The Brentford Triangle

11

Norman had returned to his kitchenette, leaving his camel snoring peacefully in the eaves of his lock-up garage, its head in a Fair Isle snood. He surveyed the wreckage of his precious equipment and wondered what was to be done. He was going to need a goodly few replacement parts if he ever hoped to restore it. It was going to be another quid or two’s worth of postcard ads in all the local newsagents: “Enthusiast requires old wireless sets/parts, etc., for charity work. Will collect, distance no object.” That had served him pretty well so far. And if the worst came to the worst then he would have to put in a bit more midnight alleyway skulking about the rear of Murray’s Electrical in the High Street.

Norman picked his way amongst the tangled wreckage and pondered his lot; it didn’t seem to be much of a lot at the present time. It was bound to cost him big bucks no matter how it went, but at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that his theory was at least partially correct. The evil-smelling ship of the desert lodged in his garage testified amply to that. But there was certainly something amiss about his calculations. They would need a bit of rechecking; it was all a matter of weight, all very much a matter of weight.

Norman unearthed his chair and slumped into it. It had been an exhausting day all in all. As he sat, his chin cupped in his hand, his mind wandered slowly back to the moment which had been the source of inspiration for this great and wonderful project. Strange to recount, it had all begun one lunchtime in the saloon-bar of the Flying Swan.

Norman had been listening with little interest to a discussion between Jim Pooley and John Omally, regarding a book Jim had but recently borrowed from the Memorial Library upon the Great Mysteries of the Ancient Past. The conversation had wandered variously about, with Pooley stating that in his opinion Stonehenge was nothing more than scaffolding and that the builders, some megalithic forerunners to Geo. Wimpey and Co., had never actually got around to erecting the building. Doubtless a pub, he considered.

Omally, nodding sagely, added that this was the case with many ancient structures, that their original purposes were sorely misinterpreted by the uninspired scholars of today. The Colosseum, he said, had very much the look of a multi-storey carpark to him, and the Parthenon a cinema. “Look at the Odeon in Northfields Avenue,” he said, “the façade is damn near identical.”

Norman was about to make a very obvious remark when Pooley suddenly said, “It definitely wasn’t built as a tomb.”

“What, the Odeon Northfields? No, I don’t think so.”

“Not the Odeon, the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

“Oh, that body.” Omally nodded his head. “Surely I have read somewhere that it was the work of them extraterrestrial lads who used to carry a lot of weight back in those times.”

Pooley shook his head. “That I doubt.”

“What then?” Omally asked, draining his glass and replacing it noisily upon the bar counter.

Pooley, who could recognize a captive audience when he saw one queuing up for a one-pint ticket, ordered two more of whatever it was they were drinking at the time and continued. “It was the ticking of the old Guinness clock up there which solved the thing for me.”

“Oh, you consider the Great Pyramid to have been a pub also?”

“Hardly that.”

“Then might I make so bold as to inquire how such a humble thing as the Guinness clock leads you to solve a riddle which has baffled students of Egyptology for several thousands of years?”

“It is simplicity itself,” said Jim, but of course it was nothing of the sort… “The ticking of the Guinness clock put me in mind, naturally enough, of Big Ben.”

“Naturally enough.”

“Now as you may have noticed, Big Ben is a very large clock with a pendulum so great that it would easily reach from here, right down the passage and into the gents.”

Omally whistled. “As big as that, eh?”

“As big, and this huge clock is kept accurately ticking away by the piles of pennies placed upon that pendulum by the builders of the thing. Am I right?”

“You are,” said Omally agreeably, “you are indeed.”

“Well then!” said Pooley triumphantly.

“Well then what?”

Pooley sighed; he was clearly speaking to an idiot. “The Great Pyramid is to the planet Earth what the penny piles are to Big Ben’s pendulum. Shall I explain fully?”

“Perhaps you should, Jim, but make it a quick one, eh?”

“Well then, as we are all aware, these ancient Egyptians were a pretty canny bunch. Greatly skilled at plotting the heavens and working things out on the old slide rule. Well, it is my belief that sometime back then some sort of catastrophe, no doubt of a cosmic nature, occurred and pushed the Earth a little off its axis. There is a great deal of evidence to support this, the sudden extinction of the mammoths, the shifting of the Polar caps, all this kind of thing.”

Omally yawned. “Sorry,” he said.

“Now these Egyptian lads were not to be caught napping and when they realized that impending doom was heading their way they did the only logical thing and took corrective measures.”

“Corrective measures?” The bottom of Omally’s glass was already in sight and he could feel the dartboard calling.

“Corrective measures they took,” said Jim, “by building a kind of counterbalance upon the Earth’s surface to keep the thing running on trim. They selected the exact spot which bisects exactly the continents and oceans. They aligned their construction to the four cardinal points and then whammo, or not whammo, as the case may be. There you are, you see, case proven, we have a great deal to thank those ancient sunburned builders for.”

Omally seemed strangely doubtful. “There has been a lot of building work done about the world since that time,” he said, “some of which I can personally vouch for. With all that weight being unevenly distributed about the place, I have the feeling that your old pyramid would become somewhat overwhelmed.”

Pooley shook his head. “The pyramid is a unique structure, it has an exact weight, mass, and density ratio to the planet itself. It is the one construction which will fill the bill exactly. The stones quarried for it were cut to carefully calculated sizes and shapes, each is an integral part interlocking like a Chinese puzzle. The inner chambers are aligned in such a way as to channel certain earth currents to maximum effect. It is much more than simply a big lump of rock. No matter how many other buildings go up all over the world, the pyramid will still maintain its function. To alter the Earth’s motion one would have to actually move the Great Pyramid.”

“I’ll chalk up then,” said Omally, but the remark was apparently not directed to Jim Pooley.

Norman, however, was entranced. Could there possibly be any conceivable truth behind Pooley’s ramblings? It all seemed impossibly far-fetched. But what if it were so? The implications were staggering! If one could actually alter the course of the Earth by moving the Great Pyramid about, then one could wield quite a lot of weight, in more than one sense only. A bit of a tilt northwards and Brentford would enjoy tropical summers, a mite more later in the year and there would be tropical winters too. It was all in the wrist action.

It would be quite a task, though, the Great Pyramid was estimated to weigh upwards of five million, nine hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred tons. It would take more than a builder’s lorry and a bunch of willing lads on double bubble. Possibly he could bribe coachloads of tourists into each bringing back a bit with them. That would be a lengthy business though.

Norman’s gigantic intellect went into overdrive. He had been experimenting for years with a concept based upon Einstein’s unified field theory, which was concerned primarily with the invisibilizing and teleportation of solid objects. It was rumoured that the US Navy had made a successful experiment during the war, creating some kind of magnetic camouflage which to all intents and purposes made an entire battle cruiser vanish momentarily. Einstein himself, it was said, had forbidden any further experimentation, due to the disastrous effects visited upon the crew.

Norman had recalled thinking on more than one occasion that Einstein, although an individual given to the rare flash of inspiration, had for the most part been a little too windy by half. Now if the Great Pyramid could be teleported from one site to another it might be very instructive to observe the results…

Norman scuffed his feet amongst the wreckage. It had all been so long ago, a lot of peanuts had lodged under the old bridge since then. But he had proved that at least some of it was possible. In fact, the more he thought about it the more he realized that to teleport a live camel from the Nile Delta to the St Mary’s allotment, in a matter of seconds, wasn’t a bad day’s work after all. He was definitely well on his way.

Norman smiled contentedly, picked his way over to the corner sink and, drawing back the undercurtain, took out a bottle of Small Dave’s home-made cabbage beer, a crate of which he had taken in payment for an unpaid yearly subscription to Psychic News. It was a little on the earthy side and had more than a hint of the wily sprout about it, but it did creep up on you and was always of use if your lighter had run low.

“The ultimate quest,” said Norman, raising the bottle towards the charred ceiling of the war-torn kitchenette.

It had long been a habit of his, one born it is to be believed at a Cowboy Night he had attended some years previously, for Norman to wrench the hard-edged cap from the bottle’s neck with his teeth before draining deeply from its glassy throat.

In his enthusiasm he quite forgot the matter of his wayward dentures.

The ensuing scream rattled chimney pots several streets away and caused many of the “sleeping just” to stir in their slumber and cross themselves fitfully.