Terror Firma. Matthew Thomas

looked at him as if he were a small child who’d recently overpopulated his nappy. ‘I’m not arguing with the success of the policy, I myself have been instrumental in making it so. What concerns me is the mood of apathetic irrationalism that has spread like wildfire throughout the lower orders. We’re not simply making them believe we are cleverer than we really are, we’re making them believe everything. Hasn’t it ever crossed your mind that we might have been set up for a very long fall? Our dim-witted charges are ripe for the plucking, but not for harvesting by us.’

      Now it was the turn of the Chairman herself to fix him with a frigid stare. ‘One summoned you here, Becker, to answer for your actions, not to bore us with your own ungrounded fears. You’re blowing this incident up out of all proportion. After all, it’s only one dead Grey. Learn to ‘‘let it go’’. One orders you not to try to retrieve this material, Becker – its exposure can’t possibly do us harm.’

      Becker’s jaw twitched for a moment, then was still. ‘Very well, Madame Chairman, as you wish. Are there any other duties you require me to perform, to help me fill my empty days?’

      She gazed at him with open contempt. ‘As a matter of fact, there are. You know what must be done in Urgistan, we’re due another war. The case file is in your in-tray. See the plan is initiated by the end of the week.’ The aerospace CEO nodded to their leader his heart-felt respects. Madame Chairman acknowledged him graciously with a smile.

      ‘You may go, Becker. Let us draw a line under this matter, once and for all. Is One understood?’

      Becker nodded and smiled his sweetest alligator smile, all the while promising himself this was not the end by a long way. He was well used to his theories being ridiculed, but this time the reaction of his superiors went further still. Some other force was at play. For the moment he’d bide his time, tamely following orders – well, some of them at least; meanwhile he’d remain vigilant, forever searching for the final confirmation he craved.

      Much later, as he boarded his personal black-operations helicopter, Becker played back the meeting in his head. Perhaps it wasn’t only him who was following a personal agenda all his own. But surely such tainted corruption couldn’t reach to such lofty heights?

¹ Responsible for the publication of all their albums.

¹ But not as effectively as the Committee’s last-ditch ‘Doomsday Weapon’, housed in central Greenland – control of which was forever being sought (for ‘testing’ purposes only) by the power generation lobby. Not even they knew the device was currently working overtime in a hopeless struggle to counteract the effects of global warming.

       14. Mail

      Dave sat in the shabby motel room, staring at his laptop computer screen, sipping warm flat beer, seriously considering suicide.

      In truth he didn’t ‘seriously consider suicide’. He didn’t have the bottle to do anything that would have annoyed his mum that much. Flirting with suicide was just the sort of thing he liked to think he did from time to time, a bit like cleaning the fridge or having sex with another person present. It fitted his perception of himself as a tragic hero. But it was getting harder to dodge the inescapable conclusion that he had the first part of that ambition down pat, while the second eluded him like the smallest piece of soap in a very big and cloudy bath.

      His and Kate’s love was not doomed to failure because of some unbridgeable class divide, nor an incurable fatal illness; it was doomed because one half of it wasn’t really interested in shagging the other. But that didn’t stop Dave’s gothic daydreams continuing to roll on and on in a grainy black and white film noir.

      When he had been a teenager Dave had been heavily influenced by a certain type of eighties band; the sort that wore baggy black jumpers, stuck daffodils down their pants and wrote morose songs about their girlfriends getting flattened by JCBs. Listening to this kind of music hadn’t made Dave feel any better about himself, it had just convinced him that somewhere, someone with a silly haircut was more depressed than he was. This would help for a while, until he began thinking that – at that very moment – the apparently dour mop-haired waif was no doubt hammering his sports car around LA as he siphoned champagne from a groupie’s navel and snorted cocaine through a rolled-up royalty cheque which could have kept Hendrix in purple haze long enough for him to be reclassified as a new type of meteorological phenomenon. This sure knowledge tended to throw the pop star’s professional depression into stark contrast with Dave’s purely amateur, yet far more profound, melancholy state.

      So Dave had come to the painful conclusion that there was only one thing more depressing that being young, sensitive and celibate; that was to be young, sensitive, celibate and listening to a mopey record. This horrendous state of affairs was in no way mitigated by his perception that everyone else on the surface of the planet was humping away like it was going out of fashion, including the dewy-eyed singer – who was currently droning on about how tough life was, coming from his home town and being unemployed – unless of course you happened to be in a chart-topping band, in which case it was much, much worse.

      Back then Dave had only one refuge from this heady mix of sixth-form poetry and synth-based pop. Taking a copy of Busting Out All Over – Underwear for the Larger Lady, he’d retire to his room, if not exactly to spank the monkey then at least to give it a jolly stern talking to. Thankfully these days he had more meaning to his life, or at least that’s what he tried to tell himself. The pages of ScUFODIN Magazine would wait for no man, not even if he was the victim of unrequited love and what Dave was fast coming to believe was a vast and awesomely subtle hoax that made a mockery of his entire working life. In the absence of a suitably morbid record, or any mail-order catalogues for that matter, Dave got back down to work.

      Currently he was attempting to type up an account of the previous night’s UFO event, if you could go so far as to call it that. It was a tried and trusted routine he always performed after one of his ‘encounters’, as he liked to call them. Best get it down while it was still fresh in his mind.

      But it wasn’t just the infuriating vagueness of last night’s incident which had him depressed. Dave was no stranger to the intense feeling of anticlimax which often followed a sighting – this went deeper than that. He had often reflected how UFO watching was much like being in the infantry in time of war; ninety-nine per cent stupefying boredom, one per cent shirt-drenching panic. After any fleeting high came an equally dramatic and far less fleeting low. The growing suspicion that someone, somewhere, in a darkened room, wanted it that way didn’t help in the slightest.

      With a heavy sigh Dave concluded that this depression, like most of his others, could be traced back to a far less mysterious source. For the ninth time that day he checked his email to see if Kate still cared whether he lived or died. The answer on this occasion was no different from his previous eight attempts to will his incoming mail prompter to go ‘ping’. Not for the first time that day he re-read her last message.

      Dear Dave,

      Hope you’re enjoying yourself as much as I know you are able. Have you met any other Californian beach babes yet? I do like a spring wedding.

      All hell’s broken loose back home. Have you heard the news of what went on at Glastonbury? It’s all people are talking about over here.

      All hell’s broken loose at work too. After one of the most nauseating shows I can remember we’ve started researching a special one-off to go out in just a few days time. Word’s come down from the very top that we have to be on-air ASAP. It’s to be the usual format, Mr Sunbed-Tan and a studio full of ‘real people’ queuing up to have their insanity beamed out for all the world to see. But this time, the subject matter will interest you. We’re getting an audience together of folks who claim they’ve seen flying saucers. You know, ‘I’m having