Eleven
‘Hell’s bells,’ said the Captain, ducking behind the desk. ‘It looks like a mysterious fog has been the villain all along!’ He jabbed his cutlass a bit pointlessly in the direction of the fog. ‘Which is a nuisance, because they’re notoriously difficult to fight, clouds of mysterious fog. On account of them being incorporeal and that. I have to say, if it was going to be something supernatural, I was hoping for a vampire, because they’re a doddle. Stakes, garlic, holy water, true faith, sunlight, fire . . . I’m not sure there’s anything that doesn’t kill a vampire.’
There was an ominous clanking sound from the depths of the billowing fog. Then a foot appeared, and then a leg. Then a big metal head. Eventually, an entire colossal mechanical man stepped forward, and they could now see that the fog wasn’t a supernatural miasma, but steam coming out of great big pipes stuck on the mechanical man’s back. He was so huge he had to bend down slightly just to fit through the door.
‘Aaaarrr,’ said the Captain, thinking fast and pulling Marx and Jennifer, who had momentarily frozen, dumbfounded, down behind the desk with him. ‘Don’t worry it’s not the first time I’ve encountered a mechanical man. The trick is to pose them an unsolvable logic puzzle. They can’t stand that sort of thing. Makes all the cogs in their metal brain get stuck, and then their head falls off.’
‘Do you know any logic puzzles?’ whispered Marx.
The Captain paused for a moment. ‘There’s a farmer with a boat. And he’s got a fox and a chicken and a sack of grain. Then some stuff happens which I forget. I think the answer is that the farmer has to make a nice pie out of them.’
‘Excuse me,’ boomed the gigantic mechanical man, with a polite metallic cough. ‘It’s just I know you’re hiding behind the desk, because I can see the peak of your pirate hat.’
The Captain sighed. ‘Damn my—’
‘Oh, don’t start all that again,’ said Jennifer, getting to her feet. Marx and the Pirate Captain reluctantly stood up as well.
‘Hello there,’ said the Pirate Captain for want of anything better to say. ‘I’m the Pirate Captain, the one from the newspapers. This is Jennifer, a lady. And this is Karl Marx. He’s the leader of the angry urban proletariat.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said the tin man. ‘We’ve met.’ His metal face couldn’t really convey expressions, but there was a frosty note to his metallic voice.
‘Really?’ said Marx. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but I’m terrible with names.’
The tin man struck a clumsy sort of pose, with his legs apart and his hands on his hips.
‘Soon everybody will know the name of Friedrich Nietzsche!’ he announced dramatically.
‘Oh dear,’ the Captain muttered to Marx. ‘In my experience, it’s never a good sign when they start talking about themselves in the third person.’ He turned to the mechanical man. ‘You know, boasting really isn’t a very attractive quality in a person.’
‘Little Fred Nietzsche?’ said Marx, looking the mechanical man up and down in surprise. ‘Goodness me, you’ve grown! And there’s something else. Have you changed your hair?’
‘No,’ said the big metal man, sounding a bit peeved. ‘I’ve built myself this fantastic metal body.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s probably it.’ Marx turned to Jennifer and the Pirate Captain. ‘Friedrich here used to hang around the intellectual salons. He wrote a sort of philosophy fanzine, which as I recall, was full of slightly creepy fan fiction about Spinoza having secret romantic trysts with Descartes. I’m afraid none of us took him very seriously.’
‘Well, I hope you’ve learnt an important lesson about not squashing young talent,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘Because this is what happens: years later you get menaced by colossal mechanical men. I think it’s what Buddhists call “coming back to bite you in the ass”.’ The Captain turned to Nietzsche. ‘So you’re a philosopher too?’
‘I certainly am,’ said the mechanical man, sounding very pleased with himself. ‘I’ve come up with a brand-new philosophy all of my own. It’s called “Fascism”. And it knocks Communism into a cocked hat.’28
‘I like your little town, by the way,’ said the Captain.
‘Thank you,’ said Nietzsche. ‘It’s a model of London as it will look once it has become my new capital city. You’ll see that I’ve replaced all the hospitals and schools with opera houses. And the buildings have been designed with tiny windows and lots of concrete, to encourage a general feeling of ennui and despair amongst the populace. Also, I’ve painted St Paul’s Cathedral jet black.’
‘That’s very clever how you’ve done the grass. Is that the same stuff they have in greengrocers?’
‘It is, yes,’ said Nietzsche.
‘Getting back to the point,’ frowned Jennifer, knowing that the Captain could go off on this tangent for some time. ‘Could we ask what all this is about?’
Nietzsche billowed a cloud of steam and looked into the middle distance. ‘It’s true, I was that poor boy snubbed by the uncaring intelligentsia. But I had what they call an epiphany.’
‘I had one of those once,’ said the Pirate Captain brightly. ‘It was about five years ago. A perfectly normal day. I was just there in my hammock, not getting up to much. And then, right out of the blue, I thought, What’s stopping me having ham for dinner as well as lunch? I haven’t looked back since.’
‘My epiphany was better,’ said the tin man a bit petulantly. ‘I realised that humanity is weak and stupid, like . . .’ The colossal tin Nietzsche paused, looking for the right comparison.
‘Like goats?’ suggested the Captain.
‘That’s it, like goats. And what goats need is someone to rule over them with a tin fist!’
Marx huffed. ‘Rubbish. Goats need socialised medicine and shorter working hours.’
‘Surely goats actually just need a goatherd to feed them goat food and keep wolves away?’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘And maybe one of those little bells so you know if it’s wandered off somewhere it shouldn’t.’
‘That’s only what a weak and stupid goat thinks it needs. Actually, goats need a strong leader who treats them with the contempt they deserve – a superman. An übermensch!’ He let out another big gout of steam and stomped his feet for effect. ‘And here I am, the first of those übermensch. Superior in every way!’29
‘What actual ways?’ asked Marx, puzzled.
The mechanical man looked stumped for a moment. ‘Oh, you know. All sorts. I’m better at making clanking sounds. I’m much shinier than I was before. And, um, my tin hide is able to withstand temperatures of 449.47 degrees Fahrenheit.’
‘Those hands look a bit clumsy, though.’
‘Yes, well, superior in every way, except picking up pencils, or tying shoelaces.’
‘And you’ve been making Dr Marx get the blame for drowning kittens and all that sort of thing so people would get so terrified of Communism they’d think they needed a big iron goatherd to protect them!’ fumed Jennifer. ‘It’s very rude.’
The colossal tin Nietzsche looked guiltily at where his fingernails would have been if he’d had fingernails. ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it. I needed a bogeyman, and you communists just happened to be about. It wasn’t really anything personal. It could just as easily have been single mothers, or immigrants, or something like that.’
‘Or a spider with a baby’s face!’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘That would have been pretty terrifying.’
‘Yes, that would have done very well,’ said the colossal tin Nietzsche.
‘It’s all been very inconvenient,’ said Marx, waggling an admonishing finger. ‘And I still don’t understand the whole business with stealing the waxwork crowned heads. Is it to play practical jokes? You know, leaving them in people’s beds and that sort of thing?’
‘That’s not the main reason,’ said Nietzsche, fighting back a tinny grin. He did his dramatic voice again. ‘For you see, soon every throne in Europe will be occupied by a waxwork!’
‘But then the crowned heads won’t have anywhere to sit,’ pointed out the Pirate Captain.
‘No, Pirate Captain. I intend to replace the actual crowned heads of Europe with my waxworks.’
‘I’m not sure they’ll be keen on the idea.’
‘I imagine not. But that’s academic, because at the unexpected climax of the opera tonight, a replica volcano will erupt, flooding the auditorium with magma and thereby boiling all the crowned heads into oblivion.’
Nietzsche rummaged about in his desk and held up a helpful visual aid.
‘You see? It’s real magma, you know, imported from Italy,’ he added proudly. ‘Very soon I shall control every nation in Europe, with my puppet governments spreading my philosophy far and wide, and me pulling the strings, like a huge gleaming puppeteer. I did think about making actual puppets, but in the end I decided the waxworks would be less bother. That’s the great thing about crowned heads – they don’t actually have to do anything, just stand around looking expensive, and nobody will realise anything is amiss.’
‘Well, it’s all very ingenious,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘But I’m afraid you’ve been forgetting your one terrible weakness!’ And with that the Pirate Captain triumphantly whipped out his ship’s compass. ‘Now what are you going to do? My magnetic compass will scramble your tin brain.’ He sprinted forward, clambered daringly up Nietzsche’s arm and pressed the compass against his metal forehead.30
The colossal tin Nietzsche hefted a weary sigh. ‘I’m not sure I know where to begin. For a start, your compass is tiny. And it doesn’t contain a magnet. Also, tin isn’t magnetic.’
‘Aarrrr,’ said the Pirate Captain, feeling a little ridiculous now, perched on the giant’s shoulder like a big version of Gary, the ship’s parrot. ‘So,’ he added, ‘there’s this farmer with a wolf and a chicken and—’ But before he could get any further a swat from Nietzsche’s big tin hand sent the Captain sailing through the air. Luckily, his fall was broken by the model city. And luckier still, he landed on Hyde Park rather than the Houses of Parliament or one of London’s pointier landmarks. There was a crunching sound, and the whole of London cracked down the middle and collapsed.
‘My model town!’ wailed Nietzsche, holding his hands up to his head in frustration. ‘Two years that took me to build. Two years!’ He bent his metal legs and kneeled on the floor. ‘You’ve ruined it, you clumsy oaf!’ A single drop of oil rolled from one of his eyes.
The Pirate Captain picked a few bits of Marble Arch out of his beard, fought back the urge to apologise, and whilst Nietzsche was preoccupied cradling the remains of Buckingham Palace, he, Marx and Jennifer bolted from the room. They charged down the stairs, with the Captain leading the way, but because he didn’t have time to consult the tattoos on his feet telling him which direction was left and which direction was right, they were pretty quickly lost in the opera’s maze of corridors. The trio paused, panting, as a steady clanking sound grew closer.
‘I think we’ve upset him,’ said Marx.
‘The Captain does rather seem to have that effect on people,’ said Jennifer.
‘Quickly! Through this door!’ said the Pirate Captain.
28 Philosophers don’t just war with words. In 1946 Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly chased Karl Popper round a Cambridge common room with a poker, in a dispute over whether there can be such a thing as a philosophical problem.
29 Nietzsche introduced the concept of the superman in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. DC Comics introduced the concept of ‘Krypto the Superdog’ in Adventure Comics #210 (1955). This is just one of the many reasons why Marvel are better than DC.
30 In September 2005 pirates attacked a vessel en route to Singapore that was carrying 660 tonnes of tin, worth $4.7 million. A month later the ship was found sunk, with the cargo still onboard, probably because the pirates realised tin makes for rubbish bendy cutlasses.