“Easy,” I propose to the World Government. “Flush it all down a Black Hole in space. They’re just like celestial toilets, really.” The WG is quick to reply: “Professor Brion Damage – your crap solution is accepted.”
So my Muckraker rockets blast into space, towards the Cygnus Black Hole; crammed with crud, from bent policemens’ bikes to nasty old NHS spectacles. Out of sight, out of mind, I assure the WG. How wrong am I?
Later, I’m leafing through a Life of Queen Victoria. Her biographer relates that her Maj awakes one morn to see a hundred sinister men in fur coats bicycling madly around Buckingham Palace. But wait, no: they’ve got tails! “Get that Charles Darwin in here!” she commands. “We’re surrounded by monkeys on bikes – they’re evolving and it’s all his fault!”
The Time Scanner confirms that my rocketful of rusty cycles blasts through the sky into the Eighteen Umpties and explodes over the Zoo. All the hairy mammals escape and pedal away to terrorise Victorian London. A link between time travel and black holes? I don’t believe it!
Until the Scanner detects another anomaly: English South Coast 1066. And suddenly, there is a crack of thunder as another of my Muckraker rockets rips through time and space and rains down dozens of John Lennon spectacles over Hastings Beach. And King Harold grabs a pair, thick as bottle glass, just in time to shield his eye from the Norman arrow and win the battle. Now I do believe it.
I have changed the course of history: England One France Nil, I muse, reaching for my trusty revolver.
© Mike Atkinson
No comments:
Post a Comment