‘Assuming you’re telling the truth,’ it said, ‘we’ve got nothing to be afraid of. But why the hell should we want to help that sucker? He does nothing but blow our houses down. Let the bastard rot.’
The handsome prince frowned. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it?’ he said.
‘True. What of it?’
‘Fair enough,’ the prince replied. ‘I just thought there was rather more to you pigs than that. I was wrong. I’ll try somewhere else. It’s all right.’
Silence from the tower; then, ‘Oh, the hell with it. Okay, we’re winding back the ditch cover now.’
Reprise of the hydraulic hum, this time with feeling. The plates slid back over the spike-filled trench, and a doorway opened through the wire. The handsome prince waved his thanks and walked up until he was within fifteen yards. Then he took a deep breath — Once he’d gone and the dust had started to settle, Julian climbed out of the lavatory cistern he’d been cowering under and looked around at the wreckage of what was supposed to be his home.
‘Eugene?’ he called out. ‘Desmond?’
Something moved under a near-intact sheet of plasterboard. ‘Has he gone?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
When the first gust of air from the handsome prince’s lungs (call it the huff) had hit the sails, they’d begun to turn; at first slow and graceful, gradually picking up speed, until the humming sound they made became unbearable. The tower had moved all right; more than that, it’d spun like a top round the concrete base as the forward momentum of the sails had tried to drag it out. It was quite a sight.
Then the handsome prince had started off Phase II; puffing. It was at this point that a lot of the shutters and other projecting features that didn’t lie flush against the outer skin of the tower were ripped away and flung through the air like autumn leaves. The hum of the blades became a searing scream, and their axles started to glow red hot.
The third attempt was better. More dramatic. Brought the house down, in fact.
First, however, it lifted it up, with a horrible snap and the groans of overstressed metal. The blades were now little more than a molten blur, and the shriek and whine of the slipstream on the curved aerofoils had been loud enough to boil a man’s brain. And still the handsome prince had gone on blowing, until something structural had given way with an ear-splitting twang, and quite unexpectedly the main body of the tower had lifted clear of the pedestal and launched itself into the air, lifted up by the action of the four ‘foils. For a second and a half, maybe two seconds, it hung in space like a huge dandelion seed, until gravity and entropy reminded it that this was no way for a building to behave and escorted it back to the ground. It landed the wrong way up and flew to bits.
‘I knew it was him,’ growled Desmond. ‘I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. All that stuff about expecting better things from us because we’re pigs; what human would ever have said that?’
Julian avoided eye contact. ‘What I want to know is,’ he said, ‘how’s he doing it? First a wolf, then a frog, and now a human. What the hell is the creep going to show up as next?’
Desmond spat out a chunk of concrete. ‘A JCB, maybe. At least that’d be honest. Now what I’d like to know is, where the hell were those two hired dwarves of ours when we needed them most? How much again did you say we were paying them?’
‘Off recruiting,’ Julian said. ‘Just our luck. I honestly didn’t expect to see him back again so soon.’
‘Underestimating the enemy,’ Desmond complained. ‘You keep doing it, and we keep ending up ham-deep in rubble.’ He sighed and shook himself, dislodging a dust-cloud that enveloped him completely. ‘Look, I know you’re going to bite my head off for being defeatist, but why don’t we just move on? Up sticks and go somewhere else where he isn’t going to bother us? It’d be so much easier—’
‘Sure,’ Julian replied. ‘Until the next one of his kind shows up and it starts all over again. Face it, Des, sooner or later we’d have to stop running and stand and fight. Better to do it here and now and get it over and done with.’
‘You know something, Julian? I can’t wait to see you with an apple in your mouth. It’d stop you talking garbage, for one thing.’
Julian shrugged. Matter of opinion, presumably. It had felt like the right thing to say, but maybe Desmond was right; perhaps it would be better to clear off out of the forest altogether, or go back to living in a sty with all the other non-uppity pigs, where they belonged…
‘Come on,’ he said, kicking away a strip of tangled steel with his hind legs. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
‘More power!’ roared the Baron.
Fearfully, Igor obeyed, throwing his weight against the huge lever and driving it forward. Livid blue sparks like fat, sizzling worms cascaded from the contacts. Somewhere a fuse overloaded, but the failsafes and backups cut in immediately; a fine piece of work, though the Baron said it himself, continuity of power supply guaranteed no matter how recklessly he abused the system. He bent down over the Thing strapped to the bench and peered hungrily at the dials on the control panel.
‘More power,’ he repeated.
Igor’s eyes widened like an opening flower in stop-motion. ‘The resistors,’ he screeched. ‘They’re at breaking point as it is. They just can’t take any more!’
‘More power.’
Oh well, muttered Igor to himself, he’s the boss, presumably he knows what he’s doing. And if he doesn’t — well, in years to come Katchen and the children would take a picnic up to the ruined tower on the top of the mountain, and Katchen would bring them into the burnt-out shell of the laboratory and point to a man’s silhouette appliquéd onto the flagstones and say, ‘See that? That’s your Uncle Igor.’ Immortality, of a sort. And it was better than working in the cuckoo-clock factory.
He edged the lever forward, and at first nothing happened. Then somewhere behind the massive screen of lead bricks, something began to hum, and a moment later a tremendous surge of power began to burgeon and swell, like the wave of a surfer’s lifetime on Bondi Beach. Little silver beads of molten lead glistened like dewdrops in the interstices of the shield.
A few inches away from the Baron’s nose, the needle on a dial suddenly quivered. ‘More power!’ he roared, slamming both fists down on the console and sending his coffee-mug (a birthday present from Igor, thoughtfully inscribed World’s Best Boss) flying to the floor. Igor closed his eyes, mumbled the first four words of the Ave Maria, and thrust the lever all the way home.
Raw power sprayed out of the circuits like fizzy lemonade from a shaken-up bottle. One of the minor transtator coils dissolved instantaneously into a glowing pool of molten copper; but the backup took the load, and the meter hardly wavered. You could have boiled a kettle on top of the main reactor housing, if you didn’t mind drinking luminous green tea.
‘Yes!’ thundered the Baron. ‘Igor, it…’
Before he could say exactly what, a gun barrel-straight shaft of blue fire burst from the mighty lens poised a few feet above the bench and enveloped the Thing completely. The Baron screamed and threw himself at the fire-shrouded form, trying to beat out the flames before they utterly consumed his creation; but before he even made contact, a tremendous force hauled him off his feet and slammed him against the far wall. Igor ducked under a table as a cyclone of distilled energy ripped circuit-boards and clamps and conduits out of the benches and juggled them in a spinning maelstrom of blinding heat and light around the glowing outline of the Thing. It was incredible, awesome, terrifying; Spielberg let loose in the effects laboratory with a blank cheque signed by God.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. All the lights snapped out and the laboratory was shrouded in darkness, except for an ice-cold blue glow from the bench where the Thing had been. The smoke cleared, and there was silence except for the sizzle-plink of molten copper slowly cooling.