‘Thirty innims!’ ‘Is that all?’ she yelled.
‘Yes!’ cried The Journalist. ‘Yes!’
‘I love yooooou!’ cried Lucy.
‘Ooooooooh!’ echoed The Journalist and the two of them collapsed together as the clock clicked to zero…
They lay there waiting for the forever-ending explosion that would terminate their brief affair. But, unlike the two lovers, it didn’t come. ‘What’s happened?’ Lucy was the first to speak. ‘I don’t know!’ said The Journalist. ‘I don’t know!’
15
At this same moment, Nettie suddenly managed to sit up on the couch on which Dan had placed her, and screamed: ‘Oh my God! There’s only five minutes before the bomb goes off!’
‘Five minutes!’ thought Dan. ‘This is where, in a cheap novel, the couple – confronted by imminent oblivion – would suddenly make passionate love.’
‘You’ve got to go and talk to it!’ she pleaded.
‘What?’ said Dan.
‘I can’t explain! Just believe me! It’s in the Engine Room! Hurry!’
‘What? repeated Dan a bit gormlessly.
‘HURRY! THE ENGINE ROOM! SPEAK TO THE BOMB!’
Dan decided that, while gormlessness had its place in the human repertoire of reactions, now was neither the rime nor place for it. He sprinted out of the Beauty Salon (which was, apparently, where they were) and ran down the length of the Grand Axial Canal, trying to ignore the inevitable chorus:
‘She threw her arms
Around his charms,
And gave him six pnedes as a tip!’
The first thing he saw, when he burst into the Engine Room, was a large bomb sticking up out of a cabinet. A friendly sort of voice was booming out:
‘Fifty-eight… fifty-seven… fifty-six… fifty-five… fifty-four.
Dan couldn’t think what to say. After all, he’d never addressed a bomb before. He didn’t have a clue what sort of thing it would be interested in.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Fifty-three… fifty-two… hello… fifty-one… fifty…’ replied the bomb genially.
‘Any chance of you not exploding?’ Dan thought he might as well get straight to the point.
‘No… forty-eight… forty-seven…’
Dan was not the most imaginative of men. He knew it. Lucy knew it. Nigel had known it. He was dedicated, hard-working, loyal, thorough – all those admirable and desirable things for anybody’s partner to be. But leaps of the imagination were not his forte. And yet, he had one now. He suddenly knew the one thing that bombs were bound to be interested in.
‘Do you really want to do this?’ he asked. ‘I mean isn’t it a bit self-destructive?
‘Forty-six… forty-five… Forty – Look! I am just a simple counting and exploding device and am not equipped for philosophical discourse,’ replied the bomb. ‘Please do not speak to me while I’m counting. Damn! Now you’ve made me lose my place! You see? Recommencing countdown. One thousand. Nine hundred and ninety-nine. Nine hundred and ninety-eight…’
‘Got the sucker!’ thought Dan. He checked his watch against the bomb’s counting. They had about sixteen minutes before they needed to talk to it again. He turned and raced back to Nettie.
As he ran, the thought of Nettie kept riffling his mind like a gambler’s hands riffling a deck of cards. God! She was so intelligent! How had she found out the bomb’s weakness so quickly? The clarity of her intellect made him feel so ordinary and humble.
But then he suddenly remembered how she seemed old and shrivelled: he must have been seeing things! That couldn’t have happened to the beautiful, gorgeous Nettie? And yet, it was then that Dan found himself thinking the most curious thought of course, it was terrible if something had happened to Nettie (and what had happened to her?) but, at least now, thought Dan, he might stand a chance with her!
Lucy was putting her clothes on rather hurriedly. The fact that she and The Journalist had not been blown to cosmic dust had severely embarrassed her. In fact, she didn’t know where to look.
The Journalist was regarding her curiously. ‘You do things very differently in your world,’ he said,
‘Oh?’ Lucy tried to pretend that everything was perfectly normal.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘On Blerontin we have all these absurd rituals we have to go through before having sex. There’s a thing called “dating” when a young couple go out for evenings together without necessarily “going the whole way” as we say. Then there’s a thing called “the engagement” where rings are exchanged. Finally there’s an elaborate ceremony called “a wedding” with a cake and “bridesmaids” and the “best man’s speech” – not to mention the “honeymoon”! You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole we have to go through in order to make love to each other. I like your Earth way of doing it much better.’