A Blink of the Screen

AGAZINE
, O CTOBER 1988
    I’ve tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I’ve thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I’ve always had a soft spot for this story
.
    Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.
    ‘There’s a simple explanation,’ thought Dogger. ‘I’ve gone mad.’
    This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalization at seven o’clock in the morning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren’t mad, despite appearances.
    There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists 1 call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn’t.
    He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn’t quite sure how it had started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he’d probably said things like Since you ask, I do think green 2CVs have the anti-nuclear sticker laminated into their rear window before they leave the factory. If he had been on the usual form he achieved after a pint of white wine he’d probably passed a remark about dungarees on women, too. It had been one of those rows where every jocular attempt to extract himself had opened another chasm under his feet.
    And then she’d broken, no, shattered the silence with all those comments about Erdan, macho wish-fulfilment for adolescents, and there’d been comments about Rambo, and then he’d found himself arguing the case for people who, in cold sobriety, he detested as much as she did.
    And then he’d come home and written the last chapter of
Erdan and the Serpent of the Rim
, and out of pique, alcohol, and rebellion he’d killed his hero off on the last page. Crushed under an avalanche. The fans were going to hate him, but he’d felt better afterwards, freed of something that had held him back all these years. And had made him quite rich, incidentally. That was because of computers, because half the fans he met now worked in computers, and of course in computers they gave you a wheelbarrow to take your wages home; science fiction fans might break out in pointy ears from time to time, but they bought books by the shovelful and read them round the clock.
    Now he’d have to think of something else for them, write proper science fiction, learn about black holes and quantums …
    There was another point nagging his mind as he yawned his way back to the kitchen.
    Oh, yes. Erdan the Barbarian had been standing on his doorstep.
    Funny, that.
    This time the hammering made small bits of plaster detach themselves from the wall around the door, which was an unusual special effect in a hallucination. Dogger opened the door again.
    Erdan was standing patiently next to his milk. The milk was white, and in bottles. Erdan was seven feet tall and in a tiny chain-mail loincloth; his torso looked like a sack full of footballs. In one hand he held what Dogger knew for a certainty was Skung, the Sword of the Ice Gods.
    Dogger was certain about this because he had described it thousands of times. But he wasn’t going to describe it again.
    Erdan broke the silence.
    ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to meet my Maker.’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘I have come,’ said the barbarian hero, ‘to receive my Final Reward.’ He peered down Dogger’s hall expectantly and rippled his torso.
    ‘You’re a fan, right?’ said Dogger. ‘Pretty good costume …’
    ‘What,’ said Erdan, ‘is fan?’
    ‘I want to drink your blood,’ said Skung, conversationally.
    Over the giant’s shoulder – metaphorically speaking, although under his massive armpit in real life – Dogger saw the postman coming up the path. The man walked around Erdan, humming, pushed a couple of bills into Dogger’s unresisting hand, opined against all the evidence that it looked like being a nice day, and strolled back down the path.
    ‘I want to drink his blood, too,’ said