“We used to call this neighborhood ‘Cautionary Valley’ in the old days,” said Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt to Constable Ashley. “Where vague threats of physical retribution for childhood misdemeanors came to violent fruition. Get out of bed, play with matches, refuse your soup or suck your thumb, and there was something under the bed to grab your ankles, spontaneous human combustion, accelerated starving or a double thumbectomy.” He sighed. “Of course, that was all a long time ago.”
It had been twenty-five years ago, to be exact. Jack had been only a mere subordinate in the Nursery Crime Division, which he now ran. Technically speaking, cautionary crime was “juvenilia” rather than “nursery,” but jurisdictional boundaries had blurred since the NCD’s inception in 1958 and their remit now included anything vaguely unexplainable. Sometimes Jack thought the NCD was just a mop that sponged up weird.
“Did you get any prosecutions back then?” asked Ashley, whose faint blue luminosity cast an eerie glow inside the parked car.
“We nicked a couple of ankle grabbers and took a chimney troll in for questioning, but the ringleader was always one giant stride ahead of us.”
“The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man?”
“Right. We could never prove he snipped off the thumbs of errant suck-a-thumbs, but every lead we had pointed toward him. We never got to even interview him—the attacks suddenly stopped, and he just vanished into the night.”
“Moved on?”
“I wish. Ever met a Cautionary Valley child?”
“No.”
Jack shook his head sadly. “Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We wanted to battle the Scissor-man and his cronies with everything the NCD could muster but were overruled by the local residents’ committee. They decided not to battle the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork but instead use them. They pursued a policy of ‘cautionary acquiescence’ by promulgating the stories and thus ensured that their children never had cause to accidentally invoke the cautionaries.”
“Did it work?”
“Of course. Believe me, once the hands really do grab your ankles when you get out of bed or the troll up the chimney does try to get you for not eating your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you. But they’re still here,” added Jack as he looked around, “waiting in the fabric of the neighborhood. In the stone, earth and wood. Under beds and in closets. They’ll reappear when someone is leaning back on their chair, being slovenly, not eating their soup or—worst of all—sucking their thumb.”
They fell into silence and looked around, but all was normal. The summer’s night was cool and clear and the streets empty and quiet. They had been parked on Compton Avenue for twenty-five minutes, and nothing had appeared remotely out of the ordinary.
Things at the Nursery Crime Division were looking better than they had for many years, Jack admitted to himself. The success of the Humpty Dumpty inquiry four months earlier had placed himself and the NCD firmly in people’s consciousness. While not perhaps up there among cutting-edge police detection such as murder, serious robbery or the ever-popular “cold cases,” they were certainly more important than traffic or the motorcycle-display team. There were plans to increase the funding from its ridiculously low level and add a permanent staff beyond himself, DS Mary Mary and Constable Ashley.
“What’s the time?”
Ashley glanced at his watch.
“10010 past 1011.”
Jack did a quick calculation. Eighteen minutes past eleven. It was binary, of course, Ashley’s mother tongue. He generously spoke it as ones and zeros for Jack’s benefit—full-speed binary sounds like torn linen and is totally unintelligible. Ashley had no problem with English or any of the other twenty-three principal languages on the planet; it was the decimal numbering system he couldn’t get his head around. He was a Rambosian, an alien visitor from a small planet eighteen light-years away who had arrived quite unexpectedly along with 127 others four years previously. Every single one of the 70 billion or so inhabitants of Rambosia were huge fans of Earth’s prodigious output of television drama and comedy, and Ashley had been part of a mission to discover why there had never been a third series of Fawlty Towers and to interview John Cleese. But when the mission got to see just how much filing and bureaucratic data management there was on the planet, all 128 elected to stay.
Ashley had been in uniform for two years as part of the Alien Equal Opportunities Program and had found himself, after much reshuffling, at the Nursery Crime Division, where he could do no serious harm. His real name was 1001111001000100111011100100, but that was tricky to remember and even harder to pronounce. Get the emphasis wrong on the seventh digit and it could mean “My prawns have asthma.” He was about five feet tall with slender arms and legs that bent both ways at the elbows and knees. His head was twice the width of his shoulders, with big eyes, a small mouth and no nose. The UFO fraternity had got an alien’s appearance pretty much right, which surprised them all no end. His police uniform had been especially tailored to fit his unique physique, with a special elasticized girth, as Rambosians had a tendency to swell and contract depending on atmospheric pressure.
“So,” continued Jack, “ten minutes to go. What stories do Rambosians use to terrify their children into behaving themselves, Ash?”
“Vertical stripes, mainly.”
“Why?”
Jack watched Ashley think. Due to the Rambosian physiology of a translucent outer membrane filled with a blend of gelatinous liquid, Jack really could see his mind working. “Amorous linguini” was how one unkind observer put it—but that wasn’t far wrong.
“It’s the linear uniformity in the vertical plane,” Ashley explained with a shiver, and turned a darker shade of blue. “We don’t much fancy bar codes, railings or pinstripe suits either. Mind you, horizontally we have no problem with any of them—which is why we like to wear our pinstripes perpendicular to the norm.”
“I always wondered about that,” replied Jack slowly. Conversation was never easy with Ashley. There really wasn’t much in common between humans and Rambosians—except for a passionate interest in order and bureaucracy. During his lunch hour, Ashley could often be found indulging in his hobby of “carspotting,” which is like trainspotting, only with cars. On the weekends Rambosians would cluster around one of the town’s many vehicle-number-recognition cameras, where they’d all get a bit tipsy reading the binary data stream. Other than that they lived their own lives and didn’t say very much. That was the thing about aliens that no one ever really expected. They’re a bit dull.