14.
The Goliath Apologarium
Danish Car a “Deathtrap,” Claims Kainian
Minister
Robert Edsel, the Kainian minister of road safety,
hit out at Danish car manufacturer Volvo yesterday, claiming the
boxy and unsightly vehicle previously considered one of the safest
cars on the market to be the complete reverse—a death trap for
anyone stupid enough to buy one. “The Volvo fared very poorly in
the rocket-propelled grenade test,” claimed Mr. Edsel in a press
release yesterday, “and owners and their children risk permanent
spinal injury when dropped in the car from heights as low as sixty
feet.” Mr. Edsel continued to pour scorn on the pride of the Danish
motoring industry by revealing that the Volvo’s air filters offered
“scant protection” against pyroclastic flows, poisonous fumes and
other forms of common volcanic phenomena. “I would very much
recommend that anyone thinking of buying this poor Danish product
should think again,” said Mr. Edsel. When the Danish foreign
minister pointed out that Volvos were, in fact, Swedish, Mr. Edsel
accused the Danes of once again attempting to blame their neighbors
for their own manufacturing weaknesses.
Article in The Toad on Sunday, July 16,
1988
The Isle of Man had been an independent
corporate state within England since it was appropriated for the
greater fiscal good in 1963. The surrounding Irish Sea was heavily
mined to deter unwanted visitors and the skies above protected by
the most technologically advanced antiaircraft system known to man.
It had hospitals and schools, a university, its own fusion reactor
and also, leading from Douglas to the Kennedy Graviport in New
York, the world’s only privately run Gravitube. The Isle of Man was
home to almost two hundred thousand people who did nothing but
support, or support the support, of the one enterprise that
dominated the small island: the Goliath Corporation.
The old Manx town of Laxey was renamed
Goliathopolis and was now the Hong Kong of the British archipelago,
a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside towards
Snaefell. The largest of these skyscrapers rose higher even than
the mountain peak behind and could be seen glinting in the sunlight
all the way from Blackpool, weather permitting. In this building
was housed the inner sanctum of the whole vast multinational, the
cream of Goliath’s corporate engineers. An employee could spend a
lifetime on the island and never even get past the front desk. And
it was on the ground floor of this building, right at the heart of
the corporation, that I found the Goliath Apologarium.
I joined a small queue in front of a modern
glass-topped table where two happy, smiling Goliath employees were
giving out questionnaires and numbered tickets.
“Hello!” said the clerk, a youngish girl with a
lopsided smile. “Welcome to the Goliath Corporation’s Apology
Emporium. Sorry you had to wait. How can we help you?”
“The Goliath Corporation murdered my
husband.”
“How simply dreadful!” she responded in a lame and
insincere display of sympathy. “I’m so sorry to hear that.
Goliath, as part of our move to a faith-based corporate-management
system, is committed to reversing all the unpleasant matters we
might have previously been engaged in. You need to fill in this
form, and this form—and Section D of this one—and then take a seat.
We’ll get one of our highly trained apologists to see you just as
soon as they can.”
She handed me several long forms and a numbered
ticket, then indicated a door to one side. I opened the door of the
Apologarium and walked in. It was a large hall with
floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a serene view of the Irish Sea.
On one side was a row of perhaps twenty cubicles containing suited
apologists, all listening intently to what they were being told
with the same sad and contrite expression. On the other side were
rows upon rows of wooden seating that held eager and once bullied
citizens, anxiously clasping their numbered tickets and patiently
waiting their turn. I looked at my ticket. It was number 6,174. I
glanced up at the board, which told me that number 836 was now
being interviewed.
“Dear, sweet people!” said a voice through a
tannoy. “Goliath is deeply sorry for all the harm it might
inadvertently have caused you in the past. Here at the Goliath
Apologarium we are only too happy to assist in your problem, no
matter how small—”
“You!” I said to a man who was hobbling past me
towards the exit. “Has Goliath repented to your
satisfaction?”
“Well, they didn’t really need to,” he replied
blandly. “It was I who was at fault—in fact, I apologized
for wasting their valuable time!”
“What did they do?”
“They bathed my neighborhood with ionizing
radiation, then denied it for seventeen years, even after people’s
teeth fell out and I grew a third foot.”
“And you forgave them?”
“Of course. I can see now that it was a genuine
accident and the public has to accept equal risks if we are to have
abundant clean energy, limitless food and household
electrodefragmentizers.”
He was carrying a sheaf of papers, not the
application form that I had to fill out but leaflets on how to join
New Goliath. Not as a consumer but as a worshipper. I had
always been deeply distrustful of Goliath, but this whole
“repentance” thing smelt worse than anything I had so far
witnessed. I turned, tore up my numbered ticket and headed for the
exit.
“Miss Next!” called out a familiar voice. “I say,
Miss Next!”
A short man with pinched features and a rounded
head covered with the fuzz of an aggressively short crew cut was
facing me. He was wearing a dark suit and heavy gold jewelry and
was arguably the person I liked least—this was Jack Schitt, once
Goliath’s top advanced-weapons guru and ex-convict of “The Raven.”
This was the man who had tried to prolong the Crimean War so he
could make a fortune out of Goliath’s latest superweapon, the
Plasma Rifle.
Anger rose quickly within me. I turned Friday in
the other direction so as not to give his young mind any wrong
ideas about the use of violence and then grasped Schitt by the
throat. He took a step back, stumbled and collapsed beneath me with
a yelp. Sensing I had been in this position before, I released him
and placed my hand on the butt of my automatic, expecting to be
attacked by a host of Jack’s minders. But there was nothing. Just
sad citizens looking on sorrowfully.
“There is no one here to help me,” said Jack
Schitt, slowly getting to his feet. “I have been assaulted eight
times today—I count myself fortunate. Yesterday it was
twenty-three.”
I looked at him and noticed, for the first time,
that he had a black eye and a cut on his lip.
“No minders?” I echoed. “Why?”
“It is my absolution to face those I have bullied
and harangued in the past, Miss Next. When we last met, I was head
of Goliath’s Advanced Weapons Division and corporate laddernumber
329.” He sighed. “Now, thanks to your well-publicized denouncement
of the failings of our Plasma Rifle, the corporation decided to
demote me. I am an Apology Facilitation Operative Second Class,
laddernumber 12,398,219. The mighty has fallen, Miss Next.”
“On the contrary,” I replied, “you have merely been
moved to a level more fitting for your competence. It’s a shame.
You deserved much worse than this.”
His eyes twitched as he grew angry. The old Jack,
the homicidal one, returned for a moment. But the feelings were
short-lived, and his shoulders fell as he realized that without the
Goliath Security Service to back him up, his power over me was
minimal.
“Maybe you are right,” he said simply. “You will
not have to wait your turn, Miss Next. I will deal with your case
personally. Is this your son?” He bent down to look closer. “Cute
fellow, isn’t he?”
“Eiusmod tempor incididunt adipisicing elit,” said
Friday, glaring at Jack suspiciously.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘If you touch me, my mum will break your
nose.’ ”
Jack stood up quickly. “I see. Goliath and myself
offer a full, frank and unreserved apology.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Have it on account. Would you care
to come to my office?”
He beckoned me out the door, and we crossed a
courtyard with a large fountain in the middle, past a few suited
Goliath officials chattering in a corner, then through another
doorway and down a wide corridor full of clerks moving backwards
and forwards with folders tucked under their arms.
Jack opened a door, ushered me in, offered me a
chair and then sat himself. It was a miserable little office,
devoid of any decoration except a shabby Lola Vavoom calendar on
the wall and a dead plant in a pot. The only window looked out onto
a wall. He arranged some papers on his desk and spoke into the
intercom.
“Mr. Higgs, would you bring the Thursday Next file
in, please?”
He looked at me earnestly and set his head at a
slight angle, as though trying to affect some sort of apologetic
demeanor.
“None of us quite realized,” he began in the sort
of soft voice that undertakers use when attempting to persuade you
to buy the deluxe coffin, “just how appalling we had been until we
started asking people if they were at all unhappy with our
conduct.”
“Why don’t we cut the cr—” I looked at Friday, who
looked back at me. “Cut the . . . cut the . . . nonsense and
go straight to the place where you atone for your crimes.”
He sighed and stared at me for a moment, then said,
“Very well. What did we do wrong again?”
“You can’t remember?”
“I do lots of wrong things, Miss Next. You’ll
excuse me if I can’t remember details.”
“You eradicated my husband,” I said through gritted
teeth.
“Of course! And what was the name of the
eradicatee?”
“Landen,” I replied coldly. “Landen
Parke-Laine.”
At that moment a clerk arrived with a pile of
papers and laid them on his desk. Jack opened the file, which was
marked “Most Secret,” and leafed through them.
“The record shows that at the time you say your
husband was eradicated, your case officer was operative
Schitt-Hawse. It says here that he pressured you to release
operative Schitt—that’s me—from within the pages of ‘The Raven’ by
utilizing an unnamed ChronoGuard operative who volunteered
his services. It says that you complied but our promise was revoked
due to an unforeseen and commercially necessary overriding
blackmail-continuance situation.”
“You mean corporate greed, don’t you?”
“Don’t underestimate greed, Miss Next—it’s
commerce’s greatest motivating force. In this context it was
probably due to our plans to use the BookWorld to dump nuclear
waste and sell our extremely high-quality goods and services to
characters in fiction. You were then imprisoned in our most
inaccessible vault, from where you escaped, methodology
unknown.”
He closed the file.
“What this means, Miss Next, is that we kidnapped
you, tried to kill you, and then had you on our shoot-on-sight list
for over a year. You may be in line for a generous cash
settlement.”
“I don’t want cash, Jack. You had someone go back
in time to kill Landen. Now you can just get someone to go back
again and unkill him!”
Jack Schitt paused and drummed his fingers on the
table for a moment.
“That’s not how it works,” replied Schitt testily.
“The apology and restitution rules are very clear—for us to repent,
we must agree as to what we have done wrong, and there’s no mention
of any Goliath-led illegal-time-related jiggery-pokery in our
report. Since Goliath’s records are time-audited on a regular
basis, I think that proves conclusively that if there was
any timefoolery, it was instigated by the ChronoGuard—Goliath’s
chronological record is above reproach.”
I thumped the table with my fist, and Jack jumped.
Without his henchmen around him, he was a coward, and every time he
flinched, I grew stronger.
“This is complete and utter sh—” I looked at Friday
again. “Rubbish, Jack. Goliath and the ChronoGuard
eradicated my husband. You had the power to remove him—you can be
the ones that put him back.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Give me back my husband!”
The anger in Jack returned. He also rose and
pointed an accusing finger at me. “Have you even the
slightest idea how much it costs to bribe the ChronoGuard?
More money than we care to spend on the sort of miserable,
halfhearted forgiveness you can offer us. And another thing,
I—Excuse me.”
The phone had rung, and he picked it up, his eyes
flicking instantly to me as he listened.
“Yes, it is. . . . Yes, she is. . . . Yes, we do. .
. . Yes, I will.”
His eyes opened wide, and he stood up.
“This is indeed an honor, sir. . . . No, that would
not be a problem at all, sir. . . . Yes, I’m sure I can persuade
her about that, sir. . . . No, it’s what we all want. . . . And a
very good day to you, sir. Thank you.”
He put down the phone and fetched an empty
cardboard box from the cupboard with a renewed spring in his
step.
“Good news!” he exclaimed, taking some junk out of
his desk and placing it in the box. “The CEO of New Goliath has
taken a special interest in your case and will personally guarantee
the return of your husband.”
“I thought you said that timefoolery had nothing to
do with you?”
“Apparently I was misinformed. We would be very
happy to reactualize Libner.”
“Landen.”
“Right.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked suspiciously.
“No catch,” replied Jack, picking up his desk
nameplate and depositing it in the box along with the calendar. “We
just want you to forgive us and like us.”
“Like you?”
“Yes. Or pretend to anyway. Not so very hard, now,
is it? Just sign this Standard Forgiveness Release Form at the
bottom here, and we’ll reactualize your hubby. Simple, isn’t
it?”
I was still suspicious.
“I don’t believe you have any intention of getting
Landen back.”
“All right, then,” said Jack, taking some files out
of the filing cabinet and dumping them in his cardboard box, “don’t
sign and you’ll never know. As you say, Miss Next—we got rid of
him, so we can get him back.”
“You stiffed me once before, Jack. How do I know
you won’t do it again?”
Jack paused in his packing and looked slightly
apprehensive.
“Are you going to sign?”
“No.”
Jack sighed and started to take things back out of
the cardboard box and return them to their places.
“Well,” he muttered, “there goes my promotion. But
listen, whether you sign or not, you walk out of here a free woman.
New Goliath has no argument with you any longer. Besides, what do
you have to lose?”
“All I want,” I replied, “is to get my husband
back. I’m not signing anything.”
Jack took his nameplate out of the cardboard box
and put it back on his desk.
The phone rang again.
“Yes, sir. . . . No, she won’t, sir. . . . I tried
that, sir. . . . Very well, sir.”
He put the phone down and picked up his nameplate
again and hovered it over his box.
“That was the CEO. He wants to apologize to you
personally. Will you go?”
I paused. Seeing the head honcho of Goliath was an
almost unprecedented event for a non-Goliath official. If anyone
could get Landen back, it was him. “Okay.”
Jack smiled, dropped the nameplate in his box and
then hurriedly threw everything else back in.
“Well,” he said, “must dash—I’ve just been promoted
up three laddernumbers. Go to the main reception desk, and someone
will meet you. Don’t forget your Standard Forgiveness Release Form,
and if you could mention my name, I’d be really grateful.”
He handed me my unsigned forms as the door opened
and another Goliath operative walked in, also holding a cardboard
box full of possessions.
“What if I don’t get him back, Mr. Schitt?”
“Well,” he said, looking at his watch, “if you have
any grievances about the quality of our contrition, you had better
take it up with your appointed Goliath apologist. I don’t work here
anymore.”
And he smiled a supercilious smile, put on his hat
and was gone.
“Well!” said the new apologist as he walked around
the desk and started to arrange his possessions in the new office.
“Is there anything you’d like us to apologize for?”
“Your corporation,” I muttered.
“Fully, frankly and unreservedly,” replied the
apologist in the sincerest of tones.