TheBanyanTree: Mad sheep 4: the great pilithium heist

[Peter Macinnis]

Running out the door, Eric set out across the grass, heading down the 
slope for the cover of trees that surrounded a muddy pond.

"Don't go down there!" Myfanwy called. "Stay on the grass!"

"But I can lie low in there."

"No you can't. The fen is muddier than the sward."

He winced, and missed seeing the ghost of a smile on Myfanwy's face. 
"You can do as I say," she told him, "or I can do worse than that. Now 
get back to the jeep."

Myfanwy began barking directions at the others, and as he drove away, it 
crossed Eric's mind that 'sheep dog' might have more than one meaning. 
He was too busy driving to hold onto the idea, and the last traces of 
the thought were extinguished as they rounded a corner and saw a 
straight road with no side-streets, and a large expanse of water in 
front of them. There was a ramp for launching boats onto the river.

In the rear-view mirror that he suspected wouldn't be there in an 
authentic jeep, he saw flashing blue lights behind them. "We're 
trapped," he said, and swore several interesting oaths. Behind him, 
unseen, the red sheep called Hermione made some notes. It would be some 
time before Eric learned about Hermione's notes.

"No we're not," said Myfanwy, as she nosed a yellow button on the 
dashboard. There was a whining sound and the ride suddenly became a lot 
smoother. "Just go straight out onto the water, then turn left," she 
said. "I just engaged hovercraft mode."

Eric realised that this explained the smoother ride and needed no second 
telling. He went down the ramp and onto the water, followed by the 
police car which, unmodified, fell silent as its siren went under the 
water. "We have better sirens than that," said Dougal. "We call them the 
sirens of the rams."

Eric heard a shot behind him, and ignoring Dougal, he turned off the 
lights, swung the boat around to head down river and accelerated away 
into a darkness that was fast becoming day. He wished they had painted 
the jeep grey.

Now he had the feel of the hovercraft, he began to play with it, 
swinging the wheel left and right. "I wouldn't do that," said Bruce's 
voice from the back seat. "She's not too stable, this craft. If you 
don't have a full load of sheep in to work as ballast, she'll flip, easy 
as pie. Nearly happened to us once, in Budapest."

"When were you there?"

"Back in the 1980s, when we were taking Paul Erdös around his old places."

"Erdös? You knew Paul Erdös? I've got an Erdös number of 5!"

"Yeah, we knew that," Bruce said. "We looked you up before we chose you. 
Anyhow, he was laughing about needing to have his hovercraft full of 
eels, even though we looked just like we do now. A weird bloke, that 
one. Somebody said that if we flipped, then we'd have an empty vessel, 
and he came straight back with a comment about a juggernaut."

Concentrating on his driving, Eric muttered "I don't get it."

"Nor did we at first. Empty vessel, juggernaut. Play with it."

Eric recalled that Erdös was a one-man coffee construction machine, and 
that made him realise he wanted coffee, preferably a full jug of it. 
"Shouldn't we be getting off this river before they send a chopper after 
us?"


"Just round the next bend," said Myfanwy. "We go up a ramp on the left, 
change back to jeep, and there's a change of car in a barn, just waiting 
for us."

"So this was always the way you planned to come?"

"Of course!"

"Well you could have told me!"

"We didn't want you to worry."

Eric had learned from Priscilla the art of making one word serve where 
many might have been used, and now he put it into practice. "Right!" he 
said, realising even as he did that sheep probably didn't understand 
irony. He was right, and in time, he would realise they were weak on 
coppery as well.



-- 
Peter Macinnis, boutique word herder & science gossip,
stand-up chameleon and part-time lay-down misère:
http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/