Vertigo (tales from the Vertigo labs)

By Barnaby Wilde

The collected stories from the Vertigo Research Labs. How can stairs stop working, when up becomes down? Can something be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? Jepherson Thomas, janitor at the Vertigo labs, tells all in eleven humorous stories from the world's most unlikely research establishment. Which duplicate Director is the original and which is the copy? How not to make an invisibility cloak, and what happens when funding is withdrawn?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnaby Wilde
• Release date: Jan 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311435781

Barnaby Wilde

Barnaby Wilde is the pen name of Tim Fisher. Tim was born in 1947 in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, but grew up and was educated in the West Country. He graduated with a Physics degree in 1969 and worked in manufacturing and quality control for a multinational photographic company for 30 years before taking an early retirement to pursue other interests. He has two grown up children and currently lives happily in Devon.

Book preview

Vertigo

A collection of short stories from the Vertigo Research Laboratories

by

Barnaby Wilde

Copyright 2015 by Barnaby Wilde

Barnaby Wilde asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Barnaby Wilde at Smashwords

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover picture: Based on 'Spiral staircase Monument London'

© User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-4.0

Other published works by the author.

Humorous Novels (The Tom Fletcher Stories)

I Keep Thinking It's Tuesday

A Question of Alignment

Every Which Way but East

Quirky Verse

Animalia

Life…

The Blind Philospher and the God of Small Things

Not at all Rhinocerus

A Little Bit Elephant

Tunnel Vision

The Well Boiled Icycle

Short Story Collections

Barnaby's Shorts (volumes 1 to 9)

Detective Fiction (The Mercedes Drew Mysteries)

Flowers for Mercedes

Free Running

Flandra

Smile for the Camera

Visit www.barnaby-wilde.co.uk for the author's blog and more information about the world of Barnaby Wilde. Twitter @barnaby_wilde

Vertigo

Contents

Onwards and Upwards ………………...…. The discovery of the Reversal Field

The Case of the Missing Spray Cleaner ….. When Reversal Fields collide

Jocelyn ……………………………………. The power of mind control

Onwards, Upwards and Inside Out ………. The Vertigo children's Xmas party

A Load of Balls …………………………… A cat gets into the Maglev lab

A Matter of Funding ……………………… A visit from the Paymasters

The Invisibility Cloak …………………….. No one ever notices the janitor

Double Trouble …………………………… Tweedledum or Tweedledee?

Which Craft? ……………………………… A commingling of skills

Amazonia …………………………………. Sailing in a giant paper boat

Another Ratt Tale …………………………. Another children's Xmas party

Bonus story 'Dr Kemp's Card' …………….. Prologue to the next Barnaby Wilde novel

Onwards and Upwards

Now, I know that I'm not the world's most technical guy, but even I know how stairs work. At least, I thought I did, until that day.

I used to work in a department store, just a janitor, like now, and a woman was stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs one day. Tell me young man, she said to me. Can you tell me, do these stairs go up, or do they go down? Of course, I gave her some smartass reply like, It depends which end you start, madam. But, if that lady is reading this, I'd like to apologise to you, madam. Maybe you knew more than I did back then.

My name's Jeph, by the way. Yeh, that's with a 'J' at the front and a 'ph' at the end. Short for Jepherson, Jepherson Thomas. No, that's OK. Folk are always getting it wrong. They think it's short for Geoffrey, or Jeffrey, or whatever. No matter. Jeph it is. Or, a lot of folks call me 'JT'. Hell, I've been called pretty much everything in my time. I don't take offense. If none's intended, then I don't take it.

Anyway, I was saying about the stairs. Everyone thinks they know all there is to know about stairs, but I know a bunch of people who'd disagree with you about that. That's if they'd talk to you about it at all.

It happened about two years back. I was still working as a janitor. Still am by the way. I reckon that's prob'ly how I'll end up, too. It may not be much, but it suits me. I was working for a little research company called Vertigo. Not the smartest name for a company, if you ask me, but then nobody did. Anyway, Vertigo was just a small company, only about twenty people working there then, including me. Actually, it was exactly twenty people then. I remember precisely.

I have no idea how Vertigo was funded, because they didn't actually produce anything. Not anything tangible that is. They were pure research. Maybe they were funded by the government, or something, not that it's important. Anyway, you need to understand a bit about how the company was organised in order to make any sort of sense of this story. Not that it makes much more sense after you've heard it, to be honest.

Anyway, Vertigo was situated on the edge of the technology park. It was built around a sort of a tower. It was just a small tower and I have no idea what it's original purpose was. Whatever. It was just a circular brick tower, with three floors above ground and a basement. Leading off the tower at an angle were two single storey wings. The easiest way to imagine it, is to think of it like a letter 'V'. The tower was at the vertex of the 'V' and the two wings were like the arms. I always wondered if they'd called the company Vertigo because of that 'V' shaped plan, or, maybe, it was the other way round. Or, maybe, it had nothing to do with the layout of the building at all.

Where was I? Oh, yeh. The main entrance was at the base of the tower and there was a reception desk and an admin office on that level. The entrance to the two lab wings was from there, too. I'll tell you a bit about them in a moment. As much as I know, that is.

Anyway, above the reception area, on the next level in the tower, was a small dining room area, with a couple of vending machines and a couple of offices and, above that, on the top floor was a meeting room and the boss's office. Down in the basement were the toilets, male and female, and a little store cupboard where I kept my stuff. Connecting the four levels of the tower was a spiral staircase right down the middle. One way up and one way down.

My job, basically, was limited to the tower. I was never allowed into the lab areas. I guess they did their own cleaning, or not, as the case might be. The only way you could get in there was with one of those magnetic passes. We all had them, even me, with our photos on, but if yours wasn't coded to open the lab doors, then you couldn't get in.

There were two labs, like the arms on the 'V', remember? They were just called 'A lab' and 'B lab', though pretty much everyone who worked there called 'em 'Onwards' and 'Upwards'.

That was the slogan of the company, by the way, 'Vertigo – onwards and upwards'. I'm still not sure that it was such a brilliant slogan, but that's just my opinion, like I said before.

Now, I told you that I'm not an engineer, so I don't claim to understand what it was exactly they were working on in those labs. In any case it was secret. We all had to sign the official secret act in blood when we were hired. OK, maybe not in blood, but you know what I mean.

What I do know is that 'A lab' was working on magnetic levitation propulsion systems. They just called it 'maglev' for short. 'B lab' was doing something to do with anti gravity. They used to call it 'AG'. So you see, that's where the slogan came in. 'A lab' was Onwards, and 'B lab' was Upwards. It was a sort of a joke I s'pose.

There was always rivalry between the two labs, there's no doubt about that. I wouldn't go so far as to say they hated each other, but they kept apart. They didn't sit at the same tables in the dining room, for example and the 'Onwards' magnetic stripe cards couldn't get into the 'Upwards' lab and vice versa. The 'Onwards' team used to say that the 'Upwards' were always trying to get above themselves. And the 'Upwards' used to say that 'Onwards' couldn't tell if they were coming or going. Mostly it was just friendly banter like that, but they definitely did not share information about their research projects. Maybe if they had, we'd never have had the problem with the stairs.

Anyway, during the day, I was mostly to be found on one floor, or another, of the tower, sweeping floors, dusting, cleaning windows, wiping down tables, that sort of thing. Every hour, though, I had to go down to the basement to check out the toilets. Like I said, being a janitor isn't the most glamorous job, but it suits me.

All the toilets for the whole building were down in the basement. At the bottom of the spiral stairs there was a sort of a lobby area and leading off that on one side was the door to the women's rest rooms and on the other side was the door to the men's. There was nothing very unusual about either area. Four stalls in the women's side, with four hand washbasins, and two stalls and two urinals in the men's side, with hand washbasins. There was also a door to my little store room, where I kept all my cleaning stuff. Yeh, and I'd got an old office chair in there, too, where I used to escape sometimes for a quiet coffee and a sandwich, not that I couldn't use the dining room, or anything. It's just that sometimes I like my own company for a while and they don't provide offices for janitors.

Anyway, all the rest rooms were in the basement, so, during any day you could reckon that everyone in the company would be making at least one trip down to the basement. So, it was important that I made my hourly trips to keep it all looking clean and smelling fresh.

That day, the day the stairs stopped working, began just like any other. I'd already done a couple of the hourly checks in the basement and I decided to retreat to my little cupboard for five minutes for a coffee and a sandwich. I heard footsteps on the metal staircase as people came and went outside, but it was just background noise and not unusual. Until I became aware of someone crying, that is.

Now, that wasn't so unusual. Not in itself. From time to time I would find some woman, or another, in tears down in the basement. It was about the only place they could escape to in private if they were upset about something and it seems to be in the nature of women that they get upset about things on a pretty regular basis. OK. Maybe that is a sexist comment, but I'm only speaking as I find. I don't ever remember finding a man sobbing down in the toilets, but I keep a box of paper tissues permanently on the side in my little cubby hole for the times I find myself consoling one, or another, of the girls. I think they see me as non threatening. Actually, most of the time, most folk don't really see me at all. It is a universal truth that janitors are pretty much invisible, until something goes wrong.

Anyway, I digress. I could hear sobbing, so I pushed my door open a little and I could see that it was the girl from reception. She was stood at the bottom of the stairs, pale faced and sort of whimpering. Tanya, I called across softly to her. I had to say it a couple of times before she heard me. I beckoned her over to my cupboard. I reckoned she wouldn't want other folk seeing her like that.

What's the matter, Tanya?

To my surprise she threw her arms about me. I can't go up the stairs, JT, she sobbed.

I had no idea what she meant. Had someone upset her and she didn't want to go back up, or had she hurt her leg, or what? What d'you mean? I asked.

I keep trying to go up, she sobbed. And I just end up back down here.

She seemed genuinely frightened. I did my usual avuncular thing and gave her a tissue. I heard more footsteps on the stairs and pulled her into the cupboard a little. I figured she wouldn't want to be on public display. I heard someone crash in through the door to the men's toilets.

I think I'm going mad, JT, she said. Do you think I could have Alzheimer's?

Now, Tanya, I should tell you, was all of about twenty two years old. I've heard of early onset Alzheimer's, but I don't think I recall it affecting anyone of twenty two.

What do you mean, Tanya? I asked her. Did you forget something? Hell, I forget something every day.

It's the stairs, JT, she sobbed. I can't get up the stairs.

I heard the door to the men's room crash open again and footsteps start up the metal staircase. A few seconds later more footsteps coming down, followed by a mild curse.

Do you want to tell me about it? I asked.

The footsteps started back up the stairs again, but a few seconds later there was more cursing from the lobby. I pushed my cupboard door open with my foot and saw that it was George Williams from the Onwards team. He was a little bald guy, about forty. I knew he was a family man and not one given to cursing. I wondered who'd rocked his boat.

I watched through the part open door as he began to walk slowly up the stairs until his feet disappeared from view as went round the curve. A few seconds later those same feet reappeared heading slowly back down.

What the f***? he said, as he landed back down in the lobby area. I coughed loud enough for him to hear me, but, apart from a quick glance over in my direction, he just stood there shaking