A Blink of the Screen

slowly down between the seats to the small brass fire-extinguisher.
    ‘I don’t know yet. However, you have made fifteen trips over the mountains, in these battered old aircraft, in the past three weeks; you suddenly have a lot of money; and you are a known smuggler. So I say to myself, Gustave, I say, where is he getting all this money? And I answer myself, Gustave, mon ami, he is back in his old trade.’
    ‘You found nothing at Lemay.’ Pyecraft grasped the extinguisher.
    ‘Exactly. And so you must have brought it on to the plane since. Therefore you will please to turn the machine around and—’
    He sidestepped neatly as the heavy extinguisher flew past him; Pyecraft, caught off balance, finished the swing in the centre of the instrument panel.
    High on the frosty mountainside two small figures huddled round a feebly glowing fire.
    The Inspector looked again at the remains of the aeroplane.
    ‘That was good flying.’
    ‘We might as well have crashed; if the cold doesn’t get us the wolves will.’
    They both gazed at the fire for a few moments.
    ‘Come on,’ coaxed the Inspector. ‘You might as well tell me now. Just what was it that you were smuggling?’
    Pyecraft looked at him sadly.
    ‘Aircraft,’ he said.

THE PICTURE

    T ECHNICAL C YGNET
, 1:11 , M AY 1965
    Good grief! That was a long time ago! I’m quite glad I never tried to sell this one, but once again I was playing with the words to see what happens. It’s a thing that authors do sometimes
.
    It wasn’t really a superb work of art.
    The artist had painted the sky the wrong colour and covered it with blotches in an attempt, seemingly, to hide his mistake; the perspective, what there was of it, was wrong; and the vegetation would not have been found in the wildest nightmare. The whole thing was a surrealistic portrait of hell.
    Even the frame barely held together.
    Jon kept it on the wall – one of the padded walls – of his cell. Strange and horrific though it was, it was some connection with the Outside, some reminder that there were other things besides eating, sleeping, and the occasional visit of the doctors. Sometimes they would watch him through the grille in the padded door, and shake their heads.
    ‘No cure,’ said one.
    ‘Unless we take away that – that picture,’ said the other.
    ‘You will kill him if you do.’
    ‘He will kill himself if we don’t; you know that it was the cause of his – his –’
    ‘His madness.’
    ‘There is no other word for it. That picture is the centre of his life now; I believe it is the only thing that he does not doubt. Yesterday he told me that it portrays the only true world, and that this one is really false. We can do nothing against such stubbornness.’
    ‘Then it is either kill or cure?’
    ‘Yes. I will tell him when I examine him. Perhaps the shock of having his world removed will cure him.’
    It didn’t seem to. Jon still sat hunched and brooding in the corner of his cell, staring at the picture, trying to remember …
    He heard the soft tread in the passage. They were coming to take away his picture; there was so little time left! He made one last, tremendous, despairing effort …
    And the cell was empty.
    They never did find out where he had gone or how he had escaped. It was a nine-day mystery; and, in the course of time, it was forgotten.
    But the Doctor kept the picture, and hung it up in his study. He knew his suspicions were absurd, but they stuck.
    Sometimes he stares at the picture with all three of his eyes, with the green sun below the horizon, and hopes that he is wrong.
    For how could anyone survive in a world of brown earth and green leaves, and a blue sky with only one sun?

THE PRINCE AND THE PARTRIDGE

    ‘C HILDREN’S C IRCLE’ BY U NCLE J IM ,
B UCKS F REE P RESS
, 6, 13, 20 D ECEMBER 1968
    Written under the pseudonym ‘Uncle Jim’, ‘Children’s Circle’ was a series of seventy-odd tales that appeared between 1965 and 1973, of which two have made it into this collection: ‘The Prince and the Partridge’ and ‘Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor’
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    Once upon a time – that’s always a good start – there was a young prince who was ruler of the Land of the Sun. It was a pleasant country of long days and blue skies, and most things in it were either yellow or gold.
    The cottages were built of sandstone with golden tiles, daffodils and buttercups grew in fields of ripe corn, and gold was so plentiful under the land that the streets