THE MOONBASE PROJECT

CHAPTER ONE:

HEADHUNTED

I blame it all on THE WEST WING.

I watched it religiously all the way through my secondary education, through the good
years and the increasingly bad. I loved it all, the comedy, the politics, the soap opera.
I wanted, more than anything, to be C.J.: I wanted to be standing up there in front of
the world’s press, being witty and concise about Really Important Stuff. I wanted to
be the White House Press Secretary when I grew up and considering we lived in
Cheadle in Cheshire to the south of Manchester, England, UK that was a really
unfortunate childhood ambition to have.

I didn’t grow out of it. I went on to Uni to study for a degree in Politics and Media,
which only sounds like a course for lightweights wanting to spend three years wasting
their parents’ money. No really: we had the best teacher in the country: an ex-Media
advisor to the Cabinet Office, capable of analysing the political realities in the
detached way that only a high flying Civil Servant can and only an ex-Civil Servant is
allowed to. I was his star pupil in my year: he did his very best for me when it came to
finding a job.

And, of course, I muffed it. I say ‘of course’ because if I’d followed the path outlined
for me, I’d have joined a media consultancy or one of the Civil Service P.R. sections
and you’d never have heard of me again. I’d have been one of the nameless people at
the back who never draw attention to themselves. I’d be on my way to my first
million and my first nervous breakdown or gradually turning myself grey on my way
to a GCMG and a very nice pension.

But the one thing that my mentor didn’t teach me, and perhaps I should have guessed
this might be a problem considering he was, you know, an ex-high flying Civil
Servant, was how to hold my tongue and how to suffer fools gladly or otherwise, two
skills he never managed to master himself.

I got my first job with the media team of a rising young star on the opposition back
benches. He had just launched a bid to become leader of his party: he wanted to make
a big splash, get his name in front of the punters. So he decided that he wanted to
spend a week living on a council estate, just surviving on benefits. I told him it had
already been done. I told him that no-one was going to be impressed with a staged
media event like that without a Unique Selling Point. So I told him 1) to make his stay
last a month and 2) keep a blog and record his impressions on a web cam.

So when in the second week he allowed an alky neighbour to come in and she made a
violent and obscene attempt to get his jeans off him and it got recorded on the web
cam and then started circulating on one of the video-sharing sites…. Well, let’s just
say that I wasn’t invited to renew my contract and I didn’t bother to ask for a
reference.
So then I tried working for the commercial sector. I really, really hope that nobody
now remembers Vita-Nu. It was one of the first of the commercial nano-treatments.
Designed to clear half a dozen chemicals that were associated with aging out of your
system, extend your life by maybe twenty percent, they thought. And they were right
but…

The other copywriters wanted to treat it like a fancy skin conditioner, or any one of a
dozen gloops that were supposed to keep you looking twenty into middle age. They
hadn’t really grasped that this was start-of-the-art, really new tech and they came up
with more of the same old, same old. I went to the big boss and I said, look this is
something really new, we need to do it big and with class, we need to tell people what
it can do now so they’ll get the benefit for the rest of their lives… And I sold it to him.
I’m good at selling things.

And it was a brilliant campaign, though I say so who shouldn’t. We used a big CGI
shot, (right out of HOUSE M.D.: American television again) flying through a brain, a
heart, a liver, showing how they corroded, silted up, died slowly over time… “Unless
you use Vita-Nu.” It was up for awards. I was the rising star…

Until about a year after the commercial release of Vita-Nu when it turned out that one
of the chemicals they were purging out of the body was needed for the formation of
long term memories. The users were getting gaps in their internal records, they
couldn’t remember much of the year they’d been on the drug. They were fine after
they stopped using the stuff and they all got huge payouts from the pharmaceutical
company.1 But the people I’d trod on to get the campaign remembered: I was an
embarrassment again. And unemployed again and probably unemployable in my
chosen profession.

I didn’t just mope. Not much. Not at first. I circulated my CV to everyone I could
think of. I tried to get work as a consultant, not even asking for credit on the work.
But people are superstitious. I’d been struck by lightning twice and they didn’t want
to hang around near me waiting for the next one.

I was running out of my severance pay and looking forward to the delightful prospect
of going down to the Jobcentre and seeing what Tesco were paying shelf-stackers,
when my phone rang for the first time in two months (excluding calls from my mother
asking if I’d considered moving back to Cheshire).

“Eileen Finch?”

”Yes, who is this?”

”Thornton-Baxter Recruitment. We were wondering if you would be interested in

1
How did it ever happen? Well, the testing had selected for older citizens on a mistaken assumption
that they were going to be the primary consumers of it and in part the increased mental confusion got
ignored because they were able to write it off to expected loss of acuity in older people. And the rest of
the blame is split between management who didn’t understand the science and the Expedited Drug
Safety Test Act passed by the last idiot-Congress-of-the-United-States but one. There were huge
investigations, lots of reports that failed to say ‘it’s the damn fool politicians’ fault’ and eventually a
whole lot of nothing was done. And the US found that the bulk of the business of testing new drugs had
somehow shifted to Europe. But that was their problem and not yours or mine.
coming in for an interview?”

”Oh. Well, possibly.” (DEFINITELY!) “What sort of job are we talking about?”

”We have some clients who are looking for a head of communications.”

”Oh. Would I have heard of them?”

”I’m afraid the name of our client is confidential but the salary would be well within
the range of your previous employment. Would you be able to come in tomorrow?”

I indicated that I might just be able to squeeze them into my busy schedule. And the
next day I was there, my best interview outfit just back from an emergency dry clean
and a huge portfolio of everything I’d done. (Which unfortunately meant mostly Vita-
Nu and some projects I’d worked on at Uni.)

I didn’t have to show them a thing. There were two people from the client there, a
man and a woman. Neither were corporate types: they looked like academics or
maybe I.T. geeks. They were both in their twenties, the woman a little older than the
man. She was… not pretty. Well actually she was just unfortunate in having the face
she had. Her nose would have looked good on a Roman Senator and her forehead on a
Klingon. Her hair was mousy brown and she needed the thickest specs I’ve ever seen
on a human being. But she had a nice grin, a really dirty laugh and good teeth.

The man was all right in looks, but he was a slob in dress or maybe just someone who
had never cared much about what he looked like and he had the slight paunch of
someone who spends most of his life working at a desk. He was shyer than her: he
didn’t laugh as much, just smiling slightly.

They let the recruiter from Thornton-Baxter (a ghastly woman called Joyce with all
the personality of an animatronic copy of Liz Hurley) do most of the early
questioning. I answered her but watched them.

We were about two thirds of the way through the list of tedious standard questions
(“Can you give any examples of occasions when your previous employers gave you
responsibility above your official duties?”, “Would you say you were a good team
member?”, “Do you have any disabilities or health problems we should know about?”
I swear, there must be an industry wide Standards Commission to ensure that
personnel types ask the same meaningless drivel every time) when the woman spoke
up.

“We were very interested in your work on the Vita-Nu account. That’s what you
advertising types call them, isn’t it? Accounts?”

”Yes. And we don’t like being called advertising types either.” I couldn’t help it: my
mouth just ran away with me: the little sneer in her voice set me off. I kicked myself
but she just guffawed at me.

“What then?”
”Media consultants. Communications specialists. That’s what the agency told me you
were after: someone to be in charge of your communications on your… whatever it is.
Product. Service. What?”

”A little of both,” she said and looked over at the man. He harmuphed and said:

”Our… Chairman was the one who pointed you out to us. What were you trying to
achieve with the Vita-Nu adverts?”

”Well, the same thing that every adv… every media consultant is looking to do. Get
the name of the product on everybody’s lips, in everybody’s mind. And… And I
wanted to do it by telling people exactly what it would do for them in terms they
would understand. I couldn’t give them the full scientific explanation, not if I had a
three hour long HORIZON special with the budget of a blockbuster. So I showed
them their bodies, their own bodies and told them what was happening to them as they
sat there.”

”You played on their fears,” the woman said.

“Guilty. Everyone is afraid of death: it’s not an irrational fear. Even the ones who say
they’re… you know, reconciled to it, happily awaiting the trip to Jesus or Nirvana or
something. They still wonder if they’re wrong. And I told them about a means of
putting off the thing they feared. For a while.”

”And then they stopped remembering where they had been for the past six months.”

”Yeah, well. I was screwed by the scientists.”

She gave one of those dirty laughs and said that counted as good experience for their
job.

The man perked up then. “Would you be willing to work outside the UK?”

”Ummm, a foreign contract? Whereabouts?”

”That’s something you won’t find out until after you sign our non-disclosure
agreement.”

”I’m not going to be wearing a chador?”

”A what?”

”One of those Muslim all-over nightdresses?”

”I think that’s called a hibab?2 Anyway, nothing like that. You’ll be in a country
with…. a liberal constitution and Western values. All your accommodation and living
expenses will be paid. But you’ll be out of contact with people in Britain until we’re
ready to go public with our… product.”

2
He was wrong. I was right unless I was thinking of a burqa. A hibab is a headscarf.
”What not even phone calls? I’m not even allowed a letter home?”

”Letters would be possible but they’d be subject to vetting. E-mails are possible but
likewise. No phone-calls. They won’t be practical on site.”

”Not practical? They can pick up mobile phone signals on Mount Everest. In
Antarctica even.”

”I’m sorry. I know it’s a burden…” Actually, I was thinking, it’s not. I’d not have to
listen to my mum go on about her friends and enemies in the Cheadle Amateur
Dramatic Society and my dad’s problems with his bladder. But where in the world…

For a moment I wondered if this was some sort of dodgy deal. Aimed at getting young
girls off to some pervert’s harem… But I’m not the sort to figure in anybody’s
fantasies. Nothing wrong with me but I’m just… ordinary. Perverts go for more
extreme types than me. And they don’t tell you up front that you’re going to be held
incommunicado.

I think.

“How long? Until you launch the product?”

”Not more than six months. If for any reason we can’t launch by then, your contract
will be renegotiated and you’ll have the chance to opt out of continuing it. We hope
you’ll be with us for some years to come, stay with the organisation as it grows. But
you’re only committed to helping us launch and then see us over the early days.”

“How many people would I be working with in your communications department?”

”You’d be the head of it: our chief spokeswoman..”

”Spokesperson, Teddy.” That was the woman sticking her oar in. “Press secretary
maybe. Haven’t decided on a title just yet. You’d have yourself, one assistant and as
many others you can convince our Chairman you need. When the announcement date
comes you’ll definitely need more staff: we may move people from other duties or
you’ll be allowed to recruit new bods. They’ll have to be in place and well briefed
beforehand. And our security people will want to vet anyone you bring on board.”

”Have your security people vetted me?”

”Oh yes.”

Funny, I hadn’t noticed any private detectives hanging round my part of Crouch End.
No mysterious clicks on my phone line either.

“Could I see the contract?”

The recruiter gave a squeak of disapproval as the woman pulled a huge slab of paper
out of her bag and dumped it in front of me. It had my details already filled in, right
down to my N.I. number. ‘A Contract of Employment between Eileen Finch… and
Davis-La Paz-Holmes PLC….” Who they? Let’s see now… ‘This contract shall be
construed under English law….’, arrangements for arbitration… , ‘The employee
hereby agrees to work at the project development site which shall be revealed only
after the signing of the contract…’

And then I came to the salary and I was lost. I don’t think I let them know how hard
that Nice Round Figure had hit me by anything in my face but from that moment on I
was their girl. It’s sad really but I am very greedy and I was getting very aware of
how little of the Really Good Money I’d earned was left. To quote Major Dennis
Bloodnock: “I can’t help it: they offered me… money!” (My dad was a Goon Show
fan.)

In what I hope was a calm and collected voice I said: “This figure….”

”I think I should add that you will not be subject to income tax by the government of
the country you’ll be working in. This is a big development project for them and they
have waived all tax for people working on it. So if I understand UK tax law… If you
stay outside the UK for more than six months you’ll not have to pay income tax on it
at all. Though we’ll still pay your N.I. contributions for you.”

I’m afraid I goggled at her.

“Oh?” My voice had gone all high pitched and girly. And then the man said:

”It’s still not enough, Fliss.”

”What?” She gave him a look that said he was crazy.

“She’s going to be a section head. She’ll be reporting directly to the Old Man. She
should be getting at least as much as Chorley. Maybe as much as Patel.”

She snorted and then said, “Well all right. You have a point. Another 50K.”

”A year?” I wasn’t just high pitched. I squeaked.

Of course I said I’d have to think about it. Of course I showed it to my pet lawyer,
Tony (who thought it was legal but I was still bonkers). And of course I signed it.

If I had known, would I have signed? Well, that’s a very good question. A very good
question indeed.
CHAPTER TWO

EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION

A week later I was standing on the docks at Margate Harbour, of all places,
surrounded by suitcases and feeling a right fool.

I’d spent the previous three days running around like a mad thing. Sorting my stuff
into two piles, what was going with me and what was going into storage. Getting my
flat on the market to be sublet while I was away and fending off phone calls from my
mother who was utterly convinced that her little girl was going off into white slavery
and would never be seen again.

And when I’d finished I still had all the previous evening to churn up my guts
worrying if I was doing the right thing and trying to piece together the very little
information I had into a picture that made sense.

Davis-La Paz-Holmes had been founded less than a year before. Its Articles said that
it was in the business of Technological Development. It had offices care of a City law
firm and I couldn’t find anyone who knew anything about what they were doing.

I fretted late into the night wondering what their wonderful new product (or service or
something) could be. Worst case scenario, it was one of those things that only the
inventor thinks are wonderful. Another Sinclair C5 or Segway. In which case it would
be my sad duty to… To smile and tell whatever idiot would be paying my salary that I
knew just the way to make sure that their Thing That Would Change The Way We All
Live got to the people who Really Needed it, even if they didn’t know they did.

And then I spent the next couple of hours worrying about what I’d do if it really was
that important. I’d screwed up the two launches I’d been responsible for so far. What
if I really was cursed and they had… I dunno… The Cure For Cancer or Aids or
something… Was I going to screw things up again?

And after I’d done that, I had a large brandy and went to bed. I had to be up very early
in the morning to catch a train out to Kent.

So there I was, waiting in the assigned place, looking out over the Channel and
wondering if I was ever going to be met and when my hangover would finally go
away. And just then from behind me came the most deferential little cough.

I turned and there was a tiny Chinese woman in some sort of uniform: it looked like a
sort of cross between a sailor’s and a chauffeur’s.

“Ms. Finch?”

”Umm, yes.”

”Hello, I am Louise. The Chairman sent me to fetch you. Are these all your things?”

”Yes, I can carry most of them… Is it far?”

”Not far. But if you will allow me…”

She went away and came back with a luggage trolley and started us off down one of
the piers (quays? I’m not strong on nautical terms) to where a boat was waiting: it was
not quite a yacht, more a rich man’s weekend toy. You could wander down to the
Med on it and park it off Cannes but you wouldn’t want to risk it in heavy seas and
you couldn’t live on it.

Louise refused all my help in manhandling my luggage aboard and sat me down in the
shade of a canopy at the stern of the boat while she did all the hard work of getting us
ready to leave. About fifteen minutes later we were off across the sunlight flecked
water with me still very much in the dark about where we were going and what was
going on.

I tried pumping her, I really did but got nowhere. Had she worked for the… for Davis-
La Paz-Holmes for long. Not long but she had been with the Chairman before he
founded the company. And what had he done before founding the company? Sorry, I
really must see to steering the ship now. Be there soon. Not long! Not long!

And it wasn’t long. After about half an hour we came to a halt as she let the engine
come to a puttering halt. We were out in the Channel… I have no idea exactly where.
The Kent shore had shrunk to a thin line on the horizon behind us and France was
looming just barely perceptibly ahead.

We’d passed a ferry going across the Channel and a huge oil tanker coming down
from the North Sea but neither of them were in sight at that moment. We seemed to be
bobbing up and down with nothing on the ocean but us. (Later I found out how hard it
was to arrange that on one of the world’s busiest bits of open sea.)

I looked over at Louise as she turned the engine off and we started to drift.

“Listen,” I said, “what are we…”

“Just a mo!” She picked up a telephone handset by the wheel and pressed a button on
it. “We’re here,” she said and then, in reply to a growly voice on the other end, “Am
not! We’re right on schedule! Well, you’d better get on with it then, hadn’t you!” And
at that she hung up. “Some people, really!”

“Look, are we just going to hang around here?”

“No, no, don’t worry. We’re going to be met.”

I opened my mouth to ask… Well, I don’t know what I would have asked because at
that moment I noticed that the water off the left side of me was starting to froth and
bubble most alarmingly. I stood up and looked about and it was doing that all around
the boat in a neat oval that surrounded the whole vessel.
“What the hell is that?” I’m afraid my voice rather squeaked at that point and when
the whole boat shuddered and rang with a sort of ker-thump-clang sound as if
someone had just locked it in a huge vice, I swayed and nearly fell over.

“I’d sit down if I were you,” said Louise, a suggestion I took with indecent haste my
bottom hitting the seat very firmly.

“No need to worry,” she added, as a shimmering violet dome formed around the boat.
“This is our lift.”

And with that we shot upwards into the sky.

CHAPTER THREE: FLY ME TO THE MOON

After a while of just standing there watching the ground rush away from us and the
sky go from blue to black, I was aware of the sound of ice tinkling against glass.
Louise came up to me and pushed a tumbler into my hands. I took a careful sip: very
nice whisky.

“Urrrmmm,” I said coherently a few more sips later.

“Yes?” Louise smiled at me over a glass of her own. “Anything I can help you with?”

Very carefully I made my way to the side of the boat and looked over. Beneath us
was England, very green in the sunshine with white summer clouds scudding gently
across it. I leaned over a touch more and saw beneath the boat the white curve of
some sort of….

All right, Eileen, time to state it clearly. You’re on a boat perched on top of a glowing
lilac… force field? Is that the right term? A glowing lilac force field on top of a flying
saucer. Except it looks to be oval rather than round. Got that? Good!

“What happened to the water?”

“The water we were floating in? That water? It got left behind in the Channel. The
warp field is… what do the geek boys call it? Programmably permeable. It can be set
to let different things pass through. At the moment, for instance, it’s keeping the air in
and on that side,” she pointed in the direction I had not been looking in, “it’s keeping
the direct light of the sun out thus stopping us from turning into crispy fried critters.”

And indeed the lilac glowy thing on that side of the boat was dark and not at all see
through.

“Seen enough? Time to get us stowed away for the journey.”

Louise went back to the telephone and picked it up. “Hello? Reel us in, Derek!”

There was a sort of muffled ‘crack’ sound and when I looked over the side I saw that
the white hull of the ovoid beneath us had opened up and we were sinking towards it.
A few moments later we were resting inside a chamber big enough to take the boat
and even something a bit larger. The opening closed again over our heads and as I
looked round I saw a figure standing by some sort of control panel. Something about
the elongated limbs roused images of aliens in autopsy rooms in my memory.

It was wearing jeans, rather dirty sneakers and an aging t-shirt that said: SAVE THE
CHEERLEADER SAVE THE WORLD. When it turned to face us, I saw it had very
thick glasses and a complexion that hadn’t seen daylight in eons. Louise went to the
ladder that went over the side of our boat, snapped to attention and saluted.
“Permission to come aboard, sir?”

The figure groaned and said: “You don’t have to do that… Why do you always do
that?”

She sighed and relaxed. “I’m trying to start a proper respect for procedure and
tradition. But some people… Eileen this is Derek. He’s sort of second or third in the
hierarchy of tech.”

“I’m not really. I just…”

“He just takes the ideas that the Great Brains have and makes them work. He really
needs to work on his self confidence.”

Oh yes, I thought, And saluting and thrusting your boobs out at him is going to help
with that is it?

“Hello, Derek. Is this your flying saucer?”

“Umm… No. I’m not even the pilot.”

“Captain,” said Louise as she grabbed hold of my stuff and began throwing it over the
side to the floor of the hangar.

“Whatever. Did you get the stuff I asked for?”

“In the hold. It’s not good for you.”

“I can’t concentrate without Jolt.”

“Tea would do just as well and not make your bowels rumble so much. But pay me no
mind.”

Two hours later we were on the Moon.

I don’t think that young people today really appreciate how bloody surprising that
was. I’d done the Apollo Missions as a project in Modern History at school (it may
sound geeky but the alternative was Vietnam and that’s just depressing) and I knew it
had taken them days to get there and back.

But the good ship Bernard Quatermass (geeks should not be allowed to name ships)
made it in two hours. In that time I had met the Captain, one Brian “Boo-Boo”
Titmouse, a large bear of a man, one of the subspecies of geek called ‘fat beard’. He
accepted Louise’s salute with a crisp ‘at ease’ which formality was belied by his
uniform of Bermuda shorts, sandals and a t-shirt too small to cover his navel with the
motto:

NO, I WILL NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER!

HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT OFF AND THEN ON AGAIN?
MEH…

“Welcome aboard the Bernie! Like the view?”

He waved towards the vast panorama of space which opened up just beneath where
his sandaled feet were dangling. His captain’s chair floated in the middle of a
transparent dome that protruded beneath the belly of the craft…. Though actually
there was no particular reason to view any way as permanently ‘up’ or ‘down’ on
ships of that design (I was later to discover) because toggling the artificial gravity
could make the floor the ceiling in an instant.

“Very… nice,” I said faintly. The Earth was dwindling behind us and I could see
rather more stars than I was used to.

All right this is the point at which my brain went wibble again for a little while. The
point where I realised again that I was one a bloody Flying Saucer!

Where had it come from? Who had designed it? What did they want with me? Are
they Aliens????

Are there aliens called Derek? Or are these people just their minions. Perhaps they
have those worm things inside them from STARGATE? Perhaps they’re pod-people!

I became aware that Louise was looking at me with some concern so I feigned
technical interest.

“What about inertia?”

“Not inside the field.”

CHAPTER

THE MAN.
IN THE MOON

We came down towards the moon at such a rate of knots that I had to turn away from
the view screen so I didn’t see the cave that we suddenly dived into. All on perfectly
safe, radar guided and computer-auto-piloted courses but it would still have given me
the galloping vapours to watch it.

A little while later there was a bump and a clang and Captain Titmouse announced
that we had arrived at our destination and should disembark and thank you for flying
Selene Spacelines.

Louise got my luggage off the boat and lead me along a lot of corridors. (There were
no customs and immigration concerns in those days.) We passed some rooms full of
people, some rooms with only one lone technician apiece, a very loud and raucous bar
and some interminable corridors, worse than getting from where your airplane lands
to where you can claim your luggage.

“Hany on,” I said to Louise as my feet started to ache.

“Yes?”

I held up one finger for silence and tried jumping up.

“Gravity?” I asked.

“Ah!” she replied. “Come this way.” She led me to one of the side corridors where
there was a flimsy plastic barrier with a sign that said:

LUNAR GRAVITY BEYOND THIS POINT

“Give it a try.”

I blinked at her, stepped past the barrier and jumped up….

This was a violation of every safety procedure on the Moon since I didn’t receive my
basic briefing until the next day. But bumping my head on the ceiling convinced me I
wasn’t on Earth any more. I put that particular paranoid possibility behind me and we
went a little further and finally along a deserted corridor to a large wooden door.

The sign on the wall outside said

THE KING IS:IN

Louise went to the door and knocked. A voice boomed “Come!” so we did.

Inside, seated at a very untidy desk, was the rotund figure of a man in t-shirt, sandals
and shorts. He also wore knee length socks of a repulsive purple colour. He was in his
sixties with a long greying beard and something of a belly.

I recognised him instantly. Berkley Hammerfeld. He had had his fifteen minutes of
fame when he used the proceeds of a win on the Euromillions Lottery to buy up the
rights to Vita-Nu when they were worth only about half of the millions he had won.
People asked if he were crazy and he grinned and said “I’m just trying to be an
entrepreneur. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to do nowadays?” Everyone assumed
he would crash and burn, even me who should have known what Vita-Nu was worth
long term.

The second major life extension technology released to the public was very, very
carefully tested and had no public connection to Vita-Nu. It was called Xtension and
was mostly marketed to the sort of younger people who think putting an X on a
product made it cool.

But it worked just as well on all ages and was in fact Vita-Nu version 2.5. And the
sight of Hammerfeld assuring his public that he used his own product “and I’m no
battier than I was going in!” somehow made it survive the revelation of its connection
to the PR disaster I had caused.

He was fabulously rich and reported to be a charming lunatic.

“Ah, Eileen Finch! Welcome, welcome, sit yourself down! Louise, did you manage to
get…”

“Yes, to your favourite tea and yes to the cheese scones.”

“Wonderful! Let us have a brief break before briefing our new colleague. Will you
take, tea, Ms Finch. Or may I call you Eileen?”

I said, yes and yes and then said “King?”

“Well, yes. Not yet officially but we… me and my people feel that we are going to
have to take steps to make this….” He gestured vaguely about: “this setup into an
actual sovereign state. For which we will have to have a head of state and I have the
biggest head hereabouts as well as owning the majority share of the business side…
One of your jobs will be to figure out appropriate titles and not too ridiculous forms of
address.”

I looked at him unhappily. “King Berkley? Of the House of Hammerfeld?”

He also looked unhappy. “Yes. Not ideal. That’s going to shortened to King Berk in
no time. If it can happen to Tutankhamun it can happen to me.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“Simon. Not wonderful either but perhaps to be preferred to the monstrosity my

parents saddled me with in first place.”
Louise returned from the small kitchen attached to the office and put a mug of strong
tea in front of me. I turned down the offered sugar and looked around the room.

There was a long piece of paper along one wall, divided up into Tasks and Projects
and Dependencies with a lot of vaguely estimated dates involved. Project
Management stuff.

On the other side of the long room there was a sofa which looked comfortable enough
to sleep on. And on the side of the room opposite was a glass wall looking out into
darkness.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s going to be my view! Let me show you!”

He touched some controls on his desk computer and some floodlights on the ‘outside’
of the building came on.

And there was this huge space. It looked nothing much like it does now. There were
the entrance tunnels, dark and cavernous and there was this huge oval of bare floor
with a few hexagons laid out onto it filled with dry, red earth.

“That is going to be our park. Full artificial night and day, synced with day and night
on the equator at the prime meridian: Which is south of Cote d’Ivoire in mid ocean. I
get a view of it, through armour plated glass, because I’m the King.”

I just stood there for a moment and then I heard myself say:

“What were you thinking of putting on the flag?”

“Flag?”

“You need a flag if you’re going to be a nation. A brass cannon on a bar sinister?”

“Certainly not! And no ruddy libertariaxzn propaganda in the national motto, either!
Hmm,” he said, angrily tugging his beard, “I shall have to give a flag some thought.
I’d say a pair of bobolinks rampant, if anyone knew what a bobolink looked like…”

“So this is THE MOUSE IN THE MOON rather than THE MOON IS A HARSH
MISTRESS?”

“I do appreciate a young lady who recognises my literary references: you will go

far…” “Ah,” he said and folded his hands over his paunch, “the bobolinks, the
bobolinks, I’m having an attack of the bobolinks…”

“We should make the bobolink our national animal,” said Louise. “At least we won’t
have to provide any life support for them. Just tell the tourists there are bobolinks in
the park…”

His Maj was clearly pleased by the idea.

But then he stopped grinning and said: “The Grand Duchy of Fenwick only had to
deal with the Eisenhower administration. We’ve got President Milton Bradford.”

He fell silent for a moment as I wondered what God’s Own Politician would make of
the King of the Moon.

“I do know however what I want for the national motto.”

I raised my right eyebrow in a delicate Spock-like way.

“Omnes reges plerumque improbos.”

“I do not have the Latin.”

“Me either. I got that out of Google Translate. It’s a quote from Mark Twain: ‘All
Kings Is Mostly Rapscallions’.”

He grinned again and looked smugly pleased with himself before sobering.

“We have two problems. Two major policy aims. Firstly, keeping the Earth intact. As
a reserve of bio-systems that we know humans can live with if for no other reason. Or
if that fails keeping it intact long enough for humanity to get its eggs into several new
baskets.”

“And the other?”

”The problem of what we find out there. We will be sending off people to the stars.
They won’t be our best and brightest, necessarily. They’ll be the sort of idiot who
thinks it’s fun to go where no-one has gone before. The sort of jackass who can look
at a single column of smoke on the horizon and decide the neighbourhood has become
too crowded for them. In short, the sort of sociopathic loon who swept across North
America in advance of the people who eventually came to settle and farm and exploit.
God alone knows what will happen if they are the ones who make first contact….”

”Still, one problem at a time.”

He stroked his beard and grinned at me like a disreputable Santa Claus. Louse sat
herself on his knee and began to feed the cheese scones alternately to him and to
herself.

“Let me tell you about the technology,” he said. And for about twenty minutes he did.

“That sounds… astounding. A real… People talk about Einstein but…”

“Yes, yes. I’m just the money man so I don’t deserve that sort of credit. And don’t say
that to Dave or Tina: they both think they’re just lab rats who got lucky. They will just
shrivel up and look embarrassed. Can’t handle praise. God knows how they’ll survive
getting up on their hind legs to receive the Nobel Prizes when they come… Anyway,
you see the problems that logically follow?”
“Ah…. Some of them. Maybe.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “More tea for her and for me, Jennifer. Let me tell
you about the problems. The ones we’ve thought of. You might have new ones.”

And he did. And the tea went cold in the cup while my jaw hung open. When he was
finished, I said:

“That’s… that’s… terrible. The whole thing is a disaster! If people discover how to
do this….”

“People already have. Us, I mean. And other people will eventually. There are no
secrets in nature, just puzzles. I did give serious thought to just paying off the whole
research team and supressing the results. But it would never work. Even if I could be
sure none of them were going to break silence, eventually someone else would find
out and odds are that it would be someone who would sell the knowledge on or just
give it away because they think it should be free or something like that…” He picked
a crumb of cheese scone out of his beard and nibbled it thoughtfully for a moment. “I
have some sympathy with that idea if the alternative is it getting into the hands of the
Usual Suspects but it would still be pretty bloody. Anyway, no shutting Pandora’s
box: someone else would open it sooner or later. So, I thought hard about how to
resolve the difficulty. Would you like to hear what I came up with?”

I nodded, trembling slightly.

“Take away the tea, Louise. My usual and whatever Ms Finch is having. I declare the
sun to be over the yardarm.”

So over some more very nice malt he told me the whole plan. As much of it as he had
then, which was most of it.

And at the end of half an hour I said: “That’s it? You’re bonkers! The whole bloody
lot of you! It will never work!”

What can I say? He talked me round.

CHAPTER
THE LUNATIC HORDES

Louise took me to my room (the one I still have) which was a decent sized suite of
rooms, enough for a home office as well as place to sleep, shower and eat. I too had a
view of The Park, though not as nice a one as the Palace Office had.

And the next day I started introducing myself. Louise provided me with a personnel
list, an organisation chart (She was down as ‘Personal Assistant to the Chairman’) and
a map. The map had large splotches of red for ‘do not enter without special equipment
and yellow for ‘Beware, work still ongoing’. The difference being between needing a
vacuum suit and needing a hard hat. The green areas seemed very few and far
between.

I started with the geniuses. (Genii? Or does that mean people who pop out of bottles?)

Dave Prescott and Tina Makepeace were a pair of Cantabrigian goofballs who had
somehow stumbled on a new set of physical principles. This was not astonishing.
Scientists come up with new stuff all the time and entire new sciences more often than
you’d think.

What is astonishing is that somehow given their crippling lack of social skills and
intense inability to communicate in other than mathematical logic that they ever
managed to persuade someone who had money and could no more understand them
than I could, to invest in the research to prove their theories and invest in building not
only a fleet of flying saucers (if the three they had at that moment can be called a
fleet) but also an entire secret city on the moon to build everything that would be
needed for HM’s plan to introduce the technology to the rest of the human race with
reasonable chances of safety.

The person who brought about the introduction was Louise who had been at
Cambridge with them. She had done History And Politics and then transferred to
Management Studies when she realised how bored she was with both subjects.

“It wasn’t for monetary reasons. My family is disgusting rich. But I wanted a
challenge.”

And through her parents she knew HM. “Mummy found him amusing. Daddy found
him appalling. Mummy kept inviting him to parties. Part of their ongoing marital
warfare.”

She had been sharing a house with Dave and Tina, who were working towards
doctorates, Dave in Mathematical Physics and Tina in Computational Physics. (Which
sounds like THE MATRIX to me whenever she explains it.) They were lovers and
since their billing and cooing consisted on discussions on the chances of Dave getting
a grant to allow Tina to model his new theory Louise had to figure out what they were
saying as a form of self defence.
“And when I sort of understood what they were saying, I knew of one person who
was looking for a good use for a huge amount of money he had recently acquired…”
CHAPTER XXX
A load of old COBRAs

C.O.B.R.A. Cabinet Office: Briefing Room A

“Her Majesty’s Government does not negotiate with terrorists!”

The PM announced this in a ringing tone, as if he were rehearsing how it would sound
in Parliament. Sir Gerald Palmer (K.C.M.G.), Cabinet Secretary and the PM’s chief
non-political advisor (and inside his own head at least the PM’s chief keeper, carer
and nanny) did not quite roll his eyes but he did wince a little at the stridency. He
contemplated explaining to the PM that in fact HMG would negotiate with terrorists
under certain circumstances and had in the past on numerous occasions but previous
experience in trying to introduce facts into the head of the younger man at the head of
the table made him resolve to try a more indirect approach.

“I’m not sure, Prime Minister, that these people can be called terrorists. Not in the
strict understanding of the term.”

“Nonsense, Gerald! Don’t get lawyerly on me!” Lawyerly was one of the P.M.’s chief
terms of abuse. He had been turned down for the chance to read Jurisprudence at
Oxford and had ended up reading Politics at the LSE instead. “Have you seen the
headlines? The public are terrified! There are lunatics over their heads with
spaceships and…and… What did they call them, Brigadier?”

The briefing officer from the MoD, who was actually a couple of grades more senior
than that and from the Royal Air Force, murmured: “Particle beam weapons, Prime
Minister.”

“Exactly! If that’s not terrorism, what is?”

“Normally I might agree with you, sir,” murmured Sir Gerald, though in fact it had
been nearly two years since he last agreed with something that came out of the Head
of Government’s mouth and that had under been the previous administration. ”But
these people don’t appear to be demanding anything. It is characteristic of terrorists to
make demands.”

“Yes, they jolly well are…. Look at this…this… manifesto of theirs.” Manifesto was
another swear word in the PM’s vocabulary. “They want us to give supreme power to
the bloody United Nations of all things!”

“As I understand it not to the UN as currently constituted…”

“Yes, yes! But to some even more pie-in-the-sky version of the UN that will satisfy
these lunatics’ demands, Gerald! Those are bloody demands for you! And as
unrealistic as anything we ever got out of the bloody mad Islamists or the IRA!”

“Yes, sir. And of course with terrorists the unrealistic nature of the demands is part of
the point. When the government refuses to give in then they can up the level of threat
and the ghastliness of their operations. However, the threat here is just to… not hand
over their orbiting space stations to anyone but to keep them to themselves.”

“Keep them hanging over our ruddy heads! They could fry any aircraft on Earth, any
tank, any city….”

“They show no interest in doing so, sir.”

“That may be what they say now, but just you wait! And anyway they are threatening
to fry anyone who tries to approach their orbit and… what’s it say here ‘retain the
right to control and police any spacecraft attempting to pass beyond High Earth
Orbit.’ They’re not just terrorists: they’re bloody pirates too!”

“However, that may be sir, the fact is we don’t have any craft that can reach High
Earth Orbit so HMG is not affected by that particular assertion. Even the Russians and
Americans have very limited capacity…”

“Nothing? Is there nothing we can do? Nothing to bring these bounders to heel? You
there, boffin chap…” He waved his finger at the Chief Scientific Advisor. “Can’t we
toss a nuke at the buggers?”

Sir Gerald polished his glasses again and signalled a hovering flunky to refresh his
tea. It was going to be a long morning.

“Well, if we can’t just bung a nuke at them now how long until we can duplicate
whatever it is they’re using to fly these ruddy… shuttles of theirs.”

The CSA’s explanation that this was an entirely unanticipated development did not sit
well with the PM.

“What are we paying you for? Does anyone have any idea who these people are?
You! Spooks! Yes, you!”

Both C for the SIS and the Head of the Security Service admitted that they had been
taken by surprise but swore blind that they were following up ‘very valuable leads’
right now.

They were saved the rough side of the PM’s tongue by an aide shimmering up to him
and whispering in his ear.

“Oh,” said the PM, “does he? Right,” he went on in a rather more subdued tone. “Put
it through to here.” He licked his lips and when the phone at his elbow rang a moment
later, fixed a smile to his face (because people can hear when you’re not smiling) and
spoke: “Mister President! Jacob! Yes, delighted… Yes, very disturbing…

AFTER A VISIT TO THE WHITE HOUSE:

“Thank you all. I am pleased to say that my visit here today produced a frank and
productive exchange of views. The President and I made clear the positions of our
respective governments and we will be in further contact when consultations have
been made and the practicality of the proposals that both sides put forward have been
assessed…. Questions, yes surely… No, I have no final announcement to make: if we
had by some miracle of diplomacy come to full agreement in one meeting the
President would be out here with me and we would be issuing a joint statement….
Well, I couldn’t tell you if this means that the Federal Government is giving the Polity
full recognition. The Secretary of State would be the person you should ask about
that: I do so look forward to her answer… Yes, yes, he did give me a copy of the
Bible: I understand he does that to everyone. I mean for everybody. I told him I
already had several copies of various translations but that I would treasure this one as
a momento of this day… Yes, yes. Even I, ‘self-appointed tin-pot dictator’ that I am
(that is how your newspaper’s editorial described me isn’t it?) will have to consult
with the people who support me and it is always wise to think about the possible
effects of agreements before entering into them, isn’t it? Read the small print
carefully, check with lawyers, that sort of thing…. Have I what? Will I confess
that…? Madam, which news organisation do you represent? Ah, I see…. You know,
here I stand: a simple chap who until a few short years ago had no more thought than
to work out how to enjoy his twilight years in peace and comfort. And now, by a
ludicrous and unlikely set of accidents, I find myself consulting with heads of state
and responsible for ensuring the safe expansion of the human race to the stars. And
you madam, and your editors and readers have come up with a set of fantasies that is
even more exotic and ridiculous than reality! I congratulate you and if I ever do come
across any reptilian Reticulan masterminds you will be the first to know!”