A Blink of the Screen

ON SOMEONE ? S ING LIKE A PIGEON ? N O . N O ONE KILLED M R S LUMBER . I CAN’T HELP YOU THERE .
    ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir,’ said Carrot. ‘I think you have.’
    D AMN .
    Death watched Carrot leave, ducking his head as he went down the narrow stairs of the hovel.
    N OW THEN, WHERE WAS I …
    ‘Excuse me,’ said the wizened old man in the bed. ‘I happen to be 107, you know. I haven’t got all day.’
    A H, YES . C ORRECT .
    Death sharpened his scythe. It was the first time he’d ever helped the police with their inquiries. Still, everyone had a job to do.
    Corporal Carrot strolled easily around the town. He had a Theory. He’d read a book about Theories. You added up all the clues, and you got a Theory. Everything had to fit.
    There were sausages. Someone had to buy sausages. And then there were pennies. Normally only one subsection of the human race paid for things in pennies.
    He called in on a sausage-maker. He found a group of children, and chatted to them for a while.
    Then he ambled back to the scene of the crime in the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on the ground (colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the background – people had already dropped 7p in his helmet). He paid some attention to the heap of rubbish at the far end, and then sat down on a busted barrel.
    ‘All right … You can come out now,’ he said, to the world at large. ‘I didn’t know there were any gnomes left in the world.’
    The rubbish rustled. They trooped out – the little man with the red hat, the hunched back and the hooked nose, the little woman in the mob cap carrying the even smaller baby, the little policeman, the dog with the ruff around its neck, and the very small alligator.
    Corporal Carrot sat and listened.
    ‘He made us do it,’ said the little man. He had a surprisingly deep voice. ‘He used to beat us. Even the alligator. That was all he understood, hitting things with sticks. And he used to take all the money the dog Toby collected and get drunk. And then we ran away and he caught us in the alley and started on Judy and the baby and he fell over and—’
    ‘Who hit him first?’ said Carrot.
    ‘All of us!’
    ‘But not very hard,’ said Carrot. ‘You’re all too small. You didn’t kill him. I have a very convincing statement about that. So I went and had another look at him. He’d choked to death on something. What is this?’
    He held up a little leather disc.
    ‘It’s a swozzle,’ said the little policeman. ‘He used it for the voices. He said ours weren’t funny enough.’
    ‘“That’s the way to do it!”’ said the one called Judy, and spat.
    ‘It was stuck in his throat,’ said Carrot. ‘I suggest you run away, just as far as you can.’
    ‘We thought we could start a people’s cooperative,’ said the leading gnome. ‘You know … experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing.’
    ‘Technically it was assault,’ said Carrot. ‘But frankly I can’t see any point in taking you in.’
    ‘We thought we’d try to bring theatre to the people. Properly. Not hitting each other with sticks and throwing babies to crocodiles—’
    ‘You did that for children?’ said Carrot.
    ‘He said it was a new sort of entertainment. He said it’d catch on.’
    Carrot stood up, and flicked the swozzle into the rubbish.
    ‘People’ll never stand for it,’ he said. ‘That’s not the way to do it.’
    1 Which is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle, and why not …

THE SEA AND LITTLE FISHES

    L EGENDS
, ED . R OBERT S ILVERBERG , H ARPER C OLLINS P UBLISHERS , N EW Y ORK, 1998
    Short stories, as I have said, cost me blood. I envy those people who can write one with ease, or at least what looks like ease. I doubt if I’ve done more than fifteen in my life
.
    The Sea and Little Fishes,
though, was one of the rare story ideas that just popped up. About two weeks later Bob Silverberg popped up, too, and asked if I could write a story for the
Legends
anthology
.
    I’m not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t; it would probably have become the start of a novel, or a thread in one. It was originally about a thousand words longer, containing a scene that did nothing but slow it down, according to Bob. He was right. It was quite a good scene, nevertheless, and turned up later in
Carpe Jugulum.
    The title? Totally made up, but it sounded right. For reasons I can’t