Dark Doings In The Docks

   Well here I am back home again, and the ground is still gently rocking under my feet. Our cargo crate floated in at around eleven last night, and I decided to get some sleep before disembarking. There was, naturally, a small problem regarding the customs guys, due to the fact that I had no passport. I had spent a fair amount of time on the voyage mulling over my options on this point: the crew members had assumed I was just stranded and had not probed very deeply into my cover story (that I had been forced into an unofficial mission of industrial espionage by an overbearing boss and had cocked it up completely through incompetence). The chance that the customs office might show a similar naïveté seemed vanishingly small, and although I had essentially done nothing wrong, explaining my international movements without involving all kinds of higher agencies seemed infeasible. The minute I said "calculus" out loud, let alone "spatial anomaly" I would have blown my chance to get anybody at all on side.

   Thus it was that I found myself, at around 4:30 this morning, dropping furtively down a rope ladder into an inspection dinghy off the starboard side and making off quietly in the direction of the river Hamble. I had left a sizeable bribe for the privilege and had agreed to leave the boat with a friend of Zeppo's who lived nearby on the waterfront. On the way, I had a bit of a disagreement with a seagull, who took a bizarre liking to my nose and attempted to remove it. In return, I grabbed the irritating creature, inserted my portable mind bridge into its skull and gave it my complete memories of evolutionary history. Upon its release, it flew drunkenly over to a marker buoy and perched on the top, eyeing me ruefully. I doubt it had the neural capacity to process the lesson and draw new conclusions, but with any luck it now understood its place in the scheme of things, and might think twice before instigating any further nasal vendettas.

   Having woken up Zeppo's friend with a tap on the window (he nearly set the dogs on me!) I explained the deal and he tied up the boat, offering me a coffee. I declined, thinking only of my zero-G sleep field at home. It's quite a walk from Hamble and the dark semi-rural roads seemed somehow unreal. I saw two foxes, a deer, eighty-nine snails, four hundred trillion viruses and one drunken BBC producer who asked me whether he was anywhere near some place called Made of Ale. I told him he'd had enough already.

   Anyway, my next move will be to shave off the beard, buy a new car and generally pick up my various nefarious plots where I left off. I'm going to miss the travelling, if I'm honest. I must do it more often - only next time I'll use a more conventional mode of transport, or at least remember to take my passport through the wormhole...