Anxiety prickled my skin. The kind of anxiety you could only feel on this planet. The anxiety that came from the fact that the only beings who knew who I was were a long way away. They were as far away as it was possible to be.
‘Professor Andrew Martin,’ said one of the men, leaning back in his chair. ‘We’ve done a bit of research. We googled you. You’re quite a big fish in academic circles.’
The man stuck out his bottom lip, and displayed the palms of his hands. He wanted me to say something. What would they plan on doing to me if I didn’t? What could they have done?
I had little idea what ‘googling’ me meant, but whatever it was I couldn’t say I had felt it. I didn’t really understand what being a ‘big fish in academic circles’ meant either though I must say it was a kind of relief – given the dimensions of the room – to realise they knew what a circle was.
I nodded my head, still a little uneasy about speaking. It involved too much concentration and co-ordination.
Then the other one spoke. I switched my gaze to his face. The key difference between them, I suppose, was in the lines of hair above their eyes. This one kept his eyebrows permanently raised, causing the skin of his forehead to wrinkle.
‘What have you got to tell us?’
I thought long and hard. It was time to speak. ‘I am the most intelligent human on the planet. I am a mathematical genius. I have made important contributions to many branches of mathematics, such as group theory, number theory and geometry. My name is Professor Andrew Martin.’
They gave each other a look, and released a brief air chuckle out of their noses.
‘Are you thinking this is funny?’ the first one said, aggressively. ‘Committing a public order offence? Does that amuse you? Yeah?’
‘No. I was just telling you who I am.’
‘We’ve established that,’ the officer said, who kept his eyebrows low and close, like doona-birds in mating season. ‘The last bit anyway. What we haven’t established is: what were you doing walking around without your clothes on at half past eight in the morning?’
‘I am a professor at Cambridge University. I am married to Isobel Martin. I have a son, Gulliver. I would very much like to see them, please. Just let me see them.’
They looked at their papers. ‘Yes,’ the first one said. ‘We see you are a teaching fellow at Fitzwilliam College. But that doesn’t explain why you were walking naked around the grounds of Corpus Christi College. You are either off your head or a danger to society, or both.’
‘I do not like wearing clothes,’ I said, with quite delicate precision. ‘They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals.’ And then, remembering all I had learnt from Cosmopolitan magazine I leant in towards them and added what I thought would be the clincher. ‘They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving tantric full-body orgasm.’
It was then they made a decision, and the decision was to submit me to a psychiatric test. This essentially meant going to another rectilinear room to have to face looking at another human with another protruding nose. This human was female. She was called Priti, which was pronounced ‘pretty’ and means pretty. Unfortunate, given that she was human and, by her very nature, vomit-provoking.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I would like to start by asking you something very simple. I’m wondering if you’ve been under any pressure recently?’
I was confused. What kind of pressure was she talking about? Atmospheric? Gravitational? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A lot. Everywhere, there is some kind of pressure.’
It seemed like the right answer.
Coffee
She told me she had been talking to the university. This, alone, made little sense. How, for instance, was that done? But then she told me this: ‘They tell me you’ve been working long hours, even by the standards of your peers. They seem very upset about the whole thing. But they are worried about you. As is your wife.’
‘My wife?’
I knew I had one, and I knew her name, but I didn’t really understand what it actually meant to have a wife. Marriage was a truly alien concept. There probably weren’t enough magazines on the planet for me to ever understand it. She explained. I was even more confused. Marriage was a ‘loving union’ which meant two people who loved each other stayed together for ever. But that seemed to suggest that love was quite a weak force and needed marriage to bolster it. Also, the union could be broken with something called ‘divorce’, which meant there was – as far as I could see – very little point to it, in logical terms. But then, I had no real idea what ‘love’ was, even though it had been one of the most frequently used words in the magazine I’d read. It remained a mystery. And so I asked her to explain that too, and by this point I was bewildered, overdosing on all this bad logic. It sounded like delusion.
‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
So the coffee came and I tasted it – a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid – and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette – apparently, I was meant to swallow it.
‘What the—’ She stood up and patted herself dry, showing intense concern for her shirt. After that there were more questions. Impossible stuff like, what was my address? What did I do in my spare time, to relax?
Of course, I could have fooled her. Her mind was so soft and malleable and its neutral oscillations were so obviously weak that even with my as then still limited command of the language I could have told her I was perfectly fine, and that it was none of her business, and could she please leave me alone. I had already worked out the rhythm and the optimal frequency I would have needed. But I didn’t.
Do not escape prematurely. Do not panic. There will be time.
The truth is, I was quite terrified. My heart had begun racing for no obvious reason. My palms were sweating. Something about the room, and its proportions, coupled with so much contact with this irrational species, was setting me off. Everything here was a test.
If you failed one test, there was a test to see why. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.
Ha!
Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers. And by the end of the last failed test many were sat, as I was soon sat, in a mental hospital, swallowing a mind-blanking pill called diazepam, and placed in another empty room full of right angles. Only this time, I was also inhaling the distressing scent of the hydrogen chloride they used to annihilate bacteria.
My task was going to be easy, I decided, in that room. The meat of it, I mean. And the reason it was going to be easy was that I had the same sense of indifference towards them as they had towards single-celled organisms. I could wipe a few of them out, no problem, and for a greater cause than hygiene. But what I didn’t realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.
Mad people
Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.
Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane