A VERY WONDERFUL GAS

Wouldn't it be a really good idea if a kind of benevolent equality spread across the world?

Don’t you worry if a story begins with the words Once upon a time? I do.

Well, once upon a time on a planet far away in the deep empty black of space there lived a scientist who made many discoveries. And one of those discoveries was of a biological nature, though you must understand that his people and their biologies were very different from ours. You might even call them aliens, though, and this could be important, even aliens share some qualities that we look on as typically human. But enough of that.

The scientist (called anything I choose seeing as I don’t know the alien tongue, so I’ll call him Albert) made a fantastic discovery.

What he did was possibly a bit gruesome for the more sensitive souls who might chance upon this and accidentally read it, but he located the recently dead (the aliens did actually die, much like everything else in the enormity of the Universe that could be said to live must eventually die), and he opened up their heads.

Inside their heads they stored their brains, again very much like ourselves, which may or may not be looked upon as a spooky coincidence, and it was those brains that he was interested in. You see, the aliens had a perverse quality that troubled Albert. They were accumulative and a small number of them were overwhelmingly desirous of an unnecessary amount of wealth (yes, aliens have wealth too) and some of them, a minority of them but it must be said that the minority possessed just about all the wealth on the entire planet bar a few odd coins they accidentally dropped for the majority to swoop on and pick up. And this is what Albert thought was wrong, particularly as he was a very clever alien indeed, even though he himself was one of the poverty-struck majority.

His idea was this: his fellow aliens all lived on a lovely little planet, green and pleasant with a rose-pink sky, all had lives that commenced with a little bit of frenzied activity by their parents, often after a glass of this or that, and all terminated, at the end, in death. Does that sound in any way familiar? I suppose it’s very much the same wherever there is sentient life and consequently not special to human beings, about whom this story is not because it’s about aliens. Anyway, living cheek by jowl, as you might say, he thought that the very best thing to happen was for a kind of equality to spread out. Then the absurdly affluent would see they were needlessly rich, and share the excess amongst those who were dying of cold and hunger on the streets. It made sense to him,

But it couldn’t happen because of the instinct in their brains to accumulate as much wealth at whatever cost to their environment and friends and family as the accumulation of such wealth necessitated.

And Albert, being a clever scientist, decided to do something about it.

It was an absorbing task and it cost him a lot. His wife (yes, aliens have wives if they want them) didn’t approve of all the blood stains on his shirt collars and other items of otherwise pristine clothing, so she left him in a huff and went off to live with his brother-in-law from the other side of the planet on the banks of a lagoon where she lived in a state of greedy peace and harmony for the rest of her days, and died as a millionairess and dripping with gemstones at the still tender age of forty-three.

But he got there in the end.

He discovered a tiny knobbly bit of the alien brain that grew ever larger when its owner spied wealth, and the result of this growing larger was the need for the brain’s owner to accumulate that wealth for him or herself �" it wasn’t purely a male thing, though possession of a scrotum may have helped.

There was no way Albert’s idea of a better world would come about because of what he found when he dug deep into dead brains. Knobbly bits of this and that didn’t seem to mean much, but he looked deeper and wow! The knobbly bits of tissue, though small, were akin to cancers, but they didn’t terminate the lives of their hosts, but changed them from nice happy aliens to greedy grasping creatures, the sort best despised.

He cultured bits of the brain in Petrie dishes (the odd thing is that one piece of scientific apparatus was called by the same name on that far away planet as it is on Mother Earth) and he poked at it, analysed it, poured various chemicals onto it, watched it grow and shrink with huge fascination and noted one really, really interesting thing.

Expose it to a whiff of a particular gas and it shrunk before his very eyes as that gas combined with this and that inside it and caused it to virtually turn inside-out and almost (but not quite every time) vanish.

He loved his discovery and needed to test it. He needed to see if the knobbly little cellular structure inside a living brain also responded to a whiff of the particular gas. Because if it did he had his solution to the problem that irked him: how to put a stop to the greed that drove a minority to possess far more than their alien selves could ever hope to need, and at a huge cost to everyone else.

But where to do it?

Then a lightbulb exploded into being inside his own head and he knew the answer.

Over centuries the masses had been ruled by what was loosely called a Parliament. It had been set up to be a democratic arrangement where the masses supposedly chose its members, but the clever bit was they only chose the members that had already been selected from among the minority who owned everything (except a few low-value coins that they dropped carelessly as they pursued luxury lives on yachts and at banquets where they could dribble gravy to their heart’s content.)

And that selection of the wealthy great and good met in a great hall and might be looked at (or worshipped) by ordinary proles from a high gallery that was for Strangers. You see the cheek of it? The very name Strangers indicated their certainty of superiority. It was mind blowing! Such arrogance! It’s a good job it doesn’t happen here!

“I know,” thought Albert, “I will take myself to a seat in that gallery intended for Strangers and, unbeknown to anyone, release so much of my special gas that all will inhale copious quantities of it, and see what happens, though I must warn myself: if there are any in that place whose knobbly bit of brain has grown too large and dominates the rest, then the gas may kill them! And wouldn’t that be dreadful?”

“It would,” he told himself sadly. “But it would make an interesting experiment,” he added to himself, “quite virtuous.”

A week later he went to the big city and found his way to the gallery that was for Strangers, carrying secreted in his underpants (aliens wear underpants too, you’ll be happy to know) a little cylinder of his special gas.

Down below were ranged the Great and the Good.

The Head of the Hall was a female with a tendency to gurn*. Sitting near her was a bloated collection of aliens with gold and jewels and all sorts of worthy things, like high denomination bank notes, sticking out of their pockets. Opposite them was what was fondly referred to as the Opposition, which made sense, and it was their job to tell the high and mighty, the great and good, what they were doing wrong even though tradition suggested that they continue doing it anyway.

A debate raged below. The Head of the Hall was gurning really impressively and those opposite were shaking their heads in disbelief.

And Albert unscrewed the top of his flask of special gas.

Minutes passed while the arguments raged and the gas circulated.

Then he watched in sheer disbelief (well, almost disbelief) as the female gurner stopped gurning and dropped down dead mid-sentence. Others flopped back in their seats whilst a few, a very few, shook their heads, stood up, and crossed the floor to join those sitting opposite.

Albert knew then he had the solution to the woes of an entire alien planet, and boy, wasn’t he going to use it! Finally the wealth would be spread equally, the almost unbelievable greed of the few would be squashed, would disappear, and for a long age to come everyone would be deliriously happy. And all because Albert was such a clever alien.

© Peter Rogerson 04.12.17

*Gurn: to pull ridiculous facial expressions, either to offend of amuse.