Why My Brother Is Wanted For Questioning By The United Nations: I
The Saga Of My Brother, Who Is Not A Fabrication: Part 3.
It was shortly after he returned from his adventures with the Device; the
sun was shining, my father was preparing himself a sandwich of Herculean
proportions, my mother was riveting the last few panels on a light aircraft
of her own design, my uncle was lying in a hammock in the garden and my
sisters were beside him with magnifying glasses focusing his halo onto
unsuspecting ants.
The smell of burning
chitin blew from there to the window of my bedroom wherein I was meditating
upon the procedures used by my brother to acquire the Device. I wondered
if such a thing could be repeated.
Without knocking
my brother entered. He had taken to wearing a monk's habit and cowl. He
wore also a large, elaborate and shining headdress, wrought of tungsten
and silicates. This glistering crown was sturdily linked by a thick length
of cable, plated with segmented steel, to a delicate-looking funnel, lovingly
cast in chrome and buffed to a mirror-like finish and cunningly inlaid
with copper wire in intricate patterns. He warned me that it would not
be a well-considered course of action to attempt the acquisition of another
Device, certainly not at this time.
He placed the funnel
upon my head and delivered me a most puissant kick to the testes. Apparently
satisfied, he removed the funnel and walked away in a most enigmatic manner.
The next day two
large packages arrived for my brother. The first arrived in a guarded security
van and was sealed in lead. He handled it with thick gloves. The second
consisted of several hundred coolant mechanisms from freezers and tanks
of pressurised liquid nitrogen. It arrived in an articulated lorry and
we tipped the driver generously, as the Juggernaut was quite difficult
to manoeuvre in the confines of our driveway.
My brother, at great
length, took it all to his shed, which he had since reconstructed.
My mother considered it attention-seeking nonsense.
My sisters attempted to gain entry to the shed forcibly.
They employed all
manner of ingenious and far-fetched methods. When they finally gave up
they went and sat, scorched and sulking, outside the window of the shed.
My brother briefly emerged and gave them ice cream. He then borrowed my
mother's arc welding equipment and disappeared to his retreat.
"Why would a boy
of such obviously prodigious intellect make his lair somewhere as unoriginal
as the garden shed?", my uncle asked. He had recently acquired a welder's
helmet which allowed him to see past his own aura and was less bitter than
usual.
My father simply
drowned his sorrows in the construction of ever more thunderous sandwiches.
We never did find out what his sorrows were.
As ever, when we
rose the next day, a strange and bewildering sight greeted us. A towering,
rumbling colossus of a Machine rose from a hole in the shed roof. It was
intensely cold. Steam rose from it, and around it was a shimmering crystalline
lattice: frost condensed from the air around it. Through the centre ran
a length of flexible aluminium ducting pipe. The Machine was in the shape
of a cone, tapering down from its hundred-foot height to, at a guess, the
business end inside the shed.
As I watched, there
was a thump that shook the house and geysers of steam sprayed from every
crack and joint in the walls of the shed. My brother emerged with a towel
around his waist, grinning proudly. He beckoned me inside.
The shed had been
reconstructed inside as a Swedish pine sauna. As I suspected, from the
ceiling hung the very tip of the machine. It was the end of the aluminium
ducting, with a complex of hydraulics and oil pumps slung around it, holding
in place a rubbery plastic bubble resembling a lens. The assembly breathed
continuously.
"Disturbing, isn't
it", my brother commented. "I haven't been able to get it to stop, I'll
probably iron it out sooner or later. But look at this."
Below the breathing
eye were some loose floorboards. These my brother pulled aside, showing
the concrete floor of the shed. And the hole.
Or, to be precise, the pit.
The bottomless pit!
It was just large
enough to crawl into, if one's inquisitiveness took a mentally unstable
turn. As remarked, it had no visible bottom. As a test, I spat into it.
The noise of impact never made its way back to me. My brother, as ever,
had something to show me.
"Stand back and
cover your ears," he warned. I did so, and he did likewise, then with his
left foot (a trick he learned while travelling the world with the Device,
I later discovered) tugged a chain, similar in many respects to the one
which went missing from the downstairs toilet last week. There was a flash,
a thump which lifted me from the ground, and a jet of steam gushed forth
from the hole.
"The bucket!" he
said. "Quickly, while it's still hot!"
I snatched up the
bucket and ladle and handed it to him. He began to splash water over the
tube, and the shed once more filled with steam.
Wondering at this
marvellous invention, whatever its purpose, I left him to it, as several
pieces of the Machine had rocketed themselves into the surrounding area
and would have to be quietly retrieved (our neighbours seemed to have tired
of my brother's ballistic ambitions) and taped back on.
I sat at the dinner
table that evening to hear from my mother of further developments.
The sisters had
buried themselves trying to enter the shed from beneath and had been sent
upstairs for an early bath.
My father had donned
a saffron robe and made a pilgrimage to the Pinnacle of the Machine, believing
that the Ultimate Sandwich could be toasted there.
My uncle kept his
own counsel. My brother had stolen his welding mask and he had again had
no sleep. He grumped at us from the corner.
Another thump rattled
the table. At this rate my father would soon be dislodged.
We ate on.
One minute to midnight,
my watch said. My father had since abseiled back down the Machine. He reverently
held a steaming sandwich in his ceremonial tongs. This he carried away
to his shrine in the basement to consume with the Infinite. My mother was
bringing her aeroplane on a test flight. She appeared quite pleased with
the armaments in particular. I was watching a Doctor Who marathon on the
downstairs television when my brother, excitable soul that he was, burst
in, scattering ice crystals everywhere. He was followed by a gust of freezing
wind.
His jaw appeared
to have frozen, and he babbled incoherent strings of vowels at me for several
seconds, before giving up and simply dragging me through the door and out
to the shed. Here the experiment seemed complete. The Pit had settled and
the Machine sat silent. Its creator bade me look into the hole. It took
me several seconds to see it, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Distant,
near invisible, the faintest flickering glimmer.
It was the sun.
Nothing more could
be done that night. Though we ached to make a descent, we were ill-prepared
and the Pit sat empty, whistling mockingly at us. My brother equipped himself
with crampons and climbing hooks and began to dismantle the Machine from
the top down. I picked through the pieces and appropriated several parts.
My father's birthday was approaching and I felt an Atomic Sandwich Toaster
would be an appropriate gift, especially as I predicted that he would soon
be experiencing a mild case of radiation sickness brought on by the Ultimate
Sandwich. Safety had not been my father's greatest concern when he toasted
it.
Scrap metal rained
around me. The important components of the Machine had been removed and
now by brother was now setting upon it with a crowbar. I was still safe
inside the sauna, polishing what was to be the casing of the Atomic Sandwich
Toaster, when the Machine's eye lit up. There was a grinding roar which
loosened my bowels, then a gasp from above. I dashed outside to see my
brother disappear into the roof of the shed, head first. He seemed unhappy
about this development and was voicing his concerns spiritedly.
The dismantled parts
of the Machine were alive. They crept, shiftily but speedily, back to the
shed and began to reattach themselves to the Machine. Inside again, my
brother seemed to be in some difficulty. Several freezer motors had him
pinned and the Eye was extending several probes and fine wires with which
to prod him. His expression was one of extreme constipation. "Get the funnel!"
he hissed at me. "It's in my room-" At this, one of the larger probes started
feeling about his mouth. I hesitated. His room was Protected: the last
time I had attempted to enter without him I had been catapulted several
hundred feet into the air and landed in a haystack. He spat out the probe.
"Go! I've unlocked it!"
I hesitated no more. I sprinted out.
His room contained
an eclectic and fascinating collection of knick-knacks, paraphernalia and
bricabrac, but I had no time for it now. The funnel and headgear hung over
my brother's bed.
I snatched it and
ran out again. The dangling cable proved a problem. My legs rapidly became
intimately entangled with it and as I began to tumble down the stairs I
made my peace with such Gods as I could recall and were not diametrically
opposed to my existence.
It was not to be.
I crashed through the landing window, fell one storey to the ground and
rolled to a buckled but breathing halt on the driveway. With all possible
speed I hauled myself back to the shed.
The heat was blinding.
The machine had run riot in its function as Master of the Sauna but my
brother seemed to have matters in hand. He sat, crosslegged, at the centre
of a small circular snowstorm. The probes which were molesting him had pulled away
to a safe distance. The freezer motors lay in a defunct circle around him.
The Eye was partially dismantled and breathed only slowly. As ever, my
brother had surprised me.
I set the shining
headdress upon his head and the funnel in his hand. He struck. Before I
could even step back he was on his feet, out of the protective circle,
beating off probes with the crowbar in his left hand and trying to wrestle
the Eye to the ground with his right. The left hand closely resembled the
upper parts of a helicopter both in motion and effect. Everything near
to him was being torn apart. Within seconds the Eye was defenceless and
pinned.
Working quickly
he rammed it into the funnel. His eyes glazed over, he yelped and collapsed.
I took the crowbar from him and finished the destruction.
As the red mist cleared
several things resolved themselves. The shed walls were lightly sprayed
with oil. The Eye flickered its last, almost reduced to shrapnel. My brother
lay twitching and unconscious among the shredded machinery. I noted this
as the first time in four years that he had not been in complete control
of the situation. I decided that whatever the function of the helmet, it
was best that I remove it. Briefly, I examined him. In terms of vital signs,
he seemed fine, so I stepped outside to view the destruction.
In reconstructing
itself, the Machine had been less mindful of property boundaries than my
brother. It sprawled into the neighbouring gardens, steaming gently still.
Surely my brother, the infallible genius, could not have been so short-sighted
as to cause this.
From the twisted
husk of the Machine there came a rattle of falling debris. Slowly I turned
and sat to await what new developments might develop. My father picked
his way down the Machine sheepishly. "Sorry about that", he called. The
shed door clanged open and my brother staggered out, very quietly, clutching
at his head. He glared blackly at my father and staggered inside to find
some aspirin.
"Only a test", said
my father. "Beyond that, my lips are sealed." He paced away enigmatically,
as appeared to be the current fashion.
With no immediate
peril, this seemed an advantageous time to take stock of the situation.
One, my brother boring holes through planets for
reasons unknown.
Two, the Machine, given life by means and for reasons
unknown.
Three, my father responsible for administering
a test, to whom, progress and reasons unknown.
Dismissing it all, I went to bed. It was well past midnight, in case you had forgotten,
and I had just fallen out of a first-floor window.
Part 2:
The Device Of Many Uses
Part 4: Why My Brother Is Wanted For Questioning By The United Nations: II