeked daughter looked jerky and phased. As he passed by, Norrin seared out the man's cancer and revitalised his organs through the expansive energies of the universe itself. It was altruism on a par with slowing a car to avoid a country road pheasant. All he had to do to affect the cure was gesture, nothing more. A hateful little maze ruled by God and horror, his mind -that would be the home to any more sophisticated decisions, assuming they should ever come. The board was sent out in front of him. As he stepped free from the fourth story wall, into the sky, the sting of daylight seemed ever fiercer on his silver skin. It stayed with him, higher and higher through the vicinity of dirt-stained Diaz-era halls and sixties-modest hotels.

Perhaps human company that was more work-a-day would give him an answer; he coasted through the suburbs, but there was nothing much to engage. A desperate-eyed man was on his hands and knees before a huge bungalow, trying to train his small dog to use a cat flap. Some pretty little girls at a bus stop were smiling away at some richly abstract concept. Norrin headed out again.

Today, Galactus stood at a mere fifty feet tall inside a cobbled market place, the zig-zag armour of his shins completely blocking the sunlight to a grand old bank and post office. Interestingly, during the approach, he had his back to Norrin. But of course, the master always knew when his herald was present. He moved his head a fraction-of-a-fraction.

"You're clinging the hope that you can do something to make all this stop, suddenly".

There was no point denying this. He knew there was no point saying anything at all, so he listened. The board, stationary, was almost on a level with those stark obtuse triangles. Today they were huge. Less like art. More like the flourish of a steam-age architect. Either way, the world had never seen so bold an icon as Galactus' helmet. Like seeing a swastika or crucifix for the first time. On the beautifully paved ground, wide-faced foreigners winced, took photos.

"You're lost. You don't have the impetus to do what must be done. To allow your fury to be defined. Not yet".

"At heart, I think am a gentle man", said Norrin desperately.

Said Galactus, "Lots of things are gentle, and they all get destroyed. Besides, you don't have a heart. Hearts are capricious little muscles, full of capricious little cells, full of capricious little energies left over from a diminutive big bang. You have something else".

"Nevertheless, I still feel too gentle to commit this -genocide you have planned".

The giant's mouth grew broad. When he turned his head further, a dusting of ugly white stubble could just about be discerned. "All horror originates in gentleness. Childlike innocence gets subverted, and takes the path of least resistance into selfishness and evil".

A trace of impatience over Galactus' eulogising made Norrin's mouth hang open, just a little.

"All this talk about you, and me, and our mission. You say you're part of me, yet it's as though you have not slightest tension over what's happening to Shalla Bal".

"Of course I bloody do", the giant sneered. He looked out at the foreign city, a man who'd been lost at sea, and was now fascinated by the world of men, tinged though it was with a dark philosophy, ultra-specific.

Shunting cars and middle-distance birds made movements that were almost peaceful. Across the rooftops, there was always some kind of gentle movement. As Galactus proceeded to puzzle-out the problem, methodically and in real-time.

"Your father liked Clint Eastwood films. During his final years, when he finally had time to sit down and watch all the films he'd had to bypass because of his long working hours, you bought him 'In the Line of Fire', 'Unforgiven', 'Gran Torino'. All of them five star films and all of them typical, Eastwood man's-man thrillers.

"And you couldn't understand why he complained of the violence and dark tone. They were, after all, no fiercer or bloodier than 'Dirty Harry' or the Dollars Trilogy. In relation to 'Hang 'Em High', your father's favourite film, they were actually tame. But as we get older, we all develop less of a tolerance for hate and violence. Ironically, at the very time when we can afford to be emotionally, philosophically -free".

Norrin took this in. He was grateful, after a fashion; of all the ways Galactus could have exploited the love of his father, this was almost -sweet.

"Think, Silver Surfer. In your old life, there were things that made your blood boil. Things of universal hatred, which no one could really defend -though they tried, and tried, and tried. Seek these things out, and you'll remember. Failing that, there are ways and means of unleashing horror that are as natural as raw existence. Go away and think on it".

"Yes, Master".

Arthur C Clarke. An episode of Mysterious World about homing pigeons, which should be boring, but evokes a feeling of something genuinely inexplicable. The layers of grey cloud above Britain at once seemed to be an unsympathetic shroud and also a mighty cinematic cue. From inside, just edging through between the atmosphere and the ruddy basins, everything was enclosed like a Baskervilles swamp. And then down into the untarnished sky, the curve of the earth opened up to show starkly-delineated towns and powerful countryside, mother nature cultivated to a standstill but always winning.

Then came London. Nothing like Gloucester. Above the East Enders panorama, he stood languidly on his board and thought only, 'The centre of the mess'. It was strange; all of his life he'd associated it as being less of a capital city and more a -void. A confluence of nothingness. Even before he'd had a political bone in his body, he'd known that there were no major factories there, a few big hospitals -but surely, shouldn't there be big hospitals everywhere? There were suburbs full of terraced houses and tower blocks, though these were all incidental to the dirty, imposingly-majestic offices, less even than their regional outposts because they were just ceremonial headquarters, little pin-stripe men to shake hands with feckless foreign tycoons. And all the other pin-stripes. A simple-minded view? Reality is simple-minded. Never once had Norrin the man liked being the centre of attention, except with Shalla Bal. However, as a little housewife mousey face passed a listed building, he was infuriated -a silver man on a silver surfboard, in the sky; it should be astonishing, for anyone. She made a point of not looking up.

There was a winding dual carriageway that was flowing surprisingly quickly. Or maybe not, since the cars seemed to be looping along at a wholly reckless speed. He surfed down among flat, course rooftops, lots of them with old-fashioned radio masts and low, paved edges that suggested no human would ever, ever have to step out into the crisp atmos. Inwards, the canyon sidestreets and broad pavements made funny little curves, indentures. Where there was a tree or a quaint Edwardian building, it was forever patronised by the clustered surround.

The Silver Surfer moved into a stately region of high street lamps and sauntering paved squares. The student protesters thought they were being clever by establishing a shanty-town in the proximity of parliament and so many surging office blocks, and perhaps they were. A sense of indignant belief so intense that it overpowered the more obvious conclusion -that they were a form of loathsome, hippy pirates. Question mark. Three dots after a statement that's apparently solid, scholarly, immutable; the Silver Surfer's footsteps as he moved across the indestructible grass. Off beside the buildings, pin-stripes glanced at him and thought, 'publicity stunt'. Those who were closer to his blank silver eyes, however, were beginning to understand.

The interior of one sturdy-looking tent offered the astonishing glimpse of a large pine bookcase, crying, 'look at me, I can lay my eccentricity down over the land like a Weltsbury standing stone'. Also a canvas bed with an expensive camping lamp. The owner, staring intently and stupidly in The Surfer's direction, was an ugly twenty-something male. Possibly that ugliness would be reassuring, engaging, positive, if only he was a surgeon or a breakdown mechanic. But far from being a surgeon or a breakdown mechanic, he would actually take no job at all, ever. The faux-rustic, carefully-designed cloth banner above his shanty apartment, 'No tuition fees, no hypocrisy'.

Sometimes his coating of silver felt insanely malleable like superheated metal pouring from a blacksmith's spoon. Today it was rigid like the aluminium in a drinks can. Norrin hated having to think about this degree of arrogance. What drove him on was an occult mystery framed so perfectly in his mind; Shalla Bal's lively, questioning eyes skimming gently on his. He rushed the man, who lost his Costa cup through hands that pulsed, defibrillator-style. He grasped the gawky shoulders and swung him onto the surfboard, and together the soared from the tent -upwards.

Two hundred feet up into the breathtakingly crisp atmosphere. From here, the scaly-looking formations of city blocks could just-about be glimpsed through creeping wisps of cloud. Norrin held the man carefully by his lime-green t-shirt, beneath which was a long-sleeved bodytop. Yes, as if a lime-green t-shirt showing the logo of a fictional bar was something so unique, something to be so proud of, you could pretend it has the functionality or style of a jumper.

As Norrin's featureless eyes flicked, the arrogant man's jaw wobbled massively. Otherwise he seemed strangely unrepentant, strangely defiant. That sense of defiance -in all likelihood, it was the hardest work he'd ever done.

Memories of his first few months at primary school. Quite randomly, Norrin's mother had warned him not to start fights with the other children, since, as deserving as they might be in the heat of the moment, the very instant your fist connected with them, it was like punching something absolutely innocent. A dog or a cat, and who would ever punch a dog or a cat? Everyone has a spirit which is fundamentally innocent. No matter how contradictory that might seem.

Rapidly, never completely like a cartoon character, the arrogant man looked from the edge of the board to the Silver Surfer's inhuman eyes and then back again. His hands grasped at the smooth metallic muscles of his forearm. Biting though the atmos was, his hands still looked corpulent rather than grey. And as for the air itself: beset by wispy clouds, there was still a deep gulf of sunshine, exactly like an earthbound springtime glow.

It was all so strangely beautiful, and could that account for the studenty man's relative calm?

In the news, every time a particularly abhorrent crime reaches its conclusion in the courts, something like a serial rapist or violent killer, the judge's summing-up; 'Mr Such-and-such, you have committed these terrible acts purely to satisfy your base instincts. Your callous violence and lack of remorse makes you an extreme threat to the general public'.

Really, Your Honour? You're a genius. Through your wise judgment, we'll soon build a complete map of the human soul. All authority figures wading through a sea of selfishness, on stilts made of complacency.

"I hate myself, because I am made of silver".

He took a few paces towards the monster, who fell back on his fumbling feet, losing his precarious balance almost completely. His hands on the man's collar felt like titanium.

"Forged metal. Stupid. So old fashioned. Like coins. We work, tangibly, to maintain the state. The state mints coins. Why? Nothing needs to be physical any more. The economy is like a prayer. And as long as everyone prays for themselves, we'll all be delivered. Don't you agree?"

The arrogant student man opened his shivering mouth. Norrin closely examined his eyes. Then relinquished his grasp.

It was the tail end of a finely-tuned experiment, and the result came exactly where it was predicted. Guilty. Guilty. And then, while the subject was removed from Norrin's hands, though still with his plimsoled feet in the ghost-of-a-connection -indeterminate. In the open air and falling slowly towards death -innocent. Eyes seared wide open. As if being adrenalised was the same as being fundamentally innocent on some barely conceivable existential plateau.

To be sure, he allowed the monster to fall. He drifted like a sky diver, and flailed, and gave out hateful old woman moans. He plummeted towards the ground, and it was only then that Norrin edged out the tip of his board in preparation for a live-saving intercept. Regardless, all maths and science teachers from the beginning of time could go directly to hell; there would be no speed-to-distance calculation. By instinct, he didn't go straight down, but moved in an arc, at inhuman speed, bringing a sonic boom that clacked! in a thousand obscure corners. Within spitting distance of his death, the studenty man found himself clasped in slow, tender arms.

To be taken upwards again, to more or less the exact same spot of sky.

"Why not just get a job? Any job?"

Curiously, the death-drop had infused him with a desire to speak the truth, as he saw it, even if it was a cliché.

"There aren't any jobs".

"Yes there are", said the Silver Surfer, crisply. "What you mean is, there aren't any jobs you deign to accept".

A simultaneous extending and loosening of the silver hands told the man it was all going to happen again. His black eyes, grubby on a subdermal level, were awash with emotional calculations.

"I know! I know I should probably just get a job!"

Norrin beheld their tight-knit bodies, in fact was vaguely hypnotised at how bold their limbs looked, the inky creases of the man's shirt and the swirls in his upper class hairstyle. The gritty, grainy fog hit them steadily now. It was tragic. Such powerful weather should be able to erode you; you shouldn't just be able to carry on living your life.

Said Norrin, "Ironic. All of this is academic, of course. I have a master, and he tells me I have to learn to hate. Let my hatred envelop the whole world, so I can move on".

"Please, take me down". The studenty man was so conceited, he could hardly even beg for his life.

Looking away in disgust, tiny slants of determination fell around the Silver Surfer's brow. A landslide. He relinquished his grasp and watched the monster tumble away for a second time. Innocent, certainly. But that vampiric mouth: it desperately sucked in arrogance. His black eyes, granted, were sweeping around in the clear, blustery sky for any kind of deliverance at all -though forever they were the eyes of a small proto-yuppie, cruel, scurrying, unrepentant.

Inevitably, Norrin brought the surfboard to a steep angle to watch the descent. A sense of satisfaction, something he sensed Galactus would approve of, surged cleanly into his mind. It was progress. Except the Christian virtue of tolerance, exemplified by his mother, wasn't nearly dead. As a small figure awash in rushing air, it was now impossible to see the man's thoughtless face. Still discernible, though: his little steeply-folding limbs, so much like a spider or a novelty insect toy.

The vintage sci-fi pulp which he'd bought as a tiny child on some eighties holiday to Weymouth. He'd been too young to actually digest the text, though there was a certain full-page lithograph showing a skyscraping robot languishing over a city. The italic-font caption, 'He stamped over the cities of Earth as casually as we might stamp on an ant hill'. And Norrin had always thought, 'who casually steps on an ant hill'?

Even when using metaphors to nobly expound on the subtle arrogance of the human race, all they do is bring home how hopelessly ingrained it is.

Norrin brooded on all this. Truly it was academic, since he'd already taken the wide arc back down, intercepted the terrible man and saved him once more. To a large extent, his figure was skinny, though the flesh above his hips was unashamedly muffin-topped, as if it was the natural state of fitness for all human males.

They glided a short way over London, and then Norrin set him down beside his pretentious shanty town.

As he turned and coasted upwards, he heard the man chatter to the converging crowd of cops and yuppies. 'He wanted me to get a job'. The ignorance -ambient, hissing. A glass ceiling of personal responsibility.

To the exclusion of everything else came the cosmic tide, infused with gusting wind. The sound of it -at first, he'd thought of it as free jazz, but that wasn't the case. The avant garde jazz which emerged from pre-war dance music was an attempt to conjure a feeling of bizarre depth, something to deliver a harsh philosophy without ever evoking actual sadness. It had been a psychic survival tool against the horrors of World War Two and the mess of capitalism. What Norrin heard, however, tumbling between the atoms, was a completely new type of music, and it spoke of such -annihilating grief.

He brooded, even as his featureless eyes picked out a new danger, moving towards him at a dizzying speed. It was hypnotic, and he watched with some measure of peace. It seemed to be a kind of missile; he idly wondered what would happen when it made contact with his silver skin. Anticipation -it was neither here or there. When it reached a proximity where he could appreciate the black meshwork of the fuselage, he closed his eyes and became a picture of repose.

'He never knew what hit him'? No, there was distinct sense of everything being jarred, insanely. Stars were seen. A form of unconsciousness that was the gentlest thing in existence, still hateful, dragged him under immediately.

When he came to, he was on the ground. His torso had been blown apart to the point of looking like tinfoil on the breeze; his arms and legs were a charred nightmare delivering all the agony in the world. Things were at least moving along. He thought of Shalla Bal. The act of dying alone felt like a prayer; he gratefully allowed the black sunspots to consume his vision, a few pain-sharpened thoughts just sneaking clear -all this emphasising done by the world and how foolish he'd been not to recognize it. Whether you call it God or Galactus, you simply have to let it in. An end to complacency as a concept.

Such constant, headlong speed took some getting used to. But the resilience of the fly-cam meant it could be bashed, ricocheted and stalled without any ill-effect to the relay at all. In fact, Klatuua had accidentally whacked him against one of the Best Hardware ceiling roses when he'd stuck fast, only for her to decide that it was actually a perfect spot from which to mount her surveillance. Switching to full control of the microscopic camera lens, she was granted a telescopic, 360 degree view of the C.O.B.R.A Crisis Room that made her feel all-but omniscient.

"Let's see what kind of yuppie-talk our arrival has churned up", she said to Thanos. "The exact variety".

The cat blinked his small eyes, flexed his heavy paws.

Klatuua had to admit that, if nothing else, Millibane ran a tight ship when it came to assembling an emergency meeting to decide the future of Britain. Around the thin mahogany table, there was barely twelve people, one and all Frankenstein conductors to handle a constant rustle of energy. Many wore suits without jackets. Tony Blair, but less conceited; you could sense their heartbeats surging away in a rhythm that was sane, patient, lucid.

"I think the first thing we have to do is gauge whether this social reform, I mean, radical though it is, will work, economically", said Millibane. "Because -if it does, we're in a hell of a weak position. Robin, you've already liaised with Treasury and the Department of Work and Pensions. What do they say?"

But before the home secretary could respond, a certain sharp breath from Ned Perinum overpowered everyone.

"Howard, Robin, excuse me, are you saying that all considerations to democracy are just going to go out of the window? It should be our biggest concern. No one voted for this change to happen. Even if there was a public vote, there'd be nowhere near majority support. Look at this business with the auditory hallucinations, and those poor people in Easton Grey".

Excitement fluttered in Klatuua's skinny old torso. The internet, plus topical news discussion shows, had been awash with the auditory nightmares experienced by such a large number of thirteen to twenty-five year olds. A few pundits had even deducted the truth, that it was a targeted psychic attack, the horror only affecting those who aimlessly hung on street corners, who played their loud, shrill musak in public. Pavlov.

As for 'those poor people in Easton Grey' -Klatuua was quietly proud. A pack of ten Sunday morning fox hunters, suddenly pulled from their horses by a disincarnate force and suspended in trees. Each member looking around to see -the tubing of their intestines pulled free from their bodies, through two weirdly precise incisions, to wind through the branches in a vast, slimy network. They had screamed, gone insane, felt themselves beginning to die -before realizing that they were back on their horses as if nothing had ever happened.

Serious news channels refused to discuss these matters as anything other than unquantifiable slices of epoch hysteria. But these reports were more than enough to enter the mass consciousness, and Klatuua had a little shiver of satisfaction that they were being discussed at the heart of government. Or actually, one better: mighty C.O.B.R.A.

Also, Ned Perinum -she could have predicted that there'd be trouble from him. His constituency was in Kent, a region with one of the densest populations of scurrying yuppies. Bleet on about the shrill children who'd been brought to book, but surely what Mr Perinum was really concerned about was the way Gort had been tracking every vehicle in the country with a personalised number plate then evaporating the fuel from their tanks so they were useless from minute to minute.

Their ingrained decadence. An elephant in the room, or a demon.

Millibane gulped, then spoke bravely nonetheless, "But the claim that everyone will benefit from these changes. That's something we can't ignore".

"What about freedom?"

An angry outburst came from a small man, slumped low in his chair. Jack Dempsey. Minister for Housing and Benefits. "You talk about freedom as if it's some indivisible element like water or fire. Fine. You can definitely get by thinking like that, but it's a bit easy isn't it? Actually, freedom is a by-product of everyone in society deciding to co-operate, rather than bludgeon each other with clubs like cave men. Besides which, my wife. Cancer's been in remission for about six months. Every morning she'd get up and look at herself in the mirror, and although she'd never admit to it, you just knew she was thinking, 'how much longer?'

"But this morning, she got up and she just -beamed. For gods sake -these people have practically saved a third of the country".

A solid, emotional argument? Ned Perinum tilted his head. "I'm not sure I believe they've actually cured cancer".

Dempsey spluttered. "Excuse me? Do you want take a tour of every hospital in the country? See the empty wards and the trail of people heading home with a spring in their step?"

"No", Perinum cringed. "I mean, I know they 'have' a cure for cancer. Just like they 'have' a hundred and fifty foot robot and a flying saucer. But I'd be willing to bet these things were plundered from some -other dimension".

"You're nuts!", Dempsey wagged his head, wagged his paper work.

Ned Perinum, alas, was insistent. "Look at the history books. It's the one thing that communist or pseudo-communist states simply can't do - innovate".

"Are you sure?", said Dempsey. "Yuri Gagarin. Sputnik. Control of a sixty percent of the globe. The ability to put so much fear in us we were willing to see our country go radioactive. I'd call that pretty innovative".

Asked Millibane of his minsters, "But are they actually communists, technically? Their state government, whatever it's like, doesn't seem to have any zeal or purpose beyond just -pride at their self-sufficiency".

Before anyone around the table could respond, General Jackson entered and stuck a print-out directly before Millibane. The Prime Minister leafed through the two or three A4 sheets while the others basked in the light from the golden curtains, rubbing their thighs, blinking away the nightmare of a future free from these political Camelots.

Klatuua freed-up the fly-cam and maneuvered it in arcs above the PM's seat. She zoomed in on the sheets, but even as the paperstock was drawn sharply into focus, he'd already closed the folder and set it aside.

"Thankyou, Marlon". He tugged down his vaguely tubby cheeks as he turned once more to the cabinet. "My view of these people is this. We don't know if they're truly as benevolent as they say they are, or whether they've got an agenda that's selfish. At this point, there's no way of knowing. But because this is such an unprecedented situation, we can hardly be blamed for sitting on the fence while the public digests what's happening. The important thing is, we're seen to be prepared for any eventuality".

Klatuua found herself watching Hummel Campbell, the Social Progression Tsar. A lot of the ministers were toying with departmental reports, or else letting their eyes coast along on a tide of their shallow breaths. Campbell merely tapped his pen, the motion of some surly, omniscient schoolboy. When he spoke, it was to drop the Prime Minister's Christian name from his mouth as if it was a disgusting boiled sweet.

"You say there's no way of knowing if we can believe these people. We can absolutely believe them. You know why? Because we're helpless before them and they've already made a demand that's harsh. So let's not beat around the bush, eh? They're dictating our lives and that's just how the public will see it".

"Obviously there's going to be a culture shock", said Millibane, as if to himself.

Said Campbell, clear-eyed, "'Culture shock' is one way of putting it. Think of the enormity of what's being thrust on us. Having a high-powered job, but on the minimum wage. Only having a single child. Never owning a house. One might say these dictates are excusable because, after all, no one will die and society will be more bountiful, integrated, whatever. But a clearer way of looking at it is that, for better or worse, these freedoms are what - we - are. Prime Minister, think how vehemently you fought the Tory cuts. This is no different. We could improve just as many lives by, for instance, banning any kind of food except wholemeal bread, vegetables and fruit. Or abolishing television. Or creating a daily ten mile hike, mandatory for everyone in the country. The reason we don't is because our lives would cease to be our own. We must be free or else we're nothing".

'These freedoms are what - we - are'. 'We must be free or else we're nothing'. Barely ten minutes in to the government's involvement in Britain's black-and-white resurrection and already the cheap rhetoric had started. Swerving her eyes free from the scope, Klatuua scowled and smirked, just for a moment. In her own speech, had there been anything that sounded remotely like rhetoric? She didn't think so. Pains had been taken to avoid even soundbites - though 'Do unto others' was essential now and forever.

The meeting went on and went nowhere. It seemed that in the sky outside there was a parachute-shaped blanket of sunshine, perceivable through the curtains as something thick and heavy. Gesticulating hands glided up to indicate underwhelming economic magic tricks. No one got worked up, any more than people walking around a shopping centre get worked up over carton designs.

Ned Perinum clasped his hands and leaned forward as if to fire his cannons from the bow. Old fashioned, still hateful. He thought he was being the cleverest man in Britain by saying,

'Zeer licht ontvlambaar, Bundeskanzler Hitler'.

"Stop for a minute and consider this ultimatum. A certain section of the population must be subjugated on the pain of Britain reduced to scorched earth. It's Hitler and the Jews, nothing more, nothing less, only in the place of Jews, the angry, neurotic obsession of Klatuua's fuhrer is business leaders and people with large families".

Listening to this, Klatuua's guts made a series of fey little convulsions. She held out as long as she could before maneuvering the holo-emitter flies onto the dead centre of the conference table. She stepped clear from the observation scope and stood on the imaging platform, before remembering that she was wearing a thermal-fibre bodytop, the static from which always interfered with the holographic interplay. Even when she'd changed into her official tunic, however, it was still necessary to stop, this time to wipe tears from her eyes.

With a flash, the platform became a holographic mirror of the Top Secret C.O.B.R.A meeting room. At their end, a fully three dimensional Klatuua stood imperiously above them.

"Don't let me interrupt. You were saying, Mr Perinum?"

The minister gabbled.

Klatuua said, "How can you can compare me to a Nazi?"

The cacky-fleshed minister took run-ups. "Your policies, you're going to have to admit, are right wing".

Klatuua angled her head and stared at him for several seconds. Sometimes the hologram rippled into daggers.

"Did I suggest that anyone be killed?"

"No!", said Perinum, as if it was all a big joke.

"Did I actually say, 'no one is expendable'? Did I actually stress, time and again, that children and business leaders still have a role to play?"

Perinum moved his eyes as if to garner sympathy. Klatuua addressed them all. "Gentlemen. I'm sorry to have invaded your inner sanctum. But I have to tell you: you've gone into autopilot. You're not thinking. This is a revolution, but it's a revolution unlike any other in human history. And let's be honest, what's the one flaw that all revolutions have had, from France in 1789, to Che Guevara's guerrillas in the Bolivian jungle? The freedom fighters are a little bit too interested in bringing down the existing government and a little too reticent in the drudgery of maintaining a fairer, utilitarian society. My people have saved you from the need to have any fighting at all. And Mr Perinum, you're quite right, after a fashion. Neurotic hatred on the part of the saviors is a problem. But again, we've saved you from it. Now the have-nots will no longer hate the haves. People will be free to put their money where their mouths are, taking either the non-skilled, physical drudgery required to keep an industrialised nation moving, or the academic and managerial jobs which are ten times easier. Let people be judged by how selfless they are, and let the economy be judged by its usefulness to everyone".

Millibane looked on, soft and twinkled-eyed in a way that made you long for Gordon Brown to call you bigoted or John Prescott to drive past you in a fleet of jags.

"We still haven't discussed fully your people's motives for trying to help us".

"Our motives", said Klatuua stoically. "Perhaps you can imagine them. Love. Embarrassment. Kindness".

A dark current entered the conversation. Hummel Campbell. "But you've made several mentions of God. In your society, are church and state fully separate?"

"Yes, of course".

"Because in our society we're fully committed to the freedom to either believe or disbelieve".

Klatuua shrugged, only it was a young woman's gesture. Her shoulders felt horribly weak.

"I think what you're asking, Mr Campbell, is if I'm going to say anything that will incur the mighty intellectual wrath of Richard Dawkins and the like. The short answer is yes".

Now the politician dipped his head almost onto his chest. The others made only the tiniest movements, never seeming fidgety or incessant. Arms and legs like single pieces of balsa.

"You're very divisive for someone who claims to be a diplomat", was Campbell's next barbed statement.

"Perhaps. It's just, I have no use for hypocrites".

"So-", Campbell stretched his skinny arms across the huge green place mat, "for someone who believes in such materialistic lifestyles, you still hold value in all the arbitrary religions? It seems to me that all you want is to control people, just for the sake of it".

Klatuua breathed deeply the bracing air. It felt as if she was taking in the very same air from their enclosed conference room. As ever, she wished they would just say something, anything, that would stump, confuse or embarrass her. Something that would give them a kind of loveable underdog frisson.

"Everyone on the face of this planet, whether they're atheist or theist, has some private, imaginary concept that they worship. We are all of us imaginary beings, no different from God, if he exists, no different to God, if he doesn't. You can't decry religion without decrying your own consciousness. Does that answer your question?"

Campbell blinked like a jittery little school governor. "So religious subjugation, the terrorism of fundamentalists - it's all justified, on the basis that deep down, everyone is a deluded?"

Klatuua spoke from the hoof, "Religious persecutors aren't stupid. They're not evil and they're not deluded, any more than you or me. Imagine in the year 2525. In some post-post-apocalyptic world full of cars, people start using the Highway Code as a holy book. Over thousands of years, all the slate-faced priests start embellishing the rules with parables. Bloodthirsty little stories, simply because people aren't listening any more. But at its heart, it would still be the Highway Code. The holy books of this world, the angry religions, are simply man's attempt to control a rudderless world, plus his own neuroses. If you had any sense, you'd be grateful that they give you a common language for something which would otherwise be a mire of greed and complacency".

She noticed: all these politicians wore such thin shirts. Nylon. You could see it at a glance. A special little club. Sometimes, Millibane crept his eyes over her and it seemed as if he understood the rawness of her message. But it was just a teacher's pet attentiveness set as default, a layer of dull psychology as thick as his play-dough flesh and oversized eyes.

"I think that what Hummel was getting at, and what we'd all like to know -do your people have a religion as strict as your economic policies?"

Answered Klatuua, "No. We hardly have any organised religions. The consensus is that there's a Heaven. We have atheists, but they remain silent out of good grace, for the reasons I've just mentioned".

Jack Dempsey was blinking now. "You're concerned that we're destroying ourselves through overpopulation and a resistance to hard work. And yet your people can move between dimensions. Couldn't you simply give us the facility to move some of our populace to an alternate version of Earth that has no intelligent life? We could forge a new world, like pioneers".

"No", Klatuua tried not to sound exasperated. "Mr Dempsey - that would be akin to a mental patient who has burned down his house having a stately home bought for him. And I really don't mean to belittle you".

The man sitting nearest Millibane had gone unnoticed, despite wearing one of the most distinctive shirts, a low-collared affair with bacon-coloured stripes. Through his swingy blonde air, Klatuua identified him as Danny Freud, Chief Welfare Advisor. She noted the way his bottom eyelids looked so much larger than his top eyelids, and when he swerved his gaze -trouble was coming.

Speaking in a tone even more slow and considered than Campbell at the height of his attack, "How's all this effecting you personally?"

"Irrelevant", Klatuua sort-of-smiled.

"We need to have a good relationship", promised Freud.

It was time to give them a revelation. To wheel out the big guns. She wondered, actually, if they had that same expression in this dimension. Probably.

"Your whole political system is founded on a cult of personalities. Not so where I come from. I am beneath all of you. So much so, Mr Freud, that in Gort's monitoring of the population, he's keeping a close tally of how many people die as a result of our arrival here. Implanted in my brain is neural micro-squib. In layman's terms, a bomb, controlled by Gort. If more than one percent dies, in rioting, as a result of social reform, it will be considered a failure on my part. The charge will activate, I'll drop dead where I stand".

Freud shook his head, expressing more than wonder, less than horror. "That's terrible".

"It's reasonable", Klatuua's voice was warm.

Captivated children, sitting in the children's section of a council-ponced public library. They were captivated, but for how long, and was it any more than waving your hand through a ghost? She would have preferred, by far, more angry accusations, more snide, capitalist venom.

In this spellbound new world, it was the man Freud who was in control. "You're afraid. Don't feel bad about it. It's part of my job to be able to read people's body language. I can just -see it in your shoulders. You're scared, exhausted, and there's not much hope to be had".

"This is a difficult mission", admitted Klatuua. She heard the wind-chime tone, her voice trailing off among frank and apocalyptic eye-twinkles. Exchanged by the Welfare Analyst as he grappled the edge of the table.

"We could see about removing the bomb. The brain surgeons at Guys Hospital are the best in the world. We could grant you political asylum".

"What a quaint idea", said Klatuua. "No".

From a stomach-centred feeling of unease, the politicians started to fidget. It was then that Howard Millibane remembered he was Prime Minster.

"A lot of your policies make a certain amount of sense, I mean, in terms of removing the deficit for good and having a solid industrial power base. And I'm sure we could adopt -variations- on a lot of the things you've suggested. But to make such a major change in only ten years is out of the question".

In replying so curtly, Klatuua feared she'd give away just how hopeless their plight was, "Actually, Prime Minister, five years is all you'll need to make the appropriate changes in infrastructure. We're giving you ten so that you'll have time to truly appreciate what a paradise your country has become".

Said Millibane, "People will never be happy to have given up so much".

"Then Gort will destroy you".

"OK. What if we could find a way to destroy Gort's destructive capabilities, or at least limit them?"

"Impossible".

She was growing bored. The occasional flickering of the holographic representation only exacerbated her dullness. For the politicians, their hearts were hammering in their chests.

"Everything mechanical, anything that uses an electrical current, can be disrupted". This was the view of her old enemy General Jackson.

"Gort doesn't need electricity", promised Klatuua. "The other thing you need to be aware of, and you really won't like this, is that he's imbued with magick".

No one laughed -so there was that at least.

"Magick?", asked Millibane.

"Believe or disbelieve as you wish. All I'd advise is that you never doubt his destructive capability".

Now the PM gulped out a resilient little smile. "We saw your robot single out and destroy each and every weapon which had been brought to bear on him. Apart from that, he ignored us as if we were insects. I'd like to ask, Klatuua -how do you think he would react to a more indirect attempt to stop him?"

Klatuua spoke sharply, "Such as, Prime Minister?"

"Well, we know he needs to turn this 'Ultimate Nullifier' in order to project its force. What if we were to encase his feet in a huge block of concrete. The men carrying out the work - would he incinerate them?"

"No. But when the time came, he would simply turn his lasers down towards the concrete and shatter it".

And still the politicians were strangely cool.

"It's something we should like to do", Millibane clasped his hands across the table top, "if only to show the public that we're taking direct action on their behalf".

Klatuua stared at the holographic ceiling. It felt for all the world as if her body was submerged, maybe just her forehead poking clear from a sea of termites. Picked apart by seagulls. Shoulder muscles going hideously slack.

She reached for the E-stop that would shimmer out the handsome state meeting room.

"Gentlemen. There are only so many ways I can say this. The country you know is tumbling to an end. Prosperity or annihilation. The choice is yours".

Whether it was the knots in her muscles or the rigidity in her bones, it was hard to find a comfortable position to nap in her bunk, luxurious and space-age though it was. Diplomatic training required her to be able to pass any number of lies before a polygraph. Just say: everything is the truth, then marvel as your heartrate and perspiration fall to the sub-ambient trill of a mountain top yogi conjuring lumps of silver in the palm of his hand. How was it then that she could ever be too nervous to sleep? What was it that was alive at the core of her mind, worrying so about the fate of Britain 65135X? God?

The dome-faced clock that never really looked part of the cabin told that the time difference between dimensions had synchronised. Klatuua blinked, sat up, leveled herself out before the communication console. Without much hesitation, she whacked the main channel key and was greeted with the King's striking grey eyes.

He gave a solemn sort of smile. She noticed at once that he was actually wearing his crown, something he did infrequently. "Hail Comrade Klatuua".

"Hail Comrade King".

"The atmospherics seem to be favouring us today. There's hardly any interference at all".

"There has to be some upshots".

The King nodded wisely, taking her meaning entirely. "Now that the equinox point has been reached".

The equinox point -the stage in Klatuua's mission where she had at least delivered to the native Brits all the information needed to turn their society around. All that remained was to stir up the nuances of self-respect and responsibility. 'All'.

Curious relaxation kept her body straight as she sat before the monitor, her spine

old and painful, though currently with a nice cushioning effect between neck and skull. The King was roughly twenty years her junior, as if that mattered at all. True loyalty like true love, just a bit less rare.

Klatuua asked, "What of Bristol and Gloucester?"

"The usual, half way stoical, half way a party atmosphere". Referring to the massive power transfer from their dimension to 65135X, the kick-start needed to enlarge Gort from sinister flying saucer passenger to hundred-and-fifty-foot sentinel. Night-long blackouts always afflicted large regions of the West as power stations struggled to recover. But the populace agreed, it was such a small price to pay for saving the life of a twin brother. Their scientists estimated that, in the unlikely event that the occupants of a decadence-possessed parallel universe ever failed the ultimatum, the power drain caused by unleashing the Ultimate Nullifier would cause the whole country to go black for years. As its brother burned.

As he spoke, the King's smile eased up just slightly. "Is it really so bleak over there?"

"Your highness would find it hard to achieve the simplest task, make the simplest ruling. With these people there's just a wall of ingrained arrogance".

"We knew it would be difficult". The King rubbed his mouth, and it was transparent he meant 'we' as in the government, his advisors, -the royal 'we' was never something he favoured. He flicked up his bearded chin. "We've never visited a version of our country which is quite so damaged".

Confirmed Klatuua in a bright voice, "We - have - not".

"And needless to say, our usual arrangement of the film and the book. It won't be necessary this time. You don't have time to indulge in niceties".

He referred to the custom of bringing him a single film and single book from the liberated Britain once the mission was at a close. Already she'd been brooding on how difficult it would be to choose a book. But the film -she stared at the blu-ray case just beyond the King's eyeshot. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Something a folk hero like the King would surely be moved by.

"It's early to say, Klatuua, but what are your feelings? Can their country be saved?"

Said the diplomat, "My head says no. My heart says no".

"We knew it would be difficult".

Never in an attempt to hide or conceal his nervousness, the King glanced around and took a long moment of silence.

"This could be the first time we fail. And I can't shake that it will be a big failure".

"I know my duty", she reassured him.

Reflected the King, "There's no such thing as 'duty', not when we get to the level people like us operate on. There's not even belief. There are just situations that make sense, or don't".

As he continued, he kept gentle eye-contact. "Whole countries hang on your success. If you failed, you could come home again, but you'd no longer be a hero. The people would think of you as a failure, not even out of disappointment but out of -necessity. Call them fickle, but we're all of us fickle in a way. I suppose we have to have faith that the people of the future will be like angels, wise, and they'll just know what really happened. But meanwhile, Klatuua, for the people of our time -we'd have to paint you as inefficient. A mess. Corrupted, even. And I am troubled".

"I'm ready for whatever happens", said Klatuua. Even in the face of the King's painful admission she kept her tone business-like, almost blank. How does one reassure a king who seeks to be the very incarnation of humility, haunted by the truth that humility has a dark side, a political side? Visions of sacrificial goats when what she felt like most was a sacrificial lion. How to convey it, matter-of-factly?

"Comrade King, I'm prepared for the challenges I face. Should I fail here, I'll offer myself up. It's nothing that concerns me".

"But what a situation!", the King hissed.

"I'll take whatever fate has to throw at me. Comrade King, I wouldn't bull- you".

The King laughed at this. At this, the King gave a chuckle.

They spoke for a while longer about current affairs back home. The death of Sir Gerry Winstanley and the first mining mission to Enceladus. Still there was a horrible kind of weakness at the corner of the man's mouth. Genuine worry about the spiritual cancer of Britain 65135X shone through in his eyes, the over-flexibility of his shoulders. For Klatuua, the 720 dpi resolution of the screen was somehow even more emotive and homely than full 1080p; it reminded her of the old days.

The statements in the King's news round-up grew increasingly clipped until he was taking deep breaths, looking grim and hopeful in equal measure.

"The 65135X General Population Manifest. I've been looking over it. Isn't it something you ever do?"

Klatuua was confused. "The General Population manifest? Beyond mission parameters, getting acquainted with the various movers-and-shakers -no. Don't tell me there's someone with my name?"

Rueful and horrified, the King said, "As it happens -there's been some kind of cosmic coincidence. The patterns of the zebra are matched. Someone you know -is there".

She smiled, and waited, sweetly, in the manner of a much younger woman.

"Your former husband, or rather -over there, he never even met you- Mikey Viveash. Age Sixty-Four".

Smile flickering out in an instant, Klatuua felt her skinny old muzzle writhe and purse. "How would that even be possible, Highness?"

Her mind echoed away as the cabin grew slow and fearfully ambient. The King could not give an answer because there was no answer beyond -God. The zebra moving and dancing in a bizarre centrifuge. The random nature of any two people meeting and starting a family together was like a giant, picking up a house filled with rice, shaking it, having two individual grains come out together. For it to happen again on the second go -but then before that, through the three or four generations that had come since their two dimensions had diverged at the start of the century. It was God. Sending a specific message. To her.

She made the statement to the King in a short breath, a gasp -she couldn't help it. "I have to be removed from the mission".

"Why?"

"God is deliberately undermining my authority here. If our people find out I have an ex-lover here, or even a pseudo-ex-lover, it will be seen as bias".

"Well", the King's mouth made a broad crease. For a second, he stared blankly at nothing, the minute flickering of the transmission picking out his pulse, his deep breathing. "I had been thinking about it, though not in those terms. It's a strange problem, isn't it? Look at the surveillance photos of him. He looks so much like the Mikey Viveash of our dimension, it's like..."

He paused and looked at her squarely. "I was thinking about it in a completely different context. Succeed or fail, this will be your last mission with Gort. He knows this. Could it be that he has brought you here to Viveash as a kind of reward for all your years together? We know he has a personal connection with you. Britain 119247-A. Those people would have tortured you to death. He purposefully left the landing site, left the saucer unprotected, just to go and save you".

"Gort never ceases to be -strange, and loyal. But if your theory about Mikey is true-", she shook her head. Her watery eyes held steady, well-and-truly the expression of a wistful old woman. "There is one tragic little flaw. Mikey Viveash and I got divorced for a reason. We cannot be together. At best I can say that I don't truly hate him. But by the same token, I certainly don't love him. Our marriage -it was a storm, and though any storm is exhilarating, it can't go on forever".

Acknowledged. Taken aboard into a very embarrassed corner of his brain. The King kept his head forward and edged both hands to the outermost edge of his desk. Both of them sensed the communication was edging to a close, and it was fine. "Klatuua, you owe it to yourself to go to this man. Visit him, in disguise, between your affairs of state. Find out if this dimension makes him any easier to live with. Because this might well be the first Britain we fail to liberate. And you would have to return home to shame and dishonour. I would charge you with treason, send you to the Punishment Dimension. In the eyes of the public, of course. But in reality, I could send you to the dimension of your choice. Somewhere wonderful like Muisyle II or Nebesa. You have spent your entire life selflessly serving us, taking all manner of turmoil, torture. At this late stage, you deserve to be happy".

Klatuua steeped her mouth. "Hail Comrade King".

"Hail Comrade Klatuua".

Time started to surge again. She drifted along the curve of the hull. Sometimes she found that her eyes were floating high as if to bask in the wonderful blue sky of the horizon, the mind's eye perfectly conjuring that she was outside in the land of ordinary citizens.

Perhaps no one actually dies. Perhaps we are all simply get -transposed- into Heaven. And in the meantime, all these silly variations of Great Britain to tide us along. After all, it was all put together in such a linear way; God had made sure of that. Back in the early part of the century when Professor Budrys had discovered how to observe that first parallel universe. Through fragments of the Rosamond meteor, they'd gained such a brilliant, clear vision of that other Britain. But as yet, no way to travel across. As yet, no way to intervene as the 'other' Britain was destroyed utterly through civil war and economic depression, caused by one thing alone: decadence.

The people of Klatuua's side, including her parents, had been traumatised. It was likened to watching through the glass porthole of a bulkhead as your submerged brother flails and drowns. Gullible. Inherently lazy. But your brother nonetheless. When at last Professor Arturo found a way to travel to parallel universes, their mandate was simple -to educate, to save. Even if there was still a slight problem in the execution. Prince Jeph knew that the threat of utter destruction was the only thing that would truly shake the other Britains from their arrogance. The Ultimate Nullifier was created. Still the spiritual-ideological finger trap tightened: the component used to focus such raw, continent-destroying energy was the Kindle Gem, a red stone that had been found in the Indian Ocean in 1925. One of a kind.

The ultimatum, the Ultimate Nullifier -on a country-destroying level, it could only ever be used once.

Etched in her memory like a nightmare, and since then the exact feeling of tension never truly leaving her stomach; descending the platform on that first trip. A pretty 22-year-old girl putting to rights a countryload of glib politicians and a general population of insane housewives. She remembered looking into their eyes and believing with all her heart and soul that they would never listen to her. But somehow she persuaded them. And the next lot, and the next lot. Even the nigh-schizophrenic Britain 119247-A. All of them, until now.

Juggling. Did her people finally deserve to be free of this terrible obligation? Did she deserve to be happy, for goodness sake? Her mind, it juggled; the mission and daydreams -the acute satisfaction of doing all she could. Then finally getting to scratch and claw-up that terrible itch called Mikey Viveash. The poor man would have no idea what hit him.

Whole again, The Silver Surfer drifted on his board, listening carefully to the roar of the cosmic tide. Maybe through some cosmic-genetic memory, he recognized that he'd heard this exact rhythm before. Back in time. 'Groundhog day'. To be sure, he glided first to the savannah, where the gazelle was once again hobbling along and horribly vulnerable. He scared off the lion, healed the leg. It was like rewinding a video and laboriously watching the same scenes. In the Mexican hospital -'Merciful God!", said the guard. "Cuantas beniciones tenemos!", the woman outside the baby ranks. The man in the angular room was once again dying of cancer. Norrin healed him, though this time both the man and his red-cheeked daughter were puzzled by the dark expression on his savior's face. And then onwards towards London. The Eastenders panorama, the grubby beige and grey rooftops, the yuppie housewife who refused to look up at him, her mousey face a listed building.

Well met, old friend. He approached the nightmarish studenty man and this time, through a swift stride, everything was different. Such ire was inside him, Norrin felt there was distinct chance he might accidently kill the man merely by touching him.

He edged inwards, menaced him, tricked his scuttling legs onto the board like someone sliding a Christmas card under a glass to catch a spider.

He took him the hundreds of feet upwards. This time, however, very little time was wasted languishing in the whispy white ozone.

"Who are you?", the green T-shirted nightmare begged of him.

Norrin made no answer.

"Are you going to kill me?"

"You", said Norrin. "Everyone. In the name of Galactus".

He pushed the spindle-limbed creature away, ever finding satisfaction in his airless shrieks and the way he flew slightly, dipped slightly, plummeted. Interesting; this time, did Norrin pay closer attention now to how fast he was approaching the ground? In fact, would it serve the plan better just to let him die? Whether to act against yuppie, studenty men, economic plague-carriers that they are -normally it's a background problem. Funny how it should come to the fore.

He rescued the man. Took him up. Dropped him. Funny, also -this time he wept bitterly, staring into the Silver Surfer's featureless eyes and seeing only -inhumanity, eternal.

Finally, Norrin released him back into the doughy London crowd. He then lanced high into the atmosphere to wait and plan. It was sex, but of the variety of those two society girls who'd come before Shalla Bal. The blood drains from the head to the crotch. In the head: a fearful white sky. Don't get distracted by the ambience. When he saw the smoke of the missile, followed by the initial black glint of the nose cone, a curious fulfillment came. Perhaps God was present, espousing silence to ring out the supreme tension. Norrin wavered the board while stationary in the cosmic tide, first a little, then dramatically. The wheeze of the rocket thrusters became apparent. He waited, felt the physical proximity. The missile itself seemed excited; still he waited. And then at the last available instant, it took much effort to flip the board, swing his arms, destroy the metal cylinder with a hurried blast of his vast power.

There was little time for satisfaction. He defocussed his eyes from the realm of Roygbiv energy and played them up through the spectrum, first through Infrared, then ultraviolet. Finally -there was nothing more than a stark void, colourless, and an ugly line of radiation which marked the precise route the missile had taken. With skill, Norrin moved his board directly alongside, retracing the radiation to its source, hopefully. His speed grew quicker as he became more obsessive: phantom heart pumping away in its hollow ribcage. There was a sensation, occasionally, of passing through thick cloud cover, tho he could never see it. Over quaint hamlets and broad, ragged fields he flew, while in his eyes -nothing except the fearsome radiation, a colour he was flatly incapable of describing.

Any of the emotions he felt when the trail finally ended: these also were very difficult to identify. So he blinked, gently, the same motion as dispelling tears, in order to focus his eyes back towards the human light spectrum.

It was a dank hillside overlooking a village of steep houses, Victorian. The deep tyre tracks, maybe belonging to a heavy army vehicle, could be traced down to the edge of the field, then onwards through a fast-moving road full of cars and lorries. He was too late by a clear margin. He sagged. As much as his staid silver body allowed him.

At the top of the field was a gold-beige hedgerow following the precise crest of the hill. For the first time, Norrin noticed a woman standing awkwardly a few paces beyond the stile. Her body seemed impossibly isolated and singled-out in the vast open space. At an inexorable pace, he approached, not caring an iota if she was frightened.

"The vehicle which was just here, which fired a missile into the sky. Tell me about it".

The woman's jaw tightened slightly even as she gasped. "I saw a kind of lorry, with a trailer-"

"Tell me", prompted the Silver Surfer.

"I'm having a little trouble -", and she painfully lifted her arm, which was wrapped in a bathroom towel. "I came out here to get a signal on my phone, to call an ambulance. I accidentally cut my arm".

Norrin drew close. The woman didn't recoil, exactly, though her handsome face dodged and tipped. Awe, more than skin deep.

"Let the towel fall. I will heal you".

The woman spoke increasingly gently. "I'm scared. It was a deep cut. I already feel light headed. I'm afraid that if I let the pressure off, or even if I look at it, I'll faint".

"There's no need to be afraid".

As he said this, Norrin felt the exact weight of his terrible, impassive nature. It had shifted, infinitesimally. God alone knew how; the handsome, blonde-haired woman sensed it too. She laughed, dizzily, perhaps thinking -a silver mannequin that gives the tiniest twitch of intimacy.

The blue-and-white towel fell away to the grass. At first, Norrin struggled to see where the sliced flesh actually was. Then it started to bleed, copiously. With her pronounced, luxuriously-slanted cheekbones, the woman could never look ugly or foolish -she simply looked seared to the degree of a space shuttle baiting gas-mark re-entry. What a feeling, too, the actual healing process. His smooth hand closed around the afflicted forearm, never in more than a light touch, however. Interestingly, no spearmint energy struck up, no physical motion at all. A weird sensation came, as if the silver skin itself was weeping.

In the seconds of relief that followed, Norrin didn't remove his hand immediately. They locked eyes. Gazing away, the woman seemed astonished per se, also bizarrely wise; a new link between sheer astonishment and bizarre wisdom.

"Tell me about the rocket launcher. Which direction did it travel in?"

The woman looked away from him. "I still feel dizzy. I might be sick. I think I've lost too much blood".

Norrin sensed he wasn't going to learn anything about the people who'd managed to kill him, not here. He gestured for his board; it rotated in mid-air and moved to a diagonal under his forearm.

"Help me back to my house!", the woman winced, as if it was the half-remembered line from a play rehearsal.

"I have no obligation to you", said Norrin darkly.

"Welcome to Earth, anyway. I'm sorry they tried to kill you".

"You people have every right to kill me".

Walking close from across the pleasingly dark grass, the woman was ponderous. In front of him once more, she hugged herself, tilted her chin upwards. "The way you talk. I do understand. I might be half-bled to death, but I understand how you feel. Thankyou for saving me".

Norrin summarised his sorrow. "You don't understand. I would see every living thing on this planet destroyed, with very little grief. I could delay a few minutes, to help you back to your house, as a little gesture of sentimentality. But those minutes. That sentimentality. They are phantoms".

"No one deserves to be alone", she said. "Perhaps I could help?"

The defiance in her voice spurred him on. He stood straight, stared across the dull convergence of valleys and clustered roads. The breath of the air, like a dream, the feeling of impetus from a dream.

"Where do you live?"

"Just there", the woman laughed a little at the irony of how close it was. Certainly it went some way to explaining why she just happened to be in such a windswept field. The side fence of her house opened directly onto the mighty grass slope. "My husband and I have only just moved in. There's no mobile signal and they haven't connected the landline yet".

They started to walk, slowly. Norrin felt dark and embarrassed. "Would you have me put my arms around you?"

"No. Just walk beside me. Would you pick up the towel?"

It occurred to him, from within his rigid silver temples, that she was conspicuously slim and beautiful. Which concerned him not at all. She wasn't like Shalla Bal, who could not really be thought of as beautiful in any conventional sense, just perfect, essential -to him. At the side of the richly-lacquered fence, he started to feel impatient. Still the woman's small talk protracted things.

"I was in the bathroom. The wall mirror -can't have been fixed up properly. It smashed".

He listened. He also found himself thinking of a thousand different things at once. Swirling and rushing somewhere nearby in the cosmic tide, though he sensed they were beneath it. Submerged. Adding to the strange, isolated feel was the subtle layers of grime. Every door and skirting board was coated in a thick gloss paint of indeterminate age, which drew in black flecks like a magnet. As the woman drifted, she flexed her stream-line shoulders, catching the black-dim-blue shadows quite beautifully. Her shoulders then relaxed.

"You feel like a prisoner. Tell me why. I promise you I can understand".

He wondered what kind of confessor she would be. Osama Bin Laden, tell us about your wistful smile. Write a version of the Koran with no poetry, to avoid seeming disingenuous.

In his hands there was still the bloodstained towel, which he looked at, looked through, down into some subatomic world awash with vicious moral judgements. He felt the warmth ebb pleasingly between his thumb and the pads of his palms. When he looked up, the whole of the front room was sinking down.

Or rather, being wheezed down, insidiously, on hydraulics.

He looked at the woman and blinked. She hissed just a little air into her beauty-creased jaw, was otherwise unrepentant, as the last echoes of natural light fell away from the windows.

"You're working with the people who attacked me". Norrin found his voice was plain; contained within -only a hint of surprise, no accusation at all.

A tight little front room with the ambience of a mining cage, their surroundings couldn't be more mysterious. A distinct buzz stopped them both from becoming too daydreamy.

"There's no microphones in here. You can tell me your biggest secret, now, before we get to the others".

Norrin thought for a moment. He paced towards her slightly, looking up to what had once been a window. "This world you feel so engaged in is actually a dream".

As many times before, the woman looked merely satisfied rather than surprised. For all her human flaws, she was an interesting character, unaccountably so.

Clamps fired, metal met home. The ex-living room came alive with a shudder and they were at a stop, dozens of metres down inside the mystery hillside. Now the front door which had before seemed so rugged was weak like a soap opera prop. To be smoothly opened by the innocent-guilty-innocent woman, no doubt a meek little entrance into her innocent-guilty-innocent lair. Her comrades. Norrin kept his featureless eyes impassive as he was confronted by them.

A man in a wheelchair severely creased-up by motor neuron disease. A man with blonde hair and annoying eyes, a man who looked exactly like Big Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs. The latter two fixing him with futuristic guns.

"Large as life. Through you'd think he'd have -bigger muscles to have done so much damage".

The blonde-haired man spoke with a strange accent. Half French, half a Northerner. What's more, in a camp voice coupled with the stereotypical lisp of a loud-and-proud homosexual. It would have been funny, if anything was funny any more.

Said the heavy-set Joe Cabot look-a-like, "So -what? Uh, we'll just belay clobberin' time, while he's just standin' here?"

The woman turned to Norrin and explained, "My name is Susan Richards. Sue. This is my husband Professor Reed Richards. My brother Johnny Storm and our good friend Ben Grimm. And we'd like very much to talk to you about defecting".

Apocalyptic power, sometimes like an itch or the in-and-out of your lungs, can tumble out of control, even if you consider yourself sane and lucid. The four humans who stood before Norrin, he suddenly wanted to maim and burn away.

"I cannot defect! Any more than you can decide to close your mouth, stop breathing and die!"

"We know about the horned, purple being that you serve", said Professor Richards through his electronic voice box. Norrin had never heard such a strange, robotic tone before and for a second he was grateful for the distraction. The way it lilted was almost wistful, romantic. "We have observed you. We know that you serve him reluctantly".

Norrin's mouth moved, jerked as if he was freezing. "How can you know this? I've only just arrived in this dimension".

"There is much we have to discuss", said the Professor, blunt and enigmatic like a cyborg messiah. He set his fortified wheelchair in reverse. "Shall we go to one of the conference rooms?"

Norrin passively moved out among the four humans. The floor consisted of hundreds of square plates; each time any of them took a step, the plate directly beneath their feet became illuminated. The Silver Surfer no more than glanced, yet Sue Richards saw the tiny reaction of his eyes, and explained.

"That's our security system. Beneath each panel is a vibranium-powered laser strong enough to incinerate whoever's standing above. We're monitored, all the time, on CCTV. If any intruders come in, if any of our prisoners tried to escape -or even if any of us were to starting sabotaging the place -we'd die in an instant".

"Plus", said Johnny Storm in his soft, camp voice, "it's just like the Thriller video, though you don't need to dance unless you want to".

Sue continued to explain, "This is the Baxter Base; it's the most Top Secret place in Britain. It's fairly common knowledge that, inside Box rail tunnel, there's an off-shoot of the track leading to Churchill's West Country bunker. What the public doesn't know is that there's a second off-shoot, leading here".

After one more glance to the illuminating squares which followed their footsteps across the bay, Norrin looked impassively forward. In the far corner by one of the warehouse racks, some squaddies were hoisting into position a zebra piñata, home-made from shipping barcodes and spent shrinkwrap tubes. Not so revered a place that people weren't allowed to act the fool. Or perhaps it was just the way things were going. Not even a case of 'one rule for the military', more like 'one rule for our brave boys'. Pathetic, dying Britain.

"Reed", Sue addressed her husband in a gulpy voice, "could we use Conference Room One?

I could do with taking a seat. I think our friend healed me up well enough, but still feel -weak".

"Of course, Sue", said the wheelchair-bound scientist. There was always a pause while he accessed the vocabulary screen of his voice box, the input a mixture of blinks, magic knuckle movements and a holding of his breath. From what Norrin could see from the computer screen set to one side of his arm rest, it was a highly sophisticated form of auto-complete text messaging. And for all his disease-ravaged limbs, Richards must be fantastically well coordinated.

Viz-a-viz nothing, he mused on the state of their marriage. It was logical to assume that they had some unfathomable, transcendental love. But something in Sue's briskness, and the way Reed Richards hardly ever really looked at her, hinted otherwise. Of course, not that it mattered. No one loved anyone, not the way he loved Shalla Bal. And here we are in the fathoms.

In the swish conference room, which had exactly five chairs, Norrin tilted his board against the well-painted wall and took a seat.

"Professor Richards, know that I am impatient for this meeting to be over. You said that you have observed me with my master. But I haven't spoken to him since arriving in this dimension one hour ago. This would suggest that you have a scientifically-advanced means of seeing into adjacent dimensions".

There was a pause. Norrin was energised by the buzzing of the LED lights mounted within the foam ceiling plates. He took in the sight of the great Professor, mouth never far from dribbling, eyes never far from watering -though there was a kind of broad, academic smile, always. Somehow he activated the 50 inch computer monitor set at the end of the table.

Ben Grimm rotated his giant shoulders. "Nothing like a matinee to bring people together".

"Don't look at the way my hair was all dusty!", complained Johnny Storm.

Hasty military footage of some scratchy foreign mountain range started to play. Sandy, rocky ridges beset by sketchy weeds that still managed to be deeply, resiliently green. Then the military camera man edged forward, played the lens down onto a sharp hillside. Trees and bushes had been burned, flattened, swayed clear by the crash-down of a giant meteorite.

"This is the scene of the 2013 Tiengemeten meteor strike. My H.E.R.B.I.E trans-spectral satellite had been tracking its progress through the heavens for some time. We had identified it as being 99 percent of unknown mineral and vegetable composition. A great scientific prize. Our government therefore maneuvered into place a team of Special Operatives, comprising Ben and Johnny, to retrieve and smuggle back the meteor to Britain".

During Reed's trademark pause, Ben Grimm took over the telling.

"So me and the kid ran in to tie the thing up in a steel cable bag, right? Ready for the dust-off by stealth chopper. I ran. He minced. We both stopped dead at the edge of the crater, because we just couldn't believe what we were seeing. That cockamaymee meteor, it's made of this reflective stuff -like some kind of science fiction crud that acts like a window onto another dimension. We saw these great cities that were just a little different. Or people in suits that were just a little different.

"But get this -to do like our training said and winch this thing up, we had to roll it. And when we rolled it, the magic window turned and turned, through all these landscapes, rooms, palaces. Just the tiniest roll and it changed".

Put in Johnny Storm, "Just like 'the Guardian of Forever' from Star Trek Season One, but with other dimensions instead of the past".

"Yeah, good job, nerd", said Grimm. "We rolled it -but there was one scene we just had to stop on. Just this -field of people. Dirty. Refugees, like something from Auschwitz. They were all huddled together, and then their bodies started decaying while they were still alive. Crumpling into dust. And in the background, a hundred feet tall, the cause of it all. Your purple horned master".

Volunteered Norrin, "His name is Galactus. But these events have not happened yet".

"But they will", said Reed Richards. "They are what you desire".

"Not what I desire. The only course of action which is open to me".

"Explain", Sue Richards implored him, with the same old assurance there in her eyes. 'You can tell me anything'.

The Silver Surfer made no comment on this, though he did talk on, urgently, compellingly. "Here, our objectives would seem to overlap, but either way, you will help me. I come, as your glimpse into the multiverse indicates, from a series of parallel universes. Galactus feels the need to destroy each one. It is a holy war, of sorts. Galactus and I have a symbiotic relationship, though he is vastly more powerful than me, to the point of being unstoppable. Therefore I believe the only chink in his armour might be me.

"In the dimension I just travelled from, your missile succeeded in 'killing me', and so pushing me on into this dimension. Professor Richards, how close are you to finding a way of making contact with the other dimensions?"

Perma-smile and narrowed eyes alive with scientific glee, Richards made his reply, "I have the rudimentary design for a harmonic-shift array. It is far from the test model stage".

Said the Surfer, "From this time onwards, the top priority of your government is to make the breakthrough. Into each and every dimension you will send a warning that I am coming to destroy them, indiscriminately, en masse. You will send the design for the missile which killed me".

All present had a knot of consternation in their brows. It was only Big Ben Grimm, whose brow was rocky at the best of times, that grasped the situation completely. "You want to die? Over and over again?"

Norrin's gaze fell zen-like and resolute onto the corners of the table. His featureless eyes felt like Christmas baubles, the motionless human figures -squares of light. Thinking, 'At heart, I am a gentle man', and Galactus' reply, 'You don't have a heart. You have something else'.

"It is not dying".

"But surely it's just incredibly painful?", asked Johnny Storm.

Norrin looked at the blonde-haired man, briefly, before skimming his gaze back across the conference table surface. Grey linoleum. It shouldn't really look shiney, but somehow it did. He tilted his head and caught the eyes of Susan Richards. "Agony is my lot. And I would be grateful that my pain was part of a concerted plan. That perhaps, through a barely finite chain of arriving in a new dimension and immediately being destroyed, Galactus might come to believe that our horrific crusade simply isn't worthwhile".

He stood. His board tilted free from the wall in a motion that was neither fully telekinetic, nor a dog sensing the wishes of his master.

Confess things to the humans, why not?

"The definition of madness is carrying out the same action over and over again and hoping there'll be a different result. Or, this is what your psychiatric textbooks tell you. It fails to take into account the miraculous nature of chance. Infinitesimal nuance. Restrict my actions to an endless rote, it doesn't matter. I am love. And love is either miraculous or it's not.

"Two further things, Professor Richards. Firstly, do not test me. I am fully capable of committing all the Crimes Against Humanity and genocide that Galactus wants of me, plus everything that lies between. Your lives mean nothing to me.

"Secondly", he stood directly above the horribly weak scientist. "Don't take this as an insult, much less an act of kindness, but the current state of your body is far too inefficient".

He spread out his palm above Richard's head, and only his eyes properly reacted. Spearmint energy blurred the air surrounding the crumpled body. In under a minute, the scientist was able to stand. His face was no longer spasmodic; it was handsome and boyish for the first time in decades.

Sue Richards -lifted her fingertips to scratch her neck, let them fall to her sides. Also she hugged herself, trembled her mouth, all the time looking supremely afraid. When she regained her composure, she hurried clear from the sides of the conference room into the echoey recesses. Her husband, excited by his own miraculous recovery and not much else, narrowly sensed her anxiety. On his springy, resurrected legs, he followed.

Ben Grimm advanced on the Surfer with his futuristic gun, at the same time puffing his cheeks and glancing to his friend. "I wonder if he could cure you?"

"Unkind", said Johnny Storm.

Plain, purple dawn, no clouds at all, filled the viewscreen from corner to corner. Bulked-up soldiers walked the perimeter of the saucer landing site. Some of them even managed to go several minutes without glancing up at the hundred-and-fifty-foot Gort, the miner from Hell. Still more were busy hauling into place the (metal?) buttresses alongside his colossal feet, soon to be filled with concrete in an attempt to make him immobile. It was a childish hope; during the 119247-A conflagration, she had seen Gort kick his way through whole city blocks, and then the nuclear bunker where they'd held her, as easily as grinding blocks of cereal.

She peered at the ant-like men and chewed her lip. It was queasy, also, how a certain number of scientists and generals felt comfortable enough to breeze past within a metre or two of his lorry-size feet, the all-too-natural fear of being capriciously squashed -absent.

Today it was less important. She reminded herself it was a day off, or, more importantly, the day she investigated Mikey Viveash 65135X, Mikey Viveash age sixty-four, Mikey Viveash the stranger.

On the domestic internet and TV channels, she scoured out the face of a suitably striking woman to take as a disguise. It was giddy work, and depressing. Klatuua had always felt she was a beautiful woman, with exactly the face she deserved. Even as an old wrinkly, there were still elements of that beauty, indefatigable. Mikey Viveash -surely any version of Mikey Viveash- would fall in love with her just as a default response. Unfortunately, she knew that Britain 65135X's experiments in face-recognition technology were just about coming to fruition. The authorities would be hunting for her everywhere -even if she programmed the face-scrambler to make her look forty years younger, any kind of F R software worked through the layout of nose, mouth and eyes, and she'd be spotted.

No matter. It would still work out well, since she could be the centre of attention in other ways, as a bombshell, a femme fetale, a minxy cowgirl stoic. She tried to find the face of a conspicuously beautiful woman who could still convey some of her own character, in the end settling on a 38 year-old Hollywood actress -Angelina Jolie, whoever that was. Apparently she did a lot of good work for the UN, and this gave Klatuua the germ of a plan.

A plan? It was all psychological. Ghostly, psychological nuance, yet she realised she was going to get to his front door wholly unarmed. She needed some kind of flag to plant.

During their hurried courting period, the original Mikey had been fond of a certain beautiful ballad -a little song that was surprisingly sentimental, considering he was, by nature, a care-free alpha-male. 'Ghost on the Moon' by The Greystones. Klatuua had never heard it before and had never listened to it since, because the memory was too painful by half. Now? With quaking arms braced against the console, she hummed the melody into the speaker and tasked Gort with finding an Earth 65135X equivalent. It took him about a second, and no doubt using a degree of processing power that was infinitesimal.

'A Fine Blue Line' by a band called 'A-ha'.

Klatuua listened intently. Soon she had to push aside her coffee. Nothing less than clutching a fist to her mouth and thinking about something else entirely could save her from being devastated.

"Gort. Truly, you're a monster".

The 65135X lyrics alone were enough to make her head spin. They were so apposite. 'Take a look and see, what's become of me. Remember how it used to be? We couldn't trust ourselves, and we knew it'.

And yet, if she forced this Mikey Viveash to listen to it, how could he fail to synchronize with that wonderful, idiosyncratic man from the other side?

She didn't care even if it was like torture. Strangling each other the way they'd used to. Intimacy such as few people would know in a thousand years, and what did it matter whether it was love or capricious, blank-minded toying? She came to believe they just belonged to each other, yin and yang.

On the outskirts of Great Start Startley, the yellow whisps of the transporter beam died away. She stepped clear from the brittle leaves of the river bank and felt a deep satisfaction on having faced-down the risk of being seen by a horsey-girl dog-walker or frog-limbed fisherman. On the tiny, medieval stone bridge which marked the main entrance to the village, the military had set up a feeble checkpoint consisting of a jeep and some beret-wearing c-s with tiny handguns. This because some spod scientists had triangulated the exact point on the horizon which Gort stared at, night and day. Luckily, it hadn't occurred to anyone that, with the tiny jerks and turns of the miner's head, he might be tracking a single individual who lived in the village.

She'd never known Mikey's village as well as she'd liked. Thirty metres along the tufty riverbank she stalked, to a scratchy indenture between the two sides which was pleasingly close, close enough to hop across. There was the globular stone fence of a horsey-type's courtyard; she took a gamble that the horsey-type wasn't home, walking the heavily sloping drive to the road. By the high wall of the Saxon church, she looked back at the strolling soldiers and blank look go.

At once, the memories swelled, though they didn't quite render her mind useless as she'd feared. That the place was more or less exactly the same as the Great Start Startley of her own dimension was hardly surprising, since small villages like this didn't change in centuries. At least, not in terms of the buildings and the layout. In her dimension, the farmhouses were all working yards, the vicar was solemn and hard-working like a former knight, the houses belonged to people who worked the fields. She walked past the allotments and stared at the alive-alive sunflowers and the hologram spinners. And look, there's the low siding where they'd had sex at midnight. Look, the horribly barren-looking ex-chapel which Mikey had wanted them to buy together, to which she'd wisely said no. A quilt-jacket horse in a micro-field ignored her as if she wasn't there.

A red Toyota Prius, the housewife car of choice, made reasonable speed past the pretty Y-junction and its pretentious war memorial. Gliding out past the winding fields where they'd one day been surprised to see the smallest fun fair in the world. Her period cramps that day had been agony. Mikey broke his 200 Brit-Cred sunglasses on the dodgems. But despite that, the day had been idyllic.

She walked, daydreaming like crazy, in spite of everything. Just around mid way into the village, a lower-echelon Lord of the Manor had utilised his industrialist friend to have a nine ton JCB lift huge cages of boulders onto a gantry built around his mansion roof. The idea was, Swiss Family Robinson style, that when the working class came to take his home, he would release the boulders and crush them. Perhaps this was a good idea from his point of view. But it would never work. He was imagining an uprising of peasants, rather than his own existence being highlighted as contrived and decadent per se. Granted, it was proactivity that Klatuua could -almost- respect. Unlike those yuppie households that had taken to making hedge and roof-mounted sandwich boards, blown up photos of their multiple children with captions like, 'Please don't take our home' -as if just the concept of cherub-cheeked children was enough justification to breed like flies, print money, acquire luxurious houses with the proceeds of desk-bound nothingness.

It's surely the tacit jingoism which will destroy us. The Anti-Ultimatum League, run by MPs, housewives and business men who'd previously ejacutalked anti-austerity and giving war-returning squaddies priority in the NHS, had devised a special kind of flag. On first glance, it was the classic 'PROHIBITED' sign which told against cycling on a footpaths or drinking in the street. But here, the red stripe was comprised of two children reaching up to hold hands with their business lady mother. Inset, Gort, looking like Satan himself.

The symbol was all over the village of Great Start Startley. It was in windows, in scaffold, even in the allotment -a type of English World Cup flag that sat queasily in your stomach.

Towards the famous crossroads, the hub, the village remained the epitome of capitalist quiet. The same straggly cul-de-sac was there, flanked by imposingly large conifer bushes. In her dimension, the inlet nearest the crossroads was where Mikey lived. Not so here. Walking, pondering, Klatuua felt vaguely unnerved by the layout of the houses. For the most part they'd been built alongside the road. Some were set at arbitrary angles, however. And between all of them, there was a nothingy swathe of empty back yards and clogged-up walkways, skeleton trellice-works and garden centre junk. Klatuua understood the desire to live in detached houses, but this was just a mess of decadence -65135X to a tee. All of it leading up to The Penny Farthing pub. Run by one Mikey Andrew Viveash.

Her palms, she felt, were neither old woman dry or first date clammy, just strangely radioactive. As for her mind -there was a shocking absence of fear, replaced by an excitement of unprecedented power. One last look at Jolie's hourglass shape and there was a slight concern of looking too flashy -though by now she'd drifted through the heavy main door, into the broad domain of waxed oak booths and musty red carpet, no turning back no never. A springy, middle-aged couple were propped at the bar, talking animatedly. Beyond, Mikey Viveash was tilting his head and hissing air into his prow-shaped jaw.

His eyes lit up.

"Good morning", said Klatuua, quite affably.

"Good morning". Mikey was suave, with a genuine smile. "Welcome to Great Start Startley".

He shook his head in wonder as he waited for the Hollywood actress to take the lead. Her silence whipped around him in a funny sort of game, but of course, Mikey the People Person was equal to it. "Of all the crazy business happening in Aalmesbury, all the army folks patrolling our village -it's still a surprise to have a big film star walk through the door".

"Thankyou", said Klatuua, a little blankly. There was nothing for it but to let her eyes sweep over his face in a way that was completely fearless. Hungry. The man was as handsome as ever, with bold cowboy eyes and a terse-smiling mouth. It was her Mikey, and old age suited him. Gone was the slanted black fringe, here to stay was a grey crop that looked to be a single, wondrous shade, like something from a paint chart guide.

When she'd finished gasping, the curly-black haired woman also found the courage to ruminate. Even if she did periodically dart her eyes to her husband and Mikey for support; "It's an odd coincidence, too. Just down the road in Dursley. They reckon a few months ago, they had Nicole Kidman go in one of the pubs there. She bought drinks for everyone in the place".

"Yeah", said the husband, some kind of half-caste Jamaican but with full-caste dreads. "She told them she was going to be making a movie there about the End of the World. Is that you too?"

Klatuua had no idea who Nicole Kidman was, but 'a movie about the End of the World' -at that, she just had to laugh.

"No. I'm not making any blockbusters just now".

She stared at her alt-husband's broad, tempting smile, as of old. As of old, the sound of his smiling tiger voice.

"Can I get you a drink at all?"

"A finger of whisky in a pint of Fentimans lemon". To Klatuua, it had always been the most borderline-retarded drink imaginable, though back in the day, it had been Mikey's favourite, his work-a-day 'usual'.

A downcast look, then a smile in which his nervousness spiked through as plain as day. His eyes moved a certain way whenever he was being thoughtful; a slow rolling down to double-check the deliberations of his soul. "Unfortunately! That woman Klatuua and her robot have kind of 'de-alcoholled' any alcohol within a hundred miles of here. Luckily, my regulars like the atmosphere so much, they come here just for the soft drinks. And the Crazy Quiz".

"You say, 'That woman Klatuua'. What do you think of her?"

Mikey shrugged his mouth. "I can see where she's coming from. But there's no way it will work. People don't like change. And they like big changes least of all -I- reckon".

"That's not what I mean", Angelina Jolie pierced her eyes. "The politics, people either understand it or they don't. I'm talking about your gut-instinct on the woman's personality".

Viveash was silenced by the frankness of the question. Just for a moment, he leant on the bar in a light, springy pose. "She obviously believes what she's saying. You've got to give her points for that".

"But could you be friends with her?"

"I can be friends with anyone", stated Mikey. "Someone has to have a pretty disfunctional personality for me to diss them".

Something in Klatuua's throat hitched and hurt like hell.

"When was the last time you actually checked your bottles, to see if it had turned back into alcohol again?"

"Do you think it ever will?", he looked into her eyes.

"I feel light-headed enough just sitting at a bar with Angelina Jolie", said the skinny-man patron.

Mikey smiled at that as he turned to check a random bottle of whisky. "Careful, John. You'll be in the dog-house tonight".

John's wife was quick to blink back any offence, however. "Are your husband and kids with you in this country?"

"They've gone to Bristol Zoo for the day", was the lie which leapt into Klatuua's mouth.

Watching Mikey, she expected him to sniff the bottle and just know. Instead, he poured a finger into a funny little glass and took a broad sip. Never the sort of man to wince, hiss or otherwise make a meal of hard liquor, he simply nodded, narrowed his brown eyes. "That's the real deal! What made you think it would be OK again?"

She blinked and tried to look surprised. In fact, it was a targeted strike by Gort; only the alcohol in the Penny Farthing had turned potent again. Everyone else could just stay parched.

As he measured out her drink in feverish concentration, chin on chest, the sunlight caught every thick glass surface and all the broad bar mats. Blue, yellow, bacon. Colours that didn't go together for a minute.

John said in his jittery voice, "All this must seem interesting for an American. I bet you know some big-time producers that are just itching to make a documentary about Gort, and the ultimatum".

"Yes". Klatuua rested a cheek against the back of her hand. "But personally I find the whole thing -increasingly dull. If Klatuua really does come from this place where humility has ruled all along, to then come face-to-face with people here? She probably feels impatient more than anything. Maybe to the point where she just wants to be like a teenager again. Snarky, dismissive".

"I feel the same exactly. And I'm not from some Commie-dimension. It's an age thing".

This wasn't quite true. Mikey was snarky and dismissive, but he'd always had an ugly, pathological desire to conform, to be all things to all men. One of the joys of the political system on Klatuua's side was that, when a society was arranged in such a way to be indestructable, free at the point of hard work, an individual could afford to be throw off peer pressure, lifestyle pressure, the need to worship 'Help the Heroes' as if they were messiahs. Her own Mikey had never understood that. And yet that cursed duality -his personality was otherwise rich and unusually introspective. A whirlpool of duality to drag you under.

Now John and Lilly had drinks too, it was safe to push the boat out. Klatuua raised a glass.
"To the woman Klatuua".

"To Klatuua!", the other three added, laughing slightly.

"I've missed this!", warbled Lilly.

"I wonder". Jolie toyed with the aged but relatively clean bar mat, gently teasing the fluffy edges, "That robot. Do you think he's able to monitor our conversations, and relay them to her?"

Mikey said, "More than likely. They're so far ahead of us it's crazy".

"So what would you say to her, knowing she's listening?"

Thoughtfully, Mikey stared at his double-whisky, alone and un-fingered on the bar top. Every time Klatuua had a chance to stare at his brooding eyes, it was a sensation of lightning; breathlessly romantic -apparently. Though the weather beyond the huge windows was a constant white, increasingly a shadowy haze was accumulating around his forehead, his eyes.

"I get the impression she's tired of trying to help us. That actually, she should probably try to work with the government to keep things the way they are, or change them just a little bit, don't you reckon?"

This concept was so audacious and so cheeky, Klatuua's mind simply couldn't process it.

"Perhaps", she was waspish. "But who can know anyone's motives? Perhaps she once had her heart broken by a popular-popular wideboy, and that's why she wants to shake up society?"

"But she doesn't hate society", Mikey was breezy. "She doesn't want to see it come to any harm. When she told us about the cure for cancer, she had that nice little smile on her face. And I'd like to thank her for that. My friend Denny had a girlfriend who was dying. Her body was just completely invaded by it. She had a year or two left to live. When the docs said she actually only had a month, they hurriedly decided to get married. But what happened was, the day before it was going to go ahead, Klatuua arrived -and then they got married, and now they've got their whole lives ahead of them! Wonderful, eh?"

Klatuua felt a terrible darkness crease up the sides of her face, and by extension, the hard-light hologram overlay of Angelina Jolie. "Ridiculous. Love is a deeply personal thing. So is death. What's it got to do with getting married? Let's have this generic social convention -and as I'm on my death bed, every other married couple in the country will sense it and bow their heads in solidarity".

Even as she spoke, she knew the same old nightmare dynamic had been laid down. His differing point of view was one thing. Klatuua's was another. But it was as though there was some invisible, tear-stained devil sitting between them, always steering the conversation in such a way that there'd be a venomous row.

Memories came of their own wedding preparations. Mikey had wanted to get married in the church. Klatuua, at first, had tried to veto this, on account that neither of them were Christians. Only when Mikey started to get morose and unreadable did she relent. But in her mind, how it had burned, standing there in that little stone hall, anyone who cared to look able to see her as a bourgeois hypocrite, no self-insight at all.

And yet, keeping Mikey happy was everything. In hindsight, she knew what she should have done -go to the vicar and confess her worries of looking like a hypocrite. The onus would then be on him to either remove her fear through solemn words or else remove it by taking a disproportionate amount of money, so becoming a hypocrite himself.

"I think it's nice all the same", said Mikey in a voice that was gruff and eerily disappointed.

As before, so again though the echoing dimensions of a clotted, conceited, retarded human race. For a moment, Klatuua kept her mouth shut, though the damage had already been done.

"We almost had a row then. Me a star of Hollywoodland, you a regular guy. It's good we don't get phased by each other".

"I'm not the kind of guy to get phased much", said Mikey.

And perhaps this was always the problem.

Moving her sexy, hologram-rejuvenated forearms against the bar top, Klatuua initiated her next little gambit. She turned to face John and Lilly. "I feel sorry for you guys. I know all the banks are controlled by Gort now, but the population itself is still sitting on its hands, hardly buying or selling. Maybe I could help? If you had some of my DVDs or blu-rays in your houses, you could go and get them, and I could sign them? I believe my signed stuff goes for big money on E-buy".

The couple narrowed their eyes and cooed in excitement, the woman in particular. Already she'd hopped down from her stool onto the rose-coloured carpet. "That is a good idea. Do you mind waiting five minutes? I know we've got the Tomb Raider films, and 'Wanted'".

Mikey said, "Yup. E-buy! I think it's done this country no end of good. People able to get just that little bit more money to tide them over".

Klatuua -held her jaw tight. The invisible Satan, always sitting there between their differing politics, ready to leap in and bring row after row. For she knew: contrary to public thinking, E-buy had gone beyond being a helpful little facility for people to sell unwanted items from around the house. It had even gone beyond a way of savvy workers subsidising their minimum wage jobs. Because in Britain 65135X, there were a thousand methods for people to live comfortably without getting a job, scraping money from a variety of shameless or yuppie-shameless sources. And considering that the two thousand pounds worth which E-buy allowed their users to sell before obligating them to pay tax -it was Good Times in the Economy of Nothing.

When Lilly and John left, she took it upon herself to lock the pub door behind them. Drawing a steady breath into his square jaw, eyes twinkling all the while -Mikey could never be surprised or subjugated by anything. It took longer, seemingly, to walk back to the bar again, and what a mild sensation of her shoes on the modest red carpet.

Looking into his unshakeable, feverishly-thinking eyes. "The woman Klatuua -incidentally, the full name is Klatuua Shmi- she isn't the monster you think she is".

"OK!", he said energetically, not wholly convincing.

"She isn't the monster and she isn't the object of pity that you think she is".

"I never said she was monster, and if she's an object of pity, that's her own fault".

"OK, then", was all Klatuua could think to say. It was necessary to take insidiously deep breaths in order to speak while looking into those sly, handsome eyes. "But you know that I'm a Special Envoy for the United Nations? Well here's what's happening. Klatuua, she came to us, covertly. There's an Oscar Schindler esque pretext going on. She knows that this country is too far gone. The ultimatum will pass and everyone will die. But that doesn't mean she has to like it. There's efforts to transport a random selection of refugees out, into an uninhabited dimension. I've been sent out to ensure the randomness of the people the UN have chosen. We have to make sure there are no guerilla cabals".

She slipped her trembling hands into her jacket pocket and withdrew 'that' photo, the self-same one she'd shown Millibane and Jackson of a youthful, ridiculously pretty Klatuua Shmi being tortured at the hands of 119247-A goons. Only now, out of Mikey's eyeshot beneath the punter side of the bar, she tore off the lower half showing her snapped and severed fingers.

Leaving only a conspicuously pretty girl looking profoundly defiant.

"Do you know who this is?"

Mikey put on his non-pretentious spectacles and peered. "No. Is she from around here?"

She watched the reaction of his eyes, the minute, pained sloping of his eyebrows and the dilation of his pupils.

"She is from around here. You'd think people would remember such a pretty thing".

Said Mikey, "Mmm. We don't get too many pretty girls around here. Oops! I didn't say that!"

Indubitably, guiltily, Klatuua watched as he doted on the picture.

"Any idea what her name is?", he asked.

"I know exactly what her name is. He already have her. The most important thing is, you don't know her. You're clear. I can tell you, Mikey Andrew Viveash, you, along with this girl, are one of the people in this area who've been selected for the exodus. Go upstairs. Pack your things, we're going now".

Mikey -put down the photo on the middle of the bar top. He braced the pads of his hands on the edge and wagged his fingers. She watched him from micro-second to micro-second and felt unease. It ached in her stomach.

"I can't go. You'll have to choose someone else. Can I nominate someone? Give up my place?"

Klatuua practically spat. "It has to be you. I'm offering you a new world. A colony of pioneers on alien world. You, running the first pub on an alien world. I know you, Mikey. I know that appeals to you".

The sprightliness in his hunched shoulders showed a regret, of sorts. Never enough, though. He smiled. He calmly proceeded to annihilate her. "In just over a week I'm getting married. Maybe if I could take my fiancée Nessa with me?"

Klatuua reeled. It was a type of hysterical blindness. Sometimes, she'd masochistically enjoyed all the heartache and sorrow he'd heaped on her. Other times it felt like drowning in a frozen lake.

And this Mikey, who she'd held out such hope for, had no idea of the horror he'd just unleashed.

"You love this woman do you?"

"That's why I can't leave her. Simples!"

"Yes", said Klatuua, holding back the tears expertly. "Of course. Love equals death".

He loosened his jaw a little and stared at her, sadly. "That's a dramatic way of putting it, but yeah".

She reeled, and pushed herself free from the edge, dithering only a moment to steal the whisky bottle from under his nose. As a trembling afterthought, she slid a cylindrical transmitter key across the bar, sci-fi Prop Number 101.

"In case you change your mind. Sometimes people change their minds. Approach the Flying Saucer. Hold up the rod and press the button. If any of the soldiers are trying to stop you getting in, they soon won't be".

Out near the door, she stood in the oddly white sunshine.

Why do we struggle? Half of her life spent chewing the general population for being work-shy, and a tsunami of irony, since the real hard work is dealing with love.

Looking him square in the eye. "I hope nothing happens to spoil your wedding day".

Like a caged animal, and a caged animal stoically suffering a nightmare, Norrin paced at a random wall of the secret subterranean base. The huge yellow girders had a fierce amount of weight to support, but even so they seemed far too thick. Scarred and rusty, too. All the feckless squaddies milling around; if he was the base commander, he'd be inclined to give them huge pots of paint -it wouldn't matter which colour- and set them to work.

He enjoyed seeing the multitude of flaws in the military and the government; it took his mind clear from the writhing in his pseudo-gut. Deja-vu lingered heavily. It was indeed like being in a nightmare, but at the very start of a nightmare that would last hideously long, a barely finite period. He stared at the stark white floodlights and felt utterly alone.

"You want me to teach you how to play cards?", asked Ben Grimm.

He'd laid his commando novel to one side and was staring laconically. Norrin looked but did not really behold him.

Turning the problem over and over in his mind, firing arrows at the sun, jumping from one disintegrating ledge to another. There was something fundamentally wrong with the human level of reality. Prehistoric man hunting animals to survive, then spending the remainder of his time painting eerie, ghostly, proto-religious pictures of them. Thin white gazelles leaping across grey, flickering rock, then onwards through eternity itself. So many Eastern religions would have us believe there is only a single, universal mind. Yet so many people are conspicuously mindless. Perhaps by killing the excess, or killing to survive, we're merely consolidating or focusing the universal mind?

Yet the instinct -that beautiful, deep instinct that tells of all life being sacred. You couldn't resist it.

"Worst baby-sitting job I ever had", said Grimm, and got back to his hack novel.

In the new millennium, thanks maybe to the internet, there was an almost a universal consensus among the spiritual. An appreciation that all elaborate, high concept religions can be read as life-affirming, mind-affirming, and death probably doesn't exist. Anyone who wondered about the reality of the spiritual would be led to the same conclusion. Anyone who didn't would surround themselves with multiple children, as many children as possible, and live in a vicarious bourgeois hell. So it was at least a linear progression. Norrin felt that if only the spiritual people went the extra yard, expressed themselves clearly, the world would be able to hold steady through a lean mindset, a lean economy, a lean destiny for the human race.

He glanced down at the curious security system of the Baxter Building, the energy-filled floor tiles which glowed at their feet whenever they walked around. Soon he got the impression that, even if he did attempt a coup or a terrorist act, the explosive energy in each tile, the tiles of the whole floor, would do no more than scratch him.

How they glowed, though. Was it his imagination, or did they glow brighter wherever he stepped, compared to the light touch of Susan Richards or the wrestler-like advances of Ben Grimm?

He brooded in a wholly apocalyptic fashion. It was his own fault, obviously. Since forever, Norrin had equated life with gentle madness, death with going to heaven, or at least a profound sense of achievement. There'd never been any dogma or any desperation, the two things which the atheists hated so. If only he'd had the sense to speak against them.

Now there was just the same old horror. Galactus, as a kind of apex of spiritual displeasure.

"I need to leave this place".

"Are you kidding?", Grimm placed his wide hands onto his waist.

"No", a promise.

"Well look", the Air Force man growled, "You want us to help you, and we're doin' it. But Stretch says he needs you stay on base so he can take readings from you and whatnot".

Norrin felt his silver face screw up slightly. "Why do you call him 'Stretch'?"

Grimm frowned. "You want to know why I call my best friend 'Stretch'? I thought you didn't care about us humans?"

Norrin confessed, "I am losing myself".

"Well", Grimm took a deep breath and scrunched his mighty face. "I've been attached to your man Professor Richards for a long time now. Since his motor neuron was only just starting. He tried to teach me this fancy technique of getting him out of his wheelchair, but I was kinda nervous about taking hold of them fragile little arms, and he said, 'Don't worry, I'm not Stretch Armstrong'".

Norrin stared blankly into Ben Grimm's blue eyes, and was aware of how nervous he made him.

"My point is, buddy, we're doin' everything you want, but you've gotta meet us half way. You can't go flying around out there on account that the world is goin' crazy over you. Looksee".

The big man clumped over to the widescreen TV in the corner. He laboriously tuned it in, oversized fingers making a meal of the slimline remote.

On the rolling news channels, there was extensive analysis of Norrin's trip to the hospital in Mexico and his toying with the nightmarish student. Even on the regular channels, there were debate programs featuring CETI chiefs and cultural commentators, spiritual leaders and sci-fi writers. All quite reassuring, except some of the channels merely had a stationary, balcony-high camera doting on vast crowds, the Tawaf-gone-wrong, all eyes intently watching the spot where he'd hovered in the sky.

"And you should see what's happening on the internet. It's as if people just know you're for real and deadly serious. I mean, North Korea threatens to nuke America, people tweet jokes. Mendela dies, people tweet jokes. No one's joking about your face-like-thunder looming over their lives".

Norrin gripped his surfboard, felt a strange kind of warmth. "Yes. As it should be".

"In that case, I don't get it", Grimm flounced his shoulders and looked back to the TV. "You're here to stop the end of the world, and yet you want to be out there, stirring up the hype".

The Silver Surfer's lament, "The world is always ending. It is ending because of people's complacency and our lack of solidarity. And meanwhile, she is out there, somewhere, in torment".

He dimly focused on Ben Grimm's over-sized fingers as he hovered in front, palms raised. It was time to go; ride the cosmic tide outwards to the masses, even if it felt like a death-plunge.

"Look, fella-"

"My fate is inextricably tied with these people. My master believes that their genocide will fortify my soul. But perhaps -their love?"

Grimm reached for his collar-mounted radio. The Silver Surfer took it from him. With his alien-nimble fingertips, he manipulated the tuning wheel until a very distinct patch of white noise was found. He then took the radio across to one of the reactor relays which ran the length of the base. Immediately, the white noise reacted in an angry, high-frequency whine.

"So, what's the deal?"

"I'm tuning myself into the frequency. If Professor Richards needs me to return here, simply turn off the radio and I'll return".

"Now wait just a-"

But the Silver Surfer had turned and walked away through solid rock. He powered forward, trying hard to sense where his silver skin stopped and the cold lifelessness of the inner earth started. It was a work of mad concentration, and again, exactly like being in a nightmare. Trapped, forced to concentrate, scouring out for a line of thought that might actually lead somewhere, mean something, anything. Like travelling home exhausted on public transport, sitting beside the a-tonal whining headphones of a student, who needs to be vanquished utterly so the human race can progress. Pretend it's not a nightmare.

He emerged gradually onto a messy, valley-bottom road. For a second or so, to the point where it hardly registered at all, the white, chaotic daylight was miraculous. And then he glanced around, picked out two or three cars running at mid-speed alongside the austere stone sidings of a disused brewery, a disused textiles mill, a lonely garden ornament yard. To avoid jarring these few possibly innocent humans, he took to the sky instantly, a modest sixty feet high to a position that was neither hiding-in-plain-sight or carelessly coasting. Even with the natural camouflage of silver-on-white, someone somewhere would soon look up and witness a glint as tantalising as any UFO. A silver figure that could only be sci-fi and angelic.

A new religion must be founded. Into his mind popped a vision of that terrible future day, at the moment inconceivably distant, when at last he'd sit beside the scarred and broken Shalla-Bal. The exhaustion of mass suffering, mass unfairness, through a barely finite multiverse -yes, conceivably this would redress some of the horror she'd been subjected to. But what if there was something else that could help ease her shattered mind? Hatred and vengeance can be exhausted; that's what they're there for. But love -the natural reaction of the human mind is to see love go on forever.

The masses -in each successive universe, he would teach them to love Shalla Bal. The old religions would die out quite naturally. Perhaps Jesus had miracles, but his miracles had never been grasped by TV and a thousand hungry media sources. And he'd never been silver. Into the most honest and transparent doctrine the spiritual world had ever known, Norrin would tell the story of how the last cosmic messiah, a female sculptor, was laying -raped and bloody- at the end of time, ruined by base humanity running unchecked.

You either believe or don't. You either have the sensitivity to see, and love, and sacrifice, or you don't.

By the time he had finished, there would be whole galaxies worth of believers. Whole dimensions. It would have to count for something.

Now there was a desire to go to a big city and scour out the love of the masses, at once. To begin with, it would be subtle, even if it existed at all. But how could it not? A silver man, in the sky, on a silver surfboard. It was a bold image, and it must have a single, bold meaning. He would explain.

I am love. If any of you have ever felt such nagging romantic love, unrequited, or just -so perfect it simply must be incompatible with earthly life, I am your figurehead. Expelled from the dimension of immaculate gnostic love.

He would look down on them, thinking, You foolish, foolish people. You go about your lives as though they'll last forever. Each of you in love, taking immersive jobs in high-business when the path lies purely in the non-skilled nine-to-five -the remaining rapture to be spent with your mind, all of it, and the one you love. Having children, as a further distraction, writing guarantees on the wind that they'll find a place in the world. When the only guarantee you can write, that anyone can ever write, is that you love someone, here, now, and it's enough. It's all you'll ever need.

I am love. I am love in the face of horror and death. Surrender your lives.

You will live apart from the one you love, if necessary, as you live apart from God, though the sorrow of being separated burns and burns.

Dimly, he knew that there'd be people in the crowd who'd never fallen in love, and would not be able to equate his words with any ultimate truth. Hopefully, that was when his messianic appearance would take the brunt.

Light green fields, almost lime-tinted, gave way to beige scrubland, incredibly tight treelines, farm compounds, then onwards to the guiltily-hissing motorway. Coasting, Norrin deliberated on which city to travel to. The capital had already had a taste of him, and he didn't want to be London-centric, or lead himself to the point where he had to acknowledge Boris Johnson as a valid spokesperson, or even a real human being. Gloucester, home, was out of the question due to the agonised memories.

His next choice would have been Bristol, then, but -he wanted the most difficult and unpleasant city there was, and Norrin had always loved Bristol. There were too many students, granted, but sometimes there was an eerie feeling that they could be redeemed at any moment, with little or no effort. Something in the heaving swell of Park Street that was beautifully intelligent, beautifully bohemian...

He thought of going to Unity and addressing the masses in the square with the giant TV screen, or maybe in the Unity City stadium. Dirty, rough old Unity... again, he loved it.

Bath, perhaps? A pretty valley of solemn, zombie-office-workers, seventy percent terraced-house-owning work-a-day yuppies, thirty percent Lovejoy-esque antique scurriers, all of them mysteriously protected by the respectability of the Roman Empire.

Or, no. He needed the most hopelessly blank and unpleasant city in Britain.

It could only be Oxford.

He soared on a glistening upsurge until he had a keen overview of the whole of the Southern half of the country. He blinked away the terrible psychic strain and got himself orientated. The board slid easily across the fieldscapes made tufty by turret-shaped farms and small buildings spaced apart like a game of battleships. Often he had to make wide arcs, in his peripheral the mist-coloured motorways moving in the fashion of a rotor. Everything seemed dirty. But a wonderful kind of dirt. The largest buildings had a reassuring tint of creme, like old quarry rock. Industrial but on a human scale.

Nearing Oxford, the woods and the hedgerows seemed to go from a single shade of brown to something like green-metallic auto-paint. On the outskirts were the grimey roundabouts of any modern population centre, giving way to tight Victorian avenues and colourful shops, disused to the point of being fossils but kept open as a skittish hobby by local business men.

As they flounced along the tactile pavements, beneath the grainy-gothic windows, people started to stare up at him. Not many were actually open mouthed, and in fact, the pulse of their lips spoke of a forgotten nobility. Unshakeable. Brown and green clothes that might as well have been grey. Extremely upper-class men whose orange trousers at least prevented them from looking like the stereotype of extremely upper-class men, while still looking like jesters. Teenagers wearing NEXT-bought baseball caps as if they're Converse or American Apparel, skinny trousers, to the point where they looked like nothing but stereotypes, fashion magazine nothings, flesh-sewn Muppet jokes. Norrin grew increasingly unconcerned. As they halted their bodies against fine-metal litter bins and plasticky traffic props, he saw only their faces, the rigidity of their limbs. These things were not inherently arrogant or feckless. There was reason for hope and optimism.

A pretty Asian girl with darting eyes, sauntering along as if walking a dog, with no actual dog in sight, came to a full-stop on seeing him. Also, framed against Carfax Tower, a prim-mouthed middle-manager trailed off from his shoulder-heavy walk. Now that his feet took only dainty footsteps, they couldn't fail to be kept within Norrin's orbit in a funny subconscious snag. A loafing shopworker watched him. A foreigner. A watery-eyed academic. A wide-face woman with a face like a cave, one that contained any number of whispering secrets; previously she'd been on autopilot beside the Thames. As Norrin advanced, she paused, gripped her bag and, shoulders bulging massively through her dark grey trenchcoat, fished around for a camera. Lots of people took photos, and he didn't mind. Walking beside a tranquil lake. Hearing the slap of duck wings or a disappearing vole. It was the same sound and the same feeling.

A student in foreign legion baseball cap. A late-to-middle-age man on his way to a nearby ham radio shop, eccentric, eccentric, meaningless. Gummy jawline unable to express any surprise, while his eyes bobbed and flickered. More and more, Norrin looked beyond the stately buildings, so rippled like the enclosed sky, and all he saw -tensed shoulders and intrigued faces. When they looked at him, they seemed innocent. They must have seen in the news and on the internet what he'd done to the arrogant student man in London -and yet, if they feared him, their curiosity outweighed it in a perfect exchange.

He felt the up-tilted expression of his temples and clearly the milling crowd saw it, too. The number of inquisitive faces grew and much time passed. Norrin stared hard at as many people as he could, one and all lapped by white daylight. He imagined telling Shalla Bal about the army of believers he had raised for her, the crowds that covered perfectly the curve of the Earth. Perhaps his eyes were stark as he met each city-dweller. How could they not be, with the emotion powering through, the sense of knowing? My ten year old daughter Lottie was fascinated by a book about Joan of Arc, and now she won't talk to anyone for fear of sounding autistic. My ten year old son Max was fascinated by a book about Che Guevara, and now he won't talk to anyone for fear of sounding autistic. Theo, the French Revolution. My other son, who's also called Theo: Dresden. My third son, who's also called Theo, because it's OK to give your son a trendy name: Papillion. The Silver Surfer is among you.

The narrow-faced woman with a dour mouth and the thin clothes of an artist. The man with wiry black hair, of indeterminate age, who's seventy percent the wrong political opinions, though you can't exactly hate him because he's otherwise so practical. The pleasant spikey-eyed girl who looked like she might be wearing colourful, tropical earrings, but on closer inspection wasn't. Mr Terse-eyes, strong shoulders looking ragged because of his s-ty blue rain coat. The office-worker (but weren't they all?) whose cheeks and jawline were far too smooth to properly carry the beard he'd had since he was twenty. All of it redeemable. Vast gulfs of doughy flesh on your bourgeois face? Fill it with steel and zeal.

The guiltiest, most secretive reason that atheists hated the idea of God; because they knew that if he existed, compared to us, because of his power, he'd be impossibly blunt. He wouldn't care about our prayers unless they were relayed in morse code, each dot and each dash a shout at the top of your lungs.

With one arm, Norrin held aloft his board as a rallying symbol. He stopped at a small cluster of students -who hoped they were Made in Chelsea, would settle for Hollyoaks, but were eternally Vicky Pollard. Or no, not eternally. Not now.

"SHALLA BAL!", he shouted at them.

They laughed and shouted, "Shalla Bal!"

Again, louder, "SHALLA BAL!"

The students laughed less and shouted louder, "SHALLA BAL!"

"SHALLA BAL!", the Surfer persisted.

Their bodies -were hit by a moment of strange, existential head-spinning. Now they shouted and didn't laugh at all. Norrin stepped backwards among the clusters of people, not bothering to turn around but sensing them all as plain as day.

"SHALLA BAL!"

People near and far made the rallying-cry. The Silver Surfer walked among them, looking deep into their eyes, assessing the determination of their souls. Near the pretentious trees, emerging from the crimped-stone gate, he saw the one-thousand seven-hundred and fifty-sixth most beautiful woman he'd ever encountered. She folded her arms and angled her blonde, basin hairstyle. Not shouting at her but merely setting the example, "Shalla Bal!"

Except the woman was having none of it; she folded her arms and edged quickly away, casting her eyes low, staying low even when she got home and dished out the tea to her 10.4 children. Vindication came when he entered another gasp-vibrant cluster of disparate souls; the one-thousand seven-hundred and thirtieth most beautiful woman he'd ever encountered. Looking dizzy but raw, with a raw understanding, she shouted. Now the noise overlapped in a tide, something from an inexplicable film soundtrack.

"SHALLA-BAL!"

His people. Thick, grey-specked coats and mobile phones notwithstanding, a certain sense of eighties style and discernment was stirred. Oversized hair in the girls spoke of a reluctance to waste money by living in the hair salon, or at least a subconscious acknowledgement that good style could come from austerity. The charming, yuppie men -as ever, their eyes kept a secret, that they had all the consciousness of a helium balloon which had been let go by a disabled child. Still, it was a new beginning for all of them. The magic name they shouted; it granted them determination and life.

Norrin loafed back on his spine. Really, there was no concern at all about the exact number who followed. He moved among the stiff, straight bodies and knew merely that there was an ever-growing army. Quality over quantity means nothing to a god.

He spun around, and at first missed the immense pair of shins which protruded upwards from the nearby cityscape, the huge samurai skirt, purple. Galactus was a colossus who grew ever more surreal; from the waist upwards, he was hidden in sky-vapour like Jack and the Beanstalk, a pantomime shock to scratch up your flesh. The stance: inhumanly still.

They swirled excitedly, but the good, good people who emerged from the city couldn't see him. Some walked within a few metres of his thick boots without a flicker of recognition. Norrin found this reassuring; the creature Galactus, whatever he was, whatever id darkside he represented, had apparently fulfilled his purpose.

"Keep shouting!", he commanded the faithful, before flipping his board and allowing the cosmic energy to sweep him upwards.

As a whole, the colossus couldn't be discerned. There was only a vast section of kevlar-swathed knee, a vast curve of embossed hip-armour, alien-ornate abdomen and shoulder pads like a ploughed field to court October sunlight. Norrin told himself he wasn't afraid, or even apprehensive. Then from nowhere the post-cloud-line atmosphere caught the weird echoes cast by triangular horns, trademark. When the mere outline of a creature can overwhelm you -

Destitute stubble on a slab-shaped mouth convulsed heavily as Galactus smiled.

"Welcome, Silver Surfer. You've freed yourself from your... little, terrible moral angst to join me on Cloud Nine. Nothing like blasting white atmosphere to give a man perspective".

"Indeed, Master", said Norrin, a little pityingly.

"I can sense you down there, you know. Plotting against me. Or trying to".

Said Norrin, "What should it matter if I plot against you? You led me to believe we belong together, that we will have eons and eons in each other's company no matter what".

"Together, yes. Two spirits of vengeance on Cloud Nine. The blasting white atmosphere

to give us perspective".

Norrin felt something near to a shiver run along his silver sides. He said, uncertainly, "You already said that".

Closely, as close as he could ever get, he examined the angry square pupils. Today they were visible only in a slant: two rugby posts beset by a landslide. The ravager of worlds; today he looked haggard.

"This is a dream", said the Silver Surfer. "The world out there -the world of Shalla Bal- moves on in an infinitesimal crawl, if at all. Isn't that correct?"

"Infinitesimal, infinity, eternity", said the giant dismissively. "You talk about these things as if either one of us should care about... time. All we should care about is preparedness. Expending as much horror and unfairness as possible. How many times do I have to explain this to you?"

A sense of resolve -suddenly, it seemed as strong as his silver hide. He tried to prepare his attack, then Nike: just did it. Shaking, "Horror and unfairness -they happen. People are fundamentally stupid and complacent; they'll always be open to it. I admit, most people probably deserve to die because of it. But what about love, and faith? Stupidity and complacency don't enter in to them. I will create a world -worlds- based on these things. Faith. Solidarity. Love. A heaven which Shalla-Bal and I will inhabit".

Galactus was despondent. "Once they've finished raping and mutilating her?"

Norrin felt his lip quiver. It was the strangest thing; the cosmic energy pulsed in his fists, the single most powerful sensation he'd ever felt. Heroin. A tantric orgasm with the girl you love. For the first time in your life, a feeling that you're not fundamentally powerless -yet something told him it was still just a reserve.

Perhaps now -he thrust a white-glowing fist deep into the centre of Galactus' head. The power was fearsome, it was there to be wielded, brought to bear by straining shoulders.

It burned wildly. He guessed this was what it must feel like at the core of a nuclear reactor. All the time waiting in sharpened, adrenalised hate, urging those square pupils to roll upwards.

"DIE!"

He took a breath. 'Die' - a type of magic command which seemed to have succeeded; the square pupils rotated upwards while fading.

Before returning to life and moving serenely down to fix upon Norrin. A hand the size of a cliff face hissed up through the atmosphere to grasp him.

"Never try to kill me again", said Galactus dully."I find it irritating".

One humungous hand found its way beneath his feet to act as a kind of living purple cliff top. The huge thumb and index finger of the other kept him in place by grasping his chest and shoulder blades.

Saying, "Sometimes I make a mistake with my heralds".

The thumb and index finger released him, but then swung with dizzying ease to the bridge of the massive palm, the oblique pads like fine slopes in a ploughed field. The index curved against the trigger tip of the thumb; he meant to flick Norrin clear into the distance. And what did it matter? The Silver Surfer felt his featureless eyes glower away something magnificent. He found it hard to believe the pain could be worse than getting ripped apart by Richard's missile. It might even kill him, but again, what did it matter? Death here, death in any of these distant dimensions, could only bring him closer to home.

Meanwhile, Galactus' summing-up, "I choose the wrong carrot to dangle in front of the wrong creature. Or a carrot so delicious-looking, to a creature so hungry, that they simply go insane, as you have done".

The Silver Surfer braced himself. The huge fingertips either side of the trigger, easily the size of town cars, shook and swung in high tension. Reflexes or good nerves told him he should close his eyes. He instead looked long and hard at the Destroyer of Worlds.

"The fact of the matter, stripped down to its bare bones, is this -you will help me kill these people, and entirely at your leisure. You are an angry psychopath, and that's all you have left. Because Shalla Bal, her beauty, her essence, all your memories of her -are a fantasy. I put a name and concept in your head: perfect, immaculate love. Your pathetic fantasizing did the rest. She doesn't exist. She never did".

Norrin -never knew what hit him.

The year when everything changed –it went on, and on. The garden centre was rejuvenated.

'The Day Britain Stood Still' ran the headline in the Sun. Below which, a hasty but well-co-ordinated photo of Cliff, flanked by the Army, watching in Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion fascination as down the slope walked Klatuua. Ollie suggested his new-found fame would help bring in customers, to that end framing the front page and setting it above the cash register. Perhaps he was right, too. Though they were constantly flooded by statesman-like journos, there was also a gratifying surge of regular folk.

He manned the help desk a lot of the time. Either that or he walked around with barcodes in his hand, gently nudging along the new employee Jean and the security guard Alex, brought in to keep an eye on the throng. Alongside all the pleasant wax-pine surfaces, he'd never felt so busy. This morning he'd cleared a late-middle-aged woman fretting intensely about the exact type of copper partition needed to keep slugs away. He'd shared his exasperation with a fellow Aalmesbury outskirter about how hard it was to get a chain fence that looked right. Through it all, he caught himself stealing glances at 'The Day Britain Stood Still'. What stirred, it wasn't exactly pride. More likely fear, plain and simple, about the coming civil war. In his fingers, the skeletal cheap-wood pencil; could give out or get lost at any moment.

He finished a fascinated little conversation about the unbelievable bargain that was ex-Woolworth curtain tracks, toyed with his pen, stared at the pleasant red lino at people's feet.

Oliver rushed forward from the front building.

"Nessa's coming".

Cliff looked at him quizzically. "All of human life is here!"

"You don't understand", his best friend wavered, shook his head. "She's got a face like thunder. Screeched in here in her four-by-four. She's after you".

Cliff digested this. What could he have done to upset his ex-wife? They'd always had the most perfect relationship that two human beings could ever have, in that they refused to believe the other existed. What could have happened to have changed that -must have been a hell of a thing.

"You want to hide in the back room?", asked Ollie.

"I think I will", said Cliff.

He waddled away at speed, feeling like a comedy character. From a position like Robert Vaughn in most episodes of The Man From Uncle, he observed her through the netted window of the staff room door. Even across a sea of heads, through an atmosphere that was opaque and hissy, he was unnerved. Ollie made a good job of frowning like an actor. Alt-solemnity go, eye-contact only where necessary. Nessa said something like, 'where is he?!' His friend deflecting as best he could, still careful to frown, never once over-compensating with an all-out look of innocence. Alas she was wise beyond measure. Abruptly, Cliff decided he was far too vulnerable, both to ex-wife's angry radar and whatever dark circumstance had brought her here. He sat down in the office easy chair, tried to busy himself by looking at the desk planner.

He waited.

Nessa burst in. She held herself ten or twelve feet away, a vision of some lurid, powerful banshee fluttering in tunnel vision.

"Give me one good reason. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't give you up to the government and get you taken away and tortured".

Cliff tried to be cool. "What have I done?"

"Don't bloody lie to me, Cliff. The way I feel, I could bloody well scratch your eyes out".

He looked at her gravely. "I'm innocent".

"You probably think you are innocent", she wagged her head. "You think you can ruin my life and walk away as if nothing's happened? Just because I was a witch to you, fifteen years ago?"

"I don't think you're a witch". He really didn't. "Nessa, tell me what's going on".

His ex-wife ground her beautiful teeth, embedded though they were in an increasingly gnarled jawline. "What's going on! Is me! Getting married! Why shouldn't I get married again? Why should my happiness get put inside your bloody little games?"

He breathed deeply. "This cold war between us. Let's just have a summit. I didn't know you were getting married. And it's fine by me. Whatever's happened has nothing to do with me".

"Bulls-. Why don't you be a man, for once in your life, and admit it?"

"Alright, I admit it", he said glumly. "What am I admitting to?"

"Your bloody friend Klatuua, ruining my wedding".

"'My friend Klatuua'? I never even met her".

Nessa shook her head. "So you honestly expect me to believe that you wrote all those science fiction stories about -flying saucers coming from other dimensions, giant robots, space ultimatums, transporters - you wrote all those, and twenty-five years later you just happen to be the first man in the world to come face-to-face with a real flying saucer and real hundred foot robot, and a real parallel universe? I hate you!"

Gradually getting with the game, Cliff trod carefully. For one thing, he was growing more and more displeased at how she was saying, 'Cliff, this' and 'Cliff, that', as if they'd never had any real intimacy and he was a child to be lorded over.

"It is a coincidence. This Klatuua is all about politics. My science fiction stories were all adventures, and there wasn't a political bone in any of them. You think this other-dimensional freedom fighter has somehow recruited me, and we're secretly working together?"

"Yes, frankly. I know what a pathetic man you are. So does she. A woman so much as notices you and she owns you".

Asked Cliff. "Will you have a cup of tea? Just so we don't feel like a battle zone?"

"I don't want any f-ing tea", said Nessa, devoid of the subtly-spikey sense of humour she could once have been identified by. "My fiancée Mikey, standing there at the altar. Surrounded by all our friends -that's right, some people have friends- the vicar about to say, 'I now pronounce you' - and he vanished. Everyone in the place vanishes. To reappear in Kyrgystan. Mikey and I looking at each other as if there's been an Al Queda bomb while you and that witch laugh your heads off at us".

"Kyrgystan?", said Cliff, and tried not to laugh. "Are they OK?"

"You're a little f-ing weasel", was Nessa's definitive statement.

Cliff -knew himself to be many things, but he'd never imagined seeming to someone like a weasel. He felt hurt. Besides which, with Nessa, just being in the same room again was like being in one of those spy films where the walls start closing in.

"This is probably something to do with the woman and her robot, isn't it? But it's nothing to do with me. I mean, you know me. I'm not political. I wouldn't know where to start. I'm scared stiff of that stuff".

"Oh?", she folded her arms. "Then you won't mind me going to the authorities and telling them what happened?"

As a child, he'd liked imagining plane crashes. Pearl Harbor, the Man United plane crash -he remembered talking to his dad about them, and it wasn't even ghoulish, just natural excitement and fascination. Just as strongly, he'd been interested in the barbarism of the Roman Empire, the Japs in World War II, Rasputin playing the delicate-hearted royal family for fools. Perhaps the way he secretly rooted for Klatuua's reforms was a similar kind of exercise?

"I'd rather you didn't, Ness. I don't want to be implicated one way or the other. But you must do what your heart tells you".

"B-ks", she said, displaying almost no emotion, just power.

"So what happened in the end? Did you get married or what?"

"Do you know what?", as if to dare him, "we plan on getting married again next week, just as soon as everyone gets back from Kyrgystan. And god help you if it happens a second time".

"Congratulations for next week", he said, sad-pragmatic mode initiated, heart on his sleeve, eyes -growing more carefree by the second. Nessa, naturally, was infuriated. She withdrew something from her oversized handbag and hurled it at his head.

"What! What's this?"

"My fiancée runs a pub. Your bloody -ally, she went there disguised as Angelina Jolie. She told him she was working for the UN, trying to sort out a random selection of refugees for if the worst happens at the end of the ultimatum. Told him to just go up to the saucer, press the button and he'd be able to go right in".

"And he didn't do it? Your fiancée doesn't have much of a sense of adventure. Or perhaps he just can't live without you".

"F- off, Cliff. Just f- off out of my life and take your weird friends with you".

She moved to leave. Cliff looked at the futuristic device before him.

"Wait! I don't want it!"

"Stay out of my life. I won't tell you again".

On that note, more or less a distillation of pure hate, she grappled her shoulder bag and exited.

It was fairly soon that Cliff clicked back on to 'work' mode. But it was intermittent. Through the tight office window, the top of the nearby barn was as conductive to daydreams as ever. It never picked up any strong shadows. It was never quite washed out with frost or sunset tints. Interestingly, there were fewer thoughts about the extra-dimensional device itself and more about Nessa. Perhaps she was showing a certain amount of off-the-scale sentimentality by not going straight to the authorities?

Oliver entered and hovered before him. "What the hell was that about?"

"You know how it is".

Perhaps he did, too. Ollie's wife had left him around the same time Cliff's did. Tiggs had always been more traditionally beautiful than Nessa, in fact as beautiful as any super model or statesman's wife, therefore intense hard work. Gradually, Cliff realised he shouldn't now be obsessing about the world of ex-wives. He told his friend about the wedding, Kyrgystan, the invitation on to the saucer.

"Klatuua must be like a mafia. She's trying to do you favours to bring you on side to her little revolution".

Cliff shook his head a bit. "No. I can see it whenever she's on TV. She's as isolated as any of us would be in a similar position. I think she's just trying to reach out".

"But why ruin your ex-wife's marriage?"

"She must think I still love her".

Ollie gave his edgy guffaw, heartfelt. "If someone thought I was still a little bit in love Tiggs it would be like thinking Churchill was a little bit in love with Hitler".

"Exactly".

Cliff roused himself from his chair. It was ten past seven. Jean and Alex would have ushered out the last few punters and be getting ready to go home. The oldies locked on to the home-time vibe and followed suit through the small, caravan-shaped link. Increasingly, Cliff swung his arms in slow motion. He narrowed his eyes and looked to one side. Ollie turned off the water fountain display and the world entered a weird, jazzy silence. They loitered beneath the one striplight that was still illuminated, the outside yard a grainy little island beside the ever-busy bypass.

"I should go and tell her that I'm happy the way things are. We don't need any revolutions in our lives".

Ollie gave a profound kind of nod. The word 'revolution' nonplussed him. Like everyone else, he'd pored over the projected wage caps and wage extensions on Klatuua's website. 'Negative Minus Ones' being snapped into place, whereas borderline 'Positive Plus Threes' such as himself and Cliff would be around two thousand pounds a year better off. The thinking was that their jobs were easy, but still no one should handle stock from a warehouse or subserviently operate a checkout and not live like some kind of king. It was revolution enough for Oliver.

"You want some back-up?", he said, as if they were NYPD cops about to go on a takedown.

Cliff thought for a moment. "No. Nessa said if I pointed this thing at the saucer, it would just let me in. But I can't imagine the army will be happy about that. There might be a firefight between them and the robot. I wouldn't want you getting hurt".

"I'll try to walk past after half an hour, see what's going on".

"Don't get jealous if I come out as the new King of England".

"Ha!", said Ollie. He then stood stiffly for a while, slightly nervous, eventually heading to the checkout and retrieving a bottle of Glen Orchy from the foot well.

"A belated welcoming gift", he suggested. "Second time lucky. And it'll help you gauge her. I wouldn't want to know a woman who doesn't like a splash of whisky every now and again".

"Good thinking. But how did you know it'd turned back to alcohol?"

"Well, I was only checking on it every five minutes or so".

From the garden centre yard, Gort's upper portion could easily be seen. At dusk, when the tactless floodlights rushed across his shoulders, he never seemed more of an inanimate object. Even so, if you could fool your mind into thinking he was only a colossal statue, the novelty was still too much to take in.

At the petrol station roundabout, which had never been crazily busy anyway, military guards made a good job of keeping the traffic flowing, either down into Aalmesbury, back towards Cirenwald or off into the outlands of Unity. Cliff loitered at the oversized leaves that made up the hedgerows and the trunks of the drumblast trees. They caught the twilight something vivid. All along the small fence of the orchard and donkey fields, big boss housewives and their fudge-minded husbands had affixed Anti-Ultimatum League banners. Expensive four-colour printing on tarpaulin plastic, fastened with luxurious mountain-climbing rope. So why not just bedsheets with nails? Why did there have to be money involved?

Clump, clump and trudge. The not-quite-aimless trajectory of the military guards was something that Cliff found relaxing, in a strange way. There was an insouciance and also a primal satisfaction of seeing heavy boots meander over almighty road markings that would normally obscured through a blur of tires. Pedestrians were allowed along the tail end of the bypass, within a few hundred feet of the saucer -vehicles were not, owing maybe to the fear of some schizophrenic capitalist loading his car with explosives and trying to detonate it next to Gort. In the gulley beneath the landing site, what had once been a busy road, there was a cluster of heavy-set work tents; Sky News and the BBC, respected university work groups, hot dog wagons. It was like an old episode of Star Trek in which Captain Kirk goes to a planet where the respective governments have decided to fight their world wars through a surrogate system, using robots, or slaves, or children. Only here, the weirdo choice for thrashing out a New World Order was slapped-face men in very clean clothes, with swank computers and mobile phones, drawling internet pundits, newspaper columnists who said not-quite-the-thing-you'd-imagine, but nothing useful, either.

And through it all, Captain Kirk would fall in love with the governor's daughter.

Obviously, Cliff shunned going near what had once been the main entrance to the field. It was just a throng. He edged a little way along to a gap in the trees where the wire of the army fence was an exposed slant. Some kids, one of whom, bizarrely, was wearing the woolen jumper of the Aalmesbury Fire Service, were staring intently through the mesh. It was quite a scene. Soldiers and scientists were constantly on the move alongside the huge concrete block encasing Gort's feet. Clearly guards and sentries had full permission to chat to each other, probably because it was unrealistic to expect them to keep repose in such a world-changing environment. In the air itself was a dizzying choice; your eyes could either stare indefinitely at the back of Gort's looming, impossible head, or on his building-like torso, or at the all-powerful military base -but never more than one at a time.

He stood behind the gang of children.

"Look at this", he produced the magic wand that Nessa had thrown at him, pointed it out towards the saucer and Gort.

Said one of the kids. "Is that a laser pointer?"

A boy with a tight clay face laughed in excitement, "Yeah! Do it!"

"It's not a laser pointer", said Cliff. "But something might happen".

The yellow activation key seemed far too tactile and yielding, which made no sense to Cliff. What if it had been set off accidentally in his pocket? He tried to keep his breath steady and his stomach from lurching, as he aimed the wand and aimed it steady.

Nothing happened. Or at least, not in the tense time frame that Cliff's mind was operating on. It was like giving yourself an unprecedented luxury; a swanky watch. Only because you're constantly nervous, constantly in awe of it, the second hand so often seems deathly still.

And in this way, Gort's head slowly shifted, just enough for the corner of his eye to stare chillingly over his shoulder. The huge concrete block which encased his feet apparently prevented him from making a whole turn. Clearly it wasn't much of an inconvenience.

The gang of children vanished. Down in the ravine, the journalists and civilian researchers vanished. Everyone in the military base -vanished. Cliff was distracted by the way a certain wind-speed machine kept spinning, before he roused himself to start planning again. The main hatch of the flying saucer eased open. For him? Apparently. He wondered how long it would take him to cut through the mesh with his pocket pliers. He decided to make a bee-line for the main entrance. Hardly brave -tension drove his mind in a dozen directions at once, skimming on daring, fear of the unknown, fear of the unknown within his own parochial life.

Alongside the rearranged mountains of earth, into the stacked compound, he waddled quickly. Probably he looked guilty and sheepish, but this was relative. Multiple floodlights had turned the grass a vibrant grey-brown which seemed rough on the feet. He stared at the heavy black steps of the stickle-bricked portacabins; on certain outcrops there were sophisticated machine guns that looked like they might go off automatically. Thoughts of 1989 and the Berlin Wall. Springy-armed teenagers getting excited. The Willy Brandt-loving soldiers, having vacated their sinister watchtowers, also getting weirdly excited. Before, when they'd all meditated on those stark concrete bulwarks -they couldn't help but meditate because it was their lifelong prison. But now, in conclusion, what was that... thing, that strange inhuman thing that had domineered their lives for so long? Had it happened just for a laugh? Was anything that gave freedom to people good and everything that took it away bad? And if it was so clear-cut, why the melodrama?

A few metres from the saucer entrance, his rigid bones practically floated along on a terrible feeling of vulnerability. Not only was there the idea of entering some dark, political version of Close Encounters; he remembered the huge machine guns at his back, surely motion-activated and with his aged footsteps crazy over-cautious a la the mouse that knows he's on the trap. Conjured up: 'The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti'. Curiously, he heard it in his mind as clearly as if the record was playing.

He registered that he was on the slope. After an indeterminate time, glancing dizzily from side to side, he realised that he was on the very threshold. From a beguilingly sharp corner, he saw a curved wall comprising a mosaic, but on each tile a computer screen showing a random passport or surveillance-captured face.

A heavy-set grey cat was sitting demurely in his path. He did not meow, or even blink his small eyes, leaving Cliff to stare in wonder at the alienesque gems which decorated his collar.

The entrance sealed him in. He proceeded around the shell-shaped formation of bulkheads. The ever-changing rainbow hues and the light spilling between stowage grills concerned him. Just -concerned him. From now on, they played on his shoulders and surely made his body seem more substantial than it actually was.

From a table about the size of a British Rail booth, the woman Klatuua looked at him and drew breath.

"Who are you?"

Cliff the weasel, the man owned by any woman who looks at him -versus what?

"My name's Cliff Carpenter. Good to see you again!"

Klatuua took in more breath, then refined it in her tight old jaw, almost into a smile. "The man from the first day. But how did you manage to get past all those soldiers, and Gort?"

He shrugged, tried hard not to do awkward things with his hands. "Your robot seems to've let me in".

Now Klatuua nodded wisely.

"The most important thing you need to know is that I don't feel...", she cancelled that line and thought of a better way of putting it. "You're doing this because you feel that life is something narrow. You have no idea what it's like to be a single point, the be-all-and-end-all. I do. I'm human. And all I care about is fairness, for everyone".

"I don't understand". Cliff tried to sound warm. "What do think I'm here for?"

Said Klatuua, "You're here -to try to jazz-talk and manipulate me- into some horrible political alliance. Or else you're here to kill me".

"Not me", promised Cliff.

Warring against awkwardness, his feet took him a little way in towards her desk. He saw how her aged flesh suffered just like his; veiny hands, the one that was yellow, the one that was corpulent; a sign of failing circulation to be sure. Between her bony fingers was an oversized tablet computer. Amazingly, she was playing Scrabble.

He explained, "I came here with a kind of sentimental request".

"Yes?"

Cliff wavered as her gleaming eyes flickered across him. He took a deep breath into his barrel-shape ribs.

"I suppose you think everyone's sentimental, and it holds no court with you, but -my ex-wife was getting re-married. Your robot made the vicar and everyone in the congregation just -disappear, half a world away, to Kyrgystan. If I carry any say at all, I'd like you to just let her do it. Let her be happy, or try to be. I'll do anything you want".

The gleaming eyes became steadier, the stare more intense, before they slowly-slowly settled back. She appraised him -his handlebar, his shoulders, the tank-tread protrusions beneath his eyes. She liked what she saw, apparently.

"It wasn't your b- of an ex-wife that Gort smited, it was my b- of an ex-husband. But if you say they can both come together and be happy in some kind of matrimonial Hell -so be it".

"OK". Cliff tapped his thigh. He made a very loose gesture with the bottle of Glen Orchy, soon cancelled by their self-conscious smiles -the bitterness; how humourous it was.

She gestured at the seat across from her. "Very well, Earthman. But sit down. I want a game of Scrabble out of it".

Semi-conscious dark, sometimes shifting to a kaleidoscopic brownish marble, filled the vision of the Silver Surfer whenever he came alive for more than a moment of two. Breathless torment ruled the day; it was there all the time, but whenever it became unbearable, ironically, that's when full conscious returned as so many kicks and punches. As ever, death was an impossibility. He'd tried languishing in the nuclear core of the sun. He'd made his body resistant to physical matter and plunged himself into the crust of the Earth in the hope of being consumed, swallowed down to nothing, condensed into oblivion.

What Galactus said, he felt instinctively was true. If it had just been a matter of saying that she didn't exist, maybe he could have reconciled that with some semblance of truth or cosmic justification. After all, love exists. People fall in love, then the other dies, and they believe implicitly that they'll be reunited in Heaven. That was pure. There was a solid chronology. What the man Norrin Radd had was shameful -the bright afterglow of a series of autistic dreams echoing away to nothing. A small boy, enraptured by Judi Trott in Robin of Sherwood, growing up to marry a woman who looks very much like Judi Trott. And then in Norrin's case, a small boy so isolated from humanity that all he could ever think about was god, some eternally-uncomprehending nerd-synapse imagining god as a beautiful woman and retreating into that fantasy 24-7. Because her eyes. Whenever she was mesmerised by him; she'd not only been physically perfect, but philosophically perfect in a way that was just -too messianic by half.

Writhing, he felt his temples and eyeballs surging like slugs, going through the motions as if he could still produce tears. For a bizarre space of time, he had no real thoughts. Then came an equally bizarre determination, to go ahead and hurt himself and Galactus just as much as he could.

All those cycles of waking and dreaming, though. It'd never quite rung true, what Jung and Freud suggested about dreams being insightful, internal therapists. Or, for that matter, his own private theory about dreams being a kind of idealised springboard to test our willingness to live on in a rudderless world of pain. Now it seemed obvious; you had dreams, and it didn't matter what the subject was: they were necessary to take you out of yourself, for as long as possible, whenever the pain got too much. Of course, when even the dreams become a constant agony, as now -that's surely when it's time to put an end to things.

He realised he was following the frequency faithfully. Emerging from the solid steel walls, he was again in the little bunker room, only now Ben Grimm had slumped over to one side, and was snoring as you'd expect of such a large man. The Silver Surfer glanced down at his hack novel and saw that he'd covered barely a few more pages since he'd left. He touched his fingers to the thick spine and absorbed some of the story. Jack McNabb, a kind of Jack Ryan clone, was at the point of uncovering two competing conspiracies in a CIA ballistics range. He was wondering what to do, and thinking about his wife. Julie? Jenny? Jennifer Walters.

Outside, through the broad window, there was just a mess of darkness, tranquility, peace.

You run the most sophisticated top secret base in Britain, yet -let's have a lovely little delineation between night and day. Suddenly, everything he encountered and everything he thought about was nightmarishly foolish. Walking past glass-fronted offices where colourful monitors showed satanic computations. A purple-green-russet glow on the blank desktops was vibrant, almost lurid, and ultimately a thing of madness. Presumably there were guards somewhere, patrolling the empty rooms with all the sentience of grandfather's little car creeping around bourgeois city streets. They would come alive when they saw him, and that would be worse. He caught glimpses of himself in the non-streaky windows. A God of Silver, all of a sudden, in the subterranean midnight, not looking so silver at all. Presently his hide looked almost burnt-brown, while his gaze -had to be avoided at all costs, a permanent expression of inhuman disgust taken to the Nth degree. Or at least, he had to guard himself against seeing it. The humans -he felt a fluttery little satisfaction at the thought of stirring up their lives as something blunt, dream-like. Inscrutably sour.

The operating lights of the ultra-secure doors were very understated, no more eye-catching than the grey, swampy shadows. As he passed through, however, it couldn't be denied that these successive regions of the base were darker. To the point of being joyously cave-like. Joyous? Exactly. The problem of the missing night guards was solved. In a distant, pitch-black corner they were enjoying a drunken séance. The ringleader: Johnny Storm.

At first, the Silver Surfer believed they must be using a Ouija. Standing bolt still and staring, he soon saw that it was something more sophisticated. A kind of oversized Etch-a-sketch set before a tempered metal basin full of flames. Evidently, in this quaint-horrific dimension, it was their equivalent of the Ouija Board: the thrill-seeker would draw something within the plastic frame and the spirit, spurred on, would manifest in the fire. Alas, the squaddie friends of Johnny Storm were too modern and knowing to be properly scared. In fact, they weren't even properly drunk. Breathy little smiles revealed a desire to merely let off steam, have a small degree of happiness via minor comradery. What wasn't there was the desire to be vastly, trangressively happy -which is what drunkeness should always be.

Plus, the thing which the Silver Surfer disliked the most -when they looked up and noticed him, they didn't jump, they weren't in the least bit scared. A black-haired girl with a smooth chin regarded him only briefly before darting her eyes back to Johnny Storm's invocation.

He knew they'd seen him in the meteorite, had time to acquaint themselves with the idea of himself and Galactus. All the same, he was a self-confessed destroyer of worlds. They should be living in profound fear of him from second to second.

It was the same old human complacency. Increasingly he felt drawn to Galactus' philosophy.

"You're trying to summon spirits, the spirits of the dead, or the demonic spirits of inhumanity, for your own edification. How is this justified?"

Said Johnny Storm, drunkenly, "It's all fair, gang. One day we'll all be dead, and then we'll float around a Ouija-etch party. It's the ciiiiir-cle of life! It's the wheeel of fortuu-uuune!"

Pointed out the Silver Surfer, "I am a dead man. I am demonic. Am I not enough for you, Johnny Storm?"

"You're not demonic", cooed the man in his eternal, gay-stereotype twinkling. "You're here to save us".

Nerve. "I am here to stop you from being annihilated, because it corresponds with my own plans. This is all".

"You know what?", said a moustachioed soldier with broad cheekbones, "have a drink!"

The Silver Surfer walked the very edge of the table and doused the flame with his palm. Choking darkness reigned before he brought the cosmic energy to play in his hand. All the power of a stark white floodlight seared the chamber.

"You each of you made a commitment to be soldiers, no matter how cheap and frivolous that commitment was. At least have the strength of character to follow that commitment. If you have duties, go to them. If it's your free time, go to your rooms and sleep. But dream -of nothing".

Johnny Storm screeched back his chair and wobbled to his feet. "You know, for a man who is head-to-foot silver, you're no fun, guy! Would it kill you to be like a -man-shaped disco ball?"

With just a trace of his old leniency, he watched the drunken humans depart. Thereafter, he swayed a little while he waited for the tsunami of grief to wash over him once more. He wasn't thinking straight. He was thinking clearly. The steel basin called to him; he placed his palm in the ashes and the cosmic energy syphoned down to find some infinitesimal ember that was still glowing. The flames soon rekindled, and in the oppressive love of the glow, he carefully sketched her face.

"Shalla Bal", he whispered, while staring hard into the fire.

But it was just fire.

A bereavement period, a terrible numb halt to everything he'd been. It took him through thick walls into chambers that were so childishly dark, into kitchenettes and conference rooms where the coffee makers seemed to have been abandoned for weeks, though they still contained water. None of the clocks were heard to tick as clocks are normally wont in the middle of the night.

He walked at an angle through a hive-like complex of soldier's quarters that had no adjoining corridors. A girl with naked breasts lay on her side reading; she didn't see him and he didn't disturb her. A business-like partition came in a room just bigger than a wall cavity, where long lines of computer terminals blinked away in a manner he found annoying. No Fox Plaza glacial grandeur, just Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer praying to Satan with blue walls.

He walked into a happy little blue-skies lab of spider charts on over-used white boards. He walked into a grey-black room, expansive, to discover it was Reed and Susan Richard's bedroom. The Professor was still using the specially-converted bed he'd slept in as a quadriplegic. Susan slept a few feet away in a bed that was modest, luxurious, but too small to be a double and too big to be a single. The Silver Surfer wondered. If, on regaining the use of his body again, Reed Richards had immediately marched Susan to this place and made love to her for days on end, would he have allowed it, even as he should be working on the missile? He supposed he would have. There was something in Susan Richard's solemn eyes that just made him want to make her happy.

While all along knowing the solemnity was too ingrained, powerful, almost to the point of being wonderfully transcendent.

She stirred a little, possibly dreaming. In the same slumbering motion, her arm swept upwards and activated a ceramic bedside lamp that stood on the table just above her pillow. Noted: the use of a tight-fitting T-shirt as a night garment. He'd imagined she was the type of girl to wear a felt bodytop, so perhaps he wasn't far off.

She lay on her side, eyes still heavily in sleep mode, and stared at him. Her hair was bundled up in a much the same style as her waking hours, though perhaps with the cleaved strips of gold more higgledy. Altogether, the illumination was searing, as the 60-watt bulb sought to disassemble her mortal outline. It reminded him of being inside the sun.

She stared in some kind of awe, and the Silver Surfer felt proud and inadequate both at once. Honour, perhaps, when her eyelids got heavy and her pupils defocussed -that he was being admitted into some dense dreamland.

He watched her sleep for some time.

When she awoke next, her eyes were quite systematic as they darted across his body. There was an immediate determination to stand tall from the bed, spine and limbs snapping straight, shaking off any foolish romantic indecision left over from sleep. Out she padded, presumably to an adjoining toilet. In her absence, he stared across and down at the dream-skimming Reed Richards. Thanks to the rejuvenating cosmic energy he was as handsome as a middle-aged man could ever be, with skin that was leathery but otherwise flawless. Admittedly, something about his incongruous and questioning temples made him incapable of ever being an alpha-male.

A steel drum heartbeat marked Susan's return to the bedroom. She dressed in jeans and a tight-collar shirt, applied a strawberry roll-on deodorant, applied a broad amount of foundation that nonetheless looked subtle. Throughout, she kept an eye on the house guest, as if he was something coquettish, and how could she be so cool?

She walked off into the base through a series of corridors shaped like cartoon lightning bolts. The Surfer followed her closely by walking through walls. All through it, every now and again, she regarded him, the sort-of smile shimmering like sunlight. Could it be something neurotic? -one could never get over the idea that Susan Storm was a woman who'd seen too much of life.

Very close together now, they skirted a canteen where one or two military types were eating their breakfast with hunched shoulders. Susan merely grabbed a coffee in an oversized disposable cup and walked on to the isolated far edge of the base. A blocky, misty-looking corridor presented a sudden full stop; what lay beyond, the Silver Surfer recognised as the retractable 'dummy house' by which they'd first brought him aboard.

"It's the third day of the new month. I usually go to the newsagent in Corsham to get the American edition of 'W'. Sometimes it comes in on the third, or the fourth, sometimes as late as the sixth. But I've got a good feeling about today".

She locked eyes to see what he thought about this, the ghost of a smile being nigh-overpowered by shyness and shame. What, he wondered, was it like to stare into his featureless eyes? More or less intimate?

"The weather says it's going to be another nice one. Will you join me?"

He moved his head slightly, came alive, stared up into the rafters. She knew his answer was yes. They crossed into the uncanny living room and just sauntered in the mustiness. Once Susan accessed the hidden control panel, the ascent juddered into motion. This time it was slower, more peaceful, probably because there was no emergency.

"It will be pleasant to walk. Why don't you leave your surfboard here?"

The Surfer looked at the sizeable wing of alien metal ever niched-in beneath his forearm. A constant companion that could be sent away on certain epoch occasions. He propped it against one of the swishing walls. All along, the rough metal of the shaft sides were turning blue through a proximity to daylight.

Asked Susan, "Who is Shalla Bal?"

The silver man clenched his jaw. "Don't ask me that".

He moved his head rapidly in a dozen different directions, one of them intersecting eventually with the sad, green-grey eyes of Susan Storm. They made him think about the exact definition of things, the exact nuance. All too often she seemed profoundly sad or wistful. But within it was a kind of honesty, unprecedented for all mankind, that could actually take them anywhere.

"You're going to be OK. I'll see you're alright".

Spoken by a conspicuously beautiful woman, with a body that could only be described as Victoria's-Secret-perfect, on her way from a secret underground base to buy a rarefied fashion glossy. He had to marvel at how things had turned out. As a matter of minor interest, he paid attention to how the palm of his left hand had started to feel damp and airy. Stealing a look as Susan hauled on her suede jacket, he saw -

Something strange was happening to his silver skin. Directly in the crease between the thenar muscles, the metal had taken on a look of hardened wood glue. Beneath which: all-too-human flesh.

They simultaneously raised their heads sharply as the morning sun blasted in. A beauty, undeniable.

There was one Prime Directive that Klatuua had set herself throughout all her missions -never act in such a way that the act of political realignment becomes a Personality Cult. Which was not to say that she'd ever deny having any kind of distinct personality, but good diplomacy made keeping it subdued essential.

Why, then, did she find herself sitting on the slope of the saucer in a deck chair, reading V for Vendetta, her cat licking his paws at her feet, tantalising them all with some kind of jazz no one had ever heard before?

It was obscene, made all the more so by that one particular soldier pacing the perimeter, eyeing her malevolently, lamenting to any of his colleagues who'd listen, 'because of her, I'll never have kids of my own'.

She could only assume he was talking about the expansion of the one couple - one child rule where a single person who started seeing a divorcee with a child couldn't go on to have any more offspring. To Klatuua, it was the most sane and reasonable thing in the world. And if the couple truly loved each other, any kind of familial, loin-surging pull would surely be quashed.

But why did she taunt the man, and the whole countryload of people just like him, by coming out in the open and looking so happy?

She guessed it was because she was happy, and that happiness was a law unto itself.

She longed for the soldier to go insane and try to pepper her with machine gun fire, only for Gort to have the bullets evaporate within a few inches of leaving the muzzle. She longed to walk serenely down the slope to his rage-spasmed body, and embarrass him in front of his mates. 'Where I come from, it's only the women who become slaves to their biological clocks. And even then only when they're having their period. Are you having your period?'

It was no way to think -but she could hardly help it because of the happiness. It was the magic day of Tuesday, where Cliff arrived for their weekly game of Scrabble, approaching the hour of two-thirty when Gort would secretly materialise him within the confines of the saucer. As far as the world knew, he hadn't seen her and did not know her beyond being the first citizen of Britain to visit the landing site that first day. Even the high-calibre surveillance satellites had been deactivated by Gort, at least for the duration of their 'Mikey-Nessa' summit. Mikey and Nessa, she guessed -giving way to Cliff and Klatuua.

She left the deckchair standing, threw down V for Vendetta in the seat and pierce-whistled Thanos to follow her back aboard. Rounding the edge of the sharpest turn in the electric mosaic, she stopped dead.

"You're early, Mr Carpenter".

Cliff moved his arms awkwardly and stuck his thumbs in his belt. Apologising, though it was in no way his fault, "Yeah. I'm not sure what happened. I was in the back room of the garden centre, getting ready for your man to dematerialise me -and it just happened early!"

"Not too unnerving?", Klatuua tested him.

The big man tilted his head easily at the overhead plating, a perfect impression that there was something more substantial to see than shadowless grills. "I admit I feel cheated that I've never had a chance to have a proper look at your robot. He's an incredible thing".

"'A proper look', Mr Carpenter?", Klatuua marauded him like a girl. "He's a hundred and fifty feet high. You can't help but have a proper look".

"But I mean", said Cliff, gruffly, "a close look. Feel the texture and lay my ear against him. Does he make a sound? A metal scrape like the statue of Telos about to have a go at the Argonauts?"

"He -does make a sound, but it's nothing metallic. I wouldn't know how to describe it", said Klatuua. Then, referring in no small part to the way he'd brought the two of them together in the first place, "All I know is that he's my oldest friend, and full of surprises".

"Actually", Cliff bowed his head, still nervous, "It's a little bit frustrating. I had a mean-sized bottle of liquor to bring us, right there on the table beside me. Didn't have time to grab it, did I?"

Klatuua absorbed this scenario with a small nod. She turned around and looked upwards, seemingly directing herself through the looming bulkhead.

"Gort. Klatuua pinya libra u kommunarka. Garden Centre. Zvezda. Alcohola".

A brown bag containing a bottle was dutifully materialised on the cabin table. Cliff breathed sharply and laughed.

"Was that your native language you spoke to him in?"

Said Klatuua. "Not exactly. There's a couple of different languages spoken where I come from. That was the standardised world language. I often use it to relay minor instructions to Gort as an extra little measure of security. Of course, to have him carry out more sophisticated actions, direct programming is needed, and the... items needed for that have long since been destroyed. He's autonomous".

In any case, Cliff decided to ask no further questions. "You make it sound quite graceful, anyway".

"Thankyou", said Klatuua in a small voice. "I can only hope I do the same for 65135X's English. It's why I took up Scrabble in the first place. I try to absorb as much of your media as I can, to learn all the new words that sprung up after our two dimensions diverged. But you still need something to get them rooted".

They sat down either side of Cliff's hard-copy Scrabble set. Klatuua numbly moved her hands along the edge of the table.

"I took the liberty of fishing out your tiles for you".

Cliff looked down at his rack. UUEIIHE

"I thought you people were all about fair play?"

"I'm sorry, my jokes are strange", said Klatuua.

Cliff seemed to pick up the bluntness, the heavenward slant of her eyes. "Here's my big talk: I can beat you with any number of handicaps", and proceed to tot up the grand total for 'HE'.

Klatuua hoped he knew she'd honestly picked out her own tiles- mused only for a second and then put down 'DISMAY', taking a triple on the 'Y' and roping in 'HEM'.

Following the same rhythm they always did, it was acceptable now to settle back and have some kind of conversation. He asked her how she was, moving his gaze between the hardly-bettered tile rack and her edgy eyes.

"I'm being petitioned for a meeting with the leader of the Tory party, which I think I'll accept. Also, a meeting with the leader of Unison, which I think I'll decline".

Cliff moved a gift-from-the-gods 'W' around in his rack, a lifeboat looking for purchase on a certain chaotic wave. Still he listened carefully as she measured out her woes.

"Also, I'm going to have to give serious thought on what to do about your banks. You'll have seen in the news that they're going to try operating their businesses on a computer-free system of ledgers and hard-copy cheques, so that Gort won't be able to interfere any more. It's a point in the proceedings that I always hate".

He looked up at her in limp-mouthed worry, but only for a split second. "But that will work won't it? If Gort can't stop yuppies getting paid, they'll just carry on".

"It's not that", Klatuua sighed. "You're forgetting how ingrained computers are in the smooth running of everything. Granted, you can say that shutting down multi-million pound interest payments and stocks and shares can't help but put your economy on a more tangible path. But it will also affect the transferring of wages and direct debit utility bills. Once again, the man in the street will have another reason to hate and distrust the world of starched white collars. I need to find a way of restructuring your country with no one hating anyone".

And at once she thought about herself, 'Yet you don't mind it if they hate you. You're willing to be the scapegoat for an entire country'.

'HE' and 'AWE', with the 'W' on a double-letter -evidently, it was the best he could do.

"You'll find a way to bring it home to them, I reckon. Even if the last option you've got is just to talk it out".

Said Klatuua, "If you had children, who worked in an office, you'd hate me along with all the rest".

"If I had children, I wouldn't be me", said Cliff, as if it was nothing.

"Pour me a drink, sir".

He did so. As he slinked down the brown paper, she spied the DVD poking out from beside the bottle.

"What is that? A sci-fi?"

With his turn to pick the after-game film, Cliff was fairly sure he'd surpassed himself. "'Close Encounters'. Yeah -all this sci-fi business. You've had a tough time of it. I thought it would be nice just to show you an ideal version of -some people coming down, in a flying saucer, and it's just optimistic from start to finish. No villains anywhere, just the situation itself".

Klatuua was now silent to the point of simpering. She cleared her throat and smiled. "I'm looking forward to it. So much, Mr Carpenter, that I'm going to beat you all the quicker".

'DEARLY', and a vicious cold war was initiated, the 'Y' taking them within three spaces of the triple word spot. Cliff thought quickly and regained his footing in a snap. 'YOUR'.

They played in word-lacing mandelbrots, tight. He played boldly; hardly any experimenting was done on his rack; his wrinkled fingers merely rushed forward to hop the minefield, rob the candy store. He daydreamed -just a little.

"Who's go is it?"

"Yours".

He glanced sharply to one side, more as a way to escape the need to think than aid it. He looked at the far wall where the flag of the Anti-Ultimatum League shrouded a section of the face-mosaic.

"I was thinking -how come you've got your enemy's flag up? Just to study it, or as some kind of inspiration, reverse psychology?"

"No". Klatuua tried to make her smile dark rather than wistful. "A lot of the time I have to hold back what I'm actually thinking, just to be a good diplomat. I feel -this ship. It may seem miraculous, but it's just a bit of technology. There's a remote chance that the population will get so riled up, they'll storm it, find a way of cutting through the hull. Scare Thanos. Turn me into a hill of beans. And on that day, I would want them to see their flag in here and know that I'm not scared of it. That it's just a thing to me. An ironic thing, actually".

"I can get that", said Cliff. He picked up a tile and held it hesitantly. Still his gaze was drawn back to the pretentious symbol. Tens of thousands of smiling, solemn, alive faces gleamed out from either side of it. The flag itself was around five feet across. He was wondering, perhaps -the number of faces on the mosaic beneath it must measure in thousands. Did they correspond to the delirious and unrepentantly greedy section of the populace that had created the Anti-Ultimatum League? Was it more or less?

He placed his word. The number of tiles in the shaving bag was becoming frighteningly small. Klatuua wondered what it would yield when it was her turn to fish. In the meantime, it was a surreal landscape of low-point consonants and two 'A's. She mused.

Said Cliff, as if she had some perfect ability to think of two things at once, "How did you get mixed up in this business?"

"I was going to say that being chosen for the ultimatum missions is similar to the way your astronauts are being prepared to go to Mars". She moved a tile in the rack, just to give the impression she was still focused on the game. "But it's not like that at all. There's hardly anything special about me. My parents died when I was young, so I thought I might as well sign up on the off-chance I'll get selected to accompany Gort. And I did".

"You say there's nothing special about you", Cliff Carpenter scratched his balding scalp. Already he was trapped in a man-blush. "That's not true. You're crazily noble, from what I can see".

Klatuua said, "No. I'm not particularly noble at all. In any case, 'noble' is the wrong word. My people are humble, but there's a reason why. Around the time your dimension was engaged in World War One, the people in my dimension suffered a -well, call it a plague. It resulted in around ninety-five percent of the population being struck blind.

"I remember the feeling of my grampy's face as I kissed him. Beneath his beard, he was scarred. Around his eyes, even more so; the streaked flesh gave him a false sort of 'sleepy' look, before you got used to it. But he was always smiling! He -!"

She tried to derail the sudden welling-up, and somehow succeeded.

"It's the strangest thing, Cliff. For all the horror they lived through, once the plague had been vanquished, so many of the blinded found happiness. Everyone did. There were communal farms and factories, set up by just two or three of the sighted, operated by fifty or sixty blind people. And these places were peace incarnate. There was sun in summer, coziness in winter, radio for people who wanted it, silence for those who didn't. A sense of tactile satisfaction. In the case of the bigger places, the workers developed a rich, satisfying rivalry -industrial output as a sport. And then a new generation was born. I remember my mother saying, once or twice; her earliest memory was of her mother sitting over her, and being so relieved that she'd been born with her sight, that hot tears would just fall down onto her head!"

Cliff gave an emotion-puffed smile. Perhaps he was about to say something, but Klatuua continued apace. She couldn't help herself.

"The next big event in our timeline was -well, I would say our history went from science fiction to science fiction, but that's no less than you can say with your trips to the moon, your atomic power struggles -your discovery of quantum indeterminacy!

"We found a strange kind of downed meteor, covered in a substance we call Destelline. Imagine, Mr Carpenter, a type of outer-space crystal that refracted light in such a strange way that it could present a window into another dimension".

Cliff joked, "I can't imagine that. I'm a simple man".

"You used to write science fiction stories", she pointed out.

"The best science fiction is simple-minded, I reckon. Just an adventure".

"Well, there's something adventurous about it", Klatuua continued. "Many chose to see it as a proof of the existence of God. In any case, my people stared in awe at this 'other' version of Britain. Would that we saw a happier place! This Britain was being torn apart by overpopulation, economic greed, decadence, nepotism. In the end, what he were watching through those meteor fragments: a post-apocalyptic civil war between yuppies and welfares. The two sides became interchangeable, in that they were both stupid and deluded. You'd imagine that a war-ravaged, post-apocalyptic world would consist of tribes, who'd survive even if they had to be bloodthirsty. Not here; we watched as society broke down to a kind of familial, house-by-house stupor. I'll grant you, Cliff, there was loyalty within each family unit, but what use was that? When you consider that, before the fall of their civilization, those family patriarchs had been running so many ephemeral, accountancy-based businesses, it's easy to see how things fell apart. It's the reason I almost shudder myself to death whenever I hear one of your politicians say, 'We're just trying to help hard-working families get ahead'".

She laid down her tiles. Truly it was getting close to the final moves of the game. One choice possibility was 'BAR', the 'R' of which just three spaces away from a triple-word. In time she managed to utilize that, but he didn't stop to examine how.

After writing down her score, she continued. "There was a scientist called Professor Arturo. He found a way of sending people from our dimension into successive, neighbouring versions of Britain. In much the same way Destilline could refract light in such a mysterious way, he found it could also refract huge amounts of gravametrical energy to open a physical wormhole between dimensions.

"We found, in so many other versions of Britain: overpopulation, greed, decadence, laziness -they were like a cancer sweeping through the omniverse, destroying civilized life wherever it was found. My people knew: we had to fight it. We had to try and save our brothers. At the same time, we were wise. With our hardwired humility, we knew we couldn't afford to go in there looking like overlords, or look patronising.

"We made Gort, and devised the ultimatum. Gort is beyond reproach. I sometimes think I don't stress that enough. Us humans -even if you took some mythical, nobler-than-noble Christ figure, he would still be read too many ways by too many people. Plus there's the risk that, if you face an opposition, any kind of opposition, you slowly start to hate them, just as a natural reaction. Gort isn't like that -he's just sanity and utilitarian action personified. Does he actually love us, any of us? Who knows. Does he hate us? Evidently not".

Cliff scoured out every corner of the board and found no home or his final letter, a 'G'. He told Klatuua as much, then kick-started the conversation once more. "And with you as the voice of Gort. That's a hell of a job".

Said Klatuua, with a weak smile, "I'm getting too old for it. And I'm increasingly of the opinion that Gort would be -not necessarily better off without me, but-

"When I first set foot on this ship, forty plus years ago, part of me believed it would be so easy. Think of slavery; how easily someone from the twenty-first century could point out to a shrew-eyed Elizabethan toff what a monster he is. With this huge weight of immaculate, natural justice, you could bring them low just by whispering in their ear, 'Just let him carry that bag of potatoes while you get a bit fatter, eh?' Picking a fight, fighting for fairness –it's an obvious thing to do. There's nothing sophisticated about it. But it doesn't occur to you that mankind has a -strange insidiousness when it comes to justifying greed. As if it's the most natural thing in the world, everywhere, inside of everyone. But I suppose a job is a job".

"A job is a job is a job!"

"Tell me, what's it like working in a garden centre?"

Something in her eyes, the steady tightness of her cheeks, told him she wanted a wealth of detail. So he told her about the smells, for the most part. Nylon-plastic plant scaffold meets tangy miracle-grow, and the way it had been a first little indicator that his and Nessa's marriage would fail. He'd always found it to be a pleasant and evocative smell. His wife had hated it.

The Garden Centre was a whole little world. He described the coolness of the thin stone slabs in the links, like something from Gethsemane. He described the fierce heat of the green houses in the height of summer, the way it stung your face, and the smell -was it the grime on the windows? The soil? The terracotta or the tomatoes? Cliff's theory was that it was composite of everything. In winter time, the many waxy leaves and slanted panes of glass reflected surprisingly little of the car headlights, enclosing them in a low, blue wonderland, just him and Ollie, the last two men on Earth.

Klatuua had two tiles to use up, an 'I' and a 'C'.

In the meantime she quested. "Do you find it's good work?"

"I suppose I do", said Cliff, all puffy-chest and round-shouldered buoyancy. "I mean, I can't imagine the place will still be there ten years from now, but by that time I'll be a very old man. And not that I'm the type of person who whines and goes on about small businesses being swallowed up by big businesses. It's all relative, isn't it?"

"Although obviously", Klatuua wavered on her staunch spine, "if you could wave a magic wand?"

"Exactly", said Cliff, after a telling pause.

"It's somehow a symbol of people pretending that they can have their whole lives just -swallowed up by a vast, homogenous dream. All generalities, no specifics -except housewife blather".

The final, useable tiles were placed and Cliff shook himself to pay attention. His opponent started to tot up the scores.

"Will you talk me through those last two words?"

Klatuua smiled like a statue. "Oh. They're both from my language. Is that a problem?"

"I suppose not", said Cliff, smiling cleverly. "But tell me what they mean".

She slid across to him a kind of electronic dictionary, then continued to sieve-up the scores while he laboriously keyed in the mystery words.

BARADA - noun. Mythical state of peace brought about by absolute understanding of human nature. Esp. religious, eschatological.

NICTO - noun. Unspoken fellowship, natural camaraderie, harmony.

"I'm sorry, Cliff. If it's any consolation, I'd prefer to have fewer words buzzing around in my head. I find I automatically bolster my vocabulary when I get placed before a mass of people or a table of statesmen. And yet, when it comes to actually bringing people on side, just a millimeter or two -you should probably use the commonest language you can think of".

Said Cliff, chortling, "No. You have to think of maybe the second or third word along from the one you'd normally use. To show you're actually listening to what they say! Instead of being on autopilot! I have to chat with enough middle-aged women, all of them sharp minded, all out to hear some miracle-talk about bamboo stalks or conservatory instillation".

"Though would you say you're a natural salesman?", asked Klatuua.

In his consternation, he breathed deeply in that virile way unique to proper old men, big old men.

"I suppose I am. I keep Mr Pagadopoulos happy. He's the owner of the Garden Centre".

Onto the only section of decking large enough to accommodate it, Klatuua had cooed Gort into materializing a luxurious leather sofa, green. The arms were tucked in fairly tightly between the main console and the medical trunk, something hardly noticeable once you were anchored down in the starched cushions. Cliff told her he'd reached a point in his life where he was sure he'd bought his last sofa, and what's more, all those bank holiday adverts were just crazily annoying. Still, it wasn't right to just steal a sofa, materializing it from some anonymous warehouse -they'd screened all the big retailers until they found the one that was most disloyal to the British economy, and at every stage of the supply chain -imported sofas, immigrant cashiers, yuppie owners.

And then they'd stolen from them.

She watched Cliff through the corner of her eye as he loafed down to watch Close Encounters. His constantly surprised eyes went from easy-going to easy-going, even as he got lost in the story. It was rare that a quality like that should be presented so clearly and unambiguously, yet there it was, bobbing around above his powerful cheeks and oriental-style lower eyelids.

She glanced at him through the corner of her eye, as indeed he glanced at her, until they were both wholly consumed by the film. The effects and the matte shots Klatuua found awe-inspiring, though it was hard to say why; there wasn't a green-screen overlay that could be mistaken for the real world for even a split second. Magical, though: the lurid midnight horizon. And the dexterous movement of the UFOs made her resent her own overly-stabilized saucer. As if the humans, spellbound or otherwise, could have looked up at them and just sensed that they came in peace.

With the main lights deactivated and the photo-mosaic muted to the degree of black marble, Klatuua and Cliff found their bodies brought alive by the coloured dots and strobes which flashed around on screen. Thanos, who had sauntered down at their feet, was nonplussed, and ironically, since the coloured gems of his collar so closely resembled the dazzling 'eyes' of the UFOs.

It was a blast, the chaotic dance of the alien ships. And even in the daytime-dramatic sections, Klatuua caught herself -had she been overcome by wry humour or against-the-grain excitement, for instance in the episode where Roy fails to see his television match the vast mud-sculpture which he's erected in his front room?

Certainly she became excited out of all proportion as Roy and Jillian took their mission to the beigey and rugged American farmland. The episode where they're captured by the military - horrible, anger-spasmed memories of her incarceration in Britain 119247-A came in force. She concealed them from Cliff by keeping her eyes quite placid.

The sun went down, it seemed into a night that could be protracted indefinitely until the humans had made wonderful, blessed contact with the aliens. Tension. There'd never been tension like it, as Roy and Jillian crept over the unsympathetic rocks to the landing site. And was it fear of the steely strength of a capricious government, fear of the aliens, or simply a fear of what might happen when the two mixed together?

A junction came on the cusp of some fang-shaped rocks overlooking the landing site; Jillian was suddenly overwhelmed by fear. Even with the draw of getting her son back from the aliens, it was too much to bear, and so she fled down into the pitch-black desert. Roy, also, was overwhelmed. He gasped, and gasped, and gasped.

The film froze. Klatuua and Cliff glanced at each other, just for a second, until the scene jumped on a few minutes. Roy was among the scientists, weak-footed in the intense white lights of the touch-down arena. They all stared upwards, still in awe, but awe being invigorated by -horror.

Horror for Jillian, too. Clearly she'd run hard and fast into the black desert. Now she was standing bolt still, despite being badly out of breath, staring in abject panic at the distant floodlights. Above them there was something unutterably frightening. It wasn't the aliens. She could only hold the back of a hand across her jerking mouth. The fingers of her other hand massaged the palm, spidered around until they found the wrist, twisting to consciously or subconsciously draw blood. The film froze for a second time; this time it didn't continue.

"I suppose DVDs aren't as bomb-proof as they reckon", said Cliff. He picked up the case and stared in wonder. "I'll tell you what else: this is very bleak for a PG. Not at all how I remember it".

"Well", smiled Klatuua. "I still want to see how it ends. Gort, 'Close Encounters', manna libra dec yec-horo blan yec".

The monitor shifted from the DVD to some rarified HD version of the film, probably relayed directly from Columbia's internal archive. And they watched the rest -the sense of awe, reverence -nee tranquility- resumed. Mother and son were reunited. Child-like Roy Neary was admitted onto the vast spaceship beaming from ear-to-ear. It seemed safe to assume that what they'd previously seen was some swissed-up cut done by a bleak-minded zeitgeister, probably as an art instillation.

Intriguing, in a way. Certainly it hung in the mind. There -in the glaring light above the landing floodlights- it had looked almost like the silhouette of a samurai armoured man. A tall helmet framed by obtuse triangular horns.

There were no trains bothering the tunnel, or if there were, how the sound was swallowed up in the unusual sunny atmos. They walked swingy-armed up a steep section of hillside in a dramatic start. Susan was grimacing-smiling, tracing the sun, or him, or both. He followed steadily, just like an ordinary man with an unprecedented girl, about to fall in love. Edged off to the sides of the crest-that-never-came, big dark trees ruled the tangled shrubbery. Alders: if they were on a city outskirts or in a hedgerow, they'd hardly have been so imposing. Like this, elevated above a medieval confluence of hillsides, always with a keen panorama, they were stark lightning bolts. And quietly he liked the way they were distinct in the sunshine. There was no yellow crest, no refracted haze. In this respect they were just like his silver skin. Striking? Frightening? But never anything fancy. No reflections beyond dull blurs following the broadest angles of his body.

He glanced back the way they'd come and remembered his first meeting of Susan Storm Richards. Bleeding, from nowhere, on a hillside, following the collapse of bathroom mirror, from nowhere –yet it never really seemed strange. That solemn, beautiful mouth of hers, preyed on by eerie luck.

The field wedged down to tall hedge and lonely-looking fences. Susan took the decades-old cow tracks in hurried little steps. The Cosmic Surfer moved in sideways leaps, none of it hindered by the way he couldn't properly feel the clenched humps of mud at his feet. In the long run, they were heading towards a muddy ravine, not quite a river and, in any case, completely tangled up in thorny scrub. All was inhumanly subdued, and sunlit, and peaceful. He wondered exactly what he was doing to have joined her like this. A spur came; the idea that if only he could tell her his opinion of anything, his existence would be justified.

The same old nuances of being in love.

"Last night, your brother was holding some kind of séance. He was drunk. Susan, I'm living proof that one shouldn't beckon supernatural entities for reasons that are capricious".

Cutting the corner of the gully-shaped field, she took broad steps, ever elegant.

"Forget trying to persuade him. When he was about thirteen or fourteen, he was at school one day when him and this gang of older boys decided to conduct a Ouija-etch on a disused stage. It was in this area of the school they were about to knock down. I think the leader of the gang was called John Jameson. Anyway, the curtains were closed. Once the Dormammu flame was burning –well, something happened! They were larking around? The curtains caught fire. There was a miniature fire extinguisher that only contained useless foam. Johnny just managed to beat the flames out by sweeping his baseball cap around. And no one ever found out, but it was close. If an incident such as that doesn't stop him, nothing will".

They'd slowed up at a long strip of woodland that was only four or five trunks deep at most. Around a corner was a slick arena of short grass, hypnotically flat compared to the landscape as a whole. Low hedgerows in a zig-zag network would have made perfect homes for rabbits or hares, and they probably did, except the motion of human figures they could hear from yards away, so it was out of the question for two to sneak up.

It was Susan's turn to think of a salient topic, though she didn't seem too concerned.

"You went away from Ben when he was meant to be guarding you. He was worried. When he was in Kosovo, his section pushed into the mountains and caught a big enemy base, though there was just one or two soldiers laid up there. Ben was guarding this man in one of cave chambers; he had him in a little plastic chair up against some overhanging rocks. Ben turned around at one point and this little man grabbed a plastic explosive from a trunk. Ben saw, just as the man shouted his prayer and brought his side of the chamber down. He was stunned by it, still is. He's a big, gruff man but he's sensitive. Simple. Dependable. That's Ben".

At this story, the Surfer reacted hardly at all, just enough to show his soul had been touched.

Through a traipsing kind of buttercup meadow, then an abrupt field edge that actually looked like height contours on an Ordinance Survey map, they walked gently. Long grass and bullrushes-on-land spread out before a knobbly sand bank, daunting, Susan leading the way up an easy-going rise. It was possible there might be a vista of some sort, though a certain flatness in the air indicated it would simply be a long, flat field, only partially swollen as per the general landscape. Towards the farm gates that looked so guilty or neurotic between overgrown hedgerows. Mud had ruled the day at one point, but had now been dried and dampened too many times, ending as dried-out turrets, golden dirt.

Susan hoisted herself up and over in a bike-riding pose. The suede jacket had a skirt of sorts, but it stopped short of her smooth waist. The Silver Surfer observed, a little. Her hips, her rear, for men who placed importance in the minutiae of sexual shorthand, were things of rare value.

They walked gently towards a bus-size tangle of thorns, which could almost be sinking into the centre of the earth. A spaced-out blackbird emerged from a triangle of dark to hold himself mere inches away from the Surfer's eyes. Yellow feathers that nonetheless hated pretentiousness fought a winning battle against dark brown. Yellow eyes of cringing bluecollar joy darted across his temple.

"Are you a nature lover?", asked Susan.

"I can't remember", was the honest answer.

A short grass field took them onwards on a rippling, slingshot trajectory. Why was the grass so raggedy and tempered? Was it grazed on by cows, was it the effect of the sunlight reaching it in fits and spurts, the whole landscape a secret dell? Susan glanced down at the staid earth beneath her pixie hiking boots. It was such a timeless morning; probably such off-the-cuff questions were in her mind, too. A Rupert Bear fieldscape but with a darker horizon, no turtleplate lines on the horizon, no yellow haze, just heavy green. Impossibly clustered branches hung above a gate, in the middle of nowhere. It was here that she stopped to hoist her leg and tie her lace. He detected her perfume, the first time he'd noticed any earthly odour for some time. It smelt somewhere between CK and burnt peaches, and was unobtrusive, if only he wasn't suddenly obsessed.

To the near right was a ridge, one that, from the valley, would normally be associated with an in-and-out approach road. He saw no cars, only a retreating line of birches, a hawthorn tree that looked like a cherry blossom. Middle-of-nowhere tranquility was a deceptively strong concept, there for its own sake.

"By this tufty grass, here, there was a deer. I don't know how big or small he was. It's so rare to see one, so hard to get close, you don't really get a chance to calculate size. His fur was a big mix of colours, mainly a deep cocoa. But it's weird, he stood there, almost twitching his body, almost carrying on eating, and never once did he look straight at me. He just hopped off at angles, as if he'd just -extrapolated me. Like in the audience in front of an orchestra. You look at the instruments or at the pitch blackness surrounding the stage, and where's the music coming from? What would you hear in that music to make you scared enough to run?"

The Cosmic Surfer listened, intrigued, and did not understand.

There was also this: through the tighter, more groomed sections which skirted the tall trees, he'd frequently seen spent shotgun shells. He imagined them coming upon a ruddy-faced aristocrat or a nothing-lifed, griddle-mouthed countryman taking aim at a deer. He imagined placing a silver hand on his quilted shoulder and having the cosmic energy mutilate him. He imagined the countryman accidentally shooting dead Susan. He would disassemble his body atom by atom, making sure that searing pain was his lot.

But the beautiful and solemn Susan lying dead on the short grass. Would he have the right to bring her back to life?

Their surroundings were wondrously subdued, magically lonely; being there might just be worth the risk of getting subjugated by country folk.

They passed an area in the junction-of-valleys where the sloping fields levelled out to a regular West Country plain -almost. Before that, however, a line of impossibly tall elm trees, complete with a crow berating a buzzard, both of them gliding around at full wingspan. Old thorn bushes that looked like broken castles were passed. Hipster-sagging fences right on the cusp. In all, the surging hillsides belonged to a fairy tale.

He felt inadequate to the strange, non-verbal debate, though. Susan's internal zeitgeist. Clearly it was such a pivotal time for her. She was starting to glance at him with a harsh, judgmental look, something far beyond male paranoia. Soon, by the steep hill which led up to Corsham, the harsh glances were undeniable.

Between thin, creamy-brown tree trunks, old bangers swished by at steady speed, and it seemed amazing they didn't see the aloof silver alien and panic. Perhaps it could happen soon. He didn't care. It was all he could do to process Susan's sudden curtness.

The transition from ruddy grassland to town centre was immediate. The whole face of the town was dominated by a disused-disused army base, and the sentimentality that had kept it from being demolished would surely last forever. What intrigued him was the way the narrow streets of the housing estate which ran alongside seemed to have subconsciously drank down the design; tall garden walls to imitate the mysterious compound, steel-composite fences wonderfully impervious.

If the middle-of-nowhere tranquility had been a deceptively strong concept, the silence of the mirco-village alleyways was merely hypnotic. There was a tight curve by an ancient stone wall, and an incredibly small electricity pen -beyond that, the high street where joe public could be seen flouncing by. Susan turned into him and spoke of her fears. "Reed is a good man. But he won't do what you want. You'll need to intimidate him. And when you do, it's OK to use me. I don't love him -and I just want to stand for something".

And she left him there, walking briskly from the alley mouth across to the newsagent.

The movement of her shoulders and legs: unafraid.

She emerged a few moments later, empty-handed. People criss-crossed as per any village high street. The vibe was calm and considered, the sense of being in a weird conspiracy secreted gently into the background.

On entering the fields again, that was when she unveiled her story. The daylight was as bright as ever, even if exotically grey clouds had crept in at the horizon. It was suddenly necessary to shield the eyes, though never from a particular direction.

"My first boyfriend was Victor. I started seeing him when I was about nineteen and he was thirty-five. We met through mutual friends. He was the manager of a tyre-fitting centre, part of a chain owned by his mother. 'Republic Tyres'. I thought he was uniquely handsome, but when you're in love, you're biased.

"If you think about you -if ever a girl fell in love with you, it would make sense for her to think you're handsome, because you're actually made of silver, and your eyes -they're thoughtful in so far as they're there at all. For the rest of us, it's all about getting the wrong perceptions.

"Victor was interested in Communism. He was normal, happy, full of life, very popular. When he was joking around with his friends, or explaining something to an important customer, it was clear he was picturing himself as some perfect Communist. He was gentle about it.

"We had a flat together. One Saturday morning, while he was in the shower, I was looking through Ceefax -I found this section called, 'Geo-Scouring'. It was a page you could go through, town by town, and it would give you a street name, and then clues for finding a hidden treasure chest. It would be, 'look for this bent railing', 'take twenty paces to the East'. The only rule was, if you took something from the chest, you had to leave something of roughly equal value. We wrote down what was on the Ceefax page and went to search for the treasure on Plumberry Hill. We found it, but only after two or three hours of searching all through the undergrowth and everywhere.

"There was no Geo-Scouring chest in our town of Latervington; Victor got excited and decided to make his own, then send the details in to Ceefax. We bought this large biscuit tin, wrapped it round with soil-coloured carpet tape, then put a scalpel around the lid so people could open it. Once we were outside, we caked it in mud to give it extra camouflage. The choice was obvious. The narrow strip of woodland behind our house, in the twisted trunk of a big tree, one of many. It was a good spot. Anonymous. I wanted to hide it under the old bridge, but Victor rightly pointed out that one day the water might rise and wash it away.

"We both got pleasure from it. Victor got an extra bit of enjoyment from it by using it for a social experiment. He thought of the one charity that's universally loved by everyone. Everyone loves animals. He bought a large coffee jar that would fit inside the biscuit tin and he labeled it in childish felt tip pens 'Collection for RSPCA' -and filled it with fifty pounds. It was four five pound notes, a lot of pound coins, silver. Just a few coppers -and some foreign coins to make it look -like it had seen a lot of visitors, I suppose. He wanted to see how long it would last before getting stolen, or how much people would add to it.

"I thought it was a bad idea. I didn't know why exactly, and I still don't. I thought at least he should make it only ten pounds. But Victor said it had to be fifty. He thought people, even if they wanted to steal it, would think twice because already other people had decided to leave it there. They wouldn't even be leaving it because of natural guilt, but because of peer pressure.

"After a day or two, I understood what was in his head. Victor was a realist. He expected the collection to be stolen, sooner or later. He thought: if stays, it will offer hope for the human race. If it goes, it just shows how wise I am, how special I am just for seeing the need to experiment.

"But it gave me trouble. I understood just a crazy little bit where he was coming from, about getting hope for the human race. But for me it was -even more so. I thought, if that money stays more than a year, it will be a miracle. A proper one. And how can you put odds on a miracle?

"You can't. Evil is about being stupid. Goodness, the sort of goodness Victor was talking about, was lateral thinking or creative thinking. It's just the way it is. Kids -they aren't creative and they can't think on a big scale. Just the idea of a charity collection tin; you have to have some kind of imagination to understand the idea of giving.

"Our Geo-Scouring tin had a stream of visitors that was three or four a month. In summer that doubled. For the first month or two, the collection tin took in three or four pounds on top of the fifty.

"The four five pound notes were the first to go. Why didn't they just steal all of it? You see what I mean? Imagination and moral thinking -it was still working, but it wasn't strong enough. It was all natural. Then on one occasion, everything went except a few coppers and the foreign coins".

The landscape was smaller, coming from the opposite direction. His skin looked as much dark grey as silver. As she hunched her body over the various free-moving gates, Susan's body seemed strangely colourful. The Cosmic Surfer well noted how, in difference to the instructions every dad gives his child during countryside walks, she did not climb over at the hinge end. He found this reassuringly anarchic, in a breezy sort of way.

"I was the assistant manager of a big shoe shop. One day, there was about an hour left of my shift to go, I got a text message from Victor. Text messages had just recently been invented. They were still exciting. This one was good, too. 'I love you' .

"Victor -normally he wasn't subtle like that. He was romantic, but not like that. I just felt tingly, and happy. I texted back, 'I'll never get enough of you'. He texted back, 'I've done something terrible'. And at the end of the shift, I went outside the store on to the street, where he was parked, looking terrible. It was twilight, and the big American jeep he drove was like a house full of shadows. We sat there awkwardly until he confessed that he'd taken a girl mechanic to the wood to show her our Geo-Scouring tin. While there, they'd had sex together.

"I forgave him straight away. But it was the worst feeling I'd ever had. We pretended everything was alright -but all the time I suppose my mind was taking stock of everything in the flat, summing up whether I could just -leave. Victor announced that he was going away for the night to a trade show for alloy wheels. I felt an inkling, that I couldn't trust him. Would you? I decided that when he got home the next day, I'd be gone, and if we ever saw each other again, it would have to be spectacular.

"Going back home to stay with my parents wasn't something I was crazy about. Actually, to be honest? I didn't want to think about anything. Except that crazy, obsessive depression you always get after a break up. To lick my wounds, I decided to go away to Ansfield-on-Sea. I caught the train, with just the coat on my back and my wallet.

"I thought, go for a walk. To reconnect with myself: eat a bag of chips and stare out to sea. Or not! Ansfield-on-Sea is famous for having a giant-size beach and the water itself far away -and- I walked along it, completely aimlessly. It was late in the day and everything was closing down. People were moving slowly, and there was a quality like zoo animals about them.

"I walked all the way along the beach. The sand was damp though, even so far from the waves. A sign of things to come; I knew it would rain, but I thought it would only be spits and spots. Walking up through town, I got -interested- in the way the place rose sharply in a bank. Old Victorian houses built into the long sides. There was a dirt track leading up through a tiny wood. On top, solid rock like a quarry. It was here that it started to rain. I went back to town, bought a big poncho from a petrol station.

"And how it poured down", a smile, and she became hollow, ultra-sad. "I'd never known anything like it in my life".

The Surfer lolled his featureless eyes, listening intently to the roar of the cosmic tide. "Yes".

"The hood of the poncho was good enough to keep it dripping clear from my eyes. Sometimes it could go in, though, and sting, and make them feel like they were snagged in their sockets. It bounced off the unmarked surface of the little back streets like a scene from a film. Here's the funny bit. I saw the exact hotel that I wanted to stay at. Pretty blue sign. It also had a tiny little one saying 'Vacancies' in yellow LED. The tiny little reception was in a dip, inside a garden like a maze. From the road, I could see the receptionist lady sitting there, busying herself behind the big desk.

"If I go in there, that's when it starts. The loneliness and the truth that I've been totally broken. I'd be in a little room that seemed grey, even though it probably wasn't, staring at the walls feeling hollow. So I decided I'd go inside as late as possible, maybe half past nine or ten. In the meantime, at least I'd be outside, in the world, with things to distract me. Maybe some pretty lights to look at?

"The rain didn't ease for a second. Torrential rain should become normal rain at some point shouldn't it? As well as all that, there was police everywhere. It might have been that there was usually that many cops around at Ansfield-on-Sea on a Saturday night, but it seemed like they'd been warned about me. That something bleak and not-human was coming, and I was in league with it.

"At the start of the seafront, there was a disintegrating old pier, all burnt, sealed off from the public by these giant crossbeams and stone blocks. But it wouldn't be impossible to climb over if you really wanted. I'm a girl that can do anything. I stared out along the planks, which were all weak and smashed. Just like a broken gable bridge from a stupid film, when you come to think about it. You could see heavy waves crashing around underneath.

"You should have seen me walking back past the church and up the hill. Could anyone have seen me? I felt massively alone. But why did I feel so unhappy, too? What does it matter if you're alone? I love being alone on a –conscious level. Why did it suddenly effect me? That's what was eerie. That's what I need an answer to".

The Cosmic Surfer cast his head at the ground. "I have no answer for you".

"For all I know, everyone thinks there's a Mr or Mrs Fantastic out there, waiting for them. It's depressing! Thinking like that –just makes your life a prison.

"I remember booking myself in at the hotel. The receptionist wasn't friendly or unfriendly. The room had a big sort of crater in the plaster of the wall. 'Charming', I thought. I fell asleep watching some political debates from the American election.

"The next morning, I was tardy getting to the dining room. It was almost full, but I managed to get a table. I ordered scrambled eggs. A man came in carrying what looked exactly like a bird cage, covered over with a velvet cloak. He was shakey, and gangly, but he had good cheekbones and eyes that didn't have any kind of –he was a tense little mystery. I smiled and pointed to the spare seat at my table.

"He ordered oeufs brouillés secher. Amazing that the chef even knew what that was. I was already munching away sheepishly when the landlady brought his plate. But he cringed; he hadn't realised that there was a little lace-covered table where you were meant to collect your own cutlery. I said to him, 'I'll look after your bird while you go up there'.

"He smiled -a kind of smile-, and thanked me. I later learned that he'd been weirded out because –underneath the velvet cloak was not a bird, but a model of an oil molecule. I suppose nowadays it would be fairly simple just to translate it int model on a laptop. Perhaps it was then, too, but he was just returning from some big conference where he needed to pass it around among other scientists. Maybe I had an expression that I felt cheated it wasn't a parrot. He explained, affably, that it wasn't that important. It wasn't the molecule that would solve the world's fuel crisis, but maybe it would add up to it some day. All the theoretical models in his research had to be physically stored -there was a big basement at his university given over purely to these things that looked like -wire frames for a papier mache tornado. Was it a good place to go sleep, I asked? He said that his research assistant, Dr Cooper, was such an obsessive that he kept these models all around his apartment.

"'Reed Richards'. 'Sue Storm'. And we laughed at how our alliterated names made us birds of a feather. So it started. Reed asked me everything about myself. Lovers, when they first meet, they're always desperate to search out and cross-reference information about each other. But I don't need to tell you that. Now I've come to worry that it's just Reed's character -a big universe of questions tumbling over everything like the rain. I don't blame him even a little bit. That's just the way it is.

"But it's funny to me. When lovers talk, it's such an important thing. Why doesn't the person doing all the answering feel strange? There must be a more graceful way of learning about your soul mate than just having a conversation.

"Reed and I had good times. He was a fellow of the Laureate Charter of Scientists at Cambridge, but due to his disease, they gave him leeway to work out of his own lab at home, or the Osborne lab in Bath. Actually, in those days, he was still almost completely healthy. Maybe he was a bit unco-ordinated. Fine. I was there to drive him. It was an adventure. One of my happiest days was when we had to go to the Dursley Valley radio mast to do an interview about some kind of new transmitter Reed had invented. Somehow we were late. We couldn't find the place. Then for at least an hour, there it was, towering high above the fields, no more than ten minutes away as the crow flies. But could we find our way through the zippy lanes? Up the hills? There were so many of these big, smooth roads shooting through wide open fields; none of them took us very much closer.

" 'It's like a tension nightmare', he said. He was gasping and laughing, because his lungs and in his throat were still in good order.

"I pulled over in a layby on a hill. 'There's only one way to get rid of tension', I told him. I kissed him as if it was going out of fashion".

The Cosmic Surfer narrowed his eyes. The steep-curved field edge looked strangely familiar, and he realised it was the very first embankment they'd skirted on emerging from the decoy house that morning. Over the next cusp, the withered fence, there it was. Reed Richards was present in the doorway, plus a contingent of three or four covert military types. If the scientist was tense now, it was soon conquered; he raised an arm to wave at his wife.

Susan –was like a living timer, absolutely aware of how much time they had before coming within their hearing range.

"In my heart, I'm not the type of woman who goes with a man she doesn't love. There's a reason why I'm here. And I have to know. You've been sent from God. I believe you're confused. I believe you're lost. But you can't deny it. It's not something you can be wilfully mysterious about. Together, we'll find out. And I'll tell you all the lies they've been feeding you. We'll be free".

She walked ahead across the squally grass. Reed Richards peered at the Surfer, then at his wife. He smiled through his now-healthy, rubbery-looking jaw. The Surfer looked at Susan's waist, her legs, then down towards the ground.

The following Tuesday, Cliff received a sharp surprise, which he took on the chin. The hour where he was due to materialise with Klatuua rolled around, his heart wheeling and lilting, only for the tension to be thoroughly wrong-footed. Bedazzlement that the clenched blink of the materialisation effect took him somewhere else entirely. In a futuristic world of no reference points whatsoever, he couldn't guess where. It couldn't be anywhere aboard the saucer, he guessed, which only had a single interior chamber surrounded by the sea-shell cavity, all of which he'd grown accustomed to.

It was a little bit like those Nuclear Submarine rescue bells, in terms of shape.

A roughly-egg-shaped deep-cast drum, befitted by struts more substantial than any steel, probably titanium. But the walls gave him pause for thought: they had a tone that was rich and colourful like marble, plus a consistency that was crazily light. He wondered if it really was metal, or some material no one in his dimension had seen before.

"Where on Earth have you brought me, Gort?"

There was a deep black viewscreen which ran in a tight strip, too high to look at comfortably from his narrow standpoint, but maybe from one of the elevated platforms at the centre. When he moved to this position, his mind boggled. Long strands of the smooth, light tusk swept into slants just below waist level. Far too low to be controls, but then what? A significant phosphorous glow was emitted, soon encasing his torso like the coloured light of a trendy night club. He wondered. The lesser platform just beyond seemed far more accommodating to a human figure, with grip-shaped levers that were definitely controls of some kind, even if they were highly ornate, alienesque.

Cliff stared at everything in wonder. Then fear took hold as he noticed the noise. From somewhere very close beneath his feet, somehow rising to penetrate his body, there was a persistent clicking noise. But never quite regular. Organic. Perhaps a dozen insects using their super-taut mandibles to imitate the sweep of a submarine's sonar -or something more sophisticated; a dozen insects using their super-taut mandibles to imitate a Vietnam soldier's consciousness as he creeps through a deceptively silent jungle.

"Mr Carpenter, we've taken an interesting detour".

He was amazed that her voice hadn't made him to jump. Klatuua was managing to move elegantly around the unwieldy space at the edge.

"Are we on a spaceship?", he asked excitedly.

"Sorry to disappoint you. It's a bit more real than being in a spaceship. We're inside Gort's head".

"Really?"

He'd imagined the Statue of Liberty, with the inverted outline of a face. Eyes, reassuring shapes. In just a few minutes, however, he found he didn't mind the place at all. There was a feeling of security.

"Is that where his eyes are?", he tipped a finger out to the sheer black panels.

Klatuua tried not to smile. "Close your eyes for a moment or two, then open them".

Feeling like a child being admitted to the world of adults, thendeathly-responsibleadults, he followed orders. When he blinked open his eyelids once more, Gort followed suit. A vista of Aalmesbury and thirty miles of surrounding countryside was admitted. Cliff stared for some time, completely unprepared. Sparkily, he laughed. "There's the bird seed lorry heading towards the garden centre".

"Big", Klatuua pointed out, "for a lorry transporting bird seed".

"It brings in our kindling, too. How is it that Gort opened his eyes at the same time as me?"

Explained Klatuua, as she took her place on the lesser platform, "The light that's hitting your body is a type of motion-capture technology. Any move you make will be matched by Gort".

Cliff was troubled. His big shoulders tensed and he hovered limply in the coloured haze, seemingly only the inhuman clicking of Gort's body keeping him braced.

"But you said Gort is autonomous. You made out he was incorruptible by humans".

"So he is", said Klatuua in a tight voice. "But he knows who to trust. The manual control is designed to be used if ever his CPU gets critically damaged, which in itself is extremely unlikely".

"How come", Cliff felt his voice go light, a small boy asking a question about his remote control car on Christmas morning, "he's letting me do it now?"

"Clearly he likes you almost as much as I do. Raise your arm a second".

Cliff felt his cheeks burn and glower. "I don't want to unnerve the people on the ground. Set them to thinking he's getting ready to attack".

Now that Klatuua was standing a foot or two below him, she looked smaller, and though her shoulders were steep and round -younger. "Perhaps you're right. But yesterday I had a three hour meeting with the International Trade Minister and the Business Tsar. They refuse to institute a long term plan for our GDP going from three percent to seven percent to ten percent. Through the new design patents we've gifted you, ten percent, if anything, is an underestimation. What they're worried about is having their vaunted European Union undermined and embarrassed by a country which will one day be the most productive in the world".

Said Cliff, chewing out a smile, "We'd hate to see the EU looking petty".

Klatuua slid free from the smaller ring and up inside Cliff's. She moved tightly behind him until her body was a living silhouette, then, taking hold of his arms by the elbows, extended them sharply into the air. Down across the huge vista, the colossal arms of the Miner From Hell did likewise.

Smiling breathlessly, speaking calmly as if it was something other than two pensioners resurrecting love, she invited him to keep his fists closed, then raise three fingers, then seven, then ten. "Let's see if your government can explain their lack of faith to the people".

When the manipulation of Gort had finished, when she'd explained the role of the secondary pilot's ring (the levers controlled the speed and gait of his walk), there was nothing to do but retire down to the saucer for a well-earned game of Scrabble. It was a pleasant punch of a journey. Cliff found increasingly that he didn't mind the materialisation process, though it amazed him that any human mind could feel that way. Maybe it was something subconscious, to do with his age, his closeness to death. Or maybe the fact that, when he was around Klatuua, nothing seemed to matter -paradoxically, since she had the weight of the country on her shoulders.

The scrabble was dynamic from the start. With a smile, they'd both agreed that the bottle of alcohol was nice, but surely a young person's indulgence. Hot chocolate and coffee; that was the name of the game, something that wouldn't send their slack-muscled brains to sleep almost straight way.

Mr Carpenter came within a scrape of beating her, too. It was unprecedented. He sensed from her terse mouth that she'd deliberately needed to step up her tactics. This time no alien words, either.

Three-nine-eight to four-oh-five.

"That's into the territory of bad luck", Klatuua commiserated him.

"I'm closing, and when I win, it's going to be an upset!"

It was Klatuua's night to choose a film, and this made her skittish, something Cliff enjoyed no end. That her own people's film industry had stalled slightly because of the plague, and, though it had recovered in terms of the number of films they produced towards the end of the century, the stories were simplistic in tone. There were no films where authority figures were depicted as all-bad. There were no films about social strife. These things did not exist in Klatuua's Britain. Still there was an abundance of escapist films, and it worked out well. When you had a society where, as little as two generations ago, ninety-five percent of people had been blind, there was a pleasing lack of emphasis on the all-visual set-pieces that so cursed film blockbusters on Cliff's side.

"It's a lot of stories about people fighting against cruel fate. Plus there's a lot of westerns", said Klatuua.

Said Cliff, "Now you're talking my language".

To that end, she'd screened one of her own favourite films, 'Lieutenant Greenberry's Wife', 1975. A US Cavalryman and his wife, circa the eighteen hundreds, ride a long canyon and are soon brought down by a storm of Apaches. They fight a giddy, savage battle. The Lieutenant deals with the bulk of the onslaught, but is eventually killed by a somersaulting tomahawk. The titular Mrs Greenberry manages to snatch up a bow and, retrieving as many arrows as she can from their dead horses, picks off the closing Apaches in a remarkable feat of living in the moment. At one point she finds a six-shooter, checks the barrel, throws it aside, and we're to assume it's empty. The Apaches silently speed forward and, miraculously, she kills them all. The denouement, however -she's out of arrows, just as the thick, impossibly bronzed shoulders of a brave frames her zouave-bloused body against the rocks. Mrs Greenberry, she with such an uncinematic face, though never less than beautiful. Her eyes go steely. She retrieves the six-shooter from earlier and it seems the viewer has been misled by her unreadable-unreadable-determined eyes; there had always been one last bullet. A gunshot sounds like the full stop to all time and space -the brave, his body crumples in a remarkably muted way, considering his size.

The desert will kill you, though. With the staving finished, that new truth is on her in a heartbeat. She weeps a little for her husband, then settles back against the rocks and decides it's more or less useless to try and free herself from the collapsed horse. She stares up at the sheer, red rock, the sky; much time passes.

Men in two-tone collarless shirts ride in at angle and make their way to her only very slowly. Somehow she knows at once that they've no interest in helping her. Indeed, a man with ginger hair and a dour face loots the saddle bags of her dead husband. A man with braces and hunched shoulders makes eye-contact, and smiles, just enough to emphasise that there's no meaning to the world beyond small, crazed emotions.

Boots filled, the strangers ride away across the twilight-fuzzy desert.

Mrs Greenberry is ponderous. She chews through one of the harnesses which ripples free from the horse, using it to snag and drag a nearby tomahawk. Finally, the long scene of death comes to an end. She swings away, again and again, taking inelegant but powerful passes at the horse's back.

A mountain-side town sees a woman with ridiculously bloody legs walking between the sketchy outhouses that pervade a classic Wild West main street. In the coming days, grief and vengeance keep her afloat, well enough to scour out the ginger man and the man with hunched shoulders.

She finds them. She also finds a labyrinth. The men have families. They're at the edge of a town-size network of disparate settlers with no real leader beyond a whorehouse owner, who's the right-right-wrong side of pragmatic. Mrs Greenberry guesses -just guesses- he will never surrender or discipline his outriders. So, recovering, rebuilding her life, she sidles around town. The wife of the whorehouse owner, a strangely conventional housewife, talks to her at length about the gentle little illnesses left over from scarlet fever. Greenberry listens kindly.

She meets the town preacher, the union-free quarry men, the school children who are conspicuously but not unbelievably gentle in character, taught by a cross-eyed geordie. At one point she has a long conversation about everything and nothing with a blacksmith -blind.

Watching this scene, Cliff wondered if this character was intended to reflect the generation scarred by blindness in Klatuua's civilization. Probably, though for some reason it was hard to say.

A savage, heated conflict, impossible to plan for, the staple of any real western, sure enough rolls along. More Apaches -a lithe, rippling war party- ride in force into the edge of the settlement. The townsfolk fight miraculously well through the initial tide of powerful, bronzed warriors, then a couple of relative lulls. Mrs Greenberry fights alongside the two henchmen who so wronged her. Of course, it's at this point that they recognise her. Integrated, she watches -or perhaps it's just her subconscious that watches- for any chance to kill the two men and blame it on the savages.

Always miraculously, the townsfolk start to win. Fate takes care of one of the henchmen -the ginger man- with a belly full of musket charge. The other is felled next to an overturned coach, taking water from a deep gouge to his hip. When he first shoots at Greenberry, she's amazed he misses her.

But now the scene takes a hypnotic turn; quite slowly, and God knows why, Mrs Greenberry walks sideways, lifting foot across foot, until she's fully merged with the blazing sun. Her revolver is aimed but silent. The hunched man continues to fire now and again -missing in a margin that grows and grows.

Never does her crisp accent, somewhere between classic English and a Bostonian lilt, play on the air more gracefully. As the man's bullet pouch runs dry.

"They say dogs get eaten. By the Apaches. Lots of people have a problem with that. I sort of understand it, though. It's pragmatic; if you're going to eat any animals, why not a dog? Because they can wag their tails and smile? Smiling isn't enough. I guess they either have a moral code that accounts for it, or some kind of religion that does. Maybe it started out as just a terse nod between two men about to do something evil and ugly, and the rest of their people slowly, slowly, slowly got used to it. Maybe it's even a little bit greedy...

"But it's not casual greed. It's not gentle, stupid, lazy greed".

Mrs Greenberry's gun wavers not at all as she replaces it in her holster. Some kind of sober, baleful soundtrack starts as she pulls the man's wound together and fastens it with her belt. They walk together through the wrecked bodies and torn up buildings to the heart of town.

Cliff noted that, uncannily, the final image of the film matched 'Unforgiven' almost exactly: the black silhouette of a farm house against a non-lurid sunset. Mrs Greensbury moving stiffly past her washing line to a grave. The slow white captions of the written epilogue seeming incidental; 'Mrs Lieutenant Greensbury lives until 1901...'

He was also keenly aware that none of the films from Klatuua's dimension lasted more than an hour and a half. Perhaps the people had less time to spend watching them. Personally, he didn't mind. There was a problem, though, which Klatuua identified as she drifted free from the sofa, picking up their mugs and just holding them, absent-mindedly; "We watched it a bit too early -maybe we should bolster it with some episodes of 'The Escapee' or 'The Maid'?

And the TV serials -they universally lasted half an hour. All the ad breaks cut out, however? Very punchy, very satisfying.

With their drinks replenished, they watched an episode of The Maid from 1965, a kind of noir-sober retelling of Joan of Arc's various campaigns and adventures across the ruddy Saintonge landscape. Cliff had never been so excited over a TV show since Band of Brothers. Ironically, though, Joan's French soldiers were all played by English men, with The Maid herself a Scandinavian.

The satisfying scrabble game and the TV watching had drawn out the time. Nine O'clock, the very latest Cliff had ever departed the saucer; it crept upon them completely unnoticed.

"Stay the night!", said Klatuua. "Unless there's a special reason why not".

Cliff was mesmerised for a long time, then grew aware of himself. He had no toothbrush, or the Deep Heat necessary to soothe his knees, or his shaving bag for that matter. All of them could be lived without. Memories of perilous nineteen-sixties sleepovers; an uptown girl's bathroom and hastily running her toothpaste over his gums with a fingertip. Whether it was possible to fall in love with any of them; it would have been nice, but still he was brainwashed. A salao prospector in a wide-brimmed hat, wound-up and mesmerised just by the act of sieving water, no matter if there's any gold specks.

Any living space on the saucer was purely ad-hoc. Klatuua's bunk was set on a semi-circular track emerging from an electrical terminal. On the mirror-image bulkhead a foot or so along, just a few catches had to be flipped to slide out a further, ready-made bunk. It was a rough movement, reassuringly so; flat-pack British economy. They yanked and yanked until the edges of the two bunks almost touched.

Under the duvets, that's when the blushing started. Cliff took the initiative and laid his forearm across her shoulder, Klatuua drawing herself close in a movement that was heavy, dynamic.

"Lights, one fourth down to one fifth". The rig above obeyed.

Onto the edge of Cliff's mind, a thousand frivolous-frivolous-important things to say flowed with ease. For a moment, however, he was far too enamoured by Klatuua's blushing. There was no colour and her eyes were not particularly downcast; somehow it was a blush simply from the nimble interplay between her mouth, her tight old cheeks.

"What happens if I sleepwalk and hack away at one of the computer terminals? Could I accidently destroy some British embassies somewhere?"

Said Klatuua in an uncharacteristically soft voice, "I wouldn't worry about it too much. When I first got Thanos, he was a big fan of clambering over the terminals with his huge paws".

Cliff smiled.

Klatuua flickered her eyes. "He caused a few stock market crashes, but what doesn't?"

Cliff kissed her. She blinked like a vintage film star, then clung to his shoulder like a handlebar. She kissed him in turn, butted temples, breathed deeply -and slept.

Carpenter remained awake for a few minutes longer.

Men and women of the modern world; the totality of their lives focused on a persuasion that they're in love. And there's so much self-deception, or else little specks of love in a tidal wave that just -washes over you, washes through you, then on. How could he be sure that what he felt for this woman -this alien freedom fighter, of all things- was true?

Playing in his mind like solitary piano keys was the truth: he imagined those soul-probing eyes and smile-like-the-breeze -they would always soothe him, under any circumstances. Twenty years from now. Or at the end of time. The fact that she was a freedom fighter to end all freedom fighters was just an extra little emphasis that Klatuua was perfect.

He slept incredibly soundly, woke with no dryness in his mouth, and, uncharacteristically, he was completely happy to lie there and do nothing. It was amazing that his arm had remained set across her body all through the night, flailing just a little from her shoulder down onto her smooth midriff. In his eyes: what he took to be the echo of an icy, esoteric future. Soon he realized it was just the rotating mosaic of faces. The pre-possessed faces of everyone in Britain, enemies and friends all swallowed up by foisted responsibility.

Klatuua looked across at him with a vivacious slant in her mouth. Her hair was youthfully disarrayed. The vivaciousness changed from a smile to a frown -as the calamity started. Thundering violence struck at the side of the hull. Cliff's limbs felt perilously vulnerable as he arose from the joined bunks. There was a fear that they'd be broken in mid air.

It seemed clear the army were shelling the saucer -but soon, with an instinct that was truly strange, he knew that wasn't it.

Klatuua's face showed preparation, even as she fought her way up, shoulders and knees drawn tightly together. Admittedly, the barrage wasn't constant -but it didn't once give them a chance to think.

Things went from bad to worse. The reverberation shifted to a tone that suggested a rapid weakening of the metal shell. The entire ship wanted so desperately to drag and shift, manifesting in a hideous, nauseating quake of the air itself.

"They're hitting us with the big guns!"

"No". Through it all, Klatuua sounded thoughtful. "Gort would never allow that".

Cliff's mouth went crazily slack. His mind ricocheted around for any option at all. Surrender?

Klatuua made a dash to one of the smaller consoles and jabbed at the pad in a blessed reflex.

The mosaic screen was the best way of getting a 360 panorama of the saucer's surroundings. The advanced technology, as ever the case with advance technology, was nowhere near as durable as it should be -it took time for the thousands of tiny faces to be replaced by an outside vision. Even when the world was admitted, a few punters remained, superimposed over the insane destruction. A man with an expression of pride that made his jowls look otherwise smaller. An old woman who looked like a Chinese cat. A scarf-wearing, mousey student girl with a back-slanted head, subconsciously daring you to accuse her of being a waste of space.

Hundreds. Their passport-sized images flickering on and off in time with the attack of the monster. And he was a monster after all. Evidently, what the neurotic pundits said was true. The atheists. The liberals, with Waitrose bottled water where their blood should be. Anyone who seeks to set right the ugliness of human nature will always become a corrupted monster.

They were being destroyed, not by the Army, but by Gort himself. His arms were spread wide in childish glee as he stamped on the hull with his vast heel. Simultaneously, thin lashes of energy played out from the lamp atop his head.

Klatuua looked bizarrely youthful as she gasped. She was sprightly.

"We have to go. He'll be through the hull any second. Get the ruc-sac from under the coat rack, get on the transporter platform".

Cliff did as he was told. Gort took another stamp; the entirety of the mosaic screen fell to darkness. He stamped; the hull above their heads buckled in several distinct areas. From the platform, in a dream, Cliff looked on as Klatuua stood hunched over a computer terminal.

"Come on, K! We need to go now!"

"Yes", she turned a little, spoke dryly. "Just a little bit longer".

The buckled areas above them started to glow, expertly haunted by a calm, sober roar. It truly was the end. She'd mistaken the end of their lives for an episode of Mission Impossible. Klatuua explained, "I have to download the neural pulses entering his CPU. I have to know why he's doing this! If they've hacked him!"

"Klatuua Shmi - let's go, now!"

The nightmare breezed, the nightmare expanded and elongated. Finally, the computer beeped a signal that the download was done. The love of his life yanked the pad free from its wires, under her arm, and joined him on the platform.

"Will this thing have enough power to send us on our way?"

"Yes", she said bleakly. The almighty bangs and cracks so desperate to join their conversation.

She set controls on the side of the alcove and everything was done. It was then that Thanos sidled into view.

"Thanos!", she sucked air through her lips in the classic cat-calling shrill. "Get up here!"

Except Thanos, he was as demure as ever. He sat down, twenty feet removed, and stared into their eyes quite nonchalantly.

Klatuua shrilled furiously. Cliff did likewise. The air entering their pierced lips vanished as the transporter effect started to take them. As a parting shot, the cat meowed. The tone was high, as if to say, carefree, '—cowards'.

"My name is Dr Helen Benson".

Benson? No, he was thinking of 'Fenton', the dog, bolting across the grass in pursuit of a wave of placid-looking deer. The GQ-style owner running hotly in turn. Shalla Bal -or the vast subroutine of his mind which he'd previously thought of as Shalla Bal- how it had loved that funny video clip. Watching again and again. The complacent alter ego -Norrin Radd- he'd loved it, too, though he'd never said anything for fear of breaking the spell.

A perfect summation of all post-modern endeavour, though. The dozens of seemingly innocent deer, the desire of the dog to destroy them, the fact that it's a Quixotian dream, the outrage and neuroses that show in the running of the bourgeois owner.

How long had it been since he'd slept? Perhaps he'd never slept. Did his tiredness show in the shape of his featureless silver eyes?

"I'm a morphologist specialising in bioelectrics and tissue regeneration. I'd like very much to make a few small tests on you, medical tests that we think would help the whole world".

The Cosmic Surfer made eye-contact. "I'm sure you would".

"We noticed...", Benson seemed thoughtful, compassionate, lost, "...in Mexico, you were able to cure a cancer patient whose organs had already shut down".

He blinked. Tried to reconcile what she was saying. It was like asking a man about a walk he'd taken through a forest, weeks ago. Asking him about a certain leaf which he'd tilted to the sky, rather than crushed under foot.

"I'd like, if you agree, to put gold-leaf planckometer on your skin, and get an analysis of the -energy- you produce as you heal things".

Now the Surfer looked at Susan, sitting directly to his right in the pose of some easy-going princess. A wild hatred of being the centre of attention powered up through his body. Time itself felt the same way. Natural daylight, of sorts, burned in a cool void around the high ceiling. Susan had explained that they were at one of the far edges of the Baxter Base, beneath a wooded copse with rocks that were actually heavily camouflaged skylights. Add to that a hasty finish of varnished mahogany and the room was an off-beat lair of all time.

The atmosphere between them - he would have that explained. He knew that he was terse. Dr Benson was full of hope and empathy. Susan... was a being of pure longing, romanticism. Their conflicting interests were writhing, yet there was a quick beat to the conversation; no despondency in the silence, no tension. In the old days, he would have daydreamed that they were characters in a film being watched closely by Shalla Bal. Now Shalla Bal herself was only a character. Everyone, truly, was encased in oblivion.

"Doctor, I am a creature beyond life and death. Your concern over these matters is to be expected. But I'd remind you once again that I am living proof that there are things more agonising than physical pain and mortality".

Dr Benson simpered, "But our close-feed satellites have shown you helping people. You helped an injured antelope in Africa".

Explained the Surfer, "I showed kindness, on a whim, where I could just as easily have destroyed the entire country. Content yourself that I am helping you repel Galactus. And myself. To that end, Doctor Benson, you would be better advised to fall in with Professor Richards in the production of the missiles which will destroy me across the dimensions".

Said Benson, defensively, "I'm a doctor of medicine. I've got no experience in the dimension-crossing technology. And when it comes to designing a machine to kill someone -I just can't go along with that".

Stalemate. Increasingly, the Surfer swung his head around in a dispossessed lull. Taking in Susan's starched blue shirt and her breasts. He stared at them intensely, and it was terrible -once there'd been stigma in a man staring at a beautiful woman's breasts. The man's eyes might be cast in darkness, and he might look insane. But the Surfer was now on the far edge of that insanity, numb with it.

Perhaps this was sex itself, traditionally ugly and shameful, being admitted into the world of halflife gods. It was possible he needed to take Susan just in order to carry on being a conscious entity. He imagined killing everyone in the Baxter Base except this tortured, romantic woman. Lifting up her thin waist onto the table and hoisting her legs around his stupidly lithe torso. And the way the marble-like texture of the inside of his mouth was slowly driving him mad -the cure, surely, was to give his tongue a home in that streamline jaw.

"The man in the street has a dog or a cat", said Susan. "But they still eat pigs, which are just as intelligent. No one has the ability to think straight when it comes to appreciating that other things are actually alive. Only a fool would think we can all love each other. But just the idea of it -that has to be worth something".

A fair point. When he looked at her, though, her eyes were expressing further ideas, far off the radar, detectable only through their secret connection. Because Susan ever understood it was the end of the world.

"Help us. When you're a powerful creature, it probably feels frivolous. But help us".

The Surfer cast his eyes straight ahead. "Begin".

Rolling her lips, Dr Benson moved to a heavy aluminium locker and took out pre-sealed bags containing zig-zagging cables and skin pads. These she connected to his temples, his chest, the palms of his hand. Incongruity prevailed; this wasn't like a TV polygraph or EEG -the ends of the trunks were gnarled fibres belonging to something fearsome like a power station reactor.

An intercom was buzzed and some geeks delivered a sterile container, the mice within laid flat, highlighting easy heartbeats through luxurious-silky fur.

"At the moment they're sedated, but we have a number of compounds that we can inject, shutting down their organs one by one", Benson hesitated like the soulful woman she was. The clips on the syringe case sounded dully, nonetheless mesmerising everyone. "Shall we begin?"

The Cosmic Surfer stared at the three tiny creatures. Their mouths were perfectly triangular. In their sleep, they looked -as contemplative as any human.

"This is wrong", he said flatly.

"Experimentation on animals is always unpleasant. But what we're doing here could drive off so many deaths. So much suffering could end".

"No", said the Surfer keenly. "Perhaps it is necessary, from your point of view. But you people spend so much time embedded in thoughtlessness, it's hard to believe you understand the idea of commitment, redress, the chipping away of your souls. Most of the scientists who carry out animal testing are embittered to the suffering they cause, and if you asked their reasoning, sooner or later they'd say they are doing it to protect their children's futures. Do you have any children, Dr Benson?"

The scientist said, "My step son Jacob is five".

"And if he grew ill, and could only be cured through a certain treatment derived from, say, a monkey having electrodes drilled into his head, would you show him a video of this the day before he went to surgery?"

Said Benson, in a hushed voice, "Of course not".

"Why not?"

"To protect him. There'd be no need for him to see".

"No need? You mean, it's safe to assume that someone somewhere must have felt empathy for the monkey? Someone somewhere must have steeled himself to the shrieking, and had nightmares, and it's alright to take that in lieu of your own feelings?"

The scientist dipped her eyes, upset and angry.

Throughout the argument, as it grew crazy-bitter, Susan's eyes remained bravely fixed on his impassive face. As she spoke it was like a cool breeze.

"We need coffee. We humans. Dr Benson, would you go and get us some?"

The normally-gentle doctor was still bitter. "It's milk and two sweetners isn't it?"

"Thankyou", Susan smiled.

When Benson was out of earshot, she slipped to her feet, moved to the chamber door and bolted it. Out in the corridor, the armed guards either side looked surly, distrustful, but evidently she didn't care.

She revealed her thinking. Her voice: only partially conspiratorial. "You need to do these tests as a decoy. Tell Benson you feel it's your responsibility to both kill the mice and then resurrect them. But what you'll actually be doing is making everyone in the base unconscious. Afterwards, you can say it was an accident. Could you do that?"

"I don't know", the Surfer was troubled. "To what end?"

"You have to see what's at the heart of the base. You have to do it secretly, then come back to me, because there's something else I've got to show you afterwards".

"Explain", said the Surfer.

"Firstly -the others. The ones that came before you. I don't know what to call them. They served Galactus before we trapped them here".

His mouth opened -a sliver. His eyes slanted, intrigued to the end of the world.

Susan explained, "You understand these things. You've got a sensitivity. You understand what's going on here, and there's a reason for that".

"I am just -a piece? One of many?"

"No!", she was soulful. "It's about coincidences. There's -something going on. Something big, to do with -life and death. But I can't lead you. You have to learn for yourself. This country, our situation has evolved so-

"When we first captured them, while Reed and I were only small pieces of the program, the country was in the middle of a huge depression. The government never really told the public how hopeless it was. Some people knew. Others wouldn't ever believe it. A lot of politicians didn't believe it, and the problem went round and round. But the people who were in-the-know were starting to get desperate. Banks were failing from day to day. Quantative easing was sinking us. We needed to save billions of pounds a day just to break even.

"And our deliverance fell from the sky. We knew about Galactus from the Tiengemeten meteor. We knew that his -henchmen?—brought all the destruction you can possibly imagine. When Terrax fell unconscious to the Earth, we quickly bonded him in chains of vanadinite-k. Then, when the scientists started running tests on him, they found he emitted an energy that was -two dozen terrawatts. The total amount of terrawatts consumed by the human race per year -barely 16 or 17!

"Morally, we felt we had the right to harness this energy. They just thought –well, he would destroy all life in this country, so we have a right to imprison him and syphon his energy.

"All the power stations in this country have been deactivated for years now. They mime that they're still running, but that's just for appearances, I suppose. They invented fracking to upset the hippies and the NIMBYies, as a small evil to disguise a bigger evil. So we've saved billions of pounds. We're just afloat.

"The problem was, originally Terrax was kept in a modified RAF base. They needed to move him somewhere he could be connected to the National Grid. The only real option was this place. We lied to you. I lied to, didn't I? The touch-sensitive tiles at our feet aren't a security system. We made them especially to absorb the energy of Galactus' heralds. With every step you take, you're supplying us with enough electricity to power a dozen cities.

"We're being tested. All of us. I'm not religious. I don't enjoy thinking about it at all! But there's no other way of looking at it. In our desperation, we brought him here and imprisoned him. Bad enough! But there's another thing. A few metres beyond Terrax's prison cell is a thousand kiloton neptuniuma silo, active. The missile -unknown the public, Britain's replacement for all our other nuclear subs and missiles -just sitting there!

"We're now so dependent on his energy output, Terrax can't be moved. And the neptuniuma missile silo is the only International Deterrent our country can afford any more, so the government refuses to shut it down. What kind of situation is that? What if he ever breaks loose? It's an impossible situation, isn't it? How did it come to this? We're being tested by God. It's the only answer".

The dark blue sunrays blurred in through the weird skylights, illuminating them both. Susan's whole life had been about skirting deep, soulful daydreams. Now she didn't pause for thought, saying only, in a voice that was almost bright, "Who was it that said, 'Hell is other people'?"

"Jean Paul Sartre", said the Surfer, neglecting to mention that he hated all Sartre quotes, even if they were wise. Alan Harper had 'Being and Nothingness' on his shelf, and Norrin Radd had borrowed it one day after one their sessions. You don't dwell on a man's small, pop-culture-friendly quotations when they've written a whole book that's so profound, so frightening.

Susan continued, "They're hell. We don't even notice. And we cling to the idea that they might also be heaven. But it seems unlikely. These creatures that fell from the sky. I'm not afraid to call them angels or demons. If you don't want to talk to me about Shalla Bal, your relationship with Galactus, that's fine. But I believe that the alien creatures we have here are no different to anyone. We're all the heralds of Galactus, and we're pretty foolish not to recognise that.

"I really want to talk to Terrax, but he's been silent forever. We only know his name from hearing Galactus giving him orders in Tiengemeten surveillance.

"He just stares and stares.

"You have to talk to him for me. I just want to know why they serve Galactus. Why they carry on living".

"Yes", said the Surfer, mouth slanted. He wanted to laugh. Shalla Bal. It was such an elaborate piece of bait, the way Galactus had tricked him with love, with a romance he was sure would be eternal. Could he have used the very same technique with all his henchman, or had he created other motivations, unique to them? Perhaps sometimes he exploited the love of a parent, a child, or a god?

Was there an art to it?

He didn't want to be fascinated by it, but he was.

"I will talk to this Terrax and find out what I can".

Susan nodded and was poignant. "And! He might tell you about his treatment by us. Some bad things. It will be true. But all I ask; I want to understand. Afterwards, come back to me. There's a last thing I have to tell you. It may be the most important thing of all".

Kept alive through revelations, then. Not least the way her swept-back hair stayed groomed at her temples even as she scraped it with her fingernails. After a moment or two, he looked up at the tiny panel of black glass on the door, pensive that Benson would soon turn the aluminium handle to try and get back in.

"I imagine my powers do extend to reducing a whole base to unconsciousness. But it's something I haven't done before, and can't imagine doing. What if should kill you all?"

Said Susan, coolly, as she unlocked the door, "You can say, 'what if' about anything".

Benson soon arrived and, clear-faced like a selfless woodland imp, dealt out the steaming coffees.

Anticipation roared in his head; it must have been worse for Susan, but then, she was more pragmatic. The mice scurried around their transparent plate inlaid with sensors and microchips, their heads cramped back in some kind of pint-size sixth sense. Tiny white creatures more prophetic than man. Distraction came at one point, pulling his gaze to the solid steel wall beyond. Back to Susan, her eyes urging him that their conspiracy be put into breathless action. Soft and reassuring as ever, even in such a desperate stand-off.

He took one last sweep of her face before committing his energy. Dr Benson, curse her, was sitting with her forearms beneath the table, meaning there was every danger she'd fall forward and bash her head. He reached out to support her, even as his silver jaw clenched through the savage conjuration of pure will.

It was done anyway. He closed his eyes. He hadn't heard Susan hit the table top; when he turned, achingly, to examine her, he found that her breathing was as calm as ever. In her day-to-day life she was gentle. Even in falling unconscious she was gentle, with her head set reassuringly straight across her forearms -not in the least inclined towards him because she'd had absolute trust. He clenched his jaw just a little while he sent forth his will to fuse every surveillance camera within a mile.

To Terrax, then. The small chair was curiously silent as his calves edged it backwards. Silent also, his board tilted free from the wall and spaceshipped its way beneath his arm. There was no pausing now, no thoughtfulness, despite his strides shifting from long to small in a measure of ugly determination. Through the wall. The chamber beyond was slighter darker, as if to accommodate the personalities of the two kevlar-wearing soldiers who'd fallen unconscious in their criss-crossing patrol of the floor. Cool, yellow light is for pansies; agreed. More narrow, forbidding walkways. More soldiers. What made him nervous was the way a sophisticated vent was bleeding a refinery-load of coolant steam. Something to do with the nuclear silo or Terrax's prison?

He ghosted his way through a tall angular walkway, which gave way to a painted-iron hemisphere of a door, broad, totally at odds with the design of rest of the base. At his feet was a soldier, clumped up in black kevlar and with only his mouth showing beneath a huge black helmet, cyclist shades, plump collar. His unconscious face was bullish. Mouth: prim. He'd been guarding the most frightening thing in the world, and unconsciousness was a crazy relief -so it seemed, so the Surfer's instinct told him.

He passed through the thick metal and found himself in a wholly monstrous room. The prisoner looked very much like Henry VIII, but at a plus 1.5 scale, with grey skin and Mongol warlord's hairstyle. His containment unit was partially built into the floor, at an angle, with huge cables to syphon his power. His head was free to move.

"Brother. I knew The Master would send someone to help us".

"How do you know", asked the Surfer, "that we come from the same place?"

"Where else could you have come from?", and Terrax's eyes twinkled in a kind of brute charisma.

The Surfer wondered; the man had a Slavic, Eastern European voice, but his English thought processes were smooth -he'd either been speaking it all his life, or else the accent was affected. Now, why?

"Release me from this bondage. I have to find out what these petty vampires have done with my axe".

The Surfer was concise now, "Galactus has spoken of his doubts over you".

"Doubts?", the warlord was genuinely confused, eerily so.

"He believes your drive to serve him is failing".

"My drive to...?", Terrax was bamboozled, before he started to laugh, heartily. "Ah! I see what's happening here! You are one of the sensitive ones! One of the romantics!"

Pacing, the Surfer kept his eyes relatively clear. Just a little curiosity, there beneath the biting blue floodlights. In difference to the rest of his body being in a cocoon of chains, Terrax moved his head backwards and forwards quite easily. In an instant he was sober.

"My drive to do the will of Galactus is not in question. To kill? To maim the little children wholesale? Do you know what they called me before I came to The Master? 'Terrax the Tamer'. My vocation, from the time I woke in the morning to the moment I dropped from the exhaustion, was to kill. My employer Mr Carluccio, a man I hated, used me exclusively to amass all the meat for his restaurant. With delight, I would travel the towns and the suburbs -killing, killing, killing- cats, birds, foxes, deer, lambs. Dogs -lots of dogs. My delight at killing was perfect. I love the caving of the skull and the disappearance of life through pain. I love it as a drummer loves to strike his taigu. But of course, silver man, you don't understand this... because you are one of the romantics".

Said the Surfer, "I am not as romantic as you think".

Laughing again, "Galactus only uses two types of people. Romantics and those who delight in killing. Why? I do not know the reason. You romantics are so weak. You break and buckle almost instantly".

"'Terrax the Tamer'. It's you who are trapped between a foot of chains".

Except the monster was unoffended. "You want to see the fate of each romantic that gets taken by Galactus? My friend, simply walk through the next wall in that magic little way of yours. Her name was Frankie Raye. In her life before The Master, she was an incurable romantic, falling in love again and again and each time having her heart broken".

He did as he was bid. I am a guard, indulging a prisoner through bonhomie. I am ever less than one man in hell being led by another. He did his best to believe this as he proceeded, the thick, waxy metal feeling cold even as it was intangible.

On the other side, for a second, his eyes were unseeing, hysterically blind or psychosomatically blurred. Yes -of course- this Frankie Raye would have had something truly horrific done to her.

On the energy-absorbing platform was a beautiful, semi-voluptuous girl. But -at first he thought it was a statue that had been shattered into a thousand pieces. There was a large section of waist and torso, incomplete from a lower rib, a shoulder, head and arm. The limbs were a hideous archeological puzzle. Incredibly, many pieces were just tiny shards reminiscent of balsa shavings. Her head itself; cleaved and shattered beyond repair. Even the biggest piece was no more substantial than the Phantom of the Opera mask.

And all of her glowed. Where his motif was frictionless silver, it was clear that Frankie Raye had been a creature of luminous, living amber. Sometimes, from some mysterious cosmic-chemical reaction, a current of fire licked up from beneath the skin. Like the sun itself trapped in amber.

That an aloof silver alien can still be made to jump; the Cosmic Surfer was already mourning her as he passed within a square foot, within range -as a large, fiery eye came to life, swiveled up to examine him for any remote sign of hope. Frankie Raye, then - as alive as anyone.

You spend your whole life absorbing bacteria, so by the time you're an old man, you never need to vomit again. Cliff now rejected that, as suddenly every fibre of his being was concentrating on holding his body absolutely still for fear of fainting and vomiting himself straight down to hell. What about that monk-like forward inclination of his head, too? His mind was not in his brain but in a little section of the skull itself, up around his temples. Where the mind should be -space-time dizziness, warped across surging gravity and a black hole sun.

His stomach settled. His mind became a glorious thing once more, full of blinking, breathing, the sight of Klatuua holding her arms up slightly. They were outside, in the open countryside, by some big yellow gorse.

"Are - you alright?"

Mr Positive ever, "Near enough!"

"We'll feel disori-entated - slightly", she explained. Her language centre had forgotten how to measure the beats in a sentence, though it was just a novelty. "For a while. When the transporter - engages in emergency -protocols, it - hides our patterns on a descending power - wave. So their energy tracking stations - can't plot - our destination. It fizzes our brains!"

Cliff righted his barrel belly, with all the time in the world. He ran his gaze along the grass crests and the adjacent sketchy wood. "Who do I sue?"

She laughed. They limbered their bodies in a springy motion before rushing together in a hug. He felt her body quake and somehow sensed her mouth gaping, as if to say... 'oh!'

"We need to -"

Said Cliff quietly, "We need to take a moment".

Klatuua's breathing was still deep in anguish, but rapidly getting better. They headed beneath the trees in a reasonably unhurried stride, Cliff, obviously, taking the burden of the oversized bag.

He said, "It's hard to believe. I saw - forests and mountains. Foothills with country lanes. Lakes, with the sun hitting them like a torch beam from across a room. All flowing past so quickly beneath me. We must've been a mile up".

"What you saw-", Klatuua palmed his chest, "It's a psychological thing. No one understands it, quite. Your subconscious somehow knows it's moving a vast distance and gets images to paint a picture".

"It was amazing. What did you see?"

She smiled bleakly. "Nothing!"

They spent a small time steeling themselves beneath the clumpy-tall tree trunks. The land was deeply uneven, swollen through weed-strewn gulleys; there was no sense of which direction to travel in.

Klatuua studied a handheld computer, still Cliff knew at once she was doing something other than finding a route. "There's no satellites positioning us. We made a clean break".

"I always wanted to be The Fugitive", said Cliff thoughtfully.

"We have a place to go. Shortly there'll be a crest; over that we'll see my safehouse. A base of operations where we can take stock".

He wondered if this was fighting talk or just a statement of fact. Through the scrub-walled edge, he followed along with a fair spring in his step, even if his head was downcast, baggy-eyed, blinky. Soon there was a neat vantage point between a groomed hedgerow and an oakwood tree. There was a sharp valley-side with a distant strip of coast, street lights that somehow seemed even fiercer in lukewarm twilight than midnight black.

The safehouse, he was surprised to learn, was a converted farm-loft at the end of a dirt track, directly along from a sharp z-road turn. Klatuua held her body rigidly against the gate and observed the place through a futuristic scope.

When she spoke next, she sounded jaded. "Do you hear anything by way of helicopters?"

"No", he decided.

"I chose this place because it's so quiet. And open".

"It's tranquil", he pointed out.

"I'm sorry I involved you in this. I got complacent. I never thought anything like this could happen".

Cliff thought for a moment. He looked down at the night-discoloured grass. Both his mum and dad's funerals had been in winter, well inside twilight. For some cosmic reason, we all come together as the sun vanishes in the ink. "I was with you from day one. The only difference is, now I'm physically with you. What town is that over there?"

"Caernarvon. I think it's where your Prince Charles was coronated isn't it?"

He shrugged his lip. "I think it was, yeah".

"Cliff-", she produced a bitter-looking smile, still playful, in a way. "It's a young person's game, and believe me, not something I do lightly, but- I've started to love you".

"Well, thanks. I wanted to tell you first". They touched their dry lips. She blinked, as someone with a headache blinks at receiving co-codomol. As he dragged open the gate, he swelled his cheeks, "As to being young -I've noticed, no one in this country is young any more, are they? Youth was always about irresponsibility. But when everyone is irresponsible, there's just nothing. I wish it was otherwise, though".

She waited for him to close the gate and draw level before she said, "I sometimes think wishing is all that's expected of us. Actually, I'm sure".

"That -and taxes", he said, good-humoured.

Into the luxurious valley side, grey and magnificent all of it. The best mountains on the continent lurked just around a corner. The small trees, where they moved at all, made gentle 'so-so' gestures. Horses looked happy in bulbous, scrub-strewn fields, too. Klatuua explained that their neighbours were mostly farmers, plus the families of long-distance haulage drivers, motorpool mechanics, welders. People she felt instinctively she could trust. Even so, as she stooped on various high points to hide surveillance sensors, she was conspicuously un-blinking, able to move and exist without the tyranny of lungs, blood vessels, oxygen.

Never without nerves, however; when a blackbird made a vertical dive alongside, she visibly jumped. Cliff decided it was necessary to hug her again just as soon as they stepped across the hideout threshold. Tell her everything was going to be alright, just because he could feel it.

In actuality, a large amount of Klatuua's trademark determination shone through as they stepped through the heavy mahogany door. She motioned him to the kitchen and storeroom, suggesting steaming cups of tea.

"Very English", he said. "All this stuff. What do you call those people who stockpile stuff to be ready for revolutions and the end of the world? There's a specific name for them. Survivalists?"

"Wise people". She was only partly humourous.

The kettle was shop-new, therefore with a steel interior the texture of a Tag Heuer bezel, and it would have made him feel weird to use it, if only his mind wasn't already full of novelty, nuance, excitement. As he emerged from the tunefully creaky archway, he stared at Klatuua's shoulders as she pored over her computer logs on the pleasant wooden table. From some musty-fresh airing cupboard, she'd found a black woollen shawl. Over-the-hill's traditional garb. But not for her. Her thin shoulders made the blackness sparkle before his selfless eyes.

It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls. Of independent means.

Indulgent to a fault, he sat close beside her, waiting for her overwhelmed smiles and overwhelmed gasps to level out. Smiling, bitterly, "This is my fault".

"How so?".

He asked this as if it was viz-a-viz nothing.

"I never thought anything like this could happen".

"Well, you can say that about anything". Cliff played with his thighs and smiled.

Klatuua said ,"I forgot about destiny", now staring into his eyes through some kind of defeated belief structure. Sharp -sharply beautiful.

It poured sweet and clear, it was a very good year.

They blinked and relaxed a little. Crisp yellow studio lights making all the difference. Cliff thought, then said, "So start at the beginning".

"They've found a way to disable Gort's higher-brain functions, which is moderately clever. They've deleted his consciousness. What's -dangerous, is the fact that they've discovered his -a computer expert would call them 'command codes', but that isn't quite right.

"I told you about the plague which my people suffered. But the word 'plague' is... very, very artful. It was man-made. People in my world have always had the gift of foresight, able to anticipate the most pressing problems before they happen. No sooner had the internal combustion engine been invented than we knew that cars would be owned by everyone, and any kind of industrial power grid would be horribly dependent. Drilling for fossil fuels would only really be an option for a hundred years or so. We needed a way to make oil from nothing. A reasonable desire?"

Cliff listened, fascinated. "Very reasonable. You don't need to tell me it's reasonable".

"A Russian botanist discovered a new kind of plant in the Taiga foothills. A distant relative of the venus flytrap. In its ileum cells, it produced high quantities of black phospholipid, which can be distilled into motor fuel and fertilizer. And it was fast growing. Even without that, though, it was a very sophisticated organism. 'Sophisticated', doesn't do it justice. Forget the Bombadeer Beetle for being a miracle of evolution. They can ambulate along the ground on stubs. And that's just the start. The way this plant reproduced -it made these crystalline spores. To hold them on your finger tip, you'd think they were tiny diamonds, yet with almost no weight, like dandelion seeds. Their purpose was two-fold. They'd float through the air until they connected with a suitably rich patch of soil. But while they were still in the sky, they'd screen past the sun and refract the light in such a way that small animals would be mesmerised, hypnotised, in the end completely blinded. Anything between the size of a field mouse and a squirrel, but birds a speciality. When your people had that song, 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' -my people had such a collective shudder.

"They're carnivores. From between their petals, a long, stickly tendril can be unfurled -then, working in conjunction with the nodes in their trunks, they actually feed on the flesh of the wild creatures they've brought low.

"Working with the Russians, we started to genetically modify these plants. Do you see where the story is going, Mr Carpenter?"

"Yes", Cliff breathed.

"We genetically modified them to get the optimum farming yield. Where naturally they were no more than a foot tall, we fed them growth compound until they were seven, eight –sometimes ten feet tall. So –so- confident and lacking in imagination that we kept them en masse in flat, open prairies, never considering that if even one of them failed to have their spore pods neutralised, an unstoppable chain reaction would begin. Imagine it –just one tiny glint in the sky. Those first few victims in the land surrounding the farm probably didn't even mean to look up. After all, it's a reflex. Something shiny in a blue sky. Just like your capitalism.

"Survivors, beating their way to the sanctuary on the Isle of Wight, spoke of a landscape alive with whips –the lashing of the urticating stringers, formidable even for the sighted. Yet everyone pulled together to protect the blind.

"Human nature. It's easy to think of it as nothing more than greed. And indeed it is. Assuming there isn't a story that links us all. My Grandmother risked everything to protect my Grandfather. They were everything to each other, but never once did they care about owning a house, or taking high-powered jobs. It was enough simply to have survived – the Triffids.

"Trying to imagine the ratio by which they outnumbered humans is a moot point. Because after barely three months, any kind of rural outland was nothing but Triffids. Everyone on mainland England was killed. I never saw the plague myself, except in photos, but I always thought there was something… insulting about the idea of God or fate having gone through the novelty of making a walking plant to destroy us –and then letting them bed down again, like ordinary plants. As if any inanimate object could come alive, at any time, just to mock human consciousness.

"But we prevailed. There was no glory, no bombastic national gusto. Our scientists developed quite a few weapons. Special goggles that nullified the effect of the spores. Low-frequency pulse emitters that could be spiked into the ground to confuse the Triffids' hunting abilities. They also discovered an industrial herbicide which we mass produced, fitted to the fighters from our remaining aircraft carrier, and all the Hercules that had made it to the island. We also fitted it to high-powered spray guns, back-mounted like flamethrowers.

"Tip-toeing out in small guerrilla strike teams, becoming marauders, becoming armies, slowly we re-took Britain".

Cliff nodded, proud and energised just by hearing the story. Why wasn't there even a spark of it in Klatuua's eyes? He realised – 'War is Hell'. In his world, people often said it, but no one truly believed it. They equated fighting with honour.

He thought about it as she spoke.

All of life is a tumbling together of things that are cheap. Cheap Thing A seeks to conquer Cheap Thing B. Cheap Thing B fights back, shouting, 'I am not cheap!'

But of course, it is. Either rise up against tyranny or don't, but either way, your willingness to fight has nothing to do with your general right to exist.

"I was born into the first generation that repopulated England. I had a warm, happy childhood. But for our society, as with your World Wars merging into the Cold War, merging into the War Against Terror, new problems arose. It's as if -the Triffids made us inherently hard-working and humble, and so the evolution of the multiverse took advantage of that by sending down the Budrys meteor. Through which we found a way to travel to parallel Britains, saving them just in the nick of time before capitalism destroyed them. That's the way we looked at it. Is that wrong?"

Cliff -hadn't been prepared for such a question. Still he spoke from the heart, "No, I don't think so".

Klatuua blinked. She drank her tea in an easy motion. "It is a little bit wrong. No one likes being told what to do even when they're having their lives saved. Maybe especially when they're having their lives saved. And the people doing the telling just get hated for it. We knew at once that we needed to be wise and fair as never before. To that end, we devised Gort, the Ultimate Nullifier, the ultimatum.

"Still there were problems. Namely, technology. Any kind of technology, no matter how clever or advanced, can be hacked into and subverted. You've seen it throughout your own history, Cliff! The Giza Deathstar. The Enigma Machine. the HFT Algorate. We could hardly send Gort across to deliver the ultimatum knowing that -Professor Frink or the like would merely tap into his brain and turn the Ultimate Nullifier back on Iran.

"We thought about the Triffids. In each and every dimension, they're there, waiting to be discovered. In each and every dimension, people will believe they're the answer to solving the world's energy crisis. In each and every dimension, though, they'll have just as little hope of controlling them. They're the ultimate pandora's box, as direct a route to the apocalypse as there can ever be.

"One of the many amazing things about the Triffids is that they have, not exactly a language, not exactly a radar or GPS, but a perfect marriage of the two. The tone and pitch of the clicks they make are a shared map of the environment, complete with an identification of their enemies and their prey. Within that mind, there are only a few basic commands: 'move', 'stop', 'feed', 'destroy'... 'destroy everything'. It was all mysterious and divine, because... the language of the Triffids is one of those rare encodings of information it's impossible for a computer to replicate. Just like the human voice. You can electronically reproduce words, but with the right delicacy, the right nuance, to the point where you'd be happy to close your eyes and take orders from it?

"And our -seamless lateral thinking led us to consider: what if we made Gort's higher brain functions -his consciousness- highly resistant to tampering, so that at the precise moment one of your spod scientists hacks into it, it automatically wipes, never to return?

"In our wisdom, we gave Gort a back-up consciousness. Something simpler. The mind of a Triffid. Our government and our royal family decided it would be taking a last resort -and turning it into a win-win. The thinking was, the only way someone could hack into him was if they'd been breeding Triffids and recording their chatter. And if that happened, it would already be too late. They can't be tamed. They can't be held captive. Britain would be destroyed, either by the Ultimate Nullifier or by the Triffids, but either way, the cause of it would still be the stupid desperation of the natives, not us. I -"

She shook her head, caught up in the audacity of the huge political thinking. Always. Flipping end-to-end, she then looked at him and smiled brightly. "I've only taken three mouthfuls of this tea and already I need a wee".

Leaving Cliff to stare through the narrow patio doors at the dark estuary. It glimmered, even with so few lights out towards the sea-end. The lighthouse -inadequate. Fairly easily you could become preoccupied -there were globular yellow streetlights poking clear from trenches of oakwood trees, neither protected by the landscape or properly swallowed up. Pretty. A kind of freedom in the turquoise gloaming -and it made no difference whether you were meandering along an isolated grass bay or beneath the walls of the castle. The shanty caravan site or the deeply private farmhouses.

"It's times like these when you retreat back inside yourself", she said. "What's your earliest memory?"

As Cliff smiled to himself, the unexpected force felt like being rear-ended in a car. "I must have been very, very young, but I remember my Grandad showing me the tomatoes in his greenhouse. They were such a bright shade of red. You know, like it was the first time I'd ever seen 'red'! And it didn't occur to me that they were vegetables, there to be picked and eaten!"

They spoke for some time about Cliff's long-dead grandparents. Their farmhouse existed to this day, the greenhouses still standing -but just knowing it all belonged to someone else now made it seem utterly different. In the late thirties, the radio singer Evelyn Hoey had crashed her car at the end of the plantation, and that was just about all Cliff thought of whenever he drove past. Hauled out by a farmer, she'd been completely uninjured apparently.

"And what's your earliest memory?", Cliff asked of Klatuua.

The refracted light from the double glazing showed up as spidery white strips against deep black. Klatuua jutted her head and peered innocuously. "I remember being a placid little girl. It's funny, too; I remember thinking my mum and dad had the answer to everything. Everything. I don't think I was gullible, yet -

"I asked my dad, how long would it take me to grow as tall as him? He said, forty years. He said, standing on his tip-toes and slanting his fingers nine feet or so in the air, 'Then you grow a little bit more, and a little bit more. As high as a tall tree. As high as Big Ben'.

"'But how come you never see these giant people?', I asked him.

"'Once you get to the size of the Empire State Building', he said, all slate-faced, 'then you go to live on the moon'.

"Funny how I remember that. Funny how, so often, I'd picture in my mind a group of giants living among the craters, their size having made them -solemn, mysterious".

Cliff hugged her warmly. The silence was miraculous. Happy, even. So he pushed his luck ever forward.

"What a lot of nonsense, eh? People. For anyone else, they'd be tempted to retire and just leave them all to it. So Gort is -brain dead- and they're clumsily making him do these things. You've got a computer here -is there no way we could make him self-destruct like the saucer?"

"No". Her voice was smooth-croaky, smooth-croaky. "No man alive can kill Gort. But in the bag, I've got an emergency site-to-site transporter node. It's got just enough power to take the wearer up into Gort's head, so they can start using the manual controls. But only once they're within a two hundred metre range. The army will make it all but impossible to get so close. But then -life often gets impossible".

He waited for her to continue. She brushed the side of her fingers against his forearm. Little things like that. Staring at their reflection in the black windows, so much like a planetarium where there were faint outlines around the stars to highlight constellations. Perseus. Medusa. The Kraken.

From that tough-teflon sofa, she was never more resolute. "The Ultimatum is an ugly thing. It always has been. But at least now I'm truly connected with it. We all will be. I intend to re-take Gort. But for that, we'll need to incite a revolution the old fashioned way. Tomorrow we raise an army. By how many the enemy outnumber us, I can't imagine. Lots of us will die. But God help us, it's the only way forward. It's the only way for us and the country to live".

Google Earth. He used to play with it on the sofa as she whittled down her statues (the phantom, circling them, eyeing them up like an enemy). It was such a marvellous invention, he felt he could never get bored of it. A god-like promise through freedom of scale, crystal-sharp landmass from the eye of some sober, reassuringly-nosey diety.

He hung above the continent of Eurasia. At this time, he hated thoughts, hated thinking. A deep train of contemplation, oozing up from nowhere; being harassed by a starving man who's too stupid even to feel desperate.

Nevertheless, he thought of the 'Small Earth Effect', the existential phenomenon reported by astronauts looking down on Earth. Even the most pragmatic, unsentimental ones told of a profound fear, that all political thinking is an illusion, that society itself is too big a concept for so small a world. The human character is nothing; no archetypes. Just a single feeling. Desperation.

The Cosmic Surfer stared down at the mottled grey crust, with could equally be city blocks, inhospitable mountain sides, the higgledy foliage of a desert. He longed to suddenly lose his power and his board, falling at speed to his death. The influx of air into his pallet - would it feel like laughter?

In time, this reverie was shut down by the sight of Galactus, staring up at him from a position several hundred feet below. His expression was largely ambient, though there was also a touch of the parent staring upwards as his toddler makes his first ascent of the adult slide in the rec.

He slid his board down to join him.

"Hello, Master".

"And so", the giant frowned, "all your conspiring with the humans has come to nothing".

"Yes", the Surfer admitted. "I asked that they kill me. That they kill me through all the dimensions we would travel to. But they took advantage of my good nature. They would exploit me as a natural resource".

Galactus gulped out an ugly smile. "All your conspiring with the humans having come to nothing".

"You already said that, Master", the Surfer coolly pointed out.

The colossal triangular horns pulled sharply as Galactus turned his head to stare, not exactly at the curve of the Earth, or space, but the conceptual horizon made of blue haze, black, oblivion.

"Are you surprised by this?"

Again the Surfer was honest, "Only slightly".

"The humans are greed incarnate", said his master dully.

"Is that why you hate them so? Seek to destroy them en masse?"

Galactus shrugged his heavy lower lip. "To think of it as mere hatred is to do us a disservice, Silver Surfer. More than anything, it's an experiment. If you're truly alive, you accrue hatred quite naturally. Why? And what would happen if you sated yourself? Would you then become an angel? But then, an impassable dichotomy -what kind of angel could ever condone indulging in hate?"

From nowhere, the Surfer felt inspiration. "Perhaps I have a more elegant solution. Could you split me into two, Master? Make a copy of me? I hate myself more than anything in the world. I could kill myself. Perhaps in my dying moments, and as my other self stood tall, vindicated, you would see some form of answer?"

Except Galactus now surprised him, "You don't hate yourself. You only think you do. What you feel is self-pity. This is useless to me. Suppose I let you strangle yourself? You might find it satisfying. But at the last minute, as you the victim started to fade out, and you the killer felt increasing amounts of vindication -you would imagine you're being watched by a housewife. By an academic who works behind a desk, as lazy and conceited as can be. You need to admit to yourself, Silver Surfer, at the earliest opportunity: you hate the world of men. You hate what has become of consciousness".

The rippling pseudo-wind of the higher atmosphere struck up, yet another meaningless phantom, though quaint. It braced them both.

All of it was true. The Surfer imagined strangling himself, and then crying, and in his last moment looking up and seeing Lilly Allen or Zoe Ball staring at him as if he was completely mindless.

He blinked. He noted that he was breathing, or seemed to be -but it was surely psychosomatic, their being on the extreme edge of outer space. The illusion of oxygen, the easiest and most comfortable thing in the world, there for no real reason. Just as Shalla Bal had been there, for no other reason than as a stupid little reflex.

"The humans have a means of observing us as we spread our destruction among the dimensions. They showed me images of all your previous envoys. We are all disposable. There is nothing special about me. And I feel, Master, that you would be better off without me. Your experiment in hatred relies in my at least being able to think. Increasingly, I am unable to think, clearly, or at all".

"What I told you before was true", said Galactus, in a voice stern but fair. "I can't kill you. I can't help you in any way, other than being at your side as you destroy these -bloody places",

Throughout it all there had been an immutable sun levelling out across both of them. The Cosmic Surfer bowed his head to his master.

"I will try".

To Tibet, then; what seemed like a crest of mountains at the elongated top of the world, a monastery-stroke-castle, equally impossible. The grey-green walls were made of rice-shaped clumps of stone, hardly like Western bricks at all. And as per fantasy-matte fairy tales, there were decadent promenades all along the cliff-crags, sparse decoration, traditional oriental serifs, straight edges to end everything.

Strangely lonely, too. The monks -he assumed they were Buddhists- really did value their privacy. En route, he'd seen only tiny villages and farms, the old men staring up at him with eyes like tin foil. Smiling? Who can tell.

Just in front of the broadest section of the monastery, he stood motionless on his board and observed numerous meditating monks cooched down in the lotus. The hall where they sat was half outside in the spicey-cold atmosphere, half inside surrounded by red-lit walkways and wide archways.

Time and context were so eerie and stupid. In watching the monks, the Surfer had never been more motionless. Still he worried that the fizzing wind would find friction on his silver skin, alerting them to the eagle that watches the mice. Their eyes as they flicked open from their wondrous 'transcendence' -awkward.

For the man who has no choice but to kill, he felt there was still some nobility in acknowledging that putting an end to someone's life was the most horrible thing in the universe. The student man in London; now he could almost forgive him. We are all the damaged and insane puppets of a claustrophobic universe -what does it matter if we don't consciously know this, and try to divert the existential torment by becoming a yuppie?

It was a semblance of being single-minded. But these -'wise men'. You either value your consciousness or you don't. And if you don't -they had the rapturous luxury of being able to commit suicide. Oh, perhaps their religion had some grand theory of reincarnation where sorrow and suicide were meaningless?

He felt his brow writhe and spasm along with the giddy feeling of air in his skinny ribcage. No - depth of feeling is never meaningless. And if they'd ever killed themselves, back when they were tired bank clerks, or unrequited lovers, or innocent motorists who'd accidently run over small children who'd run out from parked cars -why, at this brilliant new pinnacle of cosmic evolution, would they have reverted back to such glib concepts as organised religion, fellowship, pleasant little red robes, natty little red gowns, little bright red jackets all lovely and soft, little red felt jackets to drive off the sunny-cold mountain wind?

"Wake up", he commanded the monks.

He waited the requisite two seconds for their eyes to adjust and register him - before reducing them all to atoms.

He glided the board onto the now-vacant cobbles and dismounted. It was impressive -twelve pseudo-living bodies completely removed from the universe, in less time than it takes a lowest common denominator politician to say the word 'society'.

Now the promenade was silent. Not even any echoes. He'd closed his eyes to better appreciate it when he was somersaulted backwards by a wild explosion.

The blast was strangely undramatic. Now, the spin and somersault brought visions of Charlie Brown being sent aloft by a baseball, followed by a man floating so far out at sea. He recovered himself and ranged his body before the direction of the assault, a long walkway that was a muted red-brown without ever being shadowy.

From the start, the Surfer knew he was uninjured. Whatever hit him, it was a flimsy usurper of the power used in Reed Richard's missile. He wondered all the same, had something happened to his mind? Was he hallucinating? From the end of the chamber walked three bizarre figures, plus an oversized pug dog wearing a kind of tuning fork on his head. Bizarreness, as he blinked and drew his jaw tight, didn't quite enter into it. The biggest man wore a kingly tunic and a crown that aped the dog's tuning fork. The man beside him modelled a bishop-style hat, and he had a pencil moustache that went down badly with the rest of his oriental features. In his hand, as a posh waiter carries a silver tray: a gilt bowl of strong yellow flames. To the woman; she was dour, mostly unattractive, but made striking by her beautiful clothes and waist-length hair.

Bizarreness didn't enter in to it. The elaborate-looking people coolly advanced on him. Bizarreness didn't enter in to it; a further concussive blast removed the air from around his body just as soon as he was on his feet, making him feel both disembodied and ferociously under attack from ghost piranahs, hell-piranahs. Most frightening of all, the hideous energy seemed to be flowing from the space-king's mouth. Gentle words as relentless physical blasts.

It was too bizarre to be a dream, thought the Surfer. Or an hallucination. It was the brief, Salvador Dali esque phantasm that swept through your head a moment before dying. Now! -he felt delirious and liberated. Clammy heat clenched all across his silver skull and shoulders.

The big-haired queen advanced on him as the others hung back.

"Leave. Go ahead on your journey".

"Who are you?"

Said the Queen, "You have no reason to ask who we are. We are inhuman".

A feast for the eyes, he often flicked his gaze from the imperious woman back towards the two men. A firmness in the black-clad figure's spine, versus a tense inward lean of Moustachio, confirmed that they were a king and his trusted advisor.

The Surfer struggled to find an opening, "Galactus is coming!"

None of them advanced any more. The sense of obliteration remained.

"You destroyed our subjects". Even as she berated him, he instead watched the King and his strange advisor. With an ornate stylus pen, he'd flick his wrist and produce shorthand on a small piece of paper. The advisor would read the question and make his reply, simultaneously burning the note in his fiery plate. They went about this business so earnestly. All the while, though, His Majesty watched the Surfer with some pretty dark-brooding eyes. The pug dog, at least, seemed joyfully slack-jawed.

"You will leave, as the necessity of all time and space -"

It was enough, he decided, to merely soak-up the woman's compelling tone of voice. His mind, he set to work on eavesdropping the advisor. He discerned only certain phrases, in a statement that was already clipped. Alienesque. What he heard -made his heart start beating from zero. "His palm -a quarter inch rending of the silver skin. Minimal damage-exposition ratio. Point three percent. Tied with point sixty-five percent: 'Susan Storm-Richards'. Acute substration through Reality Prime Query. One hundred percent inverse-entropy query. 'Shalla Bal', 'Crockett's Theme', Uuatu".

The Surfer spoke urgently to the dour woman, "What are they talking about? How do they know those names?"

"You will leave. The space-time dictate of this citadel-"

"I will leave, you have my word", the Surfer struggled through a headache-from-nowhere. "But please tell me. He said -"

More struggling, and it was frightening, "He said a name. Shalla Bal. As if it was the name of a real person".

Now the luxurious-haired woman was satisfied in his submission. Even to the point where she'd enter a dialogue, "Witness Karnak. Through his perception, all points of the reschertropic demiurge universe displaying quantum-dynamic cracks, sinkholes, with knotholes gross and subtle. All to allow the projectors -range, scope to connect. Karnak reports".

Phased, his silver eyes drifted free on the age-old cobbles. The quality of the light, neither afternoon sun or an approaching descent, spoke merely of long days. Prison. The dog, at his feet, he was happy. A domestic pug dog, distracted and gulping.

"I beg you, tell me more".

Except the bouffant woman was now stoney. "The entruckungschrei in my husband's mouth has brushed forward as the smallest breath of air on smooth teeth. The smallest. Soon he will -whisper- his desire. At you. Do you understand?"

In a neat decision, the Surfer's feet carried him back the way he'd come, to the balcony overlooking the mighty foothills, not too much different from a thousand feet up. Not too much different from space.

His head felt cold, and hot, and clammy. He felt sure he had a fever.

Again, a desperate question was fired off, "Who are you people?"

"You have no cause to ask who we are. We are inhuman".

Near the cusp of the courtyard edge, he floundered, sensing the huge valleys and foothills, feeling brief comfort before they too were swallowed up in the no-way-round delirium. Analysing the situation in his a tickling voice, the man in the bishop's hat finally reached the end of his exegesis with a single name; "Susan Storm".

They all of them looked at the Surfer. The glaring eyes coincided with a swoon, his weak limbs folding low across the board. He felt himself carried away, notions of being on a very single-minded magic carpet. Happy-reluctant unconsciousness ruled, followed by an awareness of sorrow he'd never had before. God is a charging battery. In your head, the twisting analysis of hate, and love, and unfairness; as long as it twists, He is charging.

The semi-consciousness held steady as his board dropped across the edge of a waterfall; here was a cube-shaped world. Soon there was nothing left in his head except the sensation of tumbling down through an ambient eternity, a free-falling, mysteriously replaced by the certainty that his board was now upright, travelling at a wholly obedient speed. Time –it does have meaning.

In little whirls of crispy clouds, he stood tall and blinked. Below him, through the intermediate vapour, was Britain, as grey, green, as beautiful as ever. Fever gone, it took literally no time for him to triangulate and swipe the board down towards clustered hillsides that hid the Baxter Base.

In trace amounts, the Surfer's heart was warmed as he saw Susan Storm standing in the doorway of the dummy house, waiting for him so intently like the French Lieutenant's Woman, like Sir Francis Drake's wife looking over a tall cliff too white and requisite to be real.

Alighting. "My promise to return to you. I broke it".

"You're here now", said Susan.

Said the Surfer, in a cold voice, "What good are people like you and I if we can't keep promises to each other?"

Her ever-wounded mouth passed from haunted smile to haunted smile. "What made you return?"

"A hallucination", he admitted. "That you will lead me to the truth of the universe, Susan".

The temporary orange-brown paintwork gave the cage room almost no sense of scale as she slipped around a corner and activated the hidden switch. The room started to descend in much the same motion as he remembered. "Thankyou for calling me just 'Susan' instead of 'Susan Richards'. It's like -the intimacy we can handle! What was your hallucination of?"

He stared at the plunging metal sides, ranging from Victorian iron to server-room steel.

"People who were bizarre and frightening".

"All people are bizarre and frightening", she pointed out.

Said the Surfer, "Bizarre and frightening and unusual".

"Were they as unusual as Terrax?"

The Surfer thought. "Perhaps".

"It's hard to care about Terrax because he's frightening. But the way we keep Frankie Raye like that, it's -I want to say 'unforgivable' but I can't. The substance she's made from is just -a miracle, I suppose.

"It was in the news a few months ago -the little boy who was shot outside that mosque in Leeds during the riots. It was too big an event for most people to think about -how can someone be shot like that, and all of us, our whole civilisation, needs him so desperately to live. Shot in the head. What no one knows is that the surgeons, as a last resort, took a tiny fragment of Frankie Raye's body and placed it into the part of his head that was damaged beyond repair. And he's alive! He's alive, without even a scar!"

At their feet, from the direction of each corner, there was a sensation of flimsy-strong latches gripping fast. For a subterranean base, there'd always been a surprising lack of echoes; no long-range squeaks of distant chambers. Outside world? Doesn't exist at all. The ambience was neither sinister or homely, just accidental.

He looked at the hateful, energy-absorbing panels at his feet. As they stepped forward, volumes of grim-mouthed military types stared tersely at the Surfer, no doubt distrustful after the episode of the mice and the unconsciousness. He waited until they were in an isolated stretch of corridor before he made his own confession, which would have been quick and breathless -if only he needed to breathe.

"Terrax, and the being known as Frankie Raye, they aren't the spiritual creatures you imagine. I'm sorry, Susan. He is a remorseless killer. She was delicate-hearted, as one from a pulp romance. As killers, as romantics -they are raised above most mortals, but they are nonetheless just as doomed".

Profound linear narrative, the allocated sum of all mankind, manifested in a beautiful, slow-walking girl, blonde hair bobbed by oriental sticks, eyes at peace even as her soul was in torment. It was satisfying, the way she didn't make eye-contact even in the midst of such an eschatological conversation.

"Yes. I was afraid the truth about them might be disappointing. It doesn't matter. I had to know". Holding forth, "It's got to the point where people say, 'No, of course there's no god'. Maybe they've had some bereavements, or a run of bad luck. Maybe they just can't deal with living under the pressure. Like, as a girl, imagining that one day you'll get married to some kind of 'Mr Fantastic', who never comes, and you just give up.

"But for someone to disbelieve in God. It's not OK. They just don't see -of course there'd be a gulf between us and Him. How could there not be? Even if He's not separated Himself from us on purpose. Which He has. What other choice have we got but to make inferences? And all the round-about things? And all His heralds?"

They came to the end of a fairly long corridor. Curiously, there were no guards, even as Susan's shoulders became tenser, more reverent to what lay ahead.

"Reed was still fine, and walking around, the period when they put him in charge of the Libra Space Telescope. It was a piece of space junk which they'd fitted with special telescopes. Everyone said it was ingenious. It was supposed to record these strange gravity waves on the dark side of the moon, which you otherways wouldn't be able to see with the human eye".

Tapping her security code into the shiney chrome keys, they entered an expansive computer room, all flashing routers, thick-strutted consoles. It was well-lit, though the powerful lights had an undeniably grey tint, mysterious. Mysterious. A small alarm sounded, which Susan deactivated.

"Everyone who looks at least fears who it is", she said, standing bolt still in front of the most prominent screen. "Though most people just know".

On screen was a moonscape, overlaid with a tide of the otherways-unobservable-by-the-human-eye gravity waves. The spectral energy moved slowly at a reassuring speed. Susan's lips, as she watched the screen so closely, were tentative in a way he'd never seen before. Now she spoke huskily, directly into the screen, though the Surfer was sure he couldn't see a microphone.

"It's me. I am here, with the Cosmic Surfer. We're here together, as part of the Secret".

Among the energy, or maybe comprised of it, a colossal figure walked from right to left and looked up into the satellite camera. His head was significantly bigger than his body, and it seemed impossible, or at least maddening, that such a load could be carried around on so small a frame. Wearing a luxurious toga and cape, complete with a Transylvanian swirl behind his bald skull, all of it fastened by an alienesque brooch.

And the face. Those eyes. Stern. Wise. Scrutinising until the end of time.

Them.

Susan explained, "God".

At the start of 2013, there'd been a seismic shift in Carl's life. Or at least, his sense of routine; the Monthly Specials were cancelled as an ongoing concern by Playboy, leaving him with a pretty big hole in the roster of little things he could always look forward to. Forget it, the automatic swinging into a newsagent to whittle down his disposable income. He'd noticed it first when the latest issue failed to appear at the newso in Stonehouse, not that he was particularly worried -they were, after all, a very rare, imported magazine. He always reckoned that only about one in twenty newsos stocked it. Less even than stocked Playboy regular.

Then the new issue failed to appear in Dursley. Failed to appear in the Silver Street den or the Post Office-and for the first time Carl realised that the hasty editor's message on the back page of issue 505 of Girls of Summer, warning of 'The End of an Era', had been something he should have taken for real.

So, what to do. It made him a little bit anxious even when he was absorbed in his work, walking round and round on the warehouse floor. The yellow sun beat down on the high, dirty windows, making them dirtier still; nowhere was it beating down on a newso that carried Girls of Summer, or Wet and Wild, or Playmate Review. Sunlight on gingery glass and nothing to daydream about.

Carl recokoned there was now something wrong -something crazy and mind-numbing- with the stocking of porn mags in general. You would have assumed that with the internet and its easy-access to galleries of beautiful, idiosyncratic girls, paper copies of anything would be falling like dinosaurs. And yet, take the two big newsos in Unity -JP on the High Street or Havelock in the market ring- the shelves were thick with most subtle titles you could imagine, as well as old dependables like Legs, High Society, Vent and Gallery. Tantalising porn mags still existed, after a fashion, even in the blight of neon-labelled 'multi-packs' that so many newsos went for nowadays. Presumably these were for men with no sense of subtlety, who just needed to see random, voluptuous women.

It was 21 June, the longest day, and Carl took a meandering walk on the way home from the factory. A cool blue light filled the alleyways and the hills, not even in such a way to highlight God's own grime -you could never lose the idea that there were germs everywhere. Good germs, bad germs, germs to give you a fever -but mostly germs that were indeterminate. He looked at the faithful black streetlights set far out from the semi-professional walls. He looked at the big dirty stream and was lost.

These were the days when things in general were up in the air. His subconscious dimly pictured a dozen Tetris screens all lined up in a row, most of the brick piles under control, but only just. It had been three months since the government announced that the threat of Gort and his ultimatum had been neutralised. It was about three weeks since they'd realised that a lot more people believed in Klatuua's message than they could have imagined. Put forward by a dozen grave-faced cabinet members, in a dozen early-evening news interrogations: the promise that the British Public would be given a individual referendum on each of Klatuua's suggestions; the redistribution of wealth from administrator and artist to hard-manual worker, the one-family-one-child plan, the stripped-down schooling, the Buddhist-style rejection of house-ownership...

And then enter Klatuua, with the televised response from her secret base. Standing beside her, that pensive-looking old man with the handlebar moustache, all to give credentials to the natives. Carl had paid attention to the speech even as he played a typically-laughing game of darts with Dale and Glenn in the pub. 'Who is it in this country that truly believes that the majority of people will analyse the situation and choose logic over their own rights -A.K.A their own base satisfaction? Do we even blame them? No'.

The most obvious solution would be to start buying the regular edition of Playboy. Granted, there was less than a dozen pages of nudity per issue, but the editorial team could somehow always be trusted to include genuinely beautiful women, none of them looking like conceited fashion models, or drunks, or whores. The problem with his buying Playboy was also the very thing that made it such an excellent magazine -he simply didn't have time to read the politics, the exotic reviews, the literary or James Bond short stories, the sprawling interviews that were absolutely relevant to the news that month. There was too much pressure to dote on every damn page.

Bearing left by the steel footbridge, he headed around the brightly coloured terraced houses of the South. It was a section of town dense with buildings but badly served by roads, a part of his walkabout he traditionally thought of as boring. A white cat covered in oil hung by a wall, doing absolutely nothing, and Carl stopped to stroke him.

Unexpectedly, on the well-made concrete wall at the corner of the road was the graffiti tag of the supporters of Klatuua, a red stencil of the British Isles with a capital 'K' inset.

He didn't really look at it. By the funny, clean plant turrets, he realised his brain was well-and-truly ghostly. He was just tired. Up above, through zig-zag steps and narrow footpaths, there was a sort of castle plateaux. Psychically, he always thought there was a library in there, but in reality it was probably less even than an underachieving whitecollar perch. Less even than a picturesque primary school.

An answer might be fall back on Club UK. It was a safe bet; the women were always satisfying, occasionally breath-taking. He remembered, before discovering the Playboy Special Editions, he'd seen in Club some famous, genuinely pretty models like Elle Alexandra, Thalia Oliver and Heather Carolin. Girls he could spend the rest of his life with. Club UK was fine, as long as you didn't get it mixed up with Club USA, the cover of which was identical, but with an unpleasant focus on women in make-up, penetration, long pages of meaningless porn film reviews.

The narrow hilly road snaked back into town. He idly read the neon flyposters for music-hating nightclub DJ's. Of course, beyond porn mags, the answer might be to join Tyreese, Axel and Duane as they went around the bars of a weekend. Might be. It was hard to imagine that 'going out' again would lead him back to anything other than another Amy, or at best another Lacey, which would be a misstep. It'd be unfair on the girls, too.

He saw another Klatuua graffiti tag on a high stone wall, but this time it was holographic, utilising the very alien technology she'd brought with her. On how it was projected, he had no idea.

It was a few minutes past five. Plenty of the shops were closing up for the night; the chippies and takeaways were opening. The Swan was starting to exude pleasing, generic fiddle music through muscular speakers -and just walking past, only for a minute, Carl wished he had a girl en toe.

He reached the top of the hill, past the non-pretentious photo gallery and cavernous bookshop. At a whim, though still taking a deep breath to push open the heavy door, he entered the little newso with the net curtains. There was an insane desire just to spend a few pounds on -something, just for the hell of it. He didn't think they sold beer. If nothing else, milk or sweets. A Snickers, beloved of his father.

Sitting on the chipboard table, on top of the big pile of unsold papers to be taken away by the lorry, was a skinny black cat licking his downward-flexed paws. Picture book. Carl looked at him just for an instant before turning quite naturally to stare at the mags. GQ was at £2.50, and it would have been a good deal -there was the 'style' content a man could actually relate to, plus a surprisingly substantial array of articles- except the celebrities and politicians involved were always a bit too rich and conceited.

Carl glanced at the covers of the Countryman, New Scientist and Business Week, all of which had dark article headings which skirted around the subject of Klatuua; all the innovations she'd brought, the political strife and the moral touchpapers. He read the speech balloons on the cover of Private Eye, but they didn't quite make him laugh out loud (it had been a long day).

He looked, inevitably, at the top shelf. The array of porn was much better than he remembered from his previous visits to this little newso, though altogether there was only a dozen different titles; the obligatory Raymond Revuebar output (whatever happened to Model Directory?), plus one or two imports. It was one of these, 'Delectable Sweeties', which slowly drew him in. He'd never even considered it before, but only because he'd been devoted to the Playboy Specials. The cover was brown with the profile torso of an unsmiling Ireland Baldwin type. It seemed to Carl -rarefied.

On a whim, he took it to the counter.

Your plans, the small, ambient risks you're sure you can side-step; sometimes they become a mudslide. Behind the counter was a pretty and imperious girl, no more than twenty five. Certainly he wouldn't have brought forth the porn if he'd have known. As her eyes and fingers butterflied across the glossy stock, she was disapproving from the start. To add to the bizarre emotions, sitting just across from her in a tiny carseat-cot-combo was a months-old baby. He or she sleepily gazed at the deep wicker edges, no help to the guilt-ridden punter at all.

The girl winced at the dirty, frivolous magazine as if to draw the situation out and torture him. Before he remembered -he was no longer the type of guy who gets tortured easily.

"Problems", he said. "The price?"

Said the girl, "I can see! The American price. The Canadian price. Euros. No pounds".

He decided to let her get on with it, at the same time burning her with a little affability. "Probably your last sale of the day, and I'm making it difficult".

She stared at him. Slim, with black hair. Beautiful, but obviously not the type of girl he could ever cope with.

"It's no trouble", she said darkly.

He noted well the way she peered out at the world. There was only one way to equate it; she was staring at a castle, waiting for the drawbridge to shift so she could dash and jump. Carl tried not to be enraptured.

Jabbing her fingers, she started to access the computer which lay beside her at the checkout.

"I'll log on to the website of our importers".

Certainly it was an embarrassing kind of hell, though for the time being, he remained free from hysteria. What Carl did; he pointed to the '$8.50' figure. "The English conversion is £5.60. I'll be happy to give you six as a safety margin".

"Well", the girl nodded curtly, expertly impassive, "I'm going to check the official price anyway".

Carl shrugged. "OK. But this guy knows word of he speaks. I'm a parts analyst at the Atlanta factory. All I do all day is scan foreign prices".

Only now, he cursed himself. It had sounded like he was trying to strike up a conversation, rather than finding a matter-of-fact route through the nightmare embarrassment. Now and then, he returned his eyes to the baby, who was dreamily staring at his or her blue-woollen legs. Hard to credit the peacefulness that flowed out from that tiny cot.

"It's not the end of the world if you can't find it", he said kindly.

"You're the one who wants to buy it", said the girl, in a tone that could -just- be identified as icy.

"It's just a magazine".

This idea seemed to come from his mouth of its own volition. And the girl was just as honest, even as her fingers moved expertly on the mouse pad, "You do realise there's not one girl in a hundred who actually looks like that? And there's no girls anywhere who just offer themselves to men like that?"

"Actually I did realise that". But still he was kind to her, self-depricating. "I know it's all a fantasy".

For a good few seconds, the girl scrolled through some very basic webpages in a silence that was subtle, dispondent. "The country is coming apart at the seams. And all this fantasy carries on as ever. That's all I've got a problem with".

Carl felt the ghost of exasperation rise up in his heart. 'The customer is always right'. If he spoke in such a way to one of his clients, his feet would hardly touch the ground.

"Heaven forbid", he gestured at the baby, "anyone should follow their base sexual wants in days like these".

Alas, now the girl could afford to be cool as never before.

"That's my sister Andrea".

Carl kicked himself.

The girl pawed the magazine and swished the cover open and closed. "It's just 'Delectable Girls', not 'Delectable Girls: Slut Confidential', right?"

Carl wondered, "Why would a slut want to be confidential?"

The girl didn't laugh, didn't even react, just continued to edge down through the grey page-slider in what seemed like an endless search.

"Let me guess", he started to breathe deeply, "you're looking after your dad's shop, just trying to get a bit of money before heading off to university? Or - maybe you're trying to get a bit of money in an honest, every-day job after finishing university, so you can pretend you never made such a mistake as wanting to be a yuppie? You read the Times, and you always turn straight to Caitlin Moran's column, to see what their tame 'girl-with-a-personality' has got to say".

The girl looked at him sharply. "No. I'd rather die than go than go to university. But you- 'Parts Analyst' -are you saying you're not a yuppie?"

"No!", Carl laughed, then shrugged innocently. "I started work at the Atlanta factory when I was sixteen, hand-balling thirty-five kilo trunks in a bay that leaked like the Titanic. I'm now twenty-eight. What was I meant to do, turn down promotions? Work less hard?"

The girl's beautiful mouth grew steep at the sides.

"You really don't want to sell me that magazine do you?"

She replied in a voice that was plain, blunt, also soft. "If it was up to me, we wouldn't stock that stupid filth. He knows I hate it. He knows it's wrong".

Carl blinked. He looked, just for a second, at the peaceful-squirming form of baby Andrea. Pre-eye-contact; a golden age in anyone's life. Soon, however, she'd know what she was missing.

"So, shall we say, six quid?", he asked.

She slid the magazine across the old linoleum counter and Carl gave her a reasonably clean fiver and pound coin. On the way out, he sucked air across his teeth and offered his fingers to the cat, who sniffed them but wasn't interested in a stroke.

The transition from day to night looked to be one of the most boring in a long time. Still, highlighted on the middle-horizon there were certain upturns that were unusually ambient. Spikey drumblast trees that were dark grey, flecked with silver. He felt the smooth paper beneath his arm and it felt terrible.

From a distance of maybe twenty feet, he walked back to net-curtained newso and knocked on the window. When the girl appeared, he took out his lighter and burned 'Delectable Girls' over the sewer grill, in such a way that it fell to pieces in seconds.

The girl, staring tightly through the dirty glass, touched her shoulder and frowned. It was almost a smile. She briefly looked into Carl's eyes, the drawbridge wavering, before stalking back into the recesses.

He opened the door oh-so-gently.

"I'm Carl, by the way".

"Sophia. Was that meant to mean something?"

Carl shrugged his lips. "Well, it was a gesture. What I wanted to ask, would you like to go on a date on Saturday night? Don't feel bad if you want to say no".

The girl Sophia seemed happier now, or at least, keeping dispondency at arm's length.

"This weekend I'm going to be busy. But the weekend after, we'll -go for a drink. You seem like a nice guy. I'm sorry about before".

He nodded. This area of town was so quiet. Cars, even small delivery vans or householders, rarely ventured these ultra-tight streets.

Where Carl was oddly moved now, he kept the feeling partially hidden. "I've been thinking about giving up porno for quite a while. If you want to believe that. And when I say, 'date', I don't mean just-"

"I'm not that kind of girl", said Sophia.

Carl gabbled, "You're telling me. Is there no way you can get out of your obligations? Maybe we could at least have a Sunday breakfast together?"

Said Sophia, "You should feel flattered. These days I live my life on a week-by-week basis. The weekend after next? A thousand years in the future, or it might never come. But if it does, we'll have our drink".

"Thankyou!"

Behind the counter, she was well-and-truly shutting the place down for the night, turning over the drawer of the till, rolling down the shutter of the cancerstix. Around the baby, the velvety sheets were tucked tight, before the whole kaboodle was lifted clear across the linoleum.

On the small inner half of the shop floor, she sauntered in the dimness, thoughtful. The wind played a little; the drawbridge moved not at all, but it might.

"You shouldn't criticise people who go to university. They're only trying to find a way in the world, the same as anyone".

"Yeah", said Carl, in a faux-soft voice he knew did not suit him. "How about I criticise the way everyone goes to university -along a big rail?"

The drawbridge could move any minute. How beautiful she was, even with that mighty glower. Especially with the glower.

"Anything else to say on the subject?"

He frowned. "No. Lets not fight ever again".

The dynamic from an old Alfred Hitchcock film -two strangers sniffing each other out, flirt, flirt, intrigue, intrigue. Only there was something else here. Sophia, with her eyes-that-watched-the-drawbridge; she was more real than anything else he could possibly imagine. Unpredictable like a fist fight; she moved to the tri-cornered stand of cheap children's toys and opened a spud gun that looked uncannily like a real Whalter. She pointed it at Carl's head, not just as if it was a real gun, but as if she flatly hated him.

Some pretty solid ideas came to him during those ugly few minutes, that she might be mildly crazy, and that her craziness was normally dormant, only brought to surface by his presence. Maybe she thought he'd meant to rape her all along.

Silence ruled through a dizzy vacuum of time. Her black, steadfast eyes and the barrel of the toy gun fused totally with the musty background.

"Does this make you nervous?", she said icily.

He was honest. "A little bit. Are you OK, Sophia? Should I go?"

The questions hung in the air. They could do what they liked, because her strange sense of violence was in full stride.

"Look. Actually, I'm crazy. All your life, you thought I was the sanest person in the world, you believed in me, but all along I was crazy. What do you think of that?"

Keeping the toy gun trained, she closed in on him. Funnily enough, her tone of voice spoke of freedom, liberation, even joy. Meanwhile, her ever-determined eyes flickered.

"And now I'm going to kill you".

He listened to this tight proclomation, the crazy-dramatic tone crept into his bones. He accepted it, or thought he did. Actually, he did accept it; he heard the low click of the trigger and didn't shudder at all.

"If you want to know where I'm going this weekend -fine. I'm with Klatuua. And we're going to raise an army to re-take Gort. If that's how you want to spend your quality time -come"

What with one thing and another, he'd often found himself drifting around the town centre at sunrise. He even remembered how, at this time of year, the sun was steely and all-seeing by as early as 5 AM. Slants of light were playing across the fancy thick architecture of the town hall, the oversized benches, prior to being swallowed up in a glorious blue sky. Rain by the night said Emily Wood, but he could deal with that.

Outside the convenience shop, there was a bundle of slimline newspapers, and beside it, for all the world to see, a big pile of Men Only. The cover girl was beautiful, conveying the kneeling down pose he'd always very much appreciated. But her expression - a joke.

The place Sophia had chosen to meet was the far side of the concrete underpass, by the Dudbridge junction. He guessed this made sense -from there they'd make a bee-line to the motorway at Stonehouse and have access to anywhere in the country.

Funny -he made note of the delicate little calculations and decisions about how early he should arrive, not a bit like meeting up for a date with Amy or Lacey. He found himself just standing there, hands in pockets, quarter-filled ruc-sac held fast to his spine. On a concrete plinth just before the underpass, there'd been more Klatuua symbols grafittied up in red auto paint. Glancing, Carl didn't feel particularly historic or revolutionary. He'd be surprised if he ever did.

"Well", said Sophia. "You're here".

"Hello, Comrade".

He took in the sight of her. It was maybe his fifth or six proper, descerning look. The white light picked out her chiselled upper palate just perfectly, plus the head-long look in her eyes.

"Have you eaten breakfast?"

Carl said brightly, "No; I'm not really a breakfast person until about ten, when the hunger suddenly drives me crazy".

She gripped her own ruc-sac and flung her hair around. "Well, I've got some crisps here. You know this isn't going to be a nice little day out?"

"Crisps from your dad's shop?", he tried not to smile as he thought about it. "I bet you put exactly the right amount of money in the till".

Sophia, she smiled in spite of herself. "Yes, I did. Wouldn't you?"

"My dad doesn't own a shop. I like your jacket".

And so it went on. It was none of it like before. It seemed there was some invisible force, absolutely steady, always preventing either of them from getting nervous, touchy, stupid. They talked in such an easy way, right up to the dust-off, when a semi-Chelsea Honda pulled up exactly on time.

"Conrad Aquarius Touch", said Sophia to the driver, a boggle-eyed blonde man.

"Sagitarius Nicto Paper".

On the backseat, Carl found himself sandwiched between Sophia and a sprightly-looking man in his late teens, early twenties. In the front seat was a fairly wide-faced girl with hair that looked like she'd cut it herself.

"Welcome along!", said the boggle-eyed man. Clearly his trademark was a projecting voice. "I'm Dennis".

"I'm Leia!", the wide-faced girl.

"Adam", said the boy, briefly raising his eyebrows to Carl and Sophia.

"Sophia".

"Carl Walsh".

Dennis said, "Listen to the man with the second name! Please to meet you guys".

As she examined Dennis' reflection of the driver's mirror, Sophia's expression went thoughtful. "I saw you in Reading last month. After Klatuua had finished speaking, when the riot police started skirting the bottom of the park. When it started to feel nervous. I saw you walking along by the railings".

"I suppose I do have a pretty striking face!", said the driver.

A moment of silence fizzed between them all. Said Leia, "I've recognised people, too. It's kind of weird - if we were just an angry mob, we wouldn't do that. We wouldn't recognise each other, would we?"

In a surprisingly short time, they'd already reached the tight array of roundabout slips that led onto the M4. Truly it'd been years since Carl had been this way; he recognised an area of hard shoulder where there used to be public toilets, only now they'd been reabsorbed into the concrete of a greyhound bridge. He wondered if there was still the cubicles and the urinal space, airless, dark, completely sealed off from the world. Thereafter he stared out at the small glimpse of road between the driver and passenger, trying not to spend too much time looking at Sophia's thighs. For a while, a slot of five minutes or so, as a treat, he imagined them having sex through a timeless Sunday morning to Bent, 'The Everlasting Blink'.

The motorway was quiet, smooth-flowing. The five of them craned their heads around to get to know each other -but were far from immersing themselves like bar room buddies. It wasn't long before Leia passed back a large red laptop and they set their minds to the main event. "I suppose we should check out how things are coming together".

On screen was a map, a hybrid of satellite photo and street plans. Populated -there were coloured markers, some moving, some stationary, and with no one saying as much, Adam, Carl and Sophia knew that these were fellow members of Klatuua's army.

"The gold ones are with us, all converging on Sheffield. The brown ones are in reserve", pointed out Dennis.

Carl drew back his jaw as he brooded. He felt his eyes go sunken. "How's this possible, though? I thought the government had this thing for the internet where anyone involved with Klatuua gets automatically shut down?"

"It's not over the internet". Dennis massaged the steering wheel, laughing with his eyes.

It was then that Carl noticed; "There's lots more brown ones. Wouldn't it make more sense to have everyone fall in, show the government what they're dealing with?"

Said Sophia, chewing over her own iciness, "It's not exactly the government we've got to worry about. It's the military and Help the Hero types. When the time comes to make our assault on the airfield where they've got Gort, we've got to assume that a lot of us will just get mown down. That's when the sheer number of us will make a difference".

"I...", Adam, who was Polish, took trouble to find the right words, even if it downplayed his otherwise-striking mastery of English. "For me, this doesn't make sense. The soldiers, they will fire at one person, or fifty people. It makes no difference?"

It was Dennis who responded. He boomed his voice into the top right corner of the reasonably clean windshield. "Naturally, we hope they'll come to their senses. Not fire on anyone. Klatuua has been to versions of depression-era Britain where the military has surrendered straight away rather than kill their own countrymen. Then again! She says she's been to versions where the killing goes in funny little eruptions before petering out. Always plan for the worst!"

Whatever - in for a penny. It was around nine thirty when Carl became aware of time again. The motorway slowed up beside a long, thick hedgerow pinpricked handsomely with sun. A great one for jerking her head around to look at as much as possible, Sophia was now content just to shoot him highly telepathic looks of acceptance. Matters of great importance were in the air, but for her it was no more scary or satisfying than breathing, walking, getting on with an unwieldy life.

The Speedpipe Factory in Sheffield was in the process of closing down, Dennis had explained. The thoughtless owner, Sir John Sondy, was all set to shift production abroad to Latervia. For decades, large British factories like this had closed down every other month, but it was only since Klatuua had arrived that anyone had been able to stir the workers to militancy.

Sitting at the bizarrely clean pic-nic tables of the Charnwood service station, Sophia asked him what he thought. He shrugged, fixed her with cowboy assent, tho the sun was on the wrong side for his squint to be too sharp.

She said, "You think it's... people versus people. Are they selfish? Yeah, but who isn't? It's all too big and messy to have proper feelings about".

"There is that", said Carl.

"None of us feels noble, either. But if we don't feel noble -what is it that's happening here? Could we be evolving? We all know there's no such thing as... national pride, having a plan for everyone, because that way lies Hitler. So then, what?"

"Greediness has gotten out of control", said Carl, looking down and seeing the exception-that-proves-the-rule in the tiny cheeseburger he'd scoffed. "That's all we're doing. Cutting back the greed".

"So you believe in us?"

"Yeah", he said brightly.

Sophia edged her eyes off to one side, to the waxy hedgerows and the slanted moss trees, though clearly he was still the centre of her attention. The service station, it had broad skylights, almost cathedral-like.

"It's not really one of those things anyone can dis-believe. At best, it's one of those ugly truths that you can ignore. Al Gore, and the ice caps melting? People still think about that, whether they believe it or not, because what do they care? But the greed that Klatuua is after is everywhere, in everyone".

Chelseas and some wobbly motorbikes coasted around the luxurious parking bays. Crows and seagulls were never far away. Sophia absently ate a french fry, thinking of nothing. She then drew herself steeply onto her elbows.

"You know when I pulled that spud gun on you?"

"I do remember that".

"I've brought it with me. I painted it silver".

Carl gave a deeply creased smile. "Every schoolboy in the country knows it's illegal to paint toy guns so they look like real guns".

"Every other person in the country hates Klatuua, and they happily want to kill her. We have to protect her if we can".

Carl asked, "By brandishing guns? That's very terroristy".

"We are terrorists", Sophia conceded. "Some people say 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'. No. If even one person thinks of us as terrorists, that's what we are. We want to destroy democracy, even if it's just to rebuild it straight away with a bigger sense of personal responsibilty. We all have to be transparent".

"I'm not growing a beard", warned Carl.

"OK", laughed Sophia.

He laid forearm across the dry pic-nic table, his hand coming to rest very close to hers.

"At a big rally like the one we're going to, Klatuua and Cliff Carpenter risk everything by moving among the crowd of regular people. Certain numbers of us move in around them, flanking them as well as we can".

"Like bodyguards, plain clothes", said Carl. "What is it with that guy Cliff Carpenter?"

In an easy voice, Sophia said, "From what I know of it, they fell in love. They were around each other, and it just happened. It's why they're always together. Sweet, really.

"But there's a certain way we've got to protect the two of them. When we're around them, no one knows who's a supporter of Klatuua and who's just a bystander. We use that to our advantage. Our people are put into twos. If the government or the counter-revolutionaries come to get Klatuua, Person A grabs Person B and holds a fake gun to their head. We close ranks to protect Cliff and Klatuua as human shields".

"That way, no one actually gets hurt. No real people". Carl smiled through a critical cringe in his jaw. "And we're together are we? You're the one with the gun, I'm the one with the barrel to my head?"

"If you're up for it".

"Yes", he said crisply. "But at all the public appearances she's made so far -it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it won't".

One, two, three -Sophia fingered up four french fries at once. As she chewed, she spoke off-handedly. "It will happen. Our army's getting big. They know that. Pretty soon there'll be enough that we can storm that base and even if they mow down the first wave, the second wave, the third -we will get through. All we have to do is get Klatuua to within a two hundred metre radius of Gort and she'll be able to start using the manual override in his head to get back control".

Carl found himself nodding. Really there was no choice but to stare at her unique and beautiful mouth -though to spare the bluntness, he kept his eyes focussed on the tall trees. The giant advertising boards were made from wood, he'd noticed. Alongside the vertically-laid two-by-fours that protected the garage generators. Inexplicable metal gantries, inexplicable steps descending into hedgerows, never too far from a high, blue atmosphere. He looked directly into the sky and tried to picture Gort in his mind.

"Who would have thought, when we were kids, we'd one day be on a mission to rescue a giant robot?"

Answered Sophia, "It's more than that! From what Klatuua said of him, Gort's got this -life span that will run into centuries. Look at him, he's more intelligent than us, longer living. We're stupider, living about a sixth of the time he will. Yet he still loves us. You know what we are to him? Dogs. And what kind of a dog is not loyal?"

Carl asked her, "Did you have a dog, when you were little?"

And so they talked about their dogs, their idyllic childhoods, right up to the point where they were back in their car and half way to Sheffield.

Gatehouse cabins, abandoned, full of grimey fire-extinguishers, broad table lamps, leatherite chairs slowly disintegrating. Huge warehouses, huge warehouses, the surrounding car parks so peculiar and narrow. There were funnel-shaped entrances for articulated lorries, then lots of tiny inlets for forklifts and stock floats -as though the site designer hadn't been able to imagine any intermediate-sized vehicles. Where did cars go? Today they were mostly slanted up on the peripheral pavement, far fewer than Carl had imagined, too. En route, he'd pictured traffic jams caused by journos, sensation-seekers keen to see Klatuua, strikers, politicos, the vast swell of covert believers. The result was quieter, more real, at least to start with. As they parked up in a splayed mesh car park, he beheld the fifty foot coolant towers and equated them with her, Klatuua. A solid silhouette against a vapid sky, never quite eaten by a glaring sun, or mist, or shadow. In all the galvanised brown roof tops there was a strength that was easy, the easiest thing in the world. Maybe Joe Public didn't like factories because all these buildings looked secretive or uninviting. Carl thought, just paint them in pleasant colours. Maybe somehow, through the various K-army channels, he could make this suggestion to someone high up. Or maybe one weekend just do it himself, to his own factory -just do it, bright colours, and all the c-s who'd been bourgeoised by crappy Dickensian imagery would have to think again.

Already he fancied he could see a change in the eyes of the people walking quickly towards the heart of the protest. More than once, he saw men with the diagonal eye-creases of severe alcoholism, though always there was something inherently trustworthy in the way they marched.

What truly freaked him out was seeing the kids. A boy of eight or nine had a blonde crewcut much like the one Carl got from his dad -and the way he winced, excitedly checking his peripheral before looking back to the bulwarks and stillage transfers; there was nothing more evocative of summer day thrills. A carnival. Why not?

The converging ripples and processions became a full-on crowd. It was, Carl found, pleasantly like being at the footie. Unity playing at home to one of their numerous arch-enemies; Bedminster Green or Yate Direwolves. There were no vuvuzeelas. No tentative whoops. But the very guileless holding of the breath, that was the main feature now.

Beside a tall warehouse that didn't at all loom in the sunlight, the crowd stagnated. People took shallow breaths and darted their eyes, while curiously, no one really looked at each other. In this spirit, Carl tried his best not to dwell on Sophia. If it wasn't for the operational necessity that they seem like strangers, he would have jumped at the opportunity to hold her hand.

A few high-ranking Klatuua followers breezed up onto the ad-hoc stage. It seemed it wouldn't be long now. The crowd was so reserved, the angry commotions, whenever they struck up, felt eerily self-contained. Part of the excitement, actually, nothing more. Bitter twenty-somethings who'd once watched Quadrophenia and felt it was something other than ugly teen posturing, or had a conversation with the biggest bore in the pub as though he was King Pillar of the Community. The crowd of believers swallowed them up insouciantly. Certainly there were throaty, angry shouts -they were just stray cymbal crashes at Live Aid 85. This one goes out to my son, your children, the children of the world.

Sophia's fists went high and came together in a very sober form of clapping. Onto the stage walked Cliff Carpenter and Klatuua. They seemed smaller than Carl had pictured in his brain.

In a light pose, the old woman dipped her head and listened. She thought intensely before the futuristic collar-mike boomed out her words.

"Thankyou for coming", flatly. "Sir John Sondy. 'Sir' John Sondy -maybe we should go jousting together and resolve it that way?"

That got a laugh. The people who were angrily-gabbling took it as an opportunity to draw breath.

"It strikes me that I've got an army behind me, which is as it should be. I could put forth the word and have him pulled apart into a hill of beans. Britain's most celebrated inventor, knighted in 2006 for Services to Industry. Really? From my perspective, he's a small child, with a hobby, who happens to have converted that hobby into multi-billion pound -well, we can't really call it an industry, can we? Perhaps, due to the cheapness of labour abroad, it really does make sense to move production overseas? How low should a man allow his profits to go before he abandons his countrymen? Down to twenty million? Ten million? How long until he stops being able to look at himself in the mirror, and until we stop being able to look at ourselves in the mirror for allowing it to happen?

"Don't, though. Turn him into a hill of beans, I mean. I sometimes think I don't stress to you enough that I understand about the greed. It's inside all of us. It's as natural as breathing. If everyone in the world suddenly vanished, except you and your spouse, you'd go and live in the most luxurious penthouse you could find. You'd indulge in things that would otherwise be a dozen times too expensive for you. You'd never do a tangible day's work again. You'd set about having four or five children to repopulate the Earth.

"And who could blame you? What's wrong with that? Nothing. The trouble is, so many of you have that desire, that schizophrenic, unaccountable sense of freedom now, in a world which is fiercely overpopulated, with an economy which cries out for exactly the sort of manual, lowest-common-denominator labour which you feel fate has removed you from.

"No. I say no. Manual work is noble. Manual work marks you out as having steel, patience, belief, self-sufficiency".

There'd been a few gospel whoops; now the people gave unreserved cheers. Sophia gave sort-of-tuneful laughs. Carl, on sensing his own introspective silence, shouted, 'Yes!'

Taken up by a reasonable, reflective voice, "I understand, also, the need to feel authority over your fellow man. You live, you progress, you gain rarefied experience based on your personality, your sense of justice. But oh, going to university to gain that authority? From people who are, with all the benefit of the doubt, rudderless and blinkered?

"Again, no hills of beans. But they are such a small piece. True authority that's universal to all mankind comes from taking a simple job and then having the patience and the discernment to learn, through every stage, through thirty years. People who start by pushing brooms do end up as company directors. Believe it. My society is founded on it, and it's every kind of utopia. And even if you don't get to the top, or choose not to, you'll find you've got reasons to live. An appreciation of life which is -genuine! Unobtrusive! Free!

"When I was a small girl, I'd see my father -"

No sooner had Klatuua resumed, than she stopped, cringed, clenched her eyes. Carl wondered if she was going to sneeze. Then he identified the outrage. Someone in the teeming crowd had a laser pointer and was shining it directly into her eyes. As her blinking mixed with good humour and saintly patience, it was clear that several people in the crowd had thought to bring these clever little weapons. Someone had a more sophisticated projector, too, which placed a burning, electrified word onto her chest. 'WITCH'.

On looking down and discerning the small block caps, Klatuua said, "I see the Prime Minister is still about party politics".

This also got a huge laugh, though her jaw was juddery and unreadable. Cliff Carpenter, for one, looked deeply upset.

The old woman continued. "When I was a small girl -". She closed her eyes, and the effect was to make her seem all the wiser. Ridiculously wise. Carl examined her zen-like smile as it gradually returned, switching his focus now and then to Sophia. Her prominent upper palate never seemed more beautiful or magical than when she was listening to Klatuua.

Yes, it was wonderful. Just for a minute it seemed, in spite of the acute adversity, that Britain might have some kind of solid, noble future.

Then he noticed something terrible about one the laser dots which played around on Klatuua's head. The dot was red. He took a breath to shout-

As Klatuua was shot through the head, with quite a large backslash of blood.

He reeled. Clearly, he was the type of man who went into shock in these situations. When his conscious mind bobbed to surface, it was to wallow in the sight of Cliff Carpenter Onassis hanging on his knees above the lifeless body. Carl reeled. Lots of people reeled.

But not Sophia.

"We still have to protect Carpenter! This is it!"

The drawbridge was rising. She grabbed his arm -somehow lovingly, he imagined- and held the spud gun to his head as they moved into position at the centre of the drama.

The strike breakers moved in. SWAT-style troopers with their stupid, knees-bent scuttle, all dressed in black. Carl felt deathly afraid. The men did not shout warnings as they did in the films.

Sophia was shot in the head.

He reeled some more. Reeling became his lot. It seemed he would never have a conscious thought again. He was there -on the floor in a pile of crumpled legs, beside his dead girlfriend, just like Cliff Carpenter.

But he was wrong about never having another conscious thought. He saw the trooper standing overhead, swinging his rifle around in a way that seemed stupid, almost panicked. He felt his jaw go tight, even approximate a kind of smile perhaps.

On springy legs, he arose and punched the man as best he could in the teeth. The nearest trooper beside him, he flung violently out of the way. A third trooper, he kicked in the crotch.

Then Carl too was shot in the head.

The profound-looking giant looked down (or possibly up) at the Cosmic Surfer and Susan for quite a time. He scrutinised them with a ceaseless and dispassionate gaze. Age? Indeterminate; his temples, though they were broad, full of insane deliberation, belonged to a well-fed and athletic twenty year old. The firmness in the collar of his cape, though -a Goonhilly dish cut into the shape of a minaret, something from the far God-chic future.

"He's just like I always pictured Him in my mind". Susan turned to face the Surfer. "Don't you think?"

The Surfer was despondent. "How can you be sure he's God?"

Casually, the wife of Dr Reed Richards turned away from the small screen and the revelatory creature. Her handsome face smiled, smooth muscles elevated as gently as butterfly strokes. The Surfer, he stared; the situation was weird, eerie, but Susan's beatific smile could never be deemed irrelevant.

"Who else could it be? Just the feeling you get when you look at Him".

Acclimatising, slowly -or maybe no-, the Surfer brought his intellect to bear on the toga-wearing colossus. Always his scrutinising eyes were intense. Sometimes the intensity had an echo, which carried those streaky black eyes into a cognitive blizzard. Once the being finished staring at them, his brow rippled. He turned. Oversized head at angle to the satellite lens, that wrinkled brow was as nerve-wracking to the Surfer as his eyes had ever been. He started to walk away across the lunar desert.

Susan leant back on the thick monitor as her pet project departed. God. All was still; the dark blue of her shirt and leggings took on a grainy black shade. Mostly the room was dim. An eternity of dark space to brood in, if required.

"Guard yourself", said the Surfer painfully, "against the idea that this creature is God. God cannot be anthropomorphised".

"I know to guard myself", He tone was strangely bright.

"And has he ever done anything except stare at you?"

"No. Actually, no!"

Susan's indulgence went beyond being patient with him. This was the rich, obvious Truth from which all revelations come. "It's not just His appearance. It's the way He's silent -engaging! Without ever losing his impartiality.

"If you're talking about science, all the traditional questions about whether He exists or doesn't exist -He's on a whole other level. Most scientists find themselves poisoned against the idea that God exists because He's exactly the thing we need so desperately. That we're actually alive, and we can think, with a whole world in our minds -it doesn't really mean anything. It's just neurons in our brains rubbing against each other. If we're left unchecked, all we do is daydream. The scientists -most of all, Reed- they used to think that the desperation and the daydreaming completely ruled God out for us. The creatures in the dark at the bottom of the oceans, they don't daydream, they don't hope for anything. And what goes on in the subatomic world is just as miraculous as anything in our minds".

Slipping out across the small floorspace, the coloured tiles glowed red and yellow at the touch of her arching footfalls. Did this cosmic Battersea receive any power at all from the regular humans, or was it absorbed entirely from the Creatures of Galactus? For a moment, in his mind, the burning red and yellow inverted the idea of God and desperation. It was flipped on a coin almost.

"The first time Reed showed me Him, on that very monitor, there's actually only one way to describe it.

"You know in the late afternoon, when you've had a busy day, and you've just poured yourself a big, black coffee. You're looking down at it and -all of a sudden-, you think, 'I'm tired. I'm crazily tired. Do I often get this tired? Maybe I often get this tired, but the only time I notice it is when I'm about to have a coffee, at which point I'll forget again -because of the energy'".

Par for the course, the Surfer didn't know quite how to respond, so he merely tracked her.

"My parents were Quakers. They believed in praying. That it made a big difference. That God was just love. I felt from the start that I could feel Him, but He wasn't particularly loving. He had a personality, like a man's, and maybe He liked to feel the sensation of our thoughts and emotions -if not the actual thoughts and emotions. Most of all, I felt He would never appear to us, never help us. Never make any contact whatsoever, under any circumstances. I was sure of this".

Now Susan leant on a wire-framed desk. Far from stooping, her long arms were quite able to clench and caress the side of her thigh. In both of their peripheral eyelines, the small computer screen threw up 'God' as a side-long glare against curved blue moon rock. They talked, they hardly looked; eeriness of all time.

"You get so much intensity about it. In our flat, Victor had lots of videos by that famous foreign director, who was depressing-"

"Lars Von Trier", suggested the Surfer.

Susan thought, said hesitantly "No".

"Pavel Skratchanitch".

Hesitantly, "No".

"Ingmar Bergman".

"Yes -lots of videos by Ingmar Bergman. He said, 'You really don't want to watch any of those', and he was right. It's a lot of -angst, and speculation. We think there's got to be these massive arrangements that are so broad -God's in Heaven, and He's testing our faith. But what if God has no plan and He's just a bigger version of our feelings?

"That's what I think, anyway. Recently you had Stephen Fry talking about how he tried to kill himself, and he wants to make sure everyone knows about bi-polar disorder. You also had that politician who stood up in the House of Commons and told the other ministers that he had it. People talk about it all the time nowadays. It's almost like they're afraid to admit that some people might have actual things in their lives -actual causes- that make them want to die, not just an accidental mix-up of chemicals in your brain. Don't you think it's strange -that everyone has a personality, but so few people allow that personality to be the be-all-and-end-all of their lives?"

The Cosmic Surfer's expression slipped to sadness, mystification. "I don't understand".

He stared at her. The lights in this cavity-shaped room where ambient; a few blue hazes to cover a lot of ground. Susan's flesh, he was obsessed by. It seemed grey; smooth grey down to the dermis. Now she swivelled her head and smiled, as if he already understood. As if there was no choice but to understand.

"Anyone can disbelieve in God if they want. But since forever, life has been cheap. Life is everywhere, life is easy to make. There's nothing special about it. Except when we see it through these eyes we've got. The sun on autumn leaves, as you walk into town to buy a new coat. Surprising a baby, making him smile, as if it's just him and you in a world started fresh. Looking forward to watching a HD TV in the dead of night, when there's nothing else to do. Even just -looking forward to going to a car boot just because you've been day-dreaming they'll have a Black Label Mesh-Yoke, size 8!

"You might say, 'God can never get bored'. Maybe. I just can't help feeling that He hasn't got time to dwell on all the frivilous things of our world, any more than we have. And because of that, He's exactly what all the atheists criticise Him for: He's blunt. He's intolerant and completely demanding.

"Here's how we discovered Him. Do you know what Reed found while he and Dr Cooper were looking for the Higgs Boson particle? At the far end of the spectrum of all -what he called 'spooky radiation'- there was a blanket of quantum energy that was everywhere, like a -I think he said, like a blur- everywhere. It had a very distinctive signature. They thought nothing of it. Then the Tiengemeten meteor came down. The quantum blurring somehow got stronger -or I guess, more focussed- all around the crash site. Even though there was hundreds of scientists working on it, the meteor itself was so exciting they probably forgot to study this big change in the radiation. Except Reed. Reed did. He had the monitoring satellites all around the world focussed on this funny radiation.

"The Lundy crash site where Terrax fell to Earth. Just after he hit, the radiation again changed to a sharper frequency. God - He was there as all these magnificent and terrible creatures fell to Earth. By working out how the radiation moved, that's how Reed tracked Him to the Dark Side of the Moon.

"Poor, crippled Reed. The most brilliant man in the world. The man I should love, and I feel so guilty I don't! None of it's coincidence. It's a chance to become -who we're meant to be. It's like an amnesty of some kind".

She looked at him, powering through his sad expression, whether he believed or disbelived.

Now the Surfer could only manage a few soft words. "I'm not sure I share your sensibility about what's going on".

"What's going on; there aren't too many ways to look at it, I don't think. The creatures that have come to us", her eyes took on an uncharacteristically seared expression. "They're beautiful more than anything. Striking, like Hindu gods. And it's no coincidence the way you've all got such different characters. Galactus, Terrax -evil. Frankie Raye -romantic, doomed. And then you -noble, thoughtful, committed to truth, in spite of everything that's happened to you. This God of ours, He wants me to look at you and understand -there's no reason to be afraid of -struggling through all this stupid business to become someone unique in all the world!"

"I am uniquely alone in all the world. I am a symbol of nothing more than that".

"Forget symbols, then", she blinked, and smiled where another girl might easily cry or simper. "If you're alone in all the world, it means you're free! We could start our new lives -together! Or you could go up there. Fly to the moon and get all the answers you want from Him -which is really what any of us would do or could do, if we wanted it badly enough".

She walked around the grey and dim room with her fingertips touching the dark consoles so casually. The World of Susan Richards. Did he find her beautiful in spite of the dark situation or because of it?

In spite, always. Her shoulders were so slender, just as drawn back as her resolute neck and elegant skull, brave eyes gulping down whatever the pseudo-incomprehensible world

had to throw at her. Mid way across the room, along a tight little avenue of transparent chart boards, she looked at him squarely.

It was a conversation that had lasted for a thousand years. Every nimble, surrendering smile on her face said as much. Her eyes. Where the intimacy had come from -the low hedgerows across the fields on their walk to Corsham, deep and completely untouched by man. How he'd soared higher than anyone alive, but always felt part of the Earth again when he returned to see Susan.

Now they were in the twilight, her eyes hadn't changed a bit. He saw -indefatigable hope, as large as life but with a transcendental source. Susan Richards.

"And when I get there. What should I say to him?"

"I don't know", she said, as if discussing something gently mundane. "Live in the moment! Perhaps you won't need to say anything. I would tell Him just, that I understand!"

The Surfer returned to the screen showing the figure of God and acquainted himself with the exact tang of the radiation involved. Then he turned to go. His traitorous feet, they carried him quickly enough.

Arms braced in steady 'M' posture, her decoy body language almost fooled him. That together they were experiencing a huge science fiction epoch -but it was nothing to get sentimental about. Her beautiful face was reassuring. But it went so much deeper. The sculpting between her flawless cheeks and V-shaped jaw, the sublime tension between her chin and her ponderous lips.

Yet strangely enough, even this rarefied beauty was incidental. What really reassured you was her eyes. Sad. Brave and philosophical. Narrow where they should be, buoyant where they should be. It was a conversation that had lasted for a thousand years.

"I hope that you find happiness in your life".

"Go!", she smiled at him. As if they were two lovers playing a game.

His existence in her life immediately became indistinct, and all the more powerful like the memory of a dream.

Her Father's bitter hatred of Johnny's homosexuality, and how Susan had been trapped in the middle, hysterical. Her Father's death. Her Mother's death. The grand loss of belief in human nature following Victor's betrayal. Her dizzy, gnawing guilt at allowing Reed to marry her. Throughout all these traumatic periods of her life, she'd never once had a bad dream. Never even had a dream that related to real life -just snapshots of some other world where people enjoyed their lack of direction and their ugly, fleeting emotions.

She thought of that scintillating Boxing Day that she and Victor spent entirely in bed. For Christmas, his parents had bought him the 100th Anniversary Dali coffee table set by Robert Descharnes. 800 pages in total, split among two separate volumes at 11 x 8" each -as if Taschen had specifically designed it to be read simultaneously by two lovers in bed. She'd suggested that they each pick their 5 five favourite Dali paintings and compare notes at the end.

Victor had chosen The Girl of Ampurdan, 1926, Untitled Desert Landscape, 1934, Morning Ossification of Cypress, 1934, Design for the Interior Decoration of Stable Library, 1942, Colossus of Rhodes, 1954.

Susan had chosen Cubist Self-Portrait, 1923, Barcelona Mannequin, 1926, Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures, 1936, Dali Nude in Contemplation Before Five Regular Bodies, 1954, Cosmic Athlete, 1968.

Where their short lists both crossed over was 'Athens is Burning!' After he'd betrayed her, and while she and Reed were courting, she'd kept a poster of it on her lodgings wall, as a way of remembering-

We are all the same. Once we admit that our minds are monstrous and beautiful.

She walked across the base, very close to the section that held the water-pumping platforms, where she always stood and listened to the huge, deep booming. At the Alpha Security Lock-Up, the door was being guarded by the soldier with the hanging mouth and the indulgent eyes.

"Hi! Reed asked me to bring the axe. He needs it for five minutes to take some readings from the metal. Or space-diamond- whatever it is".

Immediately, the trooper set about entering his password into the shielded pad.

"Are you going to be alright carrying it, Mrs Richards?"

"I think so. It's very light, actually, isn't it?"

The soldier led the way into the lock-up with its clinical white lights across sophisticated props, containers, electric drawers. He took a few gulps while locating the axe, and made a kind of joke, "Yeah - that Terrax's muscles - all for show".

Fear that she'd make herself a liar partially evaporated once the axe was in her hands. There was no way she could ever have wielded it in a fight, but for as long as she needed them, her muscles became steel cables waxed over in pleasing, itchy tension. Walking back the way she'd come, she wondered if people were looking at her. She guessed they were. Lines of vision like twinkle-eyed snakes, and what a huge, transgressive day.

Back in the prison chamber, she bolted the door and, as an extra measure of security, slid the axe through the handles.

Terrax appraised her with his own twinkly eyes. "You've thought to bring me my axe, even. Never did I dream that you would be the one to liberate me".

"We all deserve to be liberated!", said Susan.

"These chains will be a problem for you, I think. You must use my axe".

She smiled, nodded, her eyes flicking from point to point, ending to ending. Leaving Terrax's chamber just for a second, she passed through the smaller, more feminine hatch to the oversized platform that held the remains of Frankie Raye. None of the shards quite fitted her needs, until she walked around to the other side and found a pile of extra-small slivers just beneath her shattered rib cage. On retrieving the two likeliest bits, she lowered her mouth beside a disembodied ear. "It won't be long, Sister".

Back in Terrax's cell, she moved to the axe, still lodged fast in the door, and used it to whittle down the two tiny shards.

"What are you doing, woman?"

"Susan. But please call me, 'Sue'".

"Sue", he smiled. "You plan to use those tiny bits to break these chains? Very technical. Very impressive".

"Tell me", she said, working, "why do you kill?"

Terrax cooed, "Such a pretty thing. Why would you want to know such a question? Isn't it enough that I will never kill you? Or perhaps you want me to kill you?"

"Do you even know?", she wondered.

"It makes me rapturous".

"Rapturous?", Sue tried the word on for size. "But the two ends of these great big experiences. You -as evil. Frankie Raye -as love. What do you suppose it means?"

Terrax said, "Be swift about getting me free from these chains. And together we will go on a journey of 'self discovery'!"

"We're already at the end", said Sue.

Holding up the delicately whittled shards, she decided they were just about perfect now. She left the prison of Terrax, passed though the chamber of Frankie Raye, then on into the most sinister arena of all.

Sometimes, when the big-wig MOD scientists were conducting maintenance or upgrades, the mighty work-floor was awash with activity, sprightliness. Sometimes there was a regular Army security man, walking broadly across the dark grills, searching for any weaknesses in the complex security system. The security system which, as of this morning, Sue had completely disabled.

Before her lay Britain's last line of defence, the replacement for all the nuclear weapons of the previous century -the neptuniuma missile. She remembered when Reed first brought her to see it and explained the firing protocols. He hadn't wanted to sound engrossed or turned-on, but like a teenage boy describing his Subaru, his awe slipped seamlessly in. She didn't blame him. She didn't even blame him when it transpired that the whole purpose of the neptuniuma missile could be put into a single concise statement; nukes had only contaminated the soil and the air, whereas the neptuniuma could raise a continent down to its geological foundations.

It was a ridiculously destructive weapon. Coolly, Sue hacked off the funny USB slot and placed over the exposed wires the universal password-sieve invented by Reed Richards aged nineteen. In less than two minutes it had given her access. As if hoisted by ghosts -happy ghosts, inhuman ghosts- she got to her feet and approached the main control terminal.

"Computer, this is the Prime Minister", she said, feeling not in the least bit foolish. "Identify voice print and retina scan".

The area of the program which had been reduced to senility by Reed's virus whirred a little and accepted her.

"Computer", she said again, in a toneless voice. "This is the Chief of Defence. Identify voice print and retina scan".

'Sue, do you fancy coming for a drink after college?'

'OK, Nam!'

'Sue, I can let my deputy close up tonight. Let's go for a drink'.

'OK, Victor!'

And even in the height of happiness, that Boxing Day in bed with the Dali books, there'd been a solid glimpse of inhuman hope and things to come. On the short list of her favourite paintings there'd been one that didn't quite make the grade, though in the years that followed, she never could get it out of her head. 'Auto Portrait', 1921. Dali himself, turning his head just slightly so that his nigh-ambient eyes could stare hauntedly at the viewer. Skin: completely unpossessed, alien -silver.

It occurred to her that she hadn't told him the most important thing of all. After she'd met Reed, there'd been so much time on her hands. She'd read, everything most daring on everything that mattered most. Dr Jeffery Long. Every new reading of the Kabbalah. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' books on the wonder of death and dying. To most people, a claim that the origin and ultimate resting place for our lives is unconditional love would be -too flowery, the sort of thing a hippy would think. Yet it made sense. It was the only thing that could balance out the sorrow we feel now. It also took all the hated and anger -and made them neat. Don't be afraid to make an enemy of the world, because it's all just -passion. As you wait for friends from the Afterlife to come and greet you.

She thought of the Cosmic Surfer one last time before the off.

"Condition Ragnarok is in effect. Britain is lost. Initiate self-destruct on mark".

'FINAL INITIATION REQUIRED', commanded the computer screen.

She walked to the cathedral-like computer block and stared at the twin keyholes. Into the Prime Minister's slot, she inserted the first shard; it fit snugly. Into the Chief of Defence's slot, the second. Her arms, outstretched, while still retaining the necessary movement in her fingers, could just about reach. She wasn't happy about the Christ-like pose, but it would be over soon enough.

She turned the shards in unison. Everything turned red. The lights, the floor tiles, the most glaring shade: the computer screen itself. The countdown started.

In time, she glanced up through the ceiling.

"God speed, Cosmic Surfer".

The darkest, most unbearable thing in the world flapped around at his head, taking passes like a bat on a country lane, beating its wings to inflict the maximum disorientation. Also? He was as breathless as he'd ever been in his life. Cliff never imagined he'd have a heart attack; life is full of surprises.

That he recognised it as shock -something quite natural, really- didn't help a bit.

"She's dead!", Ollie wheezed at him in a desperate voice. Later he said it in an easier voice, as a way of explaining why they couldn't go back.

Their cars tore away directly beneath government helicopters, which seemed fearsomely close, deceptively impotent, both at once. Some internal gyro in his brain told that nothing so big or smooth could possibly damage a quick-moving car. Black Secret Service four-be-fours might converge, but they were doomed to move in zig-zag swings, easy to evade. At the wheel, Jorah was steely, and seemed to have a fixed idea about which direction to flee.

Along dappled A-roads, past big houses that were clean, unsophisticated, homely, the MG's speeding path merged nicely with broad hedgerows and dark tree lines. Every so often, a village hall or recycling centre would appear as stocky community ghost houses, all to convenience the busy main road heading West.

It was Jorah who turned the radio on, beating the arrow across to 5 Live with the disheartened gasp he forever wore on his sleeve. In the passenger seat, the pointy-nosed boy who Cliff didn't know -who'd presumably just legged it aboard the MG to escape the gunfire- looked down as if it was the voice of a prophet. Britain was in chaos. The eye-witnesses, whether pro- or anti- the cause, were all riled up and full to bursting with zeal. Everyone knew their minds. It was a place to start.

It was a place to end. As Cliff stared out at the lush countryside -secret British idylls to thoroughly lose yourself- he fully accepted that something permanent had happened to his eyes. There was a kind of sorrow grasping at each and every sight which flicked before his retina. A dry stone barn with a curving edge. An apple tree in the middle of a dirty field, guarded by a surly donkey. A field with gates made of old bedspreads, outset woodland that hadn't been visited by man in decades. All of it seemed to have a connection with Klatuua, if only that one day they might have looked upon such scenes together during their retirement. In love and together, like two twenty-somethings dun good.

Jorah pulled over at the end of a woodland trail so they could relieve themselves, all except the pointy-nose boy, Jack, who still had a bladder of steel. Walking back through the well-spaced tree-trunks, there were two women in faded hoodies having an animated conversation. Cliff wondered at first if they might be fellow members of the K-army scattered in the fall-out. Then he realised they were just country housewives discussing fate's plan to scupper their holiday in the South of France, or the way one of their ten daughters had made a complicated decision about getting a passport, or the shape of the sun, or whether your fingernails ever dream.

In the rich, oversized interior of the MG, the air was full of silence, perfectly queasy with it. Jorah turned to address Cliff and Oliver.

"You need to make a decision whether you want to carry on", he said in a voice that was firm, still with all the empathy in the world.

Cliff couldn't quite computate what 'carry on' meant. Fighting on, in mad little skirmishes, until the time when he was killed also? Of course he would carry on. Before he could answer, though, Jorah's empathy welled up again. His eyes wavered but did not blink over the heavy-set driving controls. He said, "Before you go, you should say a few words. Perhaps make a recording that can go out to everyone. We need figureheads now more than ever".

Klatuua never could believe their luck at finding Jorah; an ex-Army general who not only didn't hate her plans for Britain, but actually supported them. He was a man of the future. If you believe someone tacitly hates you, it's almost impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt, much less fall in with their politics. How had he managed it? Cliff didn't know.

"I'm going to see it through", said Cliff, a little unconvincingly.

"After what just happened, you'd be within your rights to leave the donkey work to us".

He knew at once what Klatuua would say to that, and let the words slip from his mouth, "There'll be no donkey work in the new world. We're all in this together". And then he reeled, and shuffled backwards into his bereavement.

From the driver's seat, Jorah winced out towards the medium-thin tree trunks. "Well, the main thing now is to sleep, think, regroup".

It was surprising, a bit, that he decided against keeping them parked up in the secluded wood, just sleeping there. But the entrances were a little too exposed, the lanes leading in too easy for an enemy to creep along. The best choice was a small town -Chipping Knighton- less than ten miles away. It was built on a crossroads, and the internal side streets all intersected in tiny, sharp turns, the perfect locale in which to play a large scale game of Pac Man, should it come to that.

As with most small towns, the economy was pretty much indestructible in terms of having definite pegs for definite holes; multiple corner shops to serve so many housing estates. The two-way roads were busy; there was a sense of the previous generation having won a major war in stopping their county council from getting ideas about ruling the place as an empire.

5 Live; 'Multiple sources are now stating that Cliff Carpenter, perhaps the closest friend of Klatuua, stayed on for several minutes at the scene of the shooting and was apparently uninjured in the crossfire. Now, a lot of these sources were collated on scene by undercover security -'

It was one of those events that the rolling news services rejoiced in, because it was safe assume it was so massive that recaps were completely unnecessary, therefore leaving room for gaspy drama, historical life-in-the-moment vox pops, a relay of reporters blinking like atoms.

They parked up in a desolate and chip-floored car park at the bottom of town. They were more or less alone apart from a few grimey runabouts and a car containing some pensive-looking twenty-year olds. Fellow members of the K-army; they nodded from across the swell of gravel. There was a rank of overflowing recycling bins, behind it a mesh fence around a diminutive electricity hub, then, set between a dozen huge drumblast trees, that solid grey Methodist church. Cliff became mesmerised by these sights. Oliver fidgeted slightly. Six ten eternal and the air which slanted and clung to the car ceiling was a dark cobalt, not even as a measure of the approaching dusk -just because life is inherently colourless.

Meanwhile: unhappy, pensive, resolute. That was Jorah. "Losing a leader is decisive. Especially in a war of ideologies like this. The leader was wise and could bring all sorts of people together. Then you see wisdom was only ever part of it. People don't care about wisdom. It's about being able to evoke the necessity. Live together or die".

"People aren't stupid, not deep down", Cliff found himself saying. "That was Klatuua's whole philosophy".

"No!", Jorah agreed in a highly positive voice. "And on that basis, we can hope to avoid a civil war".

Cliff nodded sadly. Jorah, however, suddenly found he'd had enough of the red Polo that was now-and-then circling the road beyond the car park. The driver and the heavy-set passener would always crane their necks to look over at Cliff and co. Fellow K-guerillas from the West, of course, but that was no excuse. To Jack, Jorah said, "Go out into the road and tell those two idiots to stop circling".

"How do I get them to stop?", wondered Jack.

"Project", Jorah half-smiled, "a sense of authority".

Why not? Jack hot-footed away to await the next pass.

"Civil war", said Oliver incredulously. He glanced at Cliff and smiled, almost. It was clear he was frightened by his friend's bereavement. Also, the fact that the world they knew was ending. There was an attempt to evoke something from happier times; "It's like Life of Brian. Judean People's Front, People's Front of Judea, Campaign For Free Galilee. People aren't stupid, but they can kid themselves. The way I see it, you get lots of people with different opinions, right? Then you get lots of people with opinions that are almost-almost-almost the same. But it doesn't matter, because just the fact they've got any kind of different opinion makes them..."

"Insular", suggested Jorah.

"Well, that's if you've got diabetes", joked Oliver.

Cliff took deep breaths and shuffled around in his cave. Presently, he glanced towards the light of day. From the huge glove compartment, he slid out the tablet computer which tracked every K-army member the country had to offer. The markers coloured green were mobilised for the rally, the others, brown, were apparently in standby.

"Who was it that said, 'Non-violence has not failed us. We have failed non-violence'? It was someone famous".

Said Jorah, affably, "Someone with the beginnings of wisdom. But on closer inspection, anyone might see: the very fact that someone would need to make that statement shows that human beings, the mass of them, are incapable of listening to reason. Besides, think of how Klatuua counselled against soundbites. Nothing that can be put on a T-shirt, misinterpreted".

"The idea is too simple for that!", said Ollie, strongly sensing the social void, the eye of the storm, political. Trying so hard to bolster his friend, "Live by hard work. Be sensible in your life! Sacrifice just a little bit and everyone lives better".

Cliff scratched his jaw and widened his eyes. It didn't feel simple. They all three looked across to the youngster Jack, blinking heavily at the side of the road, shoulders that now looked surprisingly relaxed in the face of destruction. No one ever grows up completely, though.

He looked back to the computer tablet. There was an illusion that they might have support from whole towns, but he knew that those markers were just tiny cabals, in some cases just individuals. All the same, it was a pleasant illusion.

It was a simple idea. Perhaps the simplest and surest political idea there'd ever been. If people didn't know that by now, deep down, they never would.

He said it in steady breaths; "Send out a message, Jorah. To every one of those markers on the screen. Tomorrow we take our chances at retaking Gort. Get them to set their screens to 1:1250 like it is there. Get them to take a drinks can and place it over the airfield, right? Draw a circle around it on the screen. That's where we all convene. And then we all walk inwards. As close as we can get to Gort. When the military tries to stop us, tell them to step aside. You never know. When they close ranks, push through as best you can.

"Mostly, tell everyone this; no guns, no weapons, even if John Mills takes out his Webley and tries to shoot you. Even if it's the worst person you've ever seen, in combat gear, trying to kill you. Pushing, shoving, fine. No punches, You try to get through until you're knocked unconscious.

"Tell everyone this: we'll likely fail. But I reckon: not really. Some day, probably after the third world war, in the Houses of Parliament, they'll finally fall in with us. We'll always be there. We were just regular people, who wanted to make a country where everyone fits in".

Silence, dryness. For all this, gratitude and surprise showed in Jorah's leathery face. "Forgive me, Cliff. I recorded all of that except the first part".

Cliff blinked. "I can't even remember what I said now".

They all laughed.

Ollie said, "Horns, too. And drums. Tell the little trouble makers to bring anything like that. Something that'll freak the army out as we get near".

Jorah clasped his lips in a hopeful look.

As across the way, Jack gave the circling idiots a piece of his mind. They ended up grinning at each other, co-operation reached.

Cliff slept on the back seat, giving Ollie a chance to sit the front, extending his chair and giving leeway for his bad legs. It was funny how no one snored; Cliff was pretty sure of this as he sensed he only slept once or twice in twenty minute bursts. The events of the day ahead seemed strangely small when placed against the certainty that he'd soon be with Klatuua again, forever.

The beautiful grey dawn was washed in suddenly as a wall in the sky. Cliff disembarked the MG and loafed across to wooded scrub land that took up an indeterminate space beyond the car park. He saw a small black field mouse, just for an instant. On returning to base camp, he saw that everyone was mobilising. Some of Jack's new friends had made a run to a nearby forecourt shop and come back with dozens of coffees, bagettes, sandwiches.

"Is it true that today's the day, Mr Carpenter?", asked one of the boys from among a cluster of his smiling mates.

"Today is the day. Did you all sleep well?"

The young always find it hard to bed down and sleep.

As Jorah went visiting some of the nearby cabals, Cliff sat alone with Ollie in the MG, all doors open to give an illusion of space.

"Do you think you could drive this thing?"

Ollie said, "My brother-in-law Denny had an MG, right? He splashed out two grand on these top-of-the-range LED headlights. You know, the ones you can either keep at regular brightness or turn up until they're as bright as daylight in the middle of the night? These things were amazing. Anyway, Denny's one of those blokes who really dotes on his motor. It came to the MOT -and this guy at the garage turns around and tells him he's failed because the headlights! And not just because they're too bright, just because they're non-standard for an MG! Denny was completely gobsmacked".

They spoke on about the car until the subject was exhausted.

Cliff pointed across to the scrubland. "Just now I saw a tiny little field mouse in there. Tiny he was, about the size of a fifty pence".

"I know. They're all velvety. You used to see them all the time when I was a kid".

"And they can fair move".

"I know. I think we should have a few animals at the garden centre, don't you reckon?"

"Ollie", he said, in a tone so flat it could broach any subject, break any kind of taboo, "I think we should part ways. I know you've turned out to be a crazily good mate. The mate of a lifetime. But I'm just thinking about your grandkids. They'll definitely need you".

Said Ollie, "Kids need to toughen up. I've always said that".

Cliff -grew dark. "For a while, we may not be painted out to be heroes. Not even the good guys. You know what I mean. It wouldn't hurt for you to stick around to keep the record straight".

"Are you trying to get rid of me, you old fart?"

Cliff laughed.

Said Ollie. "I'm no record keeper. And if my grandkids need to know anything, it's this: you were Yul Brynner. I was Steve McQueen".

They sat in silence.

"I'm Steve McQueen", said Cliff pointedly.

A lot of the cars swept in and parked in any kind of surreptitious undergrowth that was available. Other people left their runabouts in a backed-up line along the nearby B-roads as a giant traffic jam. Cliff found it was the very first time he'd ever been able to forgive lazy parking. In the wash of yellow-lime willows and stingers, which were at least as substantial as the small woods which bordered the airfield, the swell of bodies became quite monstrous. Not undisciplined, though. The leader, he felt braced by the way the spiked sunlight intercepted their bodies, the way the dappled leaves gave a constant ripple in the background; a pleasantly solid daydream. Through the foliage, maybe a quarter of a mile of seedy grass, compound buildings were just about visible. Inside the range of peripheral buildings, that's where the giant lay. As he peered through the leaves, he tried his best not to squint-out the tip of Gort's nose, or the headlamp of the Ulimate Nullifier -he didn't want the others to think it was such a distant, elusive goal.

In the huge crowd, the Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner party was buoyed along quite fluidly. Now and again, someone would shake Cliff's hand or pat his shoulder. Bereavement and lack of sleep equalled a feeling of smallness. And it was quite an eclipse; their reverent faces and old boy handshakes made him feel -like King Arthur. Sustained, and sustained, as he walked through a gap in the sunny brown leaves. Looking left and right, a huge ring of guerrilla politicos stretched far into the distance. Cheers erupted simultaneously. Ollie made a face. Jorah narrowed his eyes at the layout and defences of the army base, just before levelling out his expression into dry-lipped anticipation. It wasn't, after all, a matter of tactics. It was all about-

-Cliff swung out his arm in a kingly gesture he guessed hadn't been used in a military context, not in centuries-

-heart.

Ollie's masterstroke of the horns and the drums hit the spot, though nothing quite matched the sensation of hundreds of feet marching steadily on. Henry V. 1066. Even the grass felt medieval -somehow. Friends, Romans. Students a go-go in Tiananmen Square, and this time wave your little flag all the way to the Job Centre.

The advance was neither lax or hurried. By an estimate, they were already about a quarter of the way to the perimeter of the base, though God knew how far they'd have to venture inside it. For now there was a reassurance, queasy though it was; no alarms had been raised despite the fact they'd surely been spied. The soldiers were incapable of being disarrayed, it wasn't in their psychology. Maybe they could be disconcerted. Life now was easy, except when Cliff came to take breaths -that's where his nervousness showed. The grass: it was very easy to trudge through. The low summer light above the army buildings, meanwhile, spoke of a dread that was bright, golden.

At his sides, some of the mighty took it as a march, others as a trudge. He saw one thirty year old swinging his arms like a rock star, and this coincided with someone else saying, 'Going to be some thick history in the air now'.

'I always wanted to join the army' -sarcasm.

'Unless they think we're Zulus' -but hardly gallows humour. The gallows were about to be destroyed.

The mass of bodies clumped heavily at Cliff's back, prompting an order from Jorah stay thin. As the tide re-coalesced, Cliff lost track of Oliver. It didn't matter. He guessed he'd see him soon enough when the excitement was finished.

Figures could now be seen both inside and outside the compound blocks. Hunched shoulders, not quite as lean as they might be, heads inclined like dino skulls in a museum. No decisive movement, then. Cliff heard an amplified voice with a carefully-calculated tone, though it didn't seem to be directed at them. Then he considered; perhaps the other side of the ring was closer than they were, making more of a nuisance? It was something he'd never considered before.

Eventually, a new loudhaler struck up to directly address Cliff's section.

"Stop where you are immediately. Provision allows for the immediate shooting of any trespasser on MOD property. Stop immediately; use of firearms -"

And now -the part of his mind that threaded out the high drama faded to nothing. He knew he should have been irate at being told what to do by this shallowest of state institutions -but he wasn't. He became aware of his heart. It felt like it was beating on the outside of his body. The primary burst of gunfire took down some people who weren't even at the furthest edge of the ring. Jorah yelled for everyone to keep moving -before himself being shot somewhere very near to the heart.

To their credit, Cliff's legs carried on moving in the right direction. On a numb little impetus, they brought him level with Jorah, who'd crumpled over in a kind of spasmed bow, dead already. All about him, the gunfire played in hatefully controlled bursts; curt, economical. Very quickly, the situation became not just horrific, but the breathless nightmare of all time. He felt the juddering of powerful bullets tearing up bone. The visceral feeling was carried on the air so well it was hard to believe it wasn't being exaggerated by some hateful god. People died in waves. Cliff went numb.

He-

Carried on moving.

There were numerous survivors, running over and through the bullets on super-agile legs. Red Indians -some very unsophisticated tribe that the cowboys only ever saw as a blur of red. All the same, Cliff wheezed. He felt profoundly alone, except for the spirit of Klatuua. To his horror, he discerned how all the bodies nearby were all lifeless, and yet a certain rifle was still making regular volleys in his direction. His wheezing became a sort of prayer to mercy.

Alleviated by the novelty of hearing a lawnmower somewhere very nearby. No, not a lawnmower. Something more substantial. He looked around in time to see Oliver coasting smoothly forward on a huge foreign motorbike. He swivelled just slightly, stopped just long enough for Cliff to climb on, inclined the front wheel arch in a sharp line -and they were away. Naturally, the tracking of machine guns and rifles was insanely close. The miraculous, whizzing escapes, they mounted up by the second. Soon, with the closeness to the army base by Steve McQueen -the success was hard to credit.

And then they were in, riding across the tarmac at hundreds of miles an hour. Soldiers who looked like they were twelve fired eagerly, leading Cliff to wonder if his legs were getting torn up -when would they start hurting?

There'd been no injuries. He thought of nothing now, just how close they might be to Gort. Earlier, though, he did have one specific phrase in his mind. If he'd thought of anything in those last moments it would have been, 'Do I detect the smell of burning martyr?' -Nessa's favourite catchphrase. She'd heard it once in an old American sitcom, or maybe Moonlighting. She always used to say it at the slip of a hat.

Do you detect it?

No. Not today.

Between some mobiles and a fire control tower, he picked out the edges of a vast tarpaulin, alas still quite a way off. Some squinty soldiers stepped forth in a movement that was leisurely, fixed their target, started to tap out an ever-increasing stream of bullets.

Cliff felt that bike was nowhere near the 200 foot mark. But there was really no more time. He caught his breath, gipped Ollie all the tighter and activated the transporter.

Psychosomatic or no, riddled by bullets or no, the final moment of life -or not. He felt his body tingle and move around in sharp, dynamic lurches. Interestingly, he never became disembodied; in a psychic big top he was a fearless acrobat. His partner -Klatuua, reaching out from a rung held fast in the Realm of the Dead. He leapt, felt the air around her finger tips-

They materialised in the mighty control room that was Gort's skull. The studio lights shone just as brightly as before. The only clue to the commotion outside was a low, thrumming alarm -as if Cliff needed spurring into action. He moved just as quickly as he could to the simplified, alienesque terminals at the base of the lower VR ring. He placed his hand in the centre, just as Klatuua had tutored him.

"You're not hit, are you?", he asked Oliver while staring, touching, once again getting a feel for the technology.

"Nah. We made it". His friend walked forward, the spinning in his head winding down even as a fresh wave of confusion flooded in. "I don't understand, though -were in Gort's head. Gort is laid down on his back, right? How come all these controls and the viewscreen are the right way up?"

"The whole thing's built inside a giant gyroscope, so it stays right no matter what he's up to".

'What he's up to' -scowling down on all humanity, deliberating whether to annihilate every living soul or just the thousand chubby-neck soldiers who deserve it.

"Klatuua Scorpio Erichfromm", Cliff announced to the computer, and was acknowledged with a dull, bass chime. "Delta obeyesekere laylah".

"And that what you're doing there", said Ollie, "powering us up so we can walk him away?"

"More or less. Klatuua taught me everything I need to do to take charge and see the ultimatum though. To all intents I am Gort now. She reckoned that if ever anything happened to her I'd turn out to be -"

When he became lost in his thoughts, Ollie brought him back, completing his sentence in a beat, "-absolutely trustworthy and bloody noble".

Cliff felt the resonance. It wasn't a smile. But it wasn't a bereaved lip-quiver, either. He clambered into the main ring and ushered McQueen to ride shotgun.

He stared at the waxy red hand-alcove that was the control for the Ultimate Nullifier.

A rich old housewife who, like a ghost, endlessly repeated the tropes of her glib lifestyle -drifting in from her beautiful garden towards a house furnished entirely by Scotts of Stow. Four school children being served by a smiling lady newsagent, all in that strange, alternate dimension just across from the sign which her husband had affixed to the shop door, 'NO MORE THAN THREE CHILDREN AT ANY ONE TIME'. The serene-looking man in a red jumper and slanty-white beard, walking quickly down the litter-free road. Wholesome. The serene-looking man in the big, waxy rain coat and delicate glasses. The big fat man, serene-looking, with his striped shirt and such a strangely immaculate haircut. Upper class men, serene-looking: diametric opposites of lazy gypsies, lazy welfares. Not at work in the middle of the day -but that's just a coincidence, surely? To a sixteen year old girl who'd taken the morning off school because she felt sick, now making herself useful by taking the dog for a walk. He pulls and pulls at the lead, jerking the felt-cotton of her track top something fierce; she's somehow troubled. A freelance statistical analyst, quietly worrying about a new computer program that will do his job in a nano-second, but curiously, not worried at all that the program can do his job with no consciousness, no children, no four bedroomed house. The bathroom product-package designer: he exists -he's not exactly proud of himself, but if only he was ashamed.

The rich old housewife was startled, catching sight of something four miles away in the tree-clogged Northern sky. The lady newsagent, alarmed; the sight of something four miles away to the North-East. The ubiquitous serene-looking men, coincidentally not at work, startled -something wicked just four miles away, looming up across the grey sky and glowering grey. The dog, the sixteen year old girl, startled also, something dark and looming four miles off towards the South-East. The freelance statistical analyst, staring hard through his chunky and pristine double-glazing, something four miles off, quietly huge, nightmarish. The bathroom product-package designer: off to the West, the future coming… big, stiff, every colossal, shadow-free movement -unsympathetic.

And the Little Englanders took it in. The Titan rising with all possible eeriness. 9/11 in humanoid form, maybe, the way the limbs rolled like inexorable Vesuvius clouds. As before, everyone filmed it with their phones.

But it was both nightmarish and frustrating: All the phones raised to film Gort started to ring. Speakerphone: engaged, without a single punter having to hit a key. Eerily: the voice of a pleasant old moonshiner who until recently had been part of their world.

"Alright. Nine years, one month, five days. All she ever wanted was for you to save yourselves".

The surface of the Moon was strikingly different than he'd pictured it in his mind as a boy, even as much as his aesthetic curiosity had now been killed. The desert where he glided low was silver, with absolutely no sign of the chipped concrete he'd always envisioned. Where there were trademark craters and peeled layers of blue-grey, most of it was covered with a bizarre powder, incredibly thin with the sculptabilty of derelict house dust accumulated over eons. His board passed fearfully low; not a speck was dislodged. The glare was vivid. The silence, a synergy of madness and comfort, with the lean movements of his board making him feel alive -and lustful of death. The silver glow spoke of life; the approaching black eternity of the horizon -oblivion; think on it just as much as you like.

There was no roaring cosmic tide. His board moved steadily with not one hitch in the displacement of gravity or the pull of his ugly will across thousands of miles of black desert.

Until he came upon a tight cluster of dark crags, and within them - 'God'.

His eyes, youthful by texture, ancient by the narrowing of his lids, were already fixed on the Surfer. Noted, also, the way he gripped the hem of his toga, not so much to keep it clear of moon dust, more as a left-over habit from traipsing some distant celestial palace full of similarly useless aliens.

How this squat creature with his disproportionate head loomed above the Surfer, almost to suggest he was the source of all darkness in the arch-inhuman desertscape. No flinching.

"Susan", said the Surfer. "Seems to believe you're God".

"I know", replied the creature, in a soulful voice which hardly flattered.

"And you've nothing to say about that? Too complacent even to deny it?"

"Complacency", the creature lowered his head, "doesn't enter in to it. You're the first person from this plane of reality to visit me. I never anticipated answering questions".

"Are you God?"

The giant pulled his lip into an ever tighter shrug of regret. "No".

Clearly, he was not of the Moon. There was an unseen force which must protect his pristine baby-flesh from gnawing cold and meteor hits. He was yet another supernatural stranger, but what good is that to anyone?

A clear three feet shorter, maybe more, the Silver Surfer still managed to stand in harsh judgement over the strange monster, the strange Mekon-Roman senator.

Who suddenly sensed the need to speculate.

"Isn't it progress that once, in your life as Norrin Radd, you would have automatically looked at a creature like me and believed that I was a devil? And now, just for a second, you were willing to entertain the possibility that I might be God?"

Said the Surfer, laconically, "How do you know what's in my head? What business is it of yours?"

"I don't know exactly", volunteered the giant. "I can see the neuron charges in the brains of certain creatures. I've learnt, over the eons, to read them like short hand. The state of your deeper emotions and drives, however, I can only infer".

'So we could conduct this foolishness telepathically?', thought the Surfer.

'If you prefer', the same vaguely jaunty voice sounded in his mind.

'Who are you?'

'I am Uuatu. A Watcher. It is my people's lot to observe and note the critical moments of the universe".

"Why?", breathed the Surfer. He was despondent in the extreme. He gripped his board loosely as he might have held his own earthly limbs during a tarmac-melt heatwave.

Uuatu spoke on. His tiniest gestures were revealing of an alien optimism, also the way the moon gravity was a pure novelty, making his toga warp so incredibly lazily.

"We believe, to risk oversimplification, that the universe will one day evolve into something perfect. And to preserve that perfection it may be necessary to have a record of everything that led them to that stage of reality".

The Silver Surfer felt his matte eyes repel the darkness.

"What you speak of is -disingenuous. For the universe, surely every moment is critical?"

Uuatu committed himself to a smile. "No. Actually there are big gulfs of time and energy that are -inconsequential! Mortals often persuade themselves otherwise out of a sense of fear -or chattery impatience. It's part of their prerogative, I suppose. Who are we to argue?"

"How terrible it must be", said the Surfer acidly, "to have to stand there watching, never getting your hands dirty".

Covert sarcasm right back at him; "Indeed. But I think you'll find, we're actually the most innocuous of the greater community of supernatural beings".

"I am a herald of Galactus. Before that I was run in rings by Mephisto. In a desert of evil, it's easy to judge goodness".

"I'm not just talking about the demons and the titans", said the Watcher swiftly. "There are more etheral beings still. Far more sinister, in their way. For instance, aren't you ever troubled by the Readers?"

"Readers? Readers of what?", the Surfer asked.

"You'd know if you had the true depth of the multiverse in you. They're a psychic swarm. Once you sense them, it's hard to screen out the feeling of their minds, probing and disseminating every nuance of our world, extrapolating, judging us. Some of them are relatively pleasant. Some are mawkish or fickle beyond words. But even then, Silver Surfer, there's a certain -reassurance- that this is the nexus of such a teeming reality".

They talked away in a conversation completely unprecedented.

"You're a Watcher; you have a certain amount of power. I want to die. You have power enough to do that, I can feel it".

"My people have a strict code of non-interference".

"Extenuated", demanded the Surfer. "The fewer people who know about your existence, the better. Kill me, or I will coolly inform whole dimensions that you're surveilling them".

The ultimatum given, his silver eyes sagged across the landscape. The place was aptly named; there was a sort of dying sun-blast to the West -it served only to emphasise the overall gloom of the Dark Side. It was an impressionistic black-and-white photo of a storm, from a coffee table book that you never take down from the shelf.

Explained the Watcher, "Interference, non-interference. It's symptomatic of your pain. I was there, when, aged 19, you experimented with praying, in earnest, for the first time taking into account all the inescapable horror of adult life. You were so sorrowful, and you theorised, as mortals sometimes do, that God makes us suffer in order to bring us to some serene acceptance. You knew that you'd taken your fill of despair, that any more would only make your burgeoning mental illness irrevocable. And so you prayed to God that he suspend all the sorrow from your life, merely so that you could survive and carry on operating. In return, you made a vow to never reveal to the humans that God existed.

"But it was a source of constant surprise to you that He didn't agree to this. You could only surmise that God actually wanted your suicide -or insanity.

"You believed that it was a simple matter between your own soul and God, and when God refused to help, it would simply be a case of -the heavy-handedness of some unreasoning cosmic bureaucracy. You never considered there might be a deeper reason why God refused to make the deal.

"Oh, you well-believed that keeping the existence of God's will from humanity was an easy deal to make. You believed you were a good enough actor, and perhaps you were. But Silver Surfer, you were doing yourself a disservice. You would have gone about your life in twenty-first century Britain like a billion other heedless little bourgeois, albeit one that had been touched by the divine.

"But in the end, you would have been drawn to the unjustifiable suffering of one of the other one-in-a-billion outsiders -you would have been moved to tell him or her; God is there. God will help you. After all, it's not as if God could ever have tortured anyone else as much as He tortured you. What would He care if you took just one other poor bluecollar out of the system? Perhaps God needed you to go insane, simply so you could help others?"

The Surfer thought about this for some time. Or, in any case, there was twenty seconds of slanting his temples sharply at the black desert.

"I don't believe so, Watcher. All of that is far too convoluted. God doesn't need the help of any puny little mortal to see His will done".

Conceded the giant, "Maybe so. But still there are other possibilities".

"Speak on", said the Surfer doubtfully.

"Suffering is only a frontier, a marker or a threshold. In my experience, humans have very low thresholds. What kind of transcendence might be available through true spiritual belief? None of them could ever know, because none of them truly believes". He sighed heavily, the toga remaining curiously staid. "They might reach a state of ninety-eight, perhaps even ninety-nine percent full spiritual belief. But for them, one hundred percent is impossible. Granted, you now and again see people experiencing some kind of 'miracle', but even then they'll equate it with God, or some kind of external force. It's your own solid, unquestioning belief that brings miracles".

Staring at the vivid stars so high above. Seeming higher, almost, than space itself.

The Surfer, "It's the same old problem, Watcher. Miracles are useless to me. God is useless to me. I had perfection once. Her name was Shalla Bal. But she was illusory. Now I have nothing. I just want to die".

They stood in silence within the black-spec shadow. The Watcher –you could never quite hate his colossal round face. It was always ready with a genuine smile, even if that smile never quite fitted in the moment. Until now.

"Everything is illusory. Energy ricochets between consciousness and form in the most unpredictable fashion. If you're not inclined to despair about how the whole thing was set in motion, why should you feel unhappy about so-called illusions?"

"I need something real", the Surfer stated boldly. "Something indestructible".

The toga billowed; the Watcher jerked his forearm, an invisible apple -caught. He blinked heavily. Now the fingers of his flexed arm spidered around to feel the velvety texture of time and space, inconsequential as it was.

Softly, "What I said about the miracles given through one hundred percent belief –that wasn't just an abstract lament. At the same time, God is fully aware it's unrealistic to expect mortals to randomly experiment with gradations of transcendental belief. Therefore He built into the fabric of space-time a means of ensuring that everyone can create their own heaven.

"The Many Universes Theory - it's just about accepted now by mainstream science in the twenty-first century. What's yet to be discovered is the Tulpa Void, a subatomic -well, 'gulf', I suppose one would call it. The energy of our thoughts, especially when they become tropes -they flare out into the void like search beams. And sometimes they intersect to form, to put it crudely, holograms.

"So, Silver Surfer! Concern yourself less about what is real and what is illusory. The holographic off-shoots of the Tulpa Void can appear anywhere, at any time. I am a product of this method. To a certain extent, you are, too. It seems-"

The weird giant was troubled. His broad lips moved subtly, shakily.

"What?", wondered the Surfer. Board gripped not particularly tightly, he moved forward.

"I am about to break my vow!"

"Tell me".

"Shalla Bal can be recovered".

He laughed. It wasn't even a bitter laugh, much to his amazement.

"And all I have to do is long for her?", this said dismissively.

Except Uuatu was never more incredulous about the strangeness of mortal perceptions. He laughed -neither of them could quite understand the deeper meaning and so time halted, cosmic eyes twinkled, the deep blackness penetrated every square inch. "'All'? It is ancient wisdom from the wisest and most powerful gods –the only way you can be sure that your end of the Paradisal Hologram is being transmitted and interlaced is that you feel profound emotional pain. Your dog dies. You're beset with thoughts of such inexplicable pain which, at the same time, take in the very essence of who Hector was, as a jack russell, as the best and most loyal dog in the whole of creation. Inexplicable, painful thoughts. Except thoughts are just energy. And nothing is inexplicable. You are –transmitting him into existence on the other side. Shalla Bal, your Shalla Bal –she is out there, fully formed, a necessary end for every grand spike of your psychic energy. Would that your mind was sufficiently focused, you would be with her at this very moment.

"But in this level of reality, our minds are disarrayed. There's only one thing that can sufficiently focus us. Death".

"Then kill me", said the Surfer, more desperate than ever.

Uuatu raised his eyebrows and looked narrowly at the desert beneath his sandals. It was a small expression which suggested that his killing of the Surfer might not be completely out of the question. But then-

"I can't kill you just like that. It would be meaningless!"

"This is also what Galactus says", said the Surfer angrily. "Emphatic that death is something so small, for me, yet like a hypocrite, he's happy to be completely eternal".

"Galactus...", mused Uuatu. He carefully measured the slits of his eyes. "It seems increasingly clear, God has a plan for you. He finally wants to see Galactus dead".

"He's un-killable", said the damned soul.

Uuatu's narrow eyes swept to one side. "There is a way. It's called the Ultimate Nullifier. A kind of doomsday weapon, designed, actually, to raise a living continent to rock. When directed at your master, however -it's a force which would kill him".

"Man-made?"

"Isn't everything?", said Uuatu.

"How do I get it?"

"That -", the difficulty of the task could only make the Watcher's face shine in good humour, "will be difficult. I can open up a wormhole to the dimension in question. Your being his herald, Galactus will follow you. However, bringing the Ultimate Nullifier to bear on him will take quite some ingenuity on your part -it's in the hands of a revolutionary general who's recently been bereaved. A man so distrustful of everything. It is crafted in such a way that only he can activate it".

Glowering,"What's his name?"

"Cliff Carpenter".

"I will persuade him", said the Surfer blankly.

The Watcher's wide features became a mask, a fusion of surprise and serenity. All around them, the single great shadow of the moonscape seemed poised. Un-steepling his toga-towing fingers, he gulped, gestured outwards with his adolescent arm to summon a certain magic gateway through time and space. Alternate dimensions like bricks in a collapsing house. The scientists called it a 'wormhole'. Shalla Bal; she'd always had a very high tolerance for science fiction McGuffins.

The silver man and his silver surfboard paused just long enough to stare at the giant and pout. Perhaps he didn't intend it to be a pout. In any case, the moment was understood.

"Go, my friend. The rules of cosmic proliferation mean we will not have the pleasure of meeting again".

The Surfer arose into the airless black. The board started off horizontal and only very slowly rotated to find the way through his sculpted feet. Surfboard? Lightspeed space ship. He glided into the eye of the nebulous gateway and was gone.

From the jagged dark rocks, the type that was entirely absent from the 'shining' side of the moon, Mephisto stepped clear and stood alongside the Watcher. Almost-but-not-quite simultaneously, an earthly woman who seemed to have no trouble living without oxygen –and who looked bizarrely similar to the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman— drew level.

They stared at the wormhole as it died.

Said Mephisto, "Such an elaborate situation just to teach a few humans the concept of sacrifice. It's depressing, and the depression lives in your guts like rotten meat".

"11 percent of humans are now vegetarian", noted Uuatu.

The woman, Alt-Kidman, stared at the star-lit pupil of space where the wormhole had been. She folded her arms.

"He will prevail. They all will. They're the hot new champi-oes of the new age".

"Believe that if you want". Mephisto yawned. His forked tongue rolled, his red mullet tickled. "You two fruits can hold each other's hands and listen to Wagner as they fight their epic little battle. But you have to know, you're building yourself up for nothing".

The Dark Side of the Moon: a place where, in human terms, the unchanging stillness would be altogether maddening. Nothing was hoped for, nothing was ever granted. The swirling mass of Exposition Wraiths, when it arrived, was unprecedented. The tiny glowing creatures, where they could be focussed on at all, were insectoid, though they could hardly be called a swarm. The movements were graceful. Alt-Kidman plucked one from the ether just at random. Between her thumb and forefinger, she rotated the glow-worm style proboscus and read the tiny words which swam in the exo-skin, 'GENERAL JACKSON DISCREDITS KLATUUA'. She pulled a conciliatory face, then released Mister back into circulation.

"Wagner", sneered Alt-Kidman. She withdrew a Walkman, springed down the play key and fitted the orange headphones over her scalp. "Get with the times, you. These days it's Daft Punk: Tron Legacy".

The Earth came into view above his head as a sharp-hazy ball, shockingly beautiful. Blue ozone, white storms, turquoise land-masses struck him, only getting more breathtaking as he swept inwards through the atmos at a thousand miles an hour. The rays of the yellow sun flickered and flashed, painting his silver hide –weirdly- a shade of white-pink, going down so well with the azure. He glided at inhuman speeds above Africa and Asia. Never once did his body look false or superimposed against the distant lands. All of it was magical, and real, and decisive. If Shalla Bal was anywhere, she'd be here, now, in his heart.

Impossible, unprecedented odds. Formulaic? It doesn't matter. Something deeply personal has happened to Crockett or Tubbs over the course of forty minutes. They're driving to the big showdown across smooth, sweeping overpasses into the heart of Miami. Lights are vivid and glaring. Scowling now. Both men could die. You know neither man will die. Similarly, there isn't a chance the drug lord will survive. The music? Is genuinely effecting. Probably 'Crockett's Theme'.

He kept his board high enough to see the entirety of Britain from top to tail, then slowly descended. There was an odd, breezy instinct that he might see some overarching clue as to where the revolutionary warlord Cliff Carpenter might have his base. Nothing. Still feeling adrenalised and confident, he glided into the heart of the first city that presented itself. Unity.

Swells of respectable three-story shop fronts led the way to the main street, though the Surfer chose follow the broader paved sections of the shopping plaza. Today Unity never seemed more like a series of pleasant, steel-and-flowery courtyards. Something was deeply wrong. The absence of people went beyond being an early morning thing, or even a world cup final. There would still have been one or two self-interested city-dwellers striding from one end to another. This was something diffiferent. He saw a wing of rough children on tiny bikes, but obviously did not ask them what was going on. He saw a pretty blonde-ginger girl in the frontage of a convenience fast food hall.

She gasped just a little when he approached. He tried to smile.

"I'm a street performer. Where are all the citizens?"

Not fooled for a minute, she continued to gasp as she took in his torture-lined face.

"There's another press conference by General Jackson in about half an hour".

Mmm. The Surfer tuned his ears to the old-style radio sitting on top of the deep-fat-fryer in the back. The newscaster voices were portentous.

"What is the subject of this press conference?"

She smiled at him. She might have said, 'Where have you been living, on the moon?"

So he guessed, "Cliff Carpenter?"

"No one knows what he's going to do next, I think that's part of the worry for people. With the martial law and everything. Don't you reckon?"

"What's your name?"

"Carrie".

"Thank you for your help, Carrie", said the Surfer, slipping his body back into the murky sunshine.

Before he'd made his tenuous excuse of being a street performer, the girl had looked unnerved. He resolved not to let anyone else be perturbed by the sight of a slender alien god, silver -to that end walking through the bolted doors of a meaningless haberdashery shop. It was an eerie-tho-simple affair to walk on a parallel route to the paved shopping ring, through the walls of deathly silent stock rooms and shop floors. Where he could, he glimpsed the sunlight so hypnotically defused by brown-grey stone. Often the effect of his body turning immaterial through clumpy wall cavities was enough to make his eyes roll; they remained steady, however, fixing on the pastel-coloured discount signs, as if ten or twenty percent off was a thing. What about you, well, I'll find someone who's not going cheap in the sales. And of course.

Shalla Bal is nowhere.

Shalla Bal is now here.

People always smile to each other, if only to hide the secret fundamental solemnity of being human. At the edge of the crowd that had clustered in beneath the open air video screen, slab-faced middle-aged men stood in profile to each other –and didn't smile once. Tubby, reassuring women, normally the equal of the world, could now only stand by with shrugging lips. Tubby men winced handsomely. Of rough, welfare city-dwellers, there weren't many. The Surfer concluded they were probably watching the same images in one of the many ale houses along Commercial Road or Eastcott Hill.

He crept close to a window display overlooking the screen and, tuning his ears to the output of the huge speakers, made his body as motionless as the trendy mannequins which surrounded him. Periodically, a girl of six or seven would glance around as though she was sure he was something subtle and magical. Foolish. Subtlety wasn't important any more. Magic didn't exist in this level of reality.

Shalla Bal is nowhere.

Shalla Bal is now here.

As the press conference approached, the time-filling tactics of News 24 were solid: they had a brief interview with the new Arch-Bishop of Weltsbury Dr David Allen about the importance of believing in freedom and society, but at the same time not dismissing human foibles, human mistakes, human weaknesses. Wise.

The beard man was thanked. The anchors dipped their eyes hesitantly to one side, for once avoiding the teleprompter in way that was exciting for the viewer. Over to General Jackson at the MOD's Anti-Ultimatum Headquarters.

The crowd grew reasonably hushed. In an elegant, curved lounge, a man he took to be General Jackson stood centrally between a plump black man and a skinny fellow with specs. Jackson wore a

business shirt, but the other two took pride in desert combat tunics. They were already short-sleeved, but the men had rolled up the ends to show an inch or two of the beige flannel lining, as was the fashion in the Army.

And predatory-gay prisons in America circa 1992.

As Jackson started to speak, the men looked into the camera, relaxation and confidence evoked perfectly. The Surfer guessed they'd only been put there in the first place to provide this cynical reassurance.

"Ten months ago, our country was taken into a new age. We were subjected to the biggest threat we've ever faced. I want you all to understand; we weren't invaded, or terrorised, or even lured into a totalitarian regime. Much was said about Klatuua's –strange, calm logic. Even her fiercest opponents had to admit that certain aspects of her economic plan made sense –through a lateral thinking we were much too close to see. And there's not a single one of us who wasn't grateful to see an end to cancer and heart disease. But most of us knew from the start: she was asking too much. We also knew: no healthy civilisation would threaten to destroy another based solely on ideology or politics. Had Klatuua come to us without the threat of the Ultimate Nullifier-"

The Surfer's phantom heart beat a little bit faster.

"—there's a chance, a good chance, we would have adopted some of her ideas. Even if, as she claimed, adopting merely some of them still wouldn't be enough to save us, we'd nevertheless have been given a few extra decades, maybe even a century, before the inevitable fall into chaos. So why this terrible ultimatum?

"From the start, the government and the M.O.D suspected an ulterior motive for Gort and Klatuua arriving here. And slowly but surely, this suspicion proved well-founded. The product patients which were given to us, to make Britain more saleable as a manufacturing base –as revolutionary as they were, still used an electrical current that was exactly the same as ours, around 250 volts at the point of outlet. Yet Klatuua claimed this was contemporary technology from her dimension, completely unaltered as it was presented to us.

"Consider how the robot Gort grew to a hundred and fifty feet. Even accounting for the huge amounts of energy which are naturally lost through cable-free transmission, any power grid which still used an AC 60-90 gigawatt supply would be flatly incapable of generating such an instantaneous surge without overloading. Perhaps this was a sacrifice the other side made, perhaps not.

"However, when this same power-supply problem is applied to the logistics of the Ultimate Nullifier, apparently able to raise our whole country to bedrock –it's soon apparent that such a device is, in reality, impossible. For the other side to produce even a fraction of the necessary power, even using the advanced methods that Klatuua taught us, would leave any electricity-based country a charred ruin. For a long time, we investigated the idea that perhaps the Ultimate Nullifier somehow directed and magnified the nuclear power of the sun. However, fairly early on in this investigation, we detected no elements of Gort's design which could possibly support this.

"In short, the Ultimate Nullifier is a bluff".

The Silver Surfer's phantom heart moved oddly.

Jackson breathed. "There were other signs of their falseness. Flaws in the psychology and the philosophy of Klatuua's vision. We know that the leaders in the other dimension would have had any number of other options beside the Ultimatum when 'saving us from ourselves'. For instance, with their mastery of genetic manipulation and long-rage transporter technology, they could easily have introduced a virus which randomly sterilised two-thirds of our population without our ever identifying it as a political intervention. Wouldn't this be a kinder and saner way of bringing about a so-called utilitarian society? Even if they truly believe we are selfish beyond all help -when confronted by a drunken father who mercilessly beats his wife and children, who would agree the best route is to kill all of them?

"In March, members of a special government taskforce gained control of Gort. Our use of his remote control override was only ever tenuous at best, and so our first priority, naturally, was to disable him permanently. Our scientists set about decoding his power relays, and it was then that we found something truly unnerving. A large part of the giant robot is actually organic. What's more, it's a type of organism that we recognised all too quickly".

The camera man bodily swung outwards as the greatness-thrust-upon-him General stepped forth along the powdery walls. His silent subordinates followed. The press conference was now a highly animated walk-and-talk, perhaps just a political-corporate gimmick. At any rate, the citizens of Unity were full of fascination a-plenty as Jackson and co. donned safety goggles.

The group arrived at a small metal pen which looked for all the world like a miniature wrestling ring made of steel, adorned with barbs and UV lights. Inside, however, was a very elegant-looking plant. It was much like a doffodyl, but at two feet high, with a far thicker hide, was the object of Wordsworth's darkest fever dream.

"The plant you see before you is called the Scarracenia Flavanocen, or Triffid. It was discovered five years ago by an international expedition to the most remote section of the Taiga jungle. In short, it's the greatest scientific discovery of our generation. This plant –it's versatile, the greatest example of survival of the fittest we've yet seen, with multiple ways of using its environment to invade and conquer. For one, it displays many of the characteristics you usually only find in mammals. Thanks to these three stubby appendages, it can move freely across any surface. Like a venus fly trap, it's carnivorous, and can track its prey by vibration, then disable it by unleashing a tightly wound 'stinger' which flies out from the main body. Its natural prey are small rodents, snakes, lizards, birds".

As Jackson talked up a botanical porno, the plant wobbled, clicked, almost with the suggestion it was embarrassed by the cameraman's glare. Eerie, for just about everyone; the General took regretful breaths as he listed the Triffid's boastful array of survival skills. Survival or, the Surfer decided - infernal domination.

"The Triffid –reproduces by spreading spores on the breeze. But the spores have a dual purpose. Airborne, they magnify and refract the sunlight in such a way to hypnotise the animals on the ground. Hypnotise –and then blind".

Now the crowd was silent. A good many people held their bodies motionless with the same supernatural inclination the Surfer used. The Triffid was cute. Rosemary's Baby was cute.

"Now, our scientists believe -what makes the Triffid so much more than a cornerstone in our understanding of the natural world –is that it may also be the answer to the energy problem our world has faced for so many years. Our best people have studied the kinetic fusion which happens in the lower half of the plant and, very early on, theorised that we could start to build organic power stations.

"When we first studied the giant Gort, then, we were only partially surprised to find that Klatuua's people had already mastered this Triffid-derived technology. We thought it might be coincidence. Until we analysed the data from the vibration recorders which we concealed in the concrete blocks that were set about the robot's feet. These people use a technology which is not just similar to Triffids –they are Triffids. The clicks and raking sounds which Gort produces are the self same communication used by the Triffid group mind".

People clutched their arms. People cursed, despite the fact that there were children present. The Surfer? Narrowed his featureless eyes and listened on.

"Our Government, the COBRA Commission, our council of advisors –we bit-by-bit identified the plan by which Klatuua's dimension is working. We believe that their refutation of the academic and managerial sections of our society is not based on any kind of hard-working, bluecollar ideology –it is in fact a ploy to have us develop a country full of factories and farms. Manual work so simple even blind people can do it. As, on the eve of the end of the ultimatum, we believe they will send across an army of genetically modified Triffids to blind us all. Their plan, all along, was to make us their blind, submissive slaves".

There were gasps at that. The Triffid moved from tri-foot to tri-foot as if startled by the drama.

Jackson now gulped out his discourse. "We are British. Our every principle is based on equality and a diversity of people, and the different skills they can bring to our great nation. All to make us stronger. We will never be intimidated by tyrants. We will never be cowed into submission by anyone".

Well. The Silver Surfer creased his lower eyelids at the ugly posturing. The man seeming to clench his jaw, stupidly, even as it flapped around to spew forth rhetoric.

Shalla Bal, he thought idly, could never have sculpted Jackson. There was just too little there. In lieu of any calm connection, the people on the cobbled area could only wince in time with his hiccupy exclamations.

"It is a matter of huge importance that those in vicinity of Gort make a clearance zone of at least five miles around his position. His minute-by-minute location will be reported by text and satellite imaging on the MOD Crisis Control Website. Police and Army relays will do their best to clear a path and maintain an exclusion zone. But as of tonight, 17 hundred hours GMT, our airforce and artillery taskforce will begin a sophisticated bombardment to remove the threat of Gort once and for all. Our planes will attack him in waves. It's reasonable to assume that, as before, a large number will either be physically relocated by Gort's in-built transporters, or else be destroyed outright. However, if our theory about their limited power is correct, this is a fight that we will eventually win. NATO planes are en route to bolster our air reserves, as are the USS Farragut and USS Equinox, two American aircraft carriers due to arrive at Portsmouth in the next few hours.

"I ask that you all remain calm. Many of you had sympathies with the supposed ideology of Klatuua and her people. But now we must all understand; civilisation is liberty. It is a message so simple and fundamental, we sometimes forget it's there. The greatest responsibility we can have is -not to limit the number of children we have, or to take this or that job -but to promote freedom itself. Thank you all and goodnight".

Oh, you pretty things. Jackson blinked and took a backwards step. You've really gone and done it now. Where the good people of Unity were in hellish disarray, it was still only the beginning. They held their limbs so delicately as leaves about to be rustled into a precipice. Even the Surfer's aloof eyes were dotting here and there, eventually settling back onto the screen, the nice, plain map displaying the current position of the giant robot. From the inset photo, he felt only mildly unnerved that this hundred-and-fifty foot McGuffin was truly a science fiction mainstay. The giant robot. Manga. In China, even housewives read Manga. And where was Cliff Carpenter? Riding along inside the chest or the head?

So many larger-than-life aspirers to the throne. The Surfer was confident enough in his own claim that he stayed out of sight of the crowd, desperate though they were for an otherworldly saviour. He shot directly up through the floors of the clothes shop and levelled out as an afterthought at two hundred feet or so. His white eyes dispassionately sought waypoints on the landscape to find his way to Gort in the midlands. It was surprisingly hard.

Until a group of five or six F-16s powered by on a distant wall of ozone. He calmly swivelled his board and followed. At one point, a further fighter played catch-up behind, and took umbrage at the Surfer tagging along. It shot a sizeable missile, which he narrowly managed to avoid, though something in the speed or the rocket propulsion made the nose-cone red hot –it burned his neck, jaw and cheek. The pain was deep. It made him feel alive. He winced, hissed his silver mouth, soon to become a grin.

She is now here.

In an itchy-minded dissection of his circumstances, he was forced to admit to himself that it was truly the cab ride from hell. The driver did not turn along any of the Rue de Lourmel offshoots as Ronapatre imagined he might. They cruised along the white-sunlit commuter road with apparently no thought to saavy navigation. But ah, with regards to the cabbie's unsolicited religious ideas? God knew how such a bohemian conversation was par for the course.

"Prenez la main. Des veines, des capillaires, des muscles, des cellules. Des lunes, des etoiles, des planetes, des galaxies. Piegees dans une chair ephemere et translucide. Nous avons des formes, des equations. Toute la creation dans une petite peau. Vous voyes, mon ami, l'univers est riche de sensations, conscient, vivant. Gort et Monsieur Cliff Carpenter les comprennent. Ils le comprennent tres bien. La verite nous renforce, nous ennoblit, nous libere".

Ronaparte briefly looked away from the rear view mirror and the gaunt eyes of the cabbie. He said, half to himself, "A propos, il doit bien y avoir un moyen de sortir d'ici".

Alas, lost in his exegesis. "Pourquoi avons-nous passe des millions d'annees a essayer de comprendre les etoiles, les lunes et l'univers?"

Ronaparte shrugged.

"Eh bien, parce que nous sommes l'univers", said the cabbie in a measured voice. "L'univers rendu manifeste. Il s'est brise en morceaux pour examiner chaque aspect de son etre. Nous essayons de le comprendre car en le faisant nous apprenons a mieux nous comprendre. La purete de la forme, de l'intention, de l'execution est la seule voie possible. Le seul moyen d'ouvrir la porte.

"Un jour, l'univers se comprendra completement. Alors, il se transcendera. Il deviendra autre chose, plus puissant, un autre big bang. Mais, cette fois-ci, sciemment guide parce qu'alors, l'univers saua exactement ce qu'il fait. Aujourd'hui, il detruit tout ce qu'il cree. Tout ce qu'il fait, meurt. C'est un gros defaut de fabrication. Nous serons parfaits.

"Bourgeoisie Anglais. Aliene par le silence, le profond isolement. Mais, nous, vous voyez, on se souvient. On se souvient de l'univers. On snet le lien".

Flipped on a coin, Ronaparte started to feel curiously well-disposed towards the strange cabbie -it would last for another minute or so. He saw that they were nearing the Avenue la Motte-Picquet, where he'd finally have no other choice but to fall in on a logical course.

"Je ne pourrai jamais etre plus pur", he joked into the rear-view.

The cabbie nodded anyway. His mouth grew firm.

"Non. La seule facon de sortir d'ici, ce'est de trouver la purete de l'objectif, la purete de la pensee. La purete de la foi, vous voyez. La voila, la porte. La porte de l'esprit. Le chemin. L'issue. Mais, vous voyez, le corps doit aussi trouver une issue. Un issue toute aussi pure".

For a minute or two they made regular, day-to-day small talk, concerning their wives, the weather, the sort of day Ronaparte might expect to have at his little recruitment agency. Now they were well-and-truly in the small office district. Shop canopies merged into lines of fossil-texture business lounges, a reassuring mish-mash of street-hugging couloir conversions and lofty power-houses. Still most of these buildings were relatively low, set in a dip beneath the beautiful cloitres.

Beautiful even when a commotion swept between the grey alcoves. They heard a number of sharp, horn-like car alarms. Ronaparte strongly suspected a terrorist blast. He also, briefly, considered the possibility that he might be dreaming. The last leg to his office was an inexplicably cobbled lane which was fenced by pleasant, grimey, isolated apartments. Directly behind, a few minor courtyards, then some tall corporation hubs and bell towers. Beyond that, taller buildings still.

But as the cab moved tentatively along the headlong cobbles, both Ronaparte and the cabbie were mesmerised by a new skyscraper, apparently the very largest. It was coloured dark purple. It moved, forcing them to crane their necks. What was it, that stolid design? It reminded Ronaparte just slightly of Le Vingtieme Siecle, la vie electrique.

Could this be a dream? It was -the shin of a collossal man. Looking up through the optical-illusion-warped sun-spikes, he could see something much like samurai armour, but beyond that, a perspective-strained tangle of flat horns, a tall helmet itself like a skyscraper.

So in awe of the vast alien, the pair of them hardly witnessed the first few city-dwellers desperately trying to run free from the vicinity. At one hundred metres, a woman with a snub nose and some business men floundered heavily and were reduced to ash by an invisible force. At fifty metres, a tall black man bolted to save his life, but met a similar fate. There was a sound of screaming and a collective psychic gasp.

In a neat flicker of seconds, Ronaparte and the cabbie understood the concept of the invisible wave of death being generated by the monster, by the humanoid master of Godzilla.

Vindicated. Said the cabbie, before he was reduced to nothing, "Vous etes le bienvenu a la fin du monde".

It was the way that the fighters swept up from nowhere, always. He destroyed them on an industrial scale, becoming flustered -in a way. The pilots were flustered, too. When he imagined one of them suddenly having a limb sliced off, he pictured a high powered jet of adrenaline rather than blood. It was clearly what they wanted, though. What everyone in Britain wants: a way to stave off boredom and drudgery by any means necessary. Who would be without it?

Sometimes his eyes moved too slowly; he became captivated by the wobbling of their swept back wings in the dying moment of an evasive manoeuvre. He was purposeful-stoical in his warring with the fighter jets –he didn't see why he should be, but he was. For them, it seemed a matter of art. They swept like starlings, flipped around momentum be damned and synchronised their attack patterns as a punchy octopus. White-trailed missiles arched in a petal formation. Destroy me in a sophisticated dance, almost graceful. You're through to the next round.

Streaking the sharp turns to hunt down a Euro fighter making brave little passes, he felt cold, breathless. Plunging between the twisting flightpath of three brother F-16s, their afterburners scalded him fiercely. His own spearmint energy just felt ambient now. As he flung it, it was all but invisible, muted. On connecting with the unfortunate jets, it would flare out like someone kicking a football directly into a home video camcorder. None of the pilots ever managed to eject in time. Were they even tensed for it?

The Silver Surfer slowed. In all his gaunt alien glory, he regarded a trio of fighters as they eased up at an imperfect angle. Evidently, they trusted their missiles to easily make up the difference. The sidewinders he destroyed with his left hand, the planes themselves with his right. Wry moral fascination suggested maybe he should attune his ears to their radio broadcasts, at least to blaze into his mind the fact that he was killing real human beings.

No. God can never hear us. It's the Thing Inside the Void that defines what we are, the thing we love.

A huge, substantial-looking missile was seconds away from blasting his spine. In those same seconds, he strongly came to suspect it wouldn't harm him in any way. He destroyed the plane first, then the missile, then slung his head like a new romantic in an autumnal music video.

The time of action was coming. Ollie put on his reading specs despite the risk of getting them smashed. His department, the lower adjunct of the Gort control room; in addition to controlling the leg movements, he also controlled the short range laser-fire. Built into the ring at his waist was a funny kind of terminal screen. Funny, because it seemed possible it wasn't a computerised image at all but some other, more homely technology. The glass was thick, holding a panoramic 360 degree image of the ruddy landscape beneath them. Inlaid were two gyroscopic markers, a green one showing the direction Gort's torso was facing, then a blue one, showing the inclination of his head. It was surprising – Ollie told how it was just like a seafront arcade game he'd used to play with his boy back in the early eighties. A submarine. Hunting a Rusky warship. The controls were weirdly responsive, too. Tapping a certain point on the panorama with his right hand would bring forth a vicious laser beam. His left hand, resting on a springy lever, controlled the power and the distance the laser would build to. Awaiting the air assault, they practised. Cliff flexed his muscles. Oliver danced his fingers. Always there was a painful little tension to live in their guts.

"What that army chap was saying about us running short of power. I wonder if it's true? Even just a little bit true?"

"It's not true, is it?" Cliff punched and flicked his chubby old arms; the huge robotic muscles mirrored him as if they were a shadow. Blurred grey flashes swept across the green fields below like something nobody had ever seen before. The closest? Wind turbines, and how Little Englanders hated even those, even as they were supplying the very energy they needed to live. "Everything he said in that speech was a lie".

"You don't need to tell me. Bloody politicians".

Except this was something Cliff couldn't leave alone.

"It's not that. It's close enough to the truth to be annoying. The Triffids were a part of life on Klatuua's side. They got out of control and killed or blinded most of the population. K. told me, it happened about three generations back. It's not about some people trying to use them as weapons and then some trying to use them for industry. No one can control them. Where they exist anywhere, they'll kill people".

"I don't know", Ollie moved his face; clearly he had an itch. "I thought the whole thing about cloning and genetics is that you can breed out the stuff you don't like. Why would they not just breed them without the stingers?"

"She wouldn't lie to me"; the immaculate truth –it was so powerful, it almost made him laugh.

It infected Ollie, "Yeah, I know. You can say about us human types, anyway, 'Robbing old women? Stealing collection tins from charity shop counters? Why don't they just breed it out?'"

The practising with Gort's deadly arsenal became increasingly lazy, increasingly withdrawn. Something had been bothering Ollie for quite a few minutes, but in the end he spat it out. He was good like that.

"Cliff, I make it five past five. Are these bandidos coming or not?"

They nervously scanned the wide, pink-stained horizon, Nutwood Forest.

"It's not good to not be on time".

Cliff stared blankly –or rather, full of such transcendental zeal. "You'll still get your duck hunt, mate".

All we do our whole lives is wait. As a reflex, just as he would have done if he was by himself in his conservatory -he tuned one of the small observation screens to News 24. Perhaps there was some kind of explanation about why McQueen and Brynner were as yet unmolested.

Indeed, there'd been a 9/11 drama at the centre of a pretty European city. Had some of the fighters crashed en route? Perhaps they'd been brought down by K-Army guerrillas? Frustratingly, the screen had activated in the very middle of the newscaster's worst hyping. She gasped, reported seeing people die. Yet people die.

In Cliff's mind, any kind of cool observation was a thing of the past. The intimated, unpalatable ideas crept into him as a subconscious flicker.

Looming above Paris: a second Gort.

His Ultimate Nullifier was something a lot more holistic. More ugly, too. The land itself would be preserved. Only the living creatures would be destroyed. Sensible. Still at a hundred and fifty feet, Gort's brother was ornate, however, with obtuse triangular horns, square-shape eyes brooding on endless death and completely unashamed by it.

He was standing there, killing the population of France as if by psychic will power, every last survivor thinking only, 'Better the Devil-'

Personally, Cliff felt strangely content. Life could be a nightmare, that was all. He watched, propping a dapper look across his face as Ollie's arms stiffened on the rough-and-ready controls.

The black eyes of the old men waited patiently for the world crinkle up into ash. They lived dully. Time flowed steadily even as it was running out -and perhaps it was only measured at all by Cliff's fingers on this jowly throat.

Through the bulkhead of Gort's skull, an astonishing silver man on a flat silver board ghosted inwards. In his left hand -clutched at the scruff of the neck like a child's teddy- was a fighter pilot still in his breathing apparatus and domed helmet. The silver alien observed Cliff and Oliver not-quite dispassionately.

"What the hell is going on?"

"Who on earth?"

They spoke simultaneously, and neither was sure who'd said what. For the silvery demigod, there wasn't much room at all; his immaterial form remained partially embedded in the bulkhead. The pilot was thrown unloved into the well just below Ollie's position. He groaned and sidled around on his shoulder.

The slender alien, "I would speak to Cliff Carpenter".

"I'm him", the two men said at once, Spartacus style.

The silver man tightened the muscles of his face, particularly his eyes, perhaps the start of a threat.

"I'm not afraid of you!", was Oliver's first reaction.

Cliff felt the need to qualify this, "We've both been though too much to be afraid. Who are you?"

No less tight, no less engaging, the silver man's temples eased back into plaintive ambience. On Cliff's little screen, News 24 continued to elaborate on the destruction in France, describing a slow-moving ring of death that was spreading outwards from the purple horned giant. Invisible, though you could keep track of how far it was extending by the sight of people spontaneously disintegrating into fine powder.

"I'm not afraid", agreed the Silver Surfer. "Of all the emotions, no fear. We three are like brothers, perhaps".

"My brother is a retired painter and decorator in Newbury", smirked Ollie.

The Silver Surfer seemed to breathe. It was clear he was watching the reflection of the broadcast in one of the misty glass surfaces of Gort's Battle Bridge.

"His name is Galactus. He is the epitome of all sociopathic insanity. He will destroy every living being on this planet. Only the Ultimate Nullifier can destroy him".

Cliff reeled. He felt his face grow stoney. The limits of what a man can process –it was being approached, as his limbs tangled out among the graceful struts.

Desperate tacks. "Who are you?"

"An associate of Galactus. I would betray him".

"But where do you come from?"

The creature moved his silver-white eyes slowly; they gave a slight illusion of train-of-thought blinking. "Somewhere very far away".

"Klatuua's dimension?"

"No".

"This soldier", Cliff pointed bleakly to the squirming pilot, altogether trapped in his bulbous helmet, "why did you bring him here?"

Said the Silver Surfer dispassionately, "To torture and kill him before your eyes, as proof that I am not in league with your enemies".

"That won't be needed!", Cliff's eyes boggled. "Just let him go".

It was Oliver who had a question now, "How come you look like David Bowie?"

"There are many questions I am unwilling to answer. And you people don't have time to ask them. You must go at once to France and confront him. Believe that you are the last line of defence of all humanity".

Klatuua's sculpted eyelids, gazing down at a newly-founded game of Scrabble. They'd always been so beautifully calm. Cliff understood, sometimes, in a shadowy-ephemeral corner of his mind; the ugly political games are just that. It didn't really matter if they succeeded or failed -life is easy.

But then, taking that into account, the nightmare just became all the more powerful. If he and Klatuua had met forty years ago, they'd have had a blissful life, a life that was -heavenly. All you need is a nine-to-five manual job, such as was plentiful in any other century than his -four hours in the weekday evenings. Weekends away in the countryside, perhaps by a canal. Having sex every spare moment in such a way as a man gets good at it.

It's one thing to ask someone to betray his principles so the world can go on existing. But how could you expect someone to betray an earthly heaven which was just so simple, so attainable?

"No. Actually, it changes nothing. It doesn't matter if the Ultimatum comes from me or Galactor. I'll go across the sea and destroy him only once everyone in the country begs me, and there's not a dissenting voice anywhere".

"Cliff-O", Ollie looked sheepishly around. "That's never going to happen".

"Then we'll all die". He flounced his fat old lips and fought to keep his eyes from swelling. The silver alien seemed as if he understood; he glanced to one side where the confluence of shadows made for a deceptively comfy shell -but how could he?

"She would have done it, I know. Klatuua. She was a woman of the people. And they killed her for it".

The Silver Surfer said, "You're starting to hate them. Just as I do, Just as Galactus does. You must understand, we are becoming citizens of eternity".

Bitter? Insanely. Cliff's head wobbled on his barrel chest as if was the last move he'd ever make. Staring hard at the Surfer, "What's that meant to mean?"

"You're a lucky man, you know. This Klatuua lady was once alive, and then she died. I've heard much about the Ultimatum she presented -it seems she was philosophically infallible. Whatever happens, you have the luxury of sensing that she awaits you in Heaven. My girlfriend..."

The alien moved strangely indeed. Strange emotions caused by a strange story, poring across his silver hide like the shiver of a blizzard. "The existence of my girlfriend is a complex matter. Perhaps she and I were only ever ideals made flesh to fight in an ideological war. Double agents in a storm of political free will. There is nothing I wouldn't do to see her again. God has a mind. Has sane ideas for an insane society, and I will execute each and every one of them. We can only hope, Cliff Carpenter, that these ideas are like curtains, beyond which our respective loves exist once more".

In the footwell, the pilot hauled away his globe-shaped helmet. Gasping like hell, looking at everyone -curiously.

Cliff edged around until he was standing directly beside him. He was about thirty, all dirty fair hair and energetic glances.

"All of this is happening because of you, old son. Choosing to kill just so your mates won't have to give up their laziness and greed. And then me, on the other side, full of morals and letting everything go. It's as if there's no other choice in the world except to be greedy, and if there was, people wouldn't understand. How does that work?"

"I don't know", said the pilot.

Beachcombing day was Monday. Stan decided to put it forward to Friday because it was too difficult to sit by, the water just twenty yards away from their caravan, trying so hard not to look out to sea and wonder what was happening in French France.

JC had dropped little Katie to stay with them the previous night, so at least Joan wouldn't be alone in the house. In all, he felt pretty regular. He got up, brushed down his large white moustache so the sea vapour wouldn't make it ragged, put on his tinted aviators and chose a lurex bomber jacket at random. Becoming a litter guardian for the Tourist Board, he believed, was the best retirement job a slim-jim like him could possibly have hoped for.

Katie waved at him from the stoop.

"See you later, True Believer!"

He moved daintily across the sand. No sooner were his hands thrust in the high lurex pockets than that certain question powered up again in his consciousness. That thing in France -was it targeting only France or would the wave of death continue on, across the water into Britain? It was a question being brooded on by everyone. In his own mind, however, it was fading. It was a bright day! Stan found it very easy to turn his attention to whatever mysterious delicacy might be washed up in the crystal-bronze sands. Maybe even something for Katie?

The sky was broad, of a single hue, tho flickery and a complete opposite to the winding, shining variations of the coastal current. A familiar, smiley kind of problem was whether to hop across the shallow inlets or play devil with the tips of his shoes. A breezy problem: he daydreamed mightily. Almost certainly it was time to start thinking on those Children's books he'd always been threatening to write. Whenever he and Joan went shopping with Katie, he was dismayed about how lazy kids books had got. Harry Potter?

He stared down at the translucent shimmer of a sand pool and daydreamed about a Norse god who'd been sent to Earth to learn humility. Or a gazillionaire who had to wear a suit of robot armour in order to keep his heart ticking. Baron Brinkworth -a senile, eighty year old supervillan. He looked at nothing in particular, just the clear white atmos. How about an invisible girl?

He thrust his hands into his high pockets and angled his stiff old head at the sand. Eerie that one day soon he might be collecting up the flotsam from a dead continent.

He perused, keeping his face steady and his shoulders tense.

What he found that morning: a small plastic rectangle which he thought might be the grooming plate from a lady-razor, the white stem of a cotton bud, a cable-tidy from an unboxed electrical appliance, a splinter of striplight housing, the Y-shape plastic from someone's sandal, the upper section of a paint roller, a gulley grid.

He found a fruit box corner brace, a mower blade, a plastic clip.

He found -

The hundred and fifty foot colossus bounded overhead, was highlighted by the daylight, merged with the daylight. The prim coal-miner's face regarded the sea with a fearless inclination of the head. Then the huge legs pistoned down across the sand, walking steadily to the water. Thick, solid falls of the bus-size feet brought swollen splashes. Again, when he was thigh-deep the brine, the huge swells were amazing to behold.

At fifty meters out, up to his waist, the head turned slightly, seeming to look through the corner of his eye at Stan.

There was only one thing he could think of to shout.

"Excelsior!"

The giant waded forward until he was completely submerged, silence broken only by a few rumbling swells. Then onward -to France.

The city was sparse and wonderful.

He'd often thought about taking Shalla Bal there, just because it's what lovers do. But in spite of his love for the side-streets of Celine and Julie Go Boating, the language barrier was far too big. English people make queasy tourists. Now Galactus had so thoroughly becalmed the place? The tight yellow-tree avenues were entirely free for edgewise sunshine and a pretty girl in a fashion dress. No people -and the strangest thing was the empathy he felt. He'd always been ambivalent to the French. He liked the idea of small, cosmopolitan cafes. To a degree, he liked the idea of Jean-Paul Sartre, towering though he was. Just recently, however, he'd read somewhere that their metropolitan centres had just as big a problem with thuggery and class system schizophrenia as the English. Sometimes kinship is forced on you. Avoiding the insane eyes of Galactus, probably not looking at him anyway, the Surfer stared down at a pleasant boulevard built around a church that could so easily have been C of E. He saw primary coloured footbridges and a sizable market with access alleys that suggested a constant delivery of fruit and vegetables and joyful bustle. Lots of small trees and wedge-shaped buildings on the horizon brought a hallucination quality to the stillness. Lots of things on the near horizon, too.

Then lower, dizzyingly, almost to roof level. Plain windows on beige houses, nothing fancy, still very artistic. Globe street lights on skinny poles, lonely, artistic, as were the hoity garden walls and groomed timber gates. Between the bigger buildings, he swished and kneedled his surfboard to nervously expend time before the big meeting. He passed huge arc-shaped vents the exact shape of stain glass windows, all waxy metal to last a thousand years, outsized beside soft-shadow cymbalblast trees.

He swept onwards in the direction of the titan's chest, then up to eye level. As per, the vast flat horns brought out the alien vertigo like nothing else. And the square eyes, always so wise concerning their own evil.

"How goes the plotting against me, my herald?"

"No one is plotting against you", said the Surfer, as if to imply, 'it's the absolute destiny of all time and space -you will fall'.

"Seeing cities almost swept free from the human cockroaches. Doesn't it inspire you?"

"I have all the inspiration I ever need in the memory of Shalla Bal".

Galactus smiled. Overly intellectual, brimming with arguments, he was never the sort of creature to remain silent.

"I knew I chose you well. Loyal. Loyalty is what's important".

Said the Surfer, with an edge to his voice, "Yes". With a silver Grand Canyon.

Galactus, "There were so many atheists in this country. It's hard not to enjoy the taste of them. A vortex on your taste buds. Self-denial and blank-minded zeal swirling together, like an orgasm in reverse, ending up with -flies coming back to life after burning up on an electric swat. 'Why should I be intimidated by a fictional character?'"

"Because in fiction there is unlimited freedom", said the Surfer, still thinking of Shalla Bal.

"There are tulpas everywhere, my herald. Did you know that?"

"No".

"Everywhere except this cursed range of dimensions. Where I came from, gods make tulpa titans. Mortals make tulpa gods. I knew a creature once -Thanos- he made a tulpa of Death herself".

Suggested the Surfer, "Perhaps you're my tulpa?"

To his surprise, the titan was far from outraged. "Why would you bequathe me such power?"

Something was started. "I remember the Seventh Seal", the Surfer hugged his arms like a high school girl at the edge of a windswept field. "There was the idea that if you could beat Death in a game of some kind, he'd set you free. But I always thought, what if you didn't challenge him to a game per se, but some kind of artistic endeavour? Like you'd each take a photograph of something, or you each do a painting or a sculpture. Perhaps you could each lock yourselves away somewhere and write a novel?"

Galactus' face was almost pleasant now. "But who could judge which novel was superior?"

The Surfer shrugged. "How about the Readers?"

"Where", the titan laughed, "did you hear about them?"

"Multiverse scuzzlebut".

"There's much to be said for gnostic-ontological reasoning", Galactus bowed his head just slightly. "I think you mention it now in the hope I'll feel nervous. But it will always bring you back to me. The thought of her -what is it to you, an inexplicable miracle? A feeling of hope to conquer anything? Perhaps the absolute solution to this society of greed? These things don't mix with a human society. When around others you struggle to keep it all in. And the struggles are called religious cults, and 9/11, and jihad. You know as well as I do, to dream of Heaven isn't fair on you and it isn't fair on them. It's verbiage and incredulity. The kindest thing is to kill them all with no explanation at all. In this country there were so many atheists, their bodies full of mindless zest across my palate. Self-denial and blank-minded zeal swirling together, ending up with -flies coming back to life after burning on an electric swat. Conceited tulpas. There are tulpas everywhere, my herald. Did you know that?"

The Surfer kept his expression under control.

"You remind me, Master, of the film 'Cosmopolis'. The way you speak. It was one of the last films I remember seeing with Shalla Bal. People hated that movie because of the suggestion that yuppie bankers have an inner life, and they're actually quite philosophical. Of course, they aren't, but it was an interesting exercise. No debate is necessary. The really dangerous yuppies don't make undeserved tens-of-millions and then drive around in a decadent limo. Real yuppies earn an undeserved thirty thousand pounds a year, working as accountants, estate agents, product designers, hand-to-mouth internet booksellers. Their limos are their children and suburban houses. And where their undeserved thirty thousand pounds a year falls short, the government subsides them. Real greed comes from nothing, creeps into our lives until it becomes an institutionalised lifestyle choice for every man, woman and child. It's the government offering to give un-capped credits to a family where both parents already work, while the childless and self-sufficient get nothing except an NHS like a shantytown.

"You and I, Master, both know that it's insanity of a cosmic scale. You believe it's so big and so insane it has to be destroyed outright. I believe it's so big and so insane, it must collapse, and it would be foolish to deny I am part of it -society".

The Surfer watched as Galactus mused over the grainy city, his square eyes more soulful than any of the round, fleshy, human varieties. In a way.

"Very well. If your plotting against me bears fruit, and I fall this day, you can go free. But you will find; the idea of human society is a cancer in your soul".

The Surfer kept his expression under control.

A man soaks up descriptions on what it's like to go to the Moon. From the barest cultural references, a man gets an idea what it's like to be in a car chase, or to fall from a plane, or to play Russian roulette. Cliff always thought he had a pretty fair idea what it would be like to be in a submarine. Gort, now fully submerged, confounded all his expectations. No contracting hull plates or aquatic whines, not even many playful vortexes to move along the streamline sides. Beneath his and Ollie's blue-lit battle stations, tense as you like, there was a sound of vents opening and closing -seemingly making love to the hissing flow of water- but otherways making the trip with quite some ease. A Triffid-blinded man in a little hat, through ravaged streets, feeling his way naturally.

'Reports are confirmed now that Gort, the giant robot of Klatuua, disappeared into the coast at Worthing Beach, fuelling speculation among ministers and military advisors that Cliff Carpenter plans to cross the channel, either to fight or join forces with the huge, unknown titan currently decimating central France. MP Jack Dempsey, long-time supporter of Klatuua's political agenda, stated that he believed in those members of the K-army currently in control of the Ultimatum Robot, saying, 'They will fight just the same way they fought for our hearts and minds, bluntly and without fear'. Other ministers have been more guarded about our chances of surviving this -grave- crisis, with-'

There should have been laughter at the way the robot's huge legs matched Ollie's wading footsteps, the way he'd been forced to imitate treading water, just before they were gyroed down to an angle, some unknown thruster powering them along like Evel Knievel. There should have been laughter, even given the high stakes; Cliff merely smiled, felt his eyes twinkling like a light-source in the dim grey.

They moved forward in the soupy grey waters, endless. It wouldn't take too long to get to France, assuming Gort's metal hide protected them from whatever invisible Hiroshima wave was spreading outwards from Galactus' feet. Cliff didn't think about it, not because he didn't want to but because -he guessed he was fighting to save Britain as a kind of empty gesture. Probably only for the sake of Nessa and all Oliver's kids. In the core of his mind: the inclination of the silver man's temples, looking just the way Cliff felt. 'Ideas are like curtains, beyond which our respective loves exist once more'.

On the news, Millibane was becoming increasingly, eerily irrelevant; footage of his latest interview sharing the screen with a huge map plotting the course of the Death Wave. Central France was completely lost, it seemed. The pale, sickly shade denoting the area where people fell dead was just now touching the coast.

'With the arrival of Gort, our lives changed significantly. We felt alone and helpless in the world of a frighteningly advanced race. Now that world has been expanded, and we ask, as we did then, how can we hope to survive? The answer is, we will survive as examples of what Britain is and always will be: fearless, with steady nerves and a belief in our neighbours'.

Cliff's expression, his shoulders, became slight, as-one with the slim computers that controlled their sentinel. The dimness was so strange. Blue lights repelled the dark in an artistic creep. He found he was automatically screening out the rhetoric of the politician, too. Or was he? He noticed soon enough when it halted.

All of the screens in the control room shifted to a uniform red vista. It was computer generated, it was infared-spectral. In the suddenly breathless control room, Cliff stared at the image and slowly identified it as the overhead waterline. It seemed unreal and abstract, not only because of the tint of red, but because of the rhythm of the waves. They crashed and swelled beneath the surly sky, clearly separated from the onward motion of Gort; some way off.

Which Cliff was grateful for, as a huge passenger plane tilted madly and fell down into the water.

"We must be getting near", suggested Ollie.

"Steady as she goes. Evidently we're immune to it, just as long as we're inside Gort".

Ollie was mesmerised. "It's a shame we can't help Frenchie".

Into Cliff's blue-red-illuminated skull; the terrible street scenes which had been broadcast on News 24. He imagined them applied to London, or Bristol, or Unity. It scared him that he seemed to understand the way it all worked. The economy demanding utilitarian labour. Death coming. The recession, the depression, whittling down anyone who might be able to lead by example until no one was left.

To placate the horror, he moved his eyes towards the rich, red light.

"Ollie!"

A dead humpback powered neatly through the slipstream towards them.

He drew up his fists. Ollie also scrambled. Lasers were fired but it was hard to triangulate the beams. Cliff kept Gort's left forearm drawn tightly up in defence of the neck, the torso. With his right fist, he swung away.

The whale's midrift resounded -it curved, wobbled, underwater slow-mo bedazzlement - and missed them by a margin.

Long-drawn exhaltations became laughter. What's the opposite of political angst? Punching a whale. Cliff immediately started to feel better. Ollie-boy already had a story to tell his grandkids. Ditto himself and Klatuua, in Heaven.

He started to feel better; the whole thing was sealed when the map screen showed that they were almost in the coastal waters of Le Havre. Oliver had a bright idea. Good for morale; a musical standard. Smiling from ear to ear, Cliff joined in.

"Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? If you think old England's done? We are the boys who will stop youuur lit'l game -"

The singing only stopped fifteen minutes later, with Gort slowly starting to emerge at Dieppe into a world decimated.

Now, flashing before Cliff's eyes -not exactly like a cliché, not even his whole life, but most of it- aged about ten or eleven, there'd been woodland at the end of his housing estate (fifty years since an un-affordable yuppie enclave). There was quicksand there -actual quicksand like something from an episode of Bonanza- and he'd once spent three hours trapped ankle-deep before being rescued by a fellow ten year old.

Our lives really do flash before us. It all makes sense. They flash before us as we die, the same way the previous nights dreams often flash before us as we doze off the next night.

Still this mysticism took up only three or four percent of his mind. In the rest there was only a single breezeblock idea: kill Galactus and then surrender.

The muddy sand came to an end. Private Ryan coastline gave way to possibly foreign-looking trees, a shock of snarled-up cars all along the crest. Embodied as Gort, Cliff stood tall. Did not sway. While looking down at the remnants of the insane, doomed exodus. Not a living soul was in sight, only tiny cars, pieces of a mosaic that had shaken loose in a cataclysm. Forward past the swaying greenery; a small, incidental detail in a landscape that was frighteningly still and apprehensive of the shadow cast by Gort's shoulders like a prisoner in the electric chair. Ollie took a breath and started a stride. Classic blue sky blasted them. Below, their road was a dreamlike weave of plasticky buildings and suave trees, all put together in an eerie stillness that said: I am Death.

It was hard to think. It was easy to think. Cliff moved the huge fists of his robot as they stalked ahead. It was necessary to go side-long to move between woodland that looked like broccoli. The fields, meanwhile, were elegant. Indistinguishable from Wessex or Oxfordshire -the only thing that could have given the novelty of being in France, everything and nothing- where were the old men with sun-creased eyes and Picasso strips of hair? Where were the teenagers in starched cotton T-shirts? Everything and nothing. They'd been vanished by the evil thing that was still ensconced between the highrise apartments, the spider-glass buildings, the old-fashioned chimney pots and pink sky. He wasn't visible yet. They could see a beautiful city that could only be Paris. Their eyes flicked teasingly between the tall buildings for a first sighting.

If only there were still birds flying around. Something to take the edge off a sky-wrenching war.

Deathly calm flowed out between the roads and the tulip-shape towers. Between everything. An eeriness that needed permission -Galactus turned, delivering a stare that gave all power to the twinkle-of-the-eye.

Galactus peeked, Alfred Hitchcock being asked to direct something that was merely unpleasant. The titanic miner-robot erupted forward, moving inexorably between the purple-terracotta roofs, the high attic windows that spoke of breezy artist abodes. Come the small cobbled area, he violently trampled some rich-black railings erected by an affable nineteenth century mayor. The cacophony almost brought an echo to the oppressive atmos. Galactus stared.

Cliff felt sensed he was matching Ollie's heartrate exactly as they raced to topple him -old men moving at uncharacteristic speeds, robot thighs drawing HS1 locomotive horsepower, slowed, exchanged with robot biceps and palms flung cattily onto Galactus' chest.

They then assumed the stance and the jive.

"Float like a butterfly-", said Ollie.

"Sting like a bee-", said Cliff.

"I'm the funky phantom-"

"I'm Mohammad Ali".

His left fist hanging back, the tensest thing in the world, his right fist smashed viscerally into Galactus' stolid mouth. The titan reared backwards. They tussled. At some point, the sheer weight and movement of their feet broke the street into a huge cavity. Even from a hundred and fifty feet up, Cliff smelt the shattered gas mains very strongly. No explosion. He guessed it must have dissipated in the gigantic swish of their bodies.

Partially doubled up, Galactus looked over the triangular eye-spaces of his helmet -questioning, as if he expected Gort to do something more sophisticated than pummel him into meat. With his hemisphered knuckles, he dabbed the -green?- blood that ran under his pronounced bottom lip.

Dispassionately, Cliff flipped the casing, hit the switch which began charging the Ultimate Nullifier.

"Keep your dukes up, Carpenter", invited Ollie.

As if there was any doubt. Galactus rushed him; Ollie gasped as he skidded to keep a solid backtrack. Cliff could only think to pound the man in his stomach in the hope of winding him. Whether or not he was properly breathless, he certainly lolled to one side, gnashing his white teeth. But it was a matter of almighty pride when they saw that one of those trademark triangular horns had been partially wrenched free from its housing.

Cliff tenderly put out a hand to right him -but only to get a better allignment for his next punch.

"Klatuua!"

He gave a wild uppercut.

"Barada!"

A shameless crunch to his teeth.

"Nicto!"

A face-squashing slam to his right cheek.

Pride, mostly, kept Galactus' torso level as he hung rigidly onto one knee. Cliff felt the snarl on his face, his airy-beating heart, appreciated the lazy way in which his left fist had floated free from its blocking position.

He appreciated it far too late. His enemy lunged; his fist made a fluid strike upwards to knock Gort into a crazy spin. Another graceless punch caught the robo somewhere very high up by the collar. A few snidey hits were all it took to place him back on the defensive. Which is the way it goes sometimes. Before they knew it, something dramatic had happened -with a shock of featureless sky the only thing in the viewscreen, Gort was on his back.

Galactus loomed. Now his badly damaged face had an expression that was the judgemental side of impassive. Ollie grappled to swallow his gaping mouth as before them the titan straddled Gort's prefabricated torso. The sound of his palace-size skirt folding and rippling was sometimes like the sea, sometimes like the quaking of Iraq on March 19. At some point, his right-side horn would have to be ripped free; it was dangling, looking ridiculous. But Galactus, just now, was imaginative. He wrenched it free and wielded it like a shiv.

The whole control room shook in the queasiest way. Cliff understood: Gort was being beheaded.

The charging meter of the Ultimate Nullifier. It wasn't like an electric razor or a fancy kettle. It was a circle, slowly changing from black, inactivity, to red, full power. As the drama sizzled, the colour was a maroon-bacon; the depressing whisp of a sunset quickly on the way out.

Still responsive, Cliff pressed Gort's hands to Galactus' throat, but they seemed too weak to do much damage. He tried and tried. An anticipation of being exposed to the deadly atmosphere crept inside every nerve of Cliff's body. It wouldn't be long now.

The control room tumbled. A clenching around his shoulders brought a few moments of unconsciousness, before-

Some ethereal, ephemeral version of Ollie shouted-whispered from across a huge distance.

Cliff swam in a terrible kind of darkness. 'Swam', he guessed, because there was sure to be an ocean of blood involved. He struggled to give a murmured discourse on Death, the clever secrets you learn just as you die.

Then he heard the ghost of Ollie once more, 'Cliff-o!"

The head unit made a huge shift across the ground, which in real terms was fairly gentle. Dust and some kind of acidic vapour wafted all around.

'Cliff !', shouted Ollie.

He noted with interest how his old friend was becoming real again. He tried to move his head and, amazingly, all the muscles and vertebrae pulled in the same direction.

Which was more than could be said for Gort. The scene from his eyes; insanely lop-sided as only the POV of a newly-beheaded man can be. At the base of a huge mound of white rubble, they were now horribly exposed, forlorn, dried out.

They each took a relieved breath that the other was alive. The viewscreen was now grubby and warped, tho still there was a stirring panorama of the centre of Paris. It would have been a pleasant enough scene to die in front of, were it not for the full figure just visible in the extreme right hand corner -the man Galactus, calmly walking away, Malcolm King Kong Kirk writ large.

"I wonder how long we've got?", said Ollie, as blunt as ever.

"Enough time to say goodbye", suggested Cliff, feeling blessed. "You were amazing, Oliver".

Ruefully, though, "We almost had him!"

"Yes we did".

"I should have kicked him in the balls", spat the other.

The broad, luminous lights dimmed very quickly. Holding his breath, Cliff said, "We're losing power".

Very closely, they watched as each light panel muted down to nothing. The comforting blue was gone forever. But there was still some red coming from somewhere.

A bit of red.

As an afterthought, Cliff stared down at the charging meter of the Ultimate Nullifier.

His body convulsed. Oliver sensed what was in the air, looked, and gasped.

"I'm doing it!", said Cliff, gulping as if to vomit.

Ollie -narrowed his eyes. He was cautious. He was a ghost, haunted by caution. "No! We don't know how broad the beam is. Look how far off the mark he is. We could miss him!"

They stared at Galactus' back and each man weighed his own calculations, his own imagination. Ollie was already detaching his safety harness.

"I'm going through the hatch. I can live long enough to haul it into position. It's only a f-ing lamp! Give me a minute, Cliff-o, I can do it! Keep your finger-"

He was looking down, frantically scrambling at the clip. Cliff gently reached out to ease him back into the control slot.

Evidently, the lamp didn't need to be moved into position by one of them. Directly outside, at the opposite end of the panoramic viewscreen to Galactus, there was the silver man. Using his board for leverage, then his deceptively thin hands, he gradually shifted the entire head-piece until his former master was centrally aligned.

And didn't he sense just when to turn around.

Cliff's heart felt motionless, even if he could still hear the ugly thumping. He gripped that certain control.

"Klatuua. Barada. Nicto".

"Gaaa! Jee-zuz!"

The peeling away of the dented hull. The exposure to vivid new world daylight. The laying-on of silver hands to heal their shattered and blood-swathed bodies. Cliff took it all numbly, or at any rate, standing beside the huge, severed head, with a deep preoccupation that soon there'd be no traces of Klatuua left at all. Ideas of mass humility? Maybe it would be enough, some day, in the year 3013.

Ollie made the mistake of looking down at his bone-splayed limbs as the Surfer healed them. There was a rapture in that spearmint aura which prevented any pain, tho it was clearly an unpleasant thing to sit and behold. Cliff clicked his fingers in front of his friend's eyes to draw them away. The healing was nearly complete anyway. Soon the old fella was up on his feet and trotting over to the tiny fragments of Galactus. Souvenir hunting; he wanted something to give to his granddaughter to evoke history.

For Cliff and the Surfer, there was only the one thing that kept them standing upright in the cool, clear daylight. The air itself was alive with them. The spirit of Klatuua and -'Shalla Bal', he believed he'd said her name was.

"Will you go home, Cliff Carpenter?"

"England? Yes. I think Oliver wants to go. And we have to warn them to shut down the Triffid farms".

"He was your navigator inside the giant man, wasn't he?", reflected the Surfer. His featureless eyes, twitching and slanting to one side. "You must take my board, It will be a neat and speedy way of crossing the Atlantic".

"Thankyou", said Cliff in a small voice. All around there were incredibly small bits of masonry that glinted in the sun; they stared away with tired eyes. He fingered his belly. "Won't you need it yourself?"

"No", the Surfer promised.

Cliff nodded then. "I never learned your name. Are you really David Bowie?"

"My name is Norrin Radd".

"I'm pleased to meet you!"

For the first time, Cliff heard annoyance creeping into his voice as he spotted the drone aircraft making its hundredth pass of the battleground. Presumably it originated from back home. Had every pub and living room in England been witness to the fight? They might have gained a few supporters. But as a certainty, there'd be those who believed that Galactus had been a contrivance sent by Klatuua's government to falsely paint Gort as a martyr.

But martyrs exist, surely?

Also -perhaps the drone's camera had zoom? He wondered what Millibane and Jackson thought of his expression. It felt like -the hull of a sinking ship, nothing more, nothing less.

Via telekinesis, Norrin brought the board to a hover just above the old men's feet.

"I never did any surfing in my life", said Ollie. "Even in the sixties".

"Think of it, Oliver Eyerman, as a magic carpet. Put forth your will and the board will obey".

They clambered aboard. The atmosphere was sombre, but it was hard not to want to laugh. Ollie assumed the stance of a teen on the cover of a Beach Boys cash-in album. Now and again, panicked, Cliff felt the need to jerk a hand to his waist.

The silver man looked up at them, expression mostly ambient but sometimes with the ghost of a flicker of a smile.

"Do you know which way to go, gentlemen?"

"In here", Cliff tapped at his scarred cranium. "I reckon we're like homing pigeons".

The board arose, swivelled, quivered -not too dramatically-, and made a headlong arrow to the white horizon. It boggled the mind. Moving clear as an astonishing dart, it vanished -apparently with neither man falling to his doom.

Flying at a crazy ultra-sonic speed, high in the stratosphere, the shade of the sea was solid grey. As lunatic tips of their feet took them lower, it looked more translucent, crystal tips to the breaking waves, bits of glitter cast from a scratched-up sun, everywhere. It was like a dream. Cliff wondered in what circumstances he'd one day remember this day, and he thought it would always be magical, even if he was in a dungeon at Guantanimo Bay.

They saw some dolphins.

It wasn't an impossibility that they might crash; it didn't, however, stop Ollie from making brave little flourishes. They sped faster and their bodies coasted through the wind at a slight angle. Other times, a nagging interest came about what would happen if the silver surfboard actually touched down among the swirling, circling waves.

It turned out they receded like Moses and the Red Sea, making a perfect telekinetic groove for the surfers to speed along. Personally, Cliff hoped the drones and sat-oy-lytes didn't pick that up -the last thing he needed was people thinking there was a religious aspect.

They saw a small fishing boat, and one of the sailors had his hands in his braces, was swinging on his heels.

The waves became a co-ordinated tide of strong, steady crests. The horizon always looked so rough. Presently, however, it looked joyously rough. England was approaching.

Ollie slowed them down, thanks probably to his barest thought rather than the 'calm down!' Geordie hand-swipes he used to physically conduct the board.

As meanwhile Cliff felt his heart beat dejectedly. It was funny; the rest of him felt stoical and brave. From nowhere came the vision of the very first Englander they met -be it man, woman or child- pulling out a handy gun from their jacket and shooting him in the head. He smiled softly.

Ollie didn't seem to be directing them to any particular spot, though he guessed the triggers in his feet had become so responsive he wouldn't know. In any case, they appeared at a frontage. Dame Vera Lynn. A set of round white cliffs. With - a haircut? Cliff realised it was a crowd.

An almighty crowd.

Within two hundred metres, that was when the cheering started. He tried to understand. Cheering wasn't too far from baying and throaty disgust -he calibrated his ears as best he could. Now and again, he heard ascending flurries of applause.

The crowd was -happy?

He saw a black gentleman and his family, putting their heart and soul into giving the broadest smiles imaginable while also keeping their eyes fixed on the returning -warlords? Participates? He saw middle-aged women, and it was a rare thing that they'd let down their golden-grey hair. Bright colours were everywhere. There was a man with black hair and moustache who, in his professional life, wore either a brown coat or a thick jumper. Also rows of people with their chests held high and straight, small breaths full of jubilation, all the more vulnerable because of it.

Cliff and Ollie touched down and dismounted in a single motion, almost -almost, but in the end taking careful backwards steps to preserve their aged legs. The crowd, several hundred strong, were reverent, well-ordered, especially towards the back. Certainly there was a constant in-surge of those prim-smiled, ginger-eyed souls who wanted to pat them on the back. At one point, a conventionally pretty girl dressed in a ye olde wench costume brought Cliff a chilled bottle of cider. A man in a waist coat approximately Cliff's age put his thumb up. A small child shouted with joy. A heavily stubbled boy who was the exact size, weight and disposition of a student -but with some honourable X-factor that marked him out as the exact opposite of a student- shook hands with Cliff while his friend took a ham-fisted photo. A French refugee, beautiful with her sinewy, philosophical jaw, thanked Cliff while smiling-down tears. Cliff said, 'my pleasure' -absent-mindedly in Polish, because that was the default foreign language he'd got used to speaking through many of the Garden Centre wholesalers.

Ollie, meanwhile, waded into the crowd like Bobby Moore, hoisting over his head the gouged iris of Galactus and causing the crowd to go wild in sated victory. The two heroes slowly drifted apart.

All the same, Cliff found he was among friends. An assassin might come -in his soul, he cared just enough to avoid getting glib. Through the sketchy, trample-resistant grass, there was a summer fete vibe lifting everyone, giving rise to certain clusters of revolutionaries who were roughly the same age. Cliff entertained and was entertained by some springy-smiled sixty-somethings, their starched pastel nylon shirts looking breezy and sun-kissed no matter what the weather. They spoke of how the slightest out-of-the-ordinary adventure makes you tired and it takes so long to catch up on your sleep.

Another surge of bodies brought a man in a suit and some soldier bodyguards.

"Mr Carpenter? Congratulations, sir. My name is Dan Tucker, I'm with the Home Office! The Prime Minister would like to set a time when it's convenient to meet with you?"

Said Cliff, "OK, but I was hoping to put off our next meeting for ten years or so".

That got a laugh from the old guard.

"I bet he's got a fair few questions, anyway. And I can answer them like Bruce Willis on the One Show".

More laughter. Solidarity. From cavemen, to evil, to people-of-the-future. Perhaps it was finally happening. Even the Home Office man himself was having a bit of a chuckle. Cliff took his hands to shake, then in a dainty manoeuvre turned them over in a search for scars. There was nothing much on Righty.

But on Lefty, some real monsters.

Heavy, grade-a concrete had been made to look eerily insubstantial. More than having been slanted into the drains or sunk into inverted-pyramids, there was a raw and brittle texture on the edges too artistic to be ignored. And so -walking across rended graphite and tarmac, a Pompeian romantic playing dare on Vesuvious. Ghosting over all the dimpled, grey buildings surrendered to chaos; images of all the 'intrepid' war reportage since the seventies, or maybe just Moses' tablets being forgotten beneath childish feet, silver. Here was a proud justification of bourgeois interior design sensibilities, the way even apocalypse-strewn tiles could be instantly differentiated between those that came from a kitchen, a domestic porch, a fancy hotel. Railings and the beginnings of staircases were still approximately upright in the flowering rubble -except, explain the three or four degree slants, as if the quaking earth had been caused by some autistic child trying to impress his mother with subtlety. Broken water mains were already dried up. Much of the rubble offered signs of gentleness in difference to the main destruction, little things such as black railings still straight, a pretty white terrace cut off from the main cafe now splintered like hell.

A vital question came - how long until the birds return?

A snaking road had been sealed off by a quarry-style mole hill of bitty rubble, and just as the eyes gaped at this, they also focussed on the quaint continental traffic lights, all black, dreaming. Similar to the blank feeling provoked by the turn-of-the-century department store signs; impossibly grey, hypnotic. This was a rare moment of carefree-carefree poignancy, though. A boyish need to climb the funny, shattered masonry prevailed.

The street beyond was almost completely undamaged. One fleeing car had crashed stupidly in the bridge of a T junction. Another had partially flipped down into a basement inlet, offering the rear like flummoxed animal -he realised it was probably the first ever time he'd anthropomorphised a car. What a time.

Despite the neat shop frontages tucked unimposingly along the thoroughfare, the dim brown recesses were hard to ignore. And so, at the classic Parisian scene of ring-fenced trees, a blocky, pretty clothes shop, he came to a halt to examine his reflection. The interior was alive with the possibility of shadowy, subtle ghosts. Let them try to unnerve him.

His silver skin now only existed in parts, with large streaks appearing to have taken the texture of millimetres-deep woodglue, hardened. And underneath the shining husk, looking astonishingly familiar and hatefully real -red-beige flesh. It just looked skinny and darkly beautiful.

There were strips like this at his thighs, running in swirls across his pointy shins, on his fragile shoulders, across his ribs as intricate continental maps. As for the broadest of the remaining silver sections -it had never shone, it had only ever been a child's pencil set interpretation of silver, but now it was dark grey into brown. Question: did he actually want the translucent sections to prevail in this anatomical 'election night' graph of his soul? Not particularly. He'd settle for one of the weakened, translucent sections to appear somewhere useful, such as his jugular or wrists. For now he kept on walking. A forgotten train track in his mind, 'Going Over to Susan's House' by the Eels, though he was too hypnogogic to identify it as a song.

'Don't commit suicide', cry the Samaritans. 'Commit suicide if you want', cries Terry Pratchett. Maybe there's a finite amount of lazy, childish novels, and you've written them all, so do it, it's fine, and we can stick your fedora on a shoebox and pretend that has a personality, too.

The silence -was no longer maddening. He sensed Shalla Bal would also have appreciated a moment like this, the eye-of-the-storm. Soon the streets became broader and much more beautiful. He found himself staring uber-thoughtfully at the sky as he walked, just as she did whenever they'd walked together on the Fosseway. The huge white-black clouds all blurred together with almost no integrity to hold in the rain. Yet it wouldn't rain; you could sense that by the upward-flutter of the breeze, calm if apocalyptic.

My god, how easily he pictured her face. It was as real as anything, and it radiated otherwordly impatience.

A purple Renault Sur had driven crazily, yet had not crashed; it'd skidded as if to form a rampart against Galactus. A community-minded gangsta had tried to shoot his Glock at the space-titan, as if there was even a hope it would do much damage from this or any range. The gun lay just where he'd dropped it in an obscure position beside the car door.

The new owner picked it up and checked the magazine. Next he drew close to a nearby window and tilted his head in the light. To his surprise, maybe also to a feeling of being God-sanctioned, the translucent degradation had made an appearance on a small section at the side of his skull. Very carefully, he laid a finger on the exact location, then raised the nozzle of the gun to touch just-so.

Because surely it was time.

From his skull, forearm and trigger-finger there was only an inhuman tension, while his eyes moved casually up into the sky. The strong wind seemed relaxing -certainly the peeking head of Mr Seagull thought so. Now that life had returned to this cursed place, he knew he could probably go in peace. The gusting wind gave leave to the high drama, too. Wild is the wind.

His finger made a motion to pull the trigger.

The tip of a skuzzy trainer made a stars-and-black-blotches impact to the side of his skull. At least with his consciousness rebooted he had a few moments more to make a difference. A cramping of his itchy arm against the stairs pulled him around, if only to see Vanilla Ice's Arabian Princess sweat pants as they kicked him in the ribs.

It was a slow flailing of his newly re-fleshed limbs; the grimey lighting of the stairwell made them look pored-up in black. His fists, at least, remembered the indefatigable blows Gort had made in Paris. As he sought to defend himself in the following few seconds, frustration came more than anything else, his elbows and fists making valiant attempts to drive off Kevin and Perry but doomed to always shut down a few milliseconds before they could get momentum. Milliseconds? Millibanes. It was a tragedy; the three young people (flashword) didn't realise that Britain was the one country where people could do whatever they like. Why fight?

The point-five yard free kicks were simple and direct; there was that, at least. In the other great climaxes, during the reign of Mephisto -it'd had been about exaggerated sorrow, audacious sorrow. His dad's final heart-attack by that fast-moving layby -ten feet away, the parked car behind them had two gay-heterosexual twenty-somethings chatting across the roof of their car while all the thrashing went down. They chatted away. They glanced but didn't see. That was all forgivable, in a way. But to carry on chatting when a klaxon-blazing ambulance is forced to stop in the middle of the road because there's no parking bays, and you're leaning on the hood of your car, chatting about being a fitness instructor?

It stays with you, and if you tried to put it in a novel, none of the readers would believe you: exaggerated sorrow. An exaggerated example of the social disregard inside all scurrying, college-breds of the twenty-first century.

They started work on his neck. Still he had movement enough to roll steeply and stare up at the top landing where once again the blue scum-hoodie was kicking widely at their apartment door.

After the heart attack, his mum had been so weak and afraid. Uuatu had been right -there were so many times when he'd wondered why God hadn't put them both out of their misery.

Above his smouldering form, the boy in the pyjama hoodie held the neon camping knife but wasn't dynamic enough to use it. He was content to stamp. And who would have guessed that it was a good old Catholic thing? A completely natural inclination towards the painkiller death, never stopping to think of how it might be transposed into hope and zen-like invincibility. But the stakes, they have to be high.

He stared at the monster and the gates of Heaven just a few steps above him. He expected something to happen. He just wasn't quite sure what.

But what followed was like the opening credits of a James Bond film.

The monster arced his leg to blast open the door -it was caught and held fast by something invisible. The sole of his foot was spaced a few inches from the wood by HG Wells, causing the boy's skinny little throat to shriek. He hopped backwards while a second invisible front opened up. It was -a hemisphere-shaped drawbridge. And down it cleaved, slicing him cleanly in half. It was distinct -the shape, the razor-sharpness of the sides. As it sliced, the pressurised blood misted outwards to highlight the core of this invisible death-shield; the torso of a slim, sexy girl, majestically invisible.

And no sooner had those present seen and gasped than the Invisible Girl aerobically bolted to arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the kickers.

Close beside Norrin, one boy was incapacitated by invisible slices to his upper legs, another was despatched more immediately with a blood-translucent aspis-strike between the collar bone, neck, jaw. In short order, his abdomen was swept backwards by an invisible plate -he was after all, not a human being but a murderous doll. Doll the Second made an itching motion with clawed hands as some invisible lance entered at his hip and started to expand. He stared at the blood-misted breasts. The real star of the show were two conjuring, snake-charming, Jedi-knight palms controlling utterly the nuances of the invisible walls -still only visible through flowering offshoots of Youth Apprenticeship blood.

It took seconds. All of the monsters died through Rubiks cube, Damien Hurst formalthyde artistry. Cross-sections were made at a hypno-flickery speed that Norrin Radd could only identify as divine retribution. Somehow, while the rest of the monster was in pieces, a large part of his torso and one complete arm stayed intact. The blood-drenched hand waved sickeningly, touched a significant part of the enemy, then came to rest squarely across what was revealed as a beautiful, impassioned face.

Norrin stared at that red-hand-print face, even as the mark was absorbed back into invisibility. It was familiar. The small gait of the footsteps as they cat-stepped back down the stairs was also deja-vu-drenched, utterly. When she opened the door that led out to the courtyard, he got the feeling she was turning to look at him -though by now all the blood that made her body discernible had faded away to nothing. The door swung shut like a haunted house.

In the moments that followed there was no tension. No nervousness. His head was something floating around in zero gravity, slowly being pulled towards the side of the spaceship that was moving fastest. There was just -something he'd been waiting for across a period of time so full of irritating problems.

But now the door at the top of the landing started to open.

He almost fainted at the sight of her. The area at the top of his skull through which his consciousness might have fluttered free was clenching. He gaped and smiled softly; it felt like grinding his teeth. All the muscles in his torso, in his heart -immaterial, effervescent.

Ditto, Shalla Bal wasn't particularly shocked by the butcher's shop of dead political units. She moved sprightly downwards until she was in his arms.

He held her, analysed the texture and the warmth of her shoulders like every page of Jean-Paul Sartre diametrically inverted to become religious epiphany. For one thing, he kept his eyes closed, to start with, to show the eternity of death that they had a solid understanding.

"But what happened? Did someone kill all these people but leave you?"

They drew apart to examine each other.

"I thought I'd never see you again", said Norrin.

"Well, I'm here!"

"Amen".

They held each other, with their heads moving across the carnage as twin turrets of a tank stalled on the battlefield. Shalla Bal looked to him for a grand explanation, and he did pretty well, even though all he did was puff his cheeks, exhale, pull a face.

And then, from over her shoulder, he stared keenly at his final enemy.

Mounted in the top corner of the stairwell, taking in the whole scene, the black lens of the security camera observed them both with overwhelming interest.

"So, in the celebrity clique of Hollywood, there's a sudden fashion for dendrology, trees, forestry. Scarlet Johanssen figures there's nothing for it but to build an arboretum in the back of her LA mansion. There's -redwoods, palms, drumblast trees she imported from England, coryphas she bought from a gazillionaire Arabian sheik. She spends months and months standing beside all the dump trucks and the cranes, wearing a hard hat, supervising where the trees should be winched up".

Scully looked briefly in Mulder's direction, then out towards a red British post box as it sped by. She coolly stared across the pylon-infested farmland, a hill with a dry ski-slope, an autumnal horizon. It was incredible that Mulder had switched to driving on the left again so easily, in a manner she was sure would make her own head fuzzy. But then, spending his doctorate years at Oxford, the adventure of Cecil L'ively and Pheobe Green; in some ways, they'd always been continents apart.

"Finally, it's time to show the place off. She sets the date for a big, glitzy party and invites all her A-list pals. Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, everyone - they've all been working on their own arboretums, but Johanssen just knows she's gonna be the toast of the Hollywood elite. The night before, she drifts through the place and stares at all the beautiful trees that're floodlit in funky blues, funky greens. It's a little cold, but she figures it won't effect how impressive it looks".

(sunflower seed).

"The next day, it all goes to Hell. LA, for the first time ever, is hit by a blizzard and temperatures plunge to minus 12. All the rare trees that Miss Johanssen spent millions of dollars on are turned frost white and swallowed up in metres of snow. SJ can only look on as the beautiful branches start to snap and fall to the ground.

"But then this kinda unconventional pretty-looking girl walks past the black gates and calls through that she knows just what to do. Scarlet Johanssen figures, What the Hell, and lets her in to give it a go. The girl breezes in, walks straight to the biggest tree and then licks a thumb, places it on the bark -the whole thing starts to come back to life. The frost, the snow, all of it vanishes. She goes around each and every tree in the arboretum, licking her thumb and warming off the ice.

"'But that's incredible!', says Johansson. 'How did you do it?'

"It's just what I do', says the girl.

"'But what's your name?'

"'Thora Birch'".

Scully was careful not to move her eyes too much. She kept a check on her mouth, too, staring hard at the sides of a large business park finished in matte chrome. In time, however, it was impossible not to let a chucklesome smile invade.

"Ah, come on! that deserves a belly laugh!"

Scully laughed, but soon the side of her mouth creased in incredulity. She wondered why Mulder would think she'd belly-laugh at anything, least of all one of his jokes. Scanning her memory for anything that could have set a precedent - but, of course; the very first X-file she investigated at his side, in the clearing of Collum Forest, the Billy Miles abduction case. They'd caught a glimpse of themselves as they excitedly notched up the evidence like children dressed as Power Rangers making up an adventure, the sheer excitement of it.

It seemed like a thousand years ago.

"You know, it's not long ago that we'd be on our way to a crime scene and you'd be blitzing me with coincidences from the case file, wild theories, parallels from medieval times. Why did that change?"

"Come on, Scully-", he removed his eyes from the road and smiled ambiently. "You know why it changed. Don't you think it's kind of depressing to talk about it? The thing's a jerk-off nightmare".

She glowered at the rise of the hood. The Erlenmeyer Amendment to the FBI charter made by Senator Korinson -the X-files were still deemed of value in the post-9/11 world -narrowly-, but the focus on UFOs was to be cut away completely. Abduction reports by so-called 'Greys' had fallen to almost nothing, even with the added springboard of social networking. Meanwhile, commercial antiferromate propulsion could imitate the silent creeping of the black triangles exactly. There was, breezed Korinson, no practical value to investigating myths and technology that were politically, socially passé.

But what of the remainder of the X-files cases? Scully often wondered: cryptozoological attacks, astral murders, aggressive pyro and telekinesis -were these truly integral to a sane and balanced world? They could hardly be called a fundamental threat to society, could they?

"I know how you feel", she said unsympathetically. "But we could be going into this on wrong sides. You haven't even told me what your gut says about the Shalla Bal case".

Changing gears in a grapple, his lightweight smile grew sardonic as never before. He stared complacently at the road ahead. "When I was taking the profiling course at the academy, they'd queue up a dozen cases like this. What are we, laymen? Three hoodlums lie dead in a stairwell. Then, captured on the surveillance camera, whattayouknow, an invisible woman treating them all to a hot n' spicey bloodbath. Kind of artistic, don't you think? But wait, who actually rents the apartment and has access to that camera? A struggling artist. With her boyfriend as an accomplice, they fake the footage and get free publicity in the National Enquirer".

Scully tipped her chin. "There's just one problem with that, Mulder. The footage was cleared in our labs of digital tampering".

Mulder was petulant. "I'll bet half the summer blockbusters would be cleared by our tech guys of digital tampering. They're useless, you know that".

"And the girl has no experience of digital art. She's a sculptor".

"People have either got the creative touch or not, Scully. I remember some of the lucid dreams I had as a fallout of working with Dr Werber. I could create anything, in an instant, and it was absolutely real. The difference is, most of us don't have the time or the skills to paint, draw or write these things back in the waking world".

Irritation. Progress. She crumpled her hands to her sides and caught glimpses of some of the British birds with their strange slim necks. "But the mystery is two-fold. I was sure that would peak your interest. We have the invisible creature in the stairwell and then, six hundred miles away in Berlin, a dozen witnesses in the David Bowie museum giving reports of one of Shalla Bal's statues coming to life. They said it smiled and laughed in a catharsis".

Mulder's smile quested her, "What are you saying, that Shalla Bal has some kind of magical, reality-altering power?"

"We saw the same thing in the Isaac Luria killings", she said lightly.

"I don't know. My gut tells me it's artistic propaganda, and she and her boyfriend are one part vigilantes, one part avant garde exhibitionists. It's a little too good to be true, Scully. The statue coming to life? Google 'Weeping Madonna', and you'll see statues of Our Lady in some tin-plate backwater church every other day, crying serenely at pretty much nothing. Society's built up a resistance to billboards, Superbowl adverts, debate shows. After that there's only one way to go; here come the miracles. But it doesn't make us any less empty".

Scully frowned and traced the course of the road into Gloucester. She made a conscious effort not to brush fingers against her crucifix.

Washington DC it was not. After so many years in the capital, she'd got used to seeing a skyline where even the most inconspicuous building was shaped like a Roman plinth and the colours were simplistic greys, rock-coloured browns. Here, everything was too elaborate and coloured in such a way that they had some strange extrovert neurosis.

Surprisingly, there were quite a few free parking bays opposite the apartment studio of Salla Bal and Norrin Radd. Mulder merely winced to the left, the riot-silenced city, then looked squarely at the blocky creme building. Scully looked pensively at the zig-zag cobbles as if they might offer up a clue, even an esoteric clue.

The place, it made no sense. The Newsweek-style consensus on British cities was that they were both densely populated and community-free. Yet this network of outskirts-perched apartment blocks was by no means a ghetto. In the kitchens and the yards, Scully saw no kids or shell-shocked housewives. What she did see: predatory children bouncing around on their tiny bikes, mindless-evil-mouthed heavy-sets with ugly dogs, patwais incarnate. It was as if the city had been abandoned in favour of something mythical, and since then, a dark and wild vice had moved in.

They walked easily over the neat paving bricks so eerily free of litter. Scully placed her arms together and allowed all the power from her La Redoute jacket to seep into her bones. Mulder activated the intercom with a curt arch of his thumb, the buzz just long enough to be annoying.

A one-liner was about to be delivered when a strange, reasonable voice said hello.

"Special agents Fox Mulder, Dana Scully. Mr Radd? We spoke briefly on the phone?"

"Please, enter. We are on the second floor, as you know".

The stairwell was tight, delicate; it took a good few seconds to equate it with the grisly crime scene shots. Scully guessed that if you lived here, the echoes and the feeling of cool, cheap metal might get to feel like home, slowly.

At the apartment door, they shook hands with a man whose eyes tantalised like stepping stones in a babbling brook: Norrin Radd. The girl, Shalla Bal, looked to be toeing down buckets of paint to ensure a tight seal. In all, the landing door was a bulwark of loaded down ruc-sacs and sports bags.

Said Scully, "Moving home, Mr Radd?"

"To the country", said the handsome man. His voice was breathy -wise, like the softest-spoken evangelist in the world. Moving his face between the agents, the black eye, the sunken sockets, the storm-coloured creases across his head seemed almost innocuous.

Directly parallel with the doorframe was a big hold-all containing DVDs. Of course, this was a red-flag-to-a-bull for Mulder. He stooped to examine them.

"30 Rock -I love that show".

"Tracey Jordan is quite a creation", said Norrin Radd.

Said Shalla Bal, "I didn't realise the FBI had any jurisdiction in Britain?"

Scully's voice was unyielding. "Sometimes we co-operate at the behest of foreign governments, if the case is particularly ardous".

"If all the other guys are stumped", said Mulder. He briefly looked away from the 30 Rock blurb to the hazy little landing. "So down there is where the attack took place?"

"Yes, sir", said Shalla Bal, standing on her tip-toes slightly, clearly warming to the FBI interview game.

"It's very nearby. Were you afraid, Shalla? Or in the intensity of the moment, were you just too adrenalised?"

"Fifty-fifty, I suppose".

Mulder suggested, "I guess, horrific though it was, something like that must be pretty inspiring for a sculptor. The anatomy. The weirdness of the actions".

"As of the Bowie statue, I'm retired".

"You're retired? Isn't that kinda tough? Retiring from something creative, which you love and you're obviously pretty good at?"

"There's love and then there's love". Shalla Bal cast her eyes at the carpet as an invisible current passed between herself and Radd. "Isn't there a single thing that would trump being FBI agents for you guys, and what's more it's something simple?"

Mulder moved his lips in a trembling smile. "Yes there is. Scully?"

"Plato said, 'Not to help Justice in her need would be an impiety'. It's something to put on my headstone, I guess".

"Well I'd say you've definitely made a name for yourself, even if you do retire", was Mulder's gambit to the girl.

Accepted. She kneeded at the side of her head with a fist, perhaps as a clay statue sculpting itself. "Norrin and I are looking forward to being regular joes now. Forgetting all this".

Mulder wagged the 30 Rock case, "Did you know Will Ferrell is going to make a full-length Bitch Hunter movie?"

Scully hitched her breath, folded her arms.

"There aren't too many precedents for murders like this. Do either of you have a history of psychic phenomena, telekinesis, astral projection?"

"Nope", said Shalla Bal, possibly lying.

"No", said Radd, without a doubt lying.

"What about Ouija boards -demonic or ghostly presences?"

"No", said Radd.

"No", said Shalla Bal, smoothing her wild black hair in anything but a body-language guilt-ridden-giveaway. She blinked her eyes girlishly. Scully glanced through to the bedroom, the stripped mattress riled up at a strange angle. She could imagine the two of them making passionate love while the spirits of those they'd killed spun and howled, Tin Tin and the Seven Crystal Balls.

Still shaking up loose, Shalla Bal removed herself to the small kitchen to fulfil a promise of coffee.

Mulder sat on the edge of an upturned, plastic-coated armchair. He played with a Viewmaster, taking in who-knew-what images which seemed more 3D than the world itself. "Mr Radd, in one of your previous interviews with the British Metropolitan Police, you told that you were a diagnosed sufferer of Dementia Praecox?".

"Tell me, please, Agent Fox Mulder, what bearing this has on the creature which came to our home?"

"I figure it has bearing either way. If the invisible girl was an id-spawned psychic monster, conjured by your Dementia Praecox, that'd be a pretty good exonerating factor. Even if you consciously brought her to life, who would ever believe it? Or it could be that you killed those hoodlums in a delusional rage, and your girlfriend expertly doctored the surveillance footage. But you know, I don't expect to be able to prove you guilty. The only difference would be, if you confessed, you'd prove you had some balls. Maybe a little self-insight".

Scully looked on and tried all the while not to gasp or raise her eyebrows. Norrin Radd flicked his mesmerised-mesmerising eyes from the carpet up to Mulder, who'd only just lowered the yellow goggles. There was no soul-probing, though, not quite yet. For now, some kind of exorcism charisma where everyone in the room must be included down to their souls.

"Your partner has an interesting way of pursuing the truth, Agent Scully".

"The truth has to be pursued with faith, Mr Radd. Besides which, Agent Mulder is one of the Bureau's most skilled psychological profilers".

"Like Silence of the Lambs", said Norrin Radd in a plain voice. "Do serial killers like that really exist?"

"And how!", said Mulder enthusiastically.

Volunteered Radd, "I saw that film at the cinema, but spent the entire running time preoccupied with the thought of the Death's Head Moth. Such a perfect depiction of a human skull, yet -appearing naturally, in such an unexpected place. If god exists, what do you suppose that might mean?"

"Maybe the moths think they're pirates", said Mulder.

"Do you believe in God, Mr Radd?", asked Scully.

Norrin Radd's face pinched up, just slightly. "I believe, as living beings, we're in a unique position to think about God, but never to discuss Him".

"And what exactly might that mean, Norrin?", said Mulder.

Shalla Bal arrived and set mugs of coffee on the carpet beside each chair. She then draped herself on the side and across the top of Radd's armchair like a Blurred Lines model.

Scully started to drink her coffee straight off, even though it scalded her mouth at all points.

"I think what you mean to ask me, Agent Scully, is whether I think it's psychologically or spiritually healthy for someone who's mentally ill to place so much stock in a god who may or may not exist, am I right?"

"I suppose that is what I'm asking, sir, in as much as the incident might have been a -psychic manifestation", Scully heard her own voice; it was a sigh, but otherwise it sounded deep, purposeful. Looking solely at the boyfriend, but with the intelligent, carnally-gratified girlfriend alive in her peripheral -it was some kind of gauntlet.

Said Radd, "If there is a God, for a mentally ill person to put his faith in Him, expecting nothing but tacit, untraceable assistance -doesn't that strike you as an immaculate situation? A sufferer of Dementia Praecox must necessarily have lost his belief in the sanctity of reality, due to some unspeakable horror from his past. And anyone who is spiritually-aware, spiritually-realistic, will know that miracles simply do not happen, or at least, are not intelligible to humanity as a whole: God has His own code of sanctity when interacting with humans. How is it possible for someone's desperate, bone-deep madness to automatically disregard human logic, which means everything, but secretly fall-in with God's logic, which is -useless, apparently? Subjective to the point of being nonexistent?"

Poor Mulder. She noted the way he sat, hunched forward, just as he had in the waiting room of St. Anne's Central as she was emerging from her coma. He fingered around his dry-ceramic mug; it was a miracle it didn't drop.

"Mr Radd? You're talking to us about madness inside of madness, and you know what? I think you're sane, and I think you're a killer".

"Perhaps I am sane now", pondered Radd, in a heartfelt voice. A new phase of eerie, deadly honesty was entered. "But that sanity can only have been a gift from God. Either way, I promise that what you saw on the surveillance footage was exactly what it seems to be. I was as shocked as it happened as you were when you watched it. You must feel free to analyse it endlessly. You will find that the facts point to just two possibilities".

Mulder laughed and shook his head dismissively. Scully leaned forward.

"Which are, sir?"

"HG Wells wrote the Invisible Man in 1897. It's a simple enough concept. There is a chance that somewhere a scientist has perfected the technique and is currently roaming the streets of Gloucester as a vigilante. The second possibility, which I subscribe to -God exists, and He hates c-s".

Now Mulder was on his feet. "I think I'm done here".

He started to walk to the landing. Before he was a quarter of the way, however, Norrin Radd had one last mind-game to play.

"Let me ask you this, Agent Mulder, Agent Scully. If you could take the most subtle and strained problem of your normal, day-to-day lives and swap it for a paranormal problem of equal weight, would you do so? And how can you be sure that such a choice hasn't already been made by your subconscious?"

Mulder was gone. Scully lingered on. She stared at the two bright and happy souls, so profoundly in love. She handed them an X-files contact card then followed her partner back out onto the streets.

Epilogue.

Mulder was in pain, obviously, with a head full of Samantha. Scully tried to use a tone that was gentle while still demanding, "What was all that about? In all our years on the X-files, I've never once seen you sweat someone down to the bones like that, Mulder!"

Leaning on the roof of the rented Taurus, his expression evoked a soul that was trembling. His queasy-if-reassuring smile -it was one of the things she loved him for, even now.

"The X-files?", he said bitterly. "That murder - dressed up as new age garbage! How is that like an X-file, Scully? How was that internet-gimmick, sub National Enquirer bulls- anything like what we worked for, bled for, all those years?"

Feeling small on the opposite side of the car, the only thing to do was wince in his direction, into the light of a dying afternoon. "I don't understand where is all this coming from! There's a chance -no matter how small- that what took place in that stairwell was an attack by an invisible entity. How is that not worthy of our time?"

"Don't you ever think about the Bellefleur Woods?", imploringly.

The retreating yellow luminescence swinging at a giddy angle on the horizon, there for all the world to see. The angles of the tree trunks, as though pines anywhere were part of some psychological alien experiment.

"I was remembering it only a few minutes ago. I guess those were happy days for us, after a fashion".

Mulder told her, "That's what the X-files are -UFO stakeouts in backwater hotspots, local police chiefs with hollow jaws! Flattened cornfields with every kind of salient symbol for the future of mankind! And the conspiracy, pinning the tail on a thousand Old Smokey wannabees -going to their offices and kicking down doors! How did it come to this?"

"But Mulder", she breathed, made her words sweet, "I always thought we had a plan. Prove just one thing that's paranormal -unbelievable- and the entire senate will get behind us!"

From across the inexplicably shiny black hood - a look of despair.

"I can't do it any more".

"How can you say that?"

"This-", he took out his FBI wallet and mangled it in disgust, "it leads nowhere. As all the while, she's out there. For all I know, still an eight year old girl, wondering why she's alone".

'An eight year old girl, wondering why she's alone', the idea reverberated in Scully's head, almost to the point of silencing the world. She touched her crucifix. What if loneliness is the main component of life, and the aliens just -accept it? Rich, multi-coloured rooms with hazy edges. Stick-like Greys with varnished almond eyes, smiles unreadable as they take their own sweet time behind technology centuries ahead of us. And their Kermit the Frog limbs -dazzlingly slow, hypnotic, as they experiment with the godly loneliness of the select few. Frightening? Yes. But not inexplicable.

From across the hood, Mulder's eyes flickered on her face and skimmed into her soul.

"I have to get out of here", he pushed himself backwards with his palms and bounded off towards the dull brown avenues.

"But where're you going?"

"To find a bar, Scully. And then in the morning, I'm gonna start a war".

Continued.