The Fandom of the Operator

6

Dave was in hiding across the street, behind a hedge in someone’s front garden. As I ran out of the front door he called me over and I joined him there.

“You’re crying,” said Dave.

So I told him what happened.

Dave put his arm around my shoulder. “You did brilliantly,” he said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it.”

“You ran off and left me behind, you coward.”

“I wasn’t scared,” said Dave. “But I have a gyppy tummy and had to come outside to use the toilet. It’s this touch of Black Death I’ve got.”

“Don’t breathe on me, then,” I said. “I don’t want to catch it.”

Dave slid his arm from my shoulder and took to picking his nose.

“I suppose we might as well go home,” I said. “We’re not going to get back inside now, are we? This has all been a waste of time.”

“Seems a shame,” said Dave. “It would be so much easier to bring Mr Penrose back to life now, rather than go to all the trouble of digging him up later.”

I shrugged. “So you think we should wait some more?” I asked.

“It would be good practice,” said Dave.

“Practice for what?”

“For the future. It seems to me that adults spend most of their time waiting for something or other. A bus or a train or, for those who have a telephone, a telephone call. Or waiting for the postman or the milkman or the man to fix the broken pipe or their girlfriend to arrive. Or …”

“Stop it,” I said. “There must be more to being an adult than that. You can get into pubs and drink beer.”

“Waiting at the bar to get served,” said Dave. “Waiting for the cubical in the gents to be free so you can be sick in it. Waiting—”

“Stop!” I put my hands over my ears.

“Adults spend most of their time waiting,” said Dave, in a voice that was loud enough for me to hear. “Because all they’re really waiting for is death.”

“You paint a rosy picture of the future.” I took my hands away from my ears and took to picking my own nose. “According to Mr Timms, my death waits for me at the end of the hangman’s rope.”

“I hate adults,” said Dave. “And adults secretly hate children. Because children have more life left to them than they do. Adults are jealous. And they think they know more about everything than children do.”

“That’s because they do,” I observed.

“There’s some truth in that, I suppose,” said Dave. “And I get well peeved because there are so many things that I don’t understand yet. But I would be able to understand them if adults answered my questions. But they don’t. The reason children don’t understand as much as adults is because adults don’t tell them everything they know. They keep secrets from children. Adults complicate the world to death, but children see the world as it really is. They see it as simple. For some reason, adults don’t like ‘simple’, they like ‘complicated’. So adults screw up the world and children suffer for it.”

“You really are wise beyond your years,” said I.

“How dare you,” said Dave. “I’m wise because I’m wise. Right now, as I am. And you’re wise too. You know how to raise the dead. How many adults know that?”

“It was an adult who thought up the formula and the rituals and everything.”

“Only because stuff like that takes years to work out. If you started from scratch now, it might take you twenty years before you got it right. But once you had got it right, you could pass the information straight to your ten-year-old son and he’d know it too. Or you could keep it a secret to yourself. Which is what adults do about practically everything. They’re all a lot of homos, adults.”

All? I puzzled over this. I felt that one day I was bound to find out what a homo was, but it probably wouldn’t be before I was an adult. And then it might be too late: I might actually be a homo myself. The thought didn’t bear thinking about, so I didn’t think any more about it.

“I have this theory,” said Dave. “About Life, the Universe and Everything.”

“Sounds like a good title for a book,” I said.

“Don’t talk silly,” said Dave. “But I’ve thought hard about this theory. It’s in the form of a parable. Do you know what a parable is?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s a bird that a pirate has on his shoulder.”

Dave shook his head.

“I was only joking,” I said.

“Oh,” said Dave. “I still haven’t worked out the one about the man with the huge green head. But a parable is a moral story, like in the Bible. Would you like to hear mine?”

“Are there any spaceships in it?” I asked, for I greatly loved spaceships. Although not all spaceships. I didn’t, for instance, like the spaceships in P.P. Penrose’s Adam Earth books. They were rubbish, those spaceships.

“Of course there are spaceships in it. I only know parables that have spaceships in them.”

“Go on, then,” I said.

“All right,” said Dave. “This parable is called ‘The Parable of the Spaceships.’”

“Good title,” I said. “I—”

“Shut up,” said Dave. And I shut up.

And this is how it went.

Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth. And it was the future and people had cars that flew in the air and telephones that didn’t need wires and wore televisions on their wrists and had futuristic haircuts and big wing shoulders on their plastic jackets and lived in huge tower blocks that reached up into the clouds.

And they had spaceships. But the spaceships could only go fast enough for people to commute between the planets in this solar system, which they did all the time, for going to work and stuff like that. Mostly mining emeralds on Saturn.

Everybody was not doing OK in the future. Because there were so many people and all the planets in the solar system were getting completely overcrowded. So the scientists worked really hard on developing this spaceship that could travel at the speed of light and they built a special chamber in it where the pilot could be frozen up and stay in suspended animation until he got to his final destination, which would be the nearest planet capable of sustaining human life. They programmed the computer in the spaceship to search out the nearest planet that would comfortably support human life and then they looked for a volunteer. They wanted someone a bit special, because he would be the first man ever to set foot on this planet, which would mean that his name would go down in history and everyone would remember him for ever more (after his mission had been successful, of course, and later people had gone out to colonize this new world).

Eventually they settled on this chap whose name was Adam. Well, he had the perfect name, didn’t he? And he had a nice family with three sons and was an all-round nice fellow. And a very good spaceship pilot who flew flights to Uranus. And so Adam said that he would be pleased to go, even though it meant that he might never see his family again, but he felt certain that he would, because it was such a good spaceship and the scientists were so clever and everything.

So, there were a lot of broadcasts on everyone’s wrist televisions and a big parade and Adam got into the spaceship and waved goodbye and was frozen up and the rocket blasted off into space.

And that was the last that anyone on Earth ever saw of Adam.

He travelled across the universe at the speed of light, covering unimaginable distances, and his spaceship went on and on and on, searching for the perfect planet.

And then one day – it must have been thousands of years later – his spaceship eventually found the perfect planet and landed and Adam unfroze and opened the door and stepped out of the spaceship.

And found that he was back on Earth.

Well, at least it looked just like Earth.

And not just because of the trees and flowers. But because of the buildings and flying cars and all the people who were gathered around looking up at his spaceship.

And then out of the crowd appeared this chap who looked just like Adam. Just like him. And this chap said, “Hello, Dad,” and another chap said, “Hello, Granddad,” then another appeared and said, “Hello, Great-Granddad,” and another who said, “Hello, Great-Great-Granddad.”

And they all looked like Adam.

And Adam got a little confused.

And so the one who had said, “Hello, Dad,” explained the situation to him. He said, “Well, Dad, after you’d gone, time passed and I grew up, and I became a scientist and I looked at the plans for your spaceship and I said, ‘I can improve on that. I can make a spaceship that will travel twice the speed of light.’ So I did and I got in it and I got here in half the time it took you to get here. But when I did, I found that my own son was already here, because while I’d been gone he’d grown up and become a scientist and looked at the plans of my spaceship and said, ‘I can improve on that,’ and built a spaceship that could go four times the speed of light and he’d got here in half the time it had taken me to get here. But when he’d got here, he’d found that his own son was already here, because he’d grown up and improved the spaceship even more and got here in half the time again. But when he got here, he found that his son was already here because—”

“Stop, stop,” said Adam. “This is driving me insane. How many generations of me are there here?”

“Thousands and thousands and thousands,” said the son, “and not just here, but on every other habitable planet in the universe. The universe is now all completely overcrowded by generations and generations of you.”

Adam went back into his spaceship, and if he’d had a revolver to hand he would have shot his brains out. But he didn’t. Although he might well have done. But he was a very nice man and none of this was really his fault, so he left his spaceship and went down to the crowd and was carried shoulder-high by the crowd, for being such a pioneer and everything, and finally he had a meal out at a nice restaurant that had about three thousand tables in it, so that a few of his descendants could dine with him too.

And it was over the meal that his son put a proposition to him.

“Dad,” said his son. “As the universe is all full up now, mankind is looking for new places to live in and your great (to the power of 23,000,000)-grandson has come up with this new spaceship drive system that will take a pilot into an alternative universe in another dimension. And we’re looking for someone to pilot the ship.”

And Adam, who was frankly pretty much off his rocker by now, said, “I’ll do it. Can I do it now, or at least as soon as I’ve finished my dinner?”

And his son said, “Sure thing, Dad. First thing in the morning. The ship’s all fuelled up and waiting. We knew you’d want to volunteer.”

So the very next morning there was this big procession and a broadcast on wrist televisions that went out to planets all over the universe and Adam got into the special new interdimensional spaceship and got frozen up in the very modern cryogenic capsule. And his son pressed the launch button and the spaceship vanished into an alternative universe.

And you’ll never guess what happened when the spaceship landed on the first habitable planet it came to in the alternative universe in another dimension.

“What did happen?” I asked Dave, after he had said, “THE END.”

Dave rolled his eyes. “Same thing,” he said. “Except that now it was far more complicated, with more millions of descendants involved. And one of them had invented another spaceship that could travel into an alternative alternative universe. I had to end the parable somewhere, so I ended it there. I did toy with the idea that on his final voyage in an infinitely alternative universe Adam took a woman with him for company. And, as it turned out, when he reached the next habitable planet in a universe so many times alternative from the first one that it didn’t have a number to cover it, he finally found himself on a planet that no descendant of his had got to before him. Because the spaceships they’d designed had finally reached the point where they could no longer be improved upon. So there was only him and his woman all alone on this new planet that was just like Earth but no one had ever been to before. The woman’s name was Eve, by the way.”

“That’s a far better ending,” I said.

“Nah,” said Dave. “That’s a stupid ending. Too far-fetched.”

I removed my finger from my nose and scratched at my head with it. “I always thought that parables were supposed to have a moral to them,” I said.

“They are,” said Dave.

“So what’s the moral to yours?”

“It’s obvious,” said Dave. “Think about it.”

I thought about it. “Oh yes,” I said. “I get the moral. I understand it.”

Dave nodded thoughtfully. “I knew you would,” he said. “I only wish that I did.”