He pulled back from me, affronted. “You really do think I’m simple, don’t you, Des? You think I’m a moron.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trying to get me to prostitute my divine gifts so that you can make money on the horses.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said, relieved by the confirmation that he really was simple. “I swear to you that I wouldn’t place a single penny on a horse. I’ve never suffered from the gambling fever, but others aren’t so fortunate. I’ve got a list of thousands upon thousands of poor wretches whose lives have been ruined because they fell into the clutches of the bookmakers. They’re destitute, Trev – but you can help them. You can be their salvation.”
“How?”
“Don’t you see? If we tip them the names of a few certain winners they can get their money back from the bloodsuckers. Can’t you see the beauty and the lightness of it? We can turn the bookmakers’ own weapons against them – make the punishment fit the crime. We might even put some of them out of business.”
“I like it,” Trev mused, a messianic glitter appearing in his blue orbs. “And you promise you won’t take personal advantage of my predictions?”
“Cross my heart!” I gave the list of runners back to him. “Do your stuff, Trev. Help me fight a holy war against the syndicates.”
“I’ll do it. And do you know what, Des? Next time I communicate with Betelgeuse I’m going to give you the full credit for coming up with this idea.”
“Virtue is its own reward,” I said modestly. “Now, what about this horse?”
He frowned at the list for a full minute, took a thoughtful pull at his bottle of Blissfizz, then shook his head and heaved himself to his feet. My fears that he was going to confess failure were dispelled when he opened a cupboard and took out an instrument I recognized as his UFO detector. This was a small telescope from which he had removed the object lens and in its place had jammed an old-fashioned radio tube. I had looked into it once out of curiosity and had seen nothing but an oily blur of light which split into concentric rings when I moved the telescope’s sections – a phenomenon which apparently was enough to convince Trev that he was peering into other planes of existence. He put the UFO detector to his eye, moved the other end of the instrument up and down my list a couple of times and gave a satisfied grunt.
“That’s it,” he stated confidently. “Number four. Realrock Isle.”
“Wonderful! We’re in business.” I brought Trev into my office and brandished in front of him the introductory letter from inside information inc., which was the name Wynter had dreamed up for our phoney tipster organization. As I had expected, Trev did not even bother to scan the lines of print. His aversion to reading had in the past led to some monumental goof-offs in the mailing service, but now it was proving useful. He was standing there with a look of dreamy fulfilment all over his peach-fuzzed countenance when I handed him a pen.
He stared down at it. “What’s this for?”
“I want you to sign the letter, Trev. It’s only right that you should get all the credit. You and the Supreme Nizam.”
“I’m beginning to think I misjudged you,” he said, taking the pen. “What about putting in the name of the horse?”
“Don’t worry – I’ll strip that in at the bottom before we go to press.”
Trev nodded, satisfied, poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth the way he always did when he was writing, and signed his name with a flourish. Trevor Q. Botley. I whisked the letter away from under his hand, led him to the door and told him he was free to return to his thought projector if he wanted to bring Betelgeuse up to date on all that had been happening. Unbelievably, he shook his head.
“I’d rather get to work,” he announced. “This is no time for sitting around. It’s a time for action.”
“Action?” A sense of unreality stole over me. “Are you feeling all right?”
“This is important work, Des – not one of your trivial money-grubbing commercial exercises. In a project like this you’ll find me zealous, industrious and untiring. You’ll see.”
Coming from anybody else those words would have been disquieting – I would have much preferred to carry out the mailing shot alone and unobserved – but in the case of Trev I was not unduly worried. When it comes to serious work he has an attention span of about three seconds and a lizard-like tendency to remain perfectly motionless for hours at a time. I led the way into the shop and got down to work immediately.
Up until around 1990 the reproducing of 400,000 copies of even a single-page letter would have been a task of considerable magnitude, but the advent of gamma ray multi-sheet printing changed all that. Simply by placing the master copy on a block of treated paper and giving it a short burst of non-divergent radiation I was able to print 5,000 good copies at a time. It took me fifteen minutes to prepare the first 100,000 copies of the letter, those bearing the name of the horse Trev had selected. I passed them over to him for feeding through the Mailomat IV, the lightning-fast robot which began printing each with a name and address from Wynter’s list, folding, sealing, franking and stacking them in well-secured bundles.
True to form, Trev fell into a near-cataleptic trance in the middle of the operation. That gave me ample opportunity to peel the name of his horse off the master, strip in another one and print a further 100,000 copies. At that point Trev, apparently deciding he had had enough of being zealous, industrious and untiring, ambled off to his office to have his customary lunch of a quart of Blissfizz and a bag of nauseating confections known as Coco-blobs. It was a full hour before he returned, and by then I had printed two more 100,000 lots with the names of the remaining horses and was running them through the Mailomat.
He blinked with surprise as he glanced around the shop and saw the stage the job had reached. “Say, you’ve really been going some.”
“A strange force seemed to be driving me onwards.”
“I’m proud of you, Des,” he said. “And I want you to know you’ll get your due reward for all this work.”
I gave him a suitably enigmatic smile.
There now had to be a three-day break in the proceedings, time in which to let the letters reach their destinations and be studied in 400,000 homes.
As there was nothing I could do until the chosen race at Hillston had been run, I worked hard for the rest of the day on routine contracts and that night – partly as a celebration, partly to relieve nervous stress – blitzed a couple of my favourite clubs with all the vigour of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun rolled into one. Next morning I woke up beside a sweet young thing called Kristine, who demonstrated her essential good nature by giving me a couple of Superseltzers and remaining silent while I dressed and tottered off to work.
I got to the office shortly after eight and was brewing coffee when, to my astonishment, Trev opened the door and rolled in with a news sheet tucked under his arm. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt on which he had painted the major stars of Orion. As usual the constellation was somewhat lacking in grandeur because the central part of it was lost in the fold beneath his squabby breasts, but his round face was more animated than I had ever seen it.
“Boy, you sure look a mess,” he said, inspecting me with a show of concern.
“Never mind how I look. What brought you in so early?”
Trev unfolded his paper. “I’ve been making my selection for today,” he said importantly, “and it’s Lightburn in the …”