GERHARD VON SQUID,

  Neanderthals: Back After a Short Absence

  COINCIDENCES ARE strange things. I like the one about Sir Edmund Godfrey, who was found murdered in 1678 and left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and hanged for the crime—Mr. Green, Mr. Berry and Mr. Hill. My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: They were merely the chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”

  I suppose he’s right, but that didn’t explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless which led directly to the discovery of a valid Skyrail ticket and the Skyrail itself approaching at that precise moment can all happen out of the blue. Some things happen for a reason, and I was inclined to think that this was one of those times.

  I stepped into the single Skyrail car, which was the same as every other I had been in. It was clean, had about forty seats and room for standing if required. I took a seat at the front as the doors sighed shut and, accompanied by the hum of electric motors, we were soon gliding effortlessly above the Cerney lakes. Since I was here for a purpose, I looked around carefully to see what that might be. The Skyrail operator was neanderthal; he had his hand on the throttle and gazed absently at the view. His eyebrows twitched and he sniffed the air occasionally. The car was almost empty; seven people, all of them women and no one familiar.

  “Three down,” exclaimed a squat woman who was staring at a folded-up newspaper, half to herself and half to the rest of us. “Well decorated for prying, perhaps? Ten letters.”

  No one answered as we sailed past Cricklade Station without stopping, much to the annoyance of a large, expensively dressed lady who huffed loudly and pointed at the operator with her umbrella.

  “You there!” she boomed like a captain before the storm. “What are you doing? I wanted to get off at Cricklade, damn you!”

  The operator seemed unperturbed at the insult and muttered an apology. This obviously wasn’t good enough for the loud and objectionable woman, who jabbed the small neanderthal violently in the ribs with her umbrella. He didn’t yell out in pain, he just flinched, pulled the driver’s door closed behind him and locked it. I stood up and snatched the umbrella from the woman.

  “What the—!” she said indignantly.

  “Don’t do that,” I told her. “It’s not nice.”

  “Poppycock!” she guffawed loudly. “Why, he’s only neanderthal!”

  “Meddlesome,” said one of the other passengers sitting near the back with an air of finality, staring at an advert for the Gravitube.

  The objectionable lady and I stared at her, wondering who she was referring to. She looked at us both, flushed, and said:

  “No, no. Ten letters, three down. Well decorated for prying. Meddlesome.”

  “Very good,” muttered the lady with the crossword as she scribbled in the answer.

  I handed the umbrella back to the well-heeled woman, who eyed me malevolently; we were barely two feet apart but she wasn’t going to sit down first, and neither was I.

  “Jab the neanderthal again and I’ll arrest you for assault,” I told her.

  “I happen to know,” announced the woman tartly, “that neanderthals are legally classed as animals. You cannot assault a neanderthal any more than you can a mouse!”

  My temper began to rise—always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.

  “Perhaps,” I replied, “but I can arrest you for cruelty, bruising the calm and anything else I can think of.”

  But the woman wasn’t the least bit intimidated.

  “My husband is a justice of the peace,” she announced like a hidden trump. “I can make things very tricky for you. What is your name?”

  “Next,” I told her without hesitation. “Thursday Next. SO-27.”

  Her eyelids flickered slightly and she stopped rummaging in her bag for a pencil and paper.

  “The Jane Eyre Thursday Next?” she asked, her mood changing abruptly.

  “I saw you on the telly,” chirped the woman with the crossword. “You seem a bit obsessed with your dodo, I must say. Why couldn’t you talk about Jane Eyre, Goliath, or ending the Crimean War?”

  “Believe me, I tried.”

  The well-heeled woman decided that this was a good moment to withdraw, so she sat back in her seat two rows behind me and stared out of the window as the Skyrail swept on past Broad Blunsdon Station; the passengers variously sighed, made tut-tut noises and shrugged to one another.

  “I am going to complain to the Skyrail management about this,” said a heavyset woman with makeup like builder’s plaster. She carried a disgruntled-looking Pekinese. “A good cure for insubordination is—”

  Her speech came to an abrupt end as the neanderthal suddenly increased the speed of the car.

  I knocked on the acrylic door and said: “What’s going on, pal?”

  The neanderthal had taken about as much umbrella jabbing as he could that day, or any day, come to that.

  “We are going home now,” he said simply, staring straight ahead.

  “We?” echoed the woman with the umbrella. “No, we’re not. I live at Cricklade—”

  “He means I,” I told her. “Neanderthals don’t use the personal pronoun.”

  “Damn stupid!” she replied. I glared at her and she got the message and lapsed into sulky silence. I leaned closer to the driver.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kaylieu,” he replied.

  “Good. Now Kaylieu, I want you to tell me what the problem is.”

  He paused for a moment as the Swindon Airship stop came and went. I saw another shuttle that had been diverted to a siding and several Skyrail officials waving at us, so it was only a matter of time before the authorities knew what was going on.

  “We want to be real.”

  “Day’s hurt?” murmured the squat woman at the back, sucking the end of her pencil and staring at the crossword.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Day’s hurt?” she repeated, oblivious to the situation. “Nine down; eight letters—I think it’s an anagram.”

  “I have no idea,” I replied before returning my attention to Kaylieu. “What do you mean, real?”

  “We are not animals,” announced the once extinct cousin of mankind. “We want to be a protected species—like dodo, mammoth—and you. We want to speak to head man at Goliath and someone from Toad News.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I walked to the back of the shuttle and picked up the emergency phone.

  “Hello?” I said to the operator. “This is Thursday Next, SO-27. We have a situation in shuttle number—ah—6174.”

  When I told the operator what was going on she took a sharp intake of breath and asked how many people were with me and whether anyone was hurt.

  “Seven females, myself and the driver; we are all fine.”

  “Don’t forget Pixie Frou-Frou,” said the large woman with the overdone makeup.

  “And one Pekinese.”

  The operator told me they were clearing all the tracks ahead, we would have to keep calm and she would call back. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t a bad situation, but she had rung off.

  I sat down close to the neanderthal again. Jaw fixed, he was staring intently ahead, knuckles white on the throttle lever. We approached the Wanborough junction, crossed the M4 and were diverted west. The passenger directly behind me, a shy-looking girl in her late teens and dressed in a De La Mare label sweatshirt, caught my eye; she looked frightened.

  I smiled to try to put her at ease.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Irma,” she replied in a small voice. “Irma Cohen.”

  “Poppycock!” said the umbrella woman. “I’m Irma Cohen!”

  “So am I,” said the woman with the Peke.

  “And me!” exclaimed the thin woman at the back. It seemed after a short period of frenzied cries of “Ooh fancy that!” and “Well I never!” that everyone in the Skyrail except me and Kaylieu and Pixie Frou-Frou was called Irma Cohen. Some of them were even vaguely related. It was an unnerving coincidence—for today, the best yet.

  “Thursday,” announced the squat woman.

  “Yes?”

  But she wasn’t talking to me; she was writing in the answer: Day’s hurt—Thursday—it was an anagram.

  The emergency phone rang.

  “This is Diana Thuntress, trained negotiator for SpecOps-9,” said a businesslike voice. “Who is this?”

  “Di, it’s me, Thursday.”

  There was a pause.

  “Hello Thursday. Saw you on the telly last night. Trouble seems to follow you around, doesn’t it? What’s it like in there?”

  I looked at the small and unconcerned crowd of commuters who were showing each other pictures of their children. Pixie Frou-Frou had fallen asleep and the Irma Cohen with the crossword had announced the clue for six across: “The parting bargain?”

  “They’re fine. A little bored, but not hurt.”

  “What does the perp want?”

  “He wants to talk to someone at Goliath about species self-ownership.”

  “Wait—he’s neanderthal?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not possible! A neanderthal being violent?”

  “There’s no violence up here, Di—just desperation.”

  “Shit,” muttered Thuntress. “What do I know about dealing with thals? We’ll have to get one of the SpecOps neanderthals in.”

  “He also wants to see a reporter from Toad News.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Di?”

  “Yes?”

  “What can I tell Kaylieu?”

  “Tell him that—er—Toad News are supplying a car to take him to the Goliath Genetic Labs in the Preselli Mountains where Goliath’s governor, chief geneticist and a team of lawyers will be waiting to agree to terms.”

  As lies go, it was a real corker.

  “But is that right?” I asked.

  “There is no ‘right,’ Thursday,” snapped Diana, “not since he took control of the Skyrail. There are eight lives in there. It doesn’t take the winner of Name That Fruit! to figure out what we have to do. Pacifist neanderthal or not, there is a chance he could harm the passengers.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! No neanderthal has ever harmed anyone. What is this,” I added, outraged by the crude approach, “staff training day for the trigger-happy clots at SO-14?”

  “It’s not unusual for hostages to start to empathize with their captors, Thursday. Let us handle this.”

  “Di,” I said in a clear voice, “listen to me: No one is either threatened or in danger!”

  “Yet, Thursday. Yet. Listen, we’re not going to take that risk. This is how it’s going to be: We’re going to divert you back up along the Cirencester line. We’ll have SO-14 agents in position at Cricklade. As soon as he stops I’m afraid we will have no alternative but to take him out. I want you to make sure the passengers are all in the back of the car.”

  “Diana, that’s crazy! You’d kill him because he took a few lamebrained commuters for a merry trip round the Swindon loop?”

  “You don’t kill neanderthals; they are destroyed. There’s a big difference—and besides, the law is very strict on hijackers.”

  “He’s nothing of the sort, Di. He’s just a confused extinctee!”

  “Sorry, Thursday—this is out of my hands.”

  I hung up the phone angrily as the shuttle was diverted back up towards Cirencester. We flew through Shaw Station, much to the surprise of the waiting commuters, and were soon heading north again. I returned to the driver.

  “Kaylieu, you must stop at Purton.”

  He grunted in reply but showed little sign of being happy or sad—the subtleties of neanderthal facial expressions were mostly lost on us. He stared at me for a moment and then asked:

  “You have childer?”

  I hastily changed the subject. Being sequenced infertile was the neanderthals’ biggest cause of complaint against their sapien masters. Within thirty years or so the last of the experimental neanderthals would die of old age. Unless Goliath sequenced some more, that would be it. Extinct again—it was unlikely even we would manage that.

  “No, no, I don’t,” I replied hastily.

  “Nor us,” returned Kaylieu, “but you have a choice. We don’t. We should never have been brought back. Not to this. Not to carry bags for sapien, no childer and umbrellas jab-jab.”

  He stared bleakly into the middle distance—perhaps to a better life thirty thousand years ago when he was free to hunt large herbivores from the relative safety of a drafty cave. Home for Kaylieu was extinction again—at least for him. He didn’t want to hurt any of us and would never do so. He couldn’t hurt himself either, so he would rely on SpecOps to do the job for him.

  “Goodbye.”

  I jumped at the finality of the pronouncement but upon turning found that it was merely the crossword Mrs. Cohen filling in the last clue.

  “The parting bargain,” she muttered happily. “Good buy. Goodbye. Finished!”

  I didn’t like this; not at all. The three clues of the crossword had been “Meddlesome,” “Thursday” and “Goodbye.” More coincidences. Without the dual blowout and the fortuitous day ticket, I wouldn’t be here at all. Everyone was called Cohen and now the crossword. But goodbye? If all went according to SpecOps, the only person worthy of that interjection would be Kaylieu. Still, I had other things to worry about as we passed Purton without stopping. I asked everyone to move to the back of the car and once done, joined Kaylieu at the front.

  “Listen to me, Kaylieu. If you don’t make any threatening movements they may not open fire.”

  “We thought of that,” said the neanderthal as he pulled an imitation automatic from his tunic.

  “They will fire,” he said as Cricklade Station hove into view a half mile up the line. “We carved it from soap—Dove soap,” he added. “We thought it ironic.”

  We approached Cricklade at full speed; I could see SpecOps- 14 vehicles parked on the road and black uniformed SWAT teams waiting on the platform. With a hundred yards to run, the power to the Skyrail abruptly cut out and the shuttle skidded, power off, towards the station. The door to the driver’s compartment swung open and I squeezed in. I grabbed his soapy gun and threw it to the floor. Kaylieu wasn’t going to die, at least not if I could help it. We rumbled into the station. The doors were opened by SO-14 operatives and all the Irma Cohens rapidly evacuated. I put my arm round Kaylieu. It was the first time I had done so to any neanderthal and I was surprised by how hard the muscles were—and how warm to the touch.

  “Move away from the thal!” said a voice from a bullhorn.

  “So you can shoot him?” I yelled back.

  “He threatened the lives of commuters, Next. He is a danger to civilized society!”

  “Civilized?” I shouted angrily. “Look at you!”

  “Next!” said the voice. “Move aside. That is a direct order!”

  “You must do as they say,” said the neanderthal.

  “Over my dead body.”

  As if in reply there was a gentle POK sound and a single bullet hole appeared in the windshield of the shuttle. Someone had decided he could take out Kaylieu anyway. My temper flared and I tried to yell out in anger but no sound came from my lips. My legs felt weak and I fell to the floor in a heap, the world turning gray about me. I couldn’t even feel my legs. I heard someone yell: Medic! and the last thing I saw before the darkness overtook me was Kaylieu’s broad face looking down at me. He had tears in his eyes and was mouthing the words We’re so sorry. So very, very, sorry.

  5.

  Vanishing Hitchhikers

  Urban legends are older than congress gaiters but far more interesting. I’d heard most of them, from the dog in the microwave to ball lightning chasing a housewife in Preston, to the fried dodo leg found in a Smiley Fried Chicken, to the carnivorous Diatryma supposedly reengineered and now living in the New Forest. I’d read all about the alien spaceship that crash-landed near Lam-bourn in 1952, the story that Charles Dickens was a woman and that the president of the Goliath Corporation was actually a 142- year-old man kept alive in a bottle by medical science. Stories about SpecOps abound, the favorite at present relating to “ something odd” dug up in the Quantock Hills. Yes, I’d heard them all. Never believed any of them. Then one day, I was one. . . .

  THURSDAY NEXT,

  A Life in SpecOps

  IOPENED ONE EYE, then the other. It was a warm summer’s day on the Marlborough downs. A light zephyr brought with it the delicate scent of honeysuckle and wild thyme. The air was warm and small puffy clouds were tinged red from the setting sun. I was standing by the side of a road in open country. In one direction I could just see a lone cyclist moving towards where I stood and in the other the road wound away into the distance past fields in which sheep grazed peacefully. If this was life after death, then a lot of people had not much to worry about and the Church had delivered the goods after all.

  “Psssst!” hissed a voice close at hand. I turned to see a figure crouched behind a large Goliath Corporation billboard advertising buy-two-get-one-free grand pianos.

  “Dad—?”