Executive Decision

Meddlethwaite had tasted success. It mantled him with warmth and awe. The dammed thing worked!

Hurriedly he cast around for something to try in it. The ashtray! He pushed it into the transmitter and hit the go button. The computer tapes started hunting and the power indicators swung over as the ashtray disappeared in a burst of pale blue light to re-assemble instantaneously in the receiver receptacle at the other and of the room.

He was still staring at the ashtray when the woman came in. Small, dark-haired, she was not beautiful but possessed an indefinable presence that made her the envy of others.

"Evelyn", he said. "It works. Look, I've just transported the ashtray and that tea cup across the room." Meddlethwaite was excited. His face was flushed. "I wired in the fujitron chamber you brought this morning - and I couldn't resist it. I gave it a go - and look." He pointed dramatically to the receiver. "We'll be famous" he cried.

Evelyn smiled slowly, warmly. "I'm glad", she said.

"Is that all you can say", cried Meddlethwaite. "It's stupendous."

With a quick movement she brushed aside a strand of hair hanging over an eye. "Look" she said. "I have no time to waste. I want you to disconnect the transmitter portal from the transmitter itself and hook it up to that cable lying on the floor. Do it quickly", she said peremptorily, "and then come next door." The door swung closed behind her. Meddlethwaite was confused - and silent. The woman had been totally unaffected by success. She had worked like the devil and had finally come up with the answer to the problem. The machine worked - and she hadn't turned a hair.

Savagely he attacked the wiring and an hour later he had the new cable attached.

"Come here", she said as he entered the room next door. Meddlethwaite stopped in his tracks. She was adjusting a stainless steel cabinet and in an intuitive flash he recognised it for what it was - a transmitter - much bigger than the experimental model he had used next door.

Silently he approached the cabinet. "Get in", she commanded. "What the..." cried Meddlethwaite, far too late, as she pushed him suddenly into the cabinet - and the door clicked shut behind him.

Meddlethwaite was still screaming when the blue light enveloped him.

But he stopped when he felt his body slammed together and he looked out through the porthole at the grassy plain and the distant forest. He felt fine, except that he was frightened - more frightened than he had ever been. He fought to control his panic. The door would not open. And then he saw her.

It was Evelyn. She darted into his restricted field of vision. He blinked because she was clothed in a silver metallic overall. Her dark hair swung as she suddenly stopped, turned in her tracks and fired the thing she carried in her hand. The two horrible creatures chasing her, half man half ape, fell to the ground. Meddlethwaite heard nothing until she opened the door of the cabinet.

He stared at her wordless. "Come on out of there" she said carelessly. Meddlethwaite was overcome by a great sense of calmness. "Why should I?" he asked.

She stared back at him and started tugging at a zip on her coverall, "Because you've got work to do," she said, her eyes suddenly dancing. "The Galactic Executive have decided for a reason I really cannot discern that you, friend Adam, are the first of the Homo Saps."

PENNED BY BGP (Late 1950's or early 1960's)

One of my father's short stories, found among his papers after his untimely death in 1990. Click on the images below to see scans of the original typed pages:





Regards, MAlfaRK

SADF Insights : 1979 to 1981

In June 1981 I completed my two years of compulsory "National Service" in the South African Defense Force (SADF). I had been conscripted into the 7 SA Infantry Battalion and spent nine months in training (at Bourkes Luck and at Phalaborwa) and over a year in the South West African (Namibian) "operational area" commonly known as "The Border". For most of that time I was a "Grunt" - Rifleman 2, Section 2, Platoon 2, Alpha Company.

In April 2000 I found a piece of paper in the back of a drawer in my room at my mother's house in Pretoria. Nineteen years earlier, on a scrap of military stationery, I had scribbled down the insights I gained during my 24 months as an unwilling conscript in Apartheid's war machine. Interesting reading. What a waste:

• I have learned the meaning of love and respect, and how to hate.
• I have learned endurance and now know what I can take.
• I have learned the value of life and experienced the loss of death.
• I have been elated by true happiness and crushed by unyielding despair.
• I have learned to handle people and situations.
• I have seen the other side of life.
• I have learned to despise war and treasure peace.
• I have acquired some self discipline, but not army discipline.
• I now know that I must have freedom and am revolted by tyrannical oppression.
• I enjoy the tranquility of solitude and the excitement of a chosen group of friends.
• I have learned to never follow blindly and to reason carefully.
• I now know that nothing is impossible.
• I have discovered that true friendship is a scarce and valuable commodity.
• I despise the Racist Afrikaner for his contorted beliefs, his lack of culture, upbringing, etiquette and manners, his warped and twisted view of life and people, the way he resorts to violence when he knows he has not got a foot to stand on, for what he has done to me, my family and my freedom and finally for the way he is destroying this beautiful country. The Afrikaner's Apartheid-based nationalist political standpoint is deplorable.
  

With hindsight the fact that I was able to find any positive learning points at all is amazing to me. I suffered during those two years, but it appears that the glass was half full as opposed to being half empty. Yes. With my sweat, blood and tears.

MAlfaRK ©

Frank Black

I had always known Frank Black as the song writer and front man of the Pixies, the immediate forebearer of the alternative rock boom of the early 1990s. They folded in acrimonious circumstances in 1993.

Early in the new millennium I bought a Ferrari and drove from Prague to Germany to take ownership and to move it into short-term storage there. On my MP3 player I had a number of tracks that I had downloaded but not listened to. On the road, three tracks made an impression - Tenacious-D's "Tribute", Murder Dolls "Dead In Hollywood" and "Los Angeles" by Frank Black and the Catholics.



I drove back from Munich to Prague with Gerhard & Liana Schröder...and "Los Angeles" was playing as we went through a speed trap at high speed just inside the Czech border at Rosvadov. But that's another story! Since then I've delved deeper into Black's cryptic lyrics and unconventional subjects (eg. incest, collapsing dams, surrealism, Biblical violence, science fiction and surf culture) but have not had the opportunity to see him live. I was up to my ears in work when he toured passed through London on July 15, 2007, but here's his concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam two weeks earlier on July 4.



"Los Angeles" is the third track from the end. Also take a listen to the brilliant "Robert Onion" right after that. I hope you enjoy.

Cheers, MAlfaRK

Outercourse

Come with me to places of pleasure,
Value for money, measure for measure.

Treasured virginity the first frontier,
Having a great time, wish you were here.

Fear disappears as emotion increases,
Smiles all around, the friction that pleases.

Jesus saves all the souls that he can,
Out of the frying fire, into the pan.

Fan the fire of wild emotion,
Lust and passion, undying devotion.

Motion rhythmic the passion heightens,
Saccharin sensations so sweet that it frightens.

Lightens the dawn the shape so sensual,
The taste and the feel, you know it so well.

Swell the emotions physically erect,
Remnant juices, a sign of respect.

Reflect on performance we all seem to tend,
Slipping through afterglow, oblivious the end.


Musing on freedom in the context of the permissive society, the religion of free love and the joy of one-night-stand orgasms. I clearly remember writing this piece on the fly (and late at night) on July 8, 1992...fueled by red wine. I was visiting with Ulrike Cowan and her sister Kati in the commune in which Ulrike was living at the time. The house in Hatfield, Pretoria, South Africa has subsequently been demolished and replaced by a shopping mall. Such is progress. I polished the piece a little on October 12, 1992 and have not touched it since then.

Cheers MAlfaRK ©