Spaceman No.3, Sent by God

By George Holland Hill

When a spaceman lands his craft at dead of night on a hill in a quiet city park, he doesn’t know what to expect — and fears the worst. He is a very reluctant visitor.
Others before him have failed in this mission — to check out for God whether it is a good time to make his Big Comeback on planet Earth. (God took a sabbatical and decamped to another solar system after a German philosopher famously declared ‘God is dead’.)
But the first person he meets is a friendly Irishman who, stereotypically, has already had a few drinks. And is delighted to join him in a few more when the visitor produces a bottle of McAnguish’s Caledonian Panacea, the rarest brand of whisky in the world (probably in the universe).
Then they spot a man pushing a bicycle up the hill towards them, a man dressed as Sherlock Holmes. (He has a good reason for that.)
This little romp of a tale goes on to document our intrepid hero’s further adventures in the big city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Holland Hill
• Release date: Jul 8, 2015

Book preview

Spaceman No.3

Sent by God

incorporating opening chapters of the Sherlock Holmes case

The Mystery of the Missing Buddha

plus the mini-novella

A Little Adventure in the Land of Palindrome

STEAMROLLER

MEDIA

Steamroller Media

37 Daren Court

Carleton Road

London N7 0EN

England

Tel: [phone]

Copyright © George Holland Hill 2015

Author contact: [e-mail]

Spaceman No.3’s blog: WordsIntoOrbit.com

To Amey

Who knew about this book, but sadly had to leave before it was complete.

That landmark declaration by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1870s that ‘God is dead’ was the last straw for God. It was time to take a sabbatical. So he and his saintly entourage decamped to a distant solar system.

Now, in the 21st Century, God is keen to make a glorious comeback on Earth. But despite what some say, God is not omniscient. Would he be welcome?

Despatched to investigate is a reluctant fellow given a secondhand business suit, a bowler hat and an umbrella — and the new name of ‘Spaceman No.3’.

‘And while you’re over there, find out what those Buddhists are up to…’

Contents

Prologue

1 Halcyon Days

2 Enter Sherlock

3 Irish Philosophical Society

4 Philosophers Flummoxed

5 Art Deco Splendour

6 One Last Limousine

7 More Art Deco Splendour

8 Jazz Corner Café

9 The Mystery of the Missing Buddha

10 Champagne and Whisky

11 ‘God Is Dead’

12 I’m a F****** Spaceman!

13 Sunny Soho

14 Dirty Dick’s Den

15 Making a Baby

16 The Land of Palindrome

17 Boat Business

18 How to Make a Helicopter

19 All At Sea!

About the Author

Endnotes

Prologue

In the early hours of a chilly night I was walking along Highgate Road in north London arm-in-arm with my lover, Joanna with the long brown hair. We were approaching Parliament Hill Fields, the south-eastern fringe of that extensive parkland area known as Hampstead Heath.

Earlier we had visited two pubs I had never been to before. One, The Vine, I wanted to see because the restaurant critic of The Times, Giles Coren, had noted in his column a while earlier, a propos of nothing, that the pool room to the rear of the premises had a sign on the wall that read: ‘Do Not Knock On Ceiling After Midnight’. Quite a unique admonition, I had thought at the time, and it had stuck in my mind ever since.

But we soon discovered that both the pool table and its associated sign had been swept away by the area’s incoming tide of gentrification and young middle-class cool.

The second port of call was another nearby hostelry that had also recently been modernised but had at least retained its old-fashioned open log fire. I knew this because the London edition of Time Out magazine had run a feature that winter for shivering imbibers on pubs that featured ‘real fires’.

As we approached this second public house, prior to entering to appraise its acclaimed mode of heat convection, conduction and radiation, I noted another one-off sign. Directly onto the brickwork, high up on a side of the building, were painted in large cream capitals just three words, one above the other in a vertical catechism:

CIDER

ALE

MEAT

Of course, everyone has seen signs outside pubs proclaiming the freshness or variety of the victuals available inside, but never previously had I come across one that made its point quite so bluntly: MEAT.

It seemed safe to presume that the clientele would be predominantly ale-swigging carnivorous males. How wrong can you be? We entered to be confronted by a cacophonous gaggle of swaying girls, giggling gaily, some with arms around each other’s shoulders in a bid to maintain verticality. They had clearly elected to forgo the available viands in preference to the cider and ale. We two did the same, feeling that close to midnight was not an appropriate time to tackle a slab of meat.

My companion opted for the first category of beverage — unwisely, in my opinion. Cider is a drink that is refreshing to the palate but has minimal impact upon the central nervous system — initially. Cider is rather like a boxer: it spends a long time doing its ducking and diving, then takes you by surprise with a sudden sledgehammer hit to the head.

For myself I went for the second of the options, ale, while closely monitoring my consumption so as to optimise levels of physical vitality, mental acuity and lead in pencil, with a view to those levels peaking approximately one hour after draining the last drop from my glass. (A calculation of critical importance to a man such as myself, slightly beyond the prime of life, when dallying with a female as fit as a trapeze artist.)

By the time our session drew to a close an hour or so later, I realised I had seriously miscalculated. To be blunt, I was as pissed as a parrot. While Joanna, on the contrary, appeared to be ‘coming into her own’, as the expression goes. Her spirits and passion were arcing towards a dizzy zenith that I realised we would not reach in tandem.

As we left the premises, in a bid to cool her ardour (how superannuation can so cruelly reverse the male/female roles!) I broke off an ardent osculation with the words, ‘Be careful! You’ll dislodge my plastic teeth.’

She was aged about thirty-five and I was old enough to be her father. That didn’t bother me. If it bothered her she failed to mention it.

‘How many plastic ones have you got?’ she cruelly enquired.

‘Two.’

‘So have I,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Breasts! Plastic surgery. Though no one’s complained that they feel like plastic!’

‘Plastic surgery does not involve plastic,’ I declaimed pedantically. ‘But that’s about as much as I know about science and medicine.’

After half a mile or so of ambling along Highgate Road arm in arm we took a path to the left, with a bowling green to the right and tennis courts to the left, that formed the start of Parliament Hill Fields. We then took a path that led abruptly upwards towards the summit of Parliament Hill. After a while I paused and knelt down to tie a shoelace, at the same time thinking, ‘This steep climb should perk me up a bit, clear my head, get me ready for what lies ahead.’

I resumed the vertical and Joanna linked arms with me again as we trudged together up the slope.

Then she said quietly, ‘When you were tying your shoelace I saw a man get into a flying saucer and take off from the top of the hill.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘And you weren’t even on the rough country cider, just the fizzy stuff. I had no idea it had such psychotropic properties. It must be all the chemicals.’

She said nothing, just shrugged her shoulders, and we tramped on silently up the ever-steeper incline.

When we reached the top, slightly breathless myself, we took in the impressive view of the twinkling lights of night-time London spread out before us.

Then Joanna walked a few steps away to pick up something she had spotted on the grass. A couple of sheets of paper had blown out of a brown manilla folder in the chill breeze. She replaced them and handed the thick folder to me saying, ‘What is it? I’d have to put my reading glasses on to see. Maybe the man from Mars dropped it.’

I glanced at one of the typewritten pages, but also couldn’t read it without my glasses, so pushed it back into the folder and tucked the folder under my arm. ‘Probably state secrets,’ I said. ‘Dropped by a government minister taking his dog for a walk. We can look at it when we get back to my place.’

‘I thought I saw the man drop something as he climbed the ladder into his flying saucer,’ she said.

Again I said nothing, gave her a quick kiss, and we carried on walking arm in arm.

As soon as we walked through the door of my ground floor flat and into the living-room we embraced, and I am pleased to report that my two front plastic teeth remained in situ. She then took off her winter coat, her pullover, her blouse and, with an arm skilfully tucked around her back, unhooked her bra and wriggled so it fell to the floor. Naked to the waist, and with a beaming smile on her face, she raised her arms straight up above her head and declared: ‘Plastic fantastic!’

‘Don’t look very plastic to me,’ I said with an admiring glance. ‘And if you had tasty little apples before — if that’s why you went under the knife — you’ve certainly got delicious-looking mangoes now. But the central heating goes off at midnight. No one wants frozen mangoes. Let’s duck down under the duck down of the duvet.’

She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and wandered off into the bedroom while I poured myself a good stiff one in the hope that it might help me maintain a good stiff one.

As I took off my jacket and dropped it onto an armchair I saw the brown folder there where I’d placed it as we walked in.

‘I’ve still got those typed pages you found,’ I called to her.

‘Great! Bring it all in here and read it to me,’ she called back. ‘A bedtime story.’

But by the time I’d got undressed, had a quick wash to refresh myself and entered the bedroom she was… fast asleep. I put the folder on a bedside cabinet.

• • •

The next day we awoke at the crack of noon. We both had plenty of metropolitan things we should have busied ourselves with but decided to do none of them. Instead we spent the day in bed.

At some point I remembered the folder she had found and reached out to get hold of it. I then spent much of the afternoon reading aloud to my expensively modified friend the unusual events that the typed manuscript described.

The following pages are what I read to her.

1  Halcyon Days

I was anxious, hurtling through space in a little bubble. It only became clear later that I was actually in some kind of spacecraft. It came with no frills or fripperies, few bells and whistles, and was a sort of ‘entry level’ of the flying saucer fleet. A kind of intergalactic Volkswagen Beetle.

I was God knows how many light years from home. Presuming, of course, that the distance between ‘me’ and ‘home’ was not just some kind of notion, a mental concept or construct, and was a space that could actually be measured in something as solid as light years.

‘Home’ was the planet Halcyon. Not the star Halcyon (or Alcyone) in the star cluster Pleiades[1], popularly known as The Seven Sisters. No, this was a different Halcyon, Halcyon the planet that orbits around the star Vega just as Earth orbits around its own star, the Sun.

Of course, coming from Halcyon sounds a bit romantic, even exotic; it lends inhabitants such as myself a certain cachet, a certain je ne sais quoi. And while away from home it affords me the opportunity to dramatically declaim from time to time, ‘Oh! Those Halcyon days!’ But we don’t call ourselves Halcyonites, we identify more with our star, or sun, Vega that gives us light and life. So we call ourselves Vegans.

But it was while visiting the Pleiades that I got sort of ‘kidnapped’ or ‘hijacked’. Just on a whim I had decided to take a look (a full spectrum look — no half measures!) at the scene around this other Halcyon (or Alcyone), the star Halcyon. A ‘flying visit’ you might say.

Most of what I saw orbiting Halcyon I didn’t like it, I won’t bore you with why. But I spotted a telluric planet, and I have a soft spot for telluric planets. Well, I come from one myself so it’s only natural I suppose.

Anyway, I zoomed in to check it out. Where I landed there was a great crowd clamouring to get into a big gated area, so I thought there must be something good worth getting in for. But I wasn’t allowed in. It was a sort of ‘gated community’ and ‘No.2’ as they called him, the man in charge on the gate, just refused to let me in.

This was when my troubles started. I’d been about to leave quietly when No.2 (his real name was Peter, I learned later) seemed to change his mind and stopped me. He told me he’d had an idea, and that I should wait by the entrance for a while, that he’d be back soon. So, politely, I waited.

As I say, it was very busy, with lots of people clamouring to get in through these large decorative metal gates. Many of them had already been told that they weren’t allowed in, that they had to go elsewhere. It was clear that they were far from happy about that and were very reluctant to leave.

Anyway, eventually No.2 came back, unlocked the gate, and beckoned me inside. He led me towards a large stone-built structure with wide steps leading up to a façade of tall columns. I followed him through a massive door and we crossed a wide marble-floored hallway to a small side room.

He wasted no time in getting to the point. It was explained to me that they (whoever ‘they’ were) wanted me to check out what was happening these days on a planet called Earth. Apparently No.2’s boss, referred to only as ‘No.1’, had left that place in a hurry some time previously after being accused of being ‘dead’ (socially?) and no longer welcome.

I didn’t like the idea of becoming some sort of spy-cum-messenger boy. No, I’ll go quietly, I told No.2, just leave me in peace to get on with my lives. But No.2 was very persuasive. He told me it would be ‘a great adventure’. He told me a lot of things. Some sounded quite unbelievable (and probably were). But the upshot of it all was that, eventually, I acquiesced. But only on condition that I could leave the planet immediately if I didn’t like the look of it.

Once I had agreed, however reluctantly, there was then no messing around: I was immediately taken to a ‘training area’, a sort of limbo where I didn’t get to meet any of the regular inhabitants. I certainly didn’t get to meet No.1. But then I didn’t particularly want to, with his nostalgia for some distant place in his past.

But to return to the present. Here I am, hurtling through space. I am not convinced that I have made the right choice, to set off on this ‘great adventure’. (I’m supposed to write down all these thoughts later in a report for No.1, but the thoughts are already turning into something more like a diary or journal rather than an official report.)

I’m nervous. Very nervous. But who wouldn’t be nervous? All on your own in some kind of bubble, hurtling towards a planet that in terms of evolution had barely got going, and sounded downright dangerous.

And the journey seemed to be taking an absolute kalpa.[2]

From what I remembered from my brief training (I didn’t remember a lot, but that’s possibly quasi-reincarnation for you, your memory goes), Earth was a planetary body where members of the dominant species, Homo sapiens, were so mentally under-developed that they routinely massacred millions of members of their own species. And this was frequently for the barely believable ‘reason’ that one group disagreed with another group!

So what might they do to me, Spaceman No.3, if they knew I had come to spy on them and report back to No.1?

Apparently someone (sort of ‘kidnapped’ like me?) had been sent a short while earlier to one of the planet’s major conurbations and had nearly been blown to smithereens (where did that word come from?!) when craft above the city started dropping explosive devices. He left in a hurry. Apparently all he brought back was what he was wearing or carrying at the time: a business suit, a shirt and tie, some shoes — and a bowler hat and an umbrella!

He had been advised to infiltrate human society by obtaining work in the city’s financial district (his forte was forensic mathematics) and had been told that particularly the strange hat and the black umbrella were items of great symbolic significance and would ease access to that particular stratum of society. But as I say, he left in a hurry before those plans got off the ground.

The next person sent there came back with just an Olivetti portable typewriter, swearing the place was ‘Hell’ and that he was glad to escape with at least one of his lives.

Another cause for my current anxiety was that I’d been warned of my imminent transmogrification: my pleasantly ethereal self was about to be wrapped in physical form, in a physical body, something I had not had for yonks[3] as they say in the British vernacular. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a body that required regular servicing, such as eating, drinking, washing, etc. It all sounded pretty tedious.

At the time, speeding through space, I was still in my ‘normal’ state: nebulous electro-magnetic field with spiritual underpinning. You get the picture? Then suddenly one of No.1’s plethora of personal assistants informed me telepathically that I would shortly ‘assume a body’. Assume? Why euphemise? There was no assuming about it; I would soon have a body, even appear to be a body.

‘The spirit will be clothed in flesh,’ as No.2 had put it so eloquently as I metaphorically shook hands (we had no hands) with him prior to my departure.

Having a body would be so restrictive, so clumsy. I couldn’t recall what having one was like, if indeed I had ever had one before, though I had been assured that I had. But it did sound pretty restrictive. Tedious. Boring

So I just stood there and waited — or would have stood if I’d had any legs and feet. And I waited and waited, in this bubble speeding through space, waited for what seemed like an eternity[4]. Then I felt a slight tingling sensation. And that is precisely what it was: a sensation. The hovering, colourless cloud that was me was assuming a body. I began to feel quite excited. In fact, in more than one sense of the word, it really was sensational.

After a moment or two I was able to see, with my two brand new eyeballs, a pale chest and belly which sprouted various appendages: two arms, two legs, with smaller appendages, hands, feet, fingers and toes, added on apparently as little decorative flourishes. There was also a little dangling appendage near my middle. No doubt I’d soon recall what it was for.

And the sort of ‘bubble’ that I had been vaguely aware of being within, I could now see that it had a solid shape: I was in a circular room with a ceiling the curved slightly upwards towards the centre, and there was a flat metal floor.

But this physical ‘me’ that had just manifested was floating in mid-air. I felt a bit stupid and helpless. Then the voice in my head (so that’s where it was, now I physically had one) told me that gravity was about to kick in. I began to float down gently, feet first, towards the silvery metal floor.

‘Now get dressed,’ said the voice in my head in a peremptory fashion that I found rather brusque and offensive. And then I realised that the voice was no longer just in my head, it seemed to be coming from all around me, though no other being was visible.

‘Clothes you will find in one of two small leather suitcases in a cupboard storage area beneath the central control console,’ the voice told me. ‘Once you are dressed, in the other case you will find the booklet Life: A User’s Manual[5]. Read it.’

The voice added optimistically, as a kind of afterthought, ‘Good luck!’ And then, with unequivocal finality: ‘Goodbye!’

And that was it. I was on my own now.

The craft I was in was clearly what was popularly known in the English language as ‘a flying saucer’. As the name indicates, it was more or less saucer-shaped. Or rather like two saucers, one placed on top of the other, with the upper one inverted. Get the picture?

I walked, naked, to this central console and, kneeling down, opened the double doors of a cupboard built in beneath it to find two battered brown suitcases. They had presumably been brought back from Earth by a previous visitor (and no doubt loaded at the time with all the usual kitsch souvenirs of an interplanetary flight).

The suitcases had labels attached to their handles with string, one inscribed with the single word ‘Clothes’, the other one ‘Kit’. The Clothes case was not zipped all the way around as protruding from it was the curved wooden handle of what revealed itself to be a rolled up black umbrella.

I dressed myself from the case’s contents, eventually finding myself standing in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and after some trial and error managed to tie a half decent knot in a matching dark blue tie. On my feet I installed the pair of good quality black brogue shoes. I placed the rolled umbrella and the bowler hat on top of the control panel among the switches and dials.

I had no mirror with which to assess my sartorial elegance or otherwise, but felt confident that I looked fairly stylish or, as a future friend on Earth would later phrase it, ‘the dog’s bollocks’.

Next I opened the ‘Kit’ suitcase. Inside was a leather bag with handles plus the previously mentioned booklet, Life: A User’s Manual. It was the kind of instruction booklet that would come with a fridge or TV set on my new ‘home’ planet.

Well, I’ve got ‘a life’ now, I mused with a smile. Better study the instructions to find out what I’m supposed to do with it!

I turned to the first page:

WELCOME TO PLANET EARTH

Before any explication of the multifarious intricacies of Life on Earth, it is necessary first of all to deal with the basics.

You must ‘eat’ food and ‘drink’ liquids at regular intervals during the day. Both substances to be inserted into body via semi-elastic orifice on