thing he could think of. “I shall have a beer, please.”
The barman looked at him with poorly concealed astonishment. “A beer, sir? You’d like a beer?”
Cabal’s heart sank. Why was it so damnably difficult to do anything around Mirkarvians without some ridiculous social more or another causing complications? He could try backpedalling, but that would seem even more suspicious. He decided to plough ahead and try for “mildly eccentric” in the barman’s eyes, rather than “highly dubious.”
“Yes. Beer. Why, don’t you have any?”
The barman leaned forward confidentially, reaching under the bar as he did so. If that hand comes up holding a gun, thought Cabal, I’m sunk. If he’s holding half a billiard cue, however, I’m in with a chance.
“I knew you weren’t stuck up, sir,” he said quietly. “Lot of the civils, they look down on beer. Not good enough for them. But you, sir, you’re all right.”
As the barman’s hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d watched the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, from the depths of the Pacific.
In the barman’s hand was the largest stein Cabal had ever seen. One could have drowned a sack full of kittens in it, and the drinker wouldn’t even know about it until he reached the dregs. The barman held the stein beneath a beer pump and started to fill it. This took quite a while. When he was finally done, he carefully placed the stein before Cabal, winked conspiratorially, said, “I’ll put it on your chit. Good health to you, sir!” and went back to his duties, whistling jauntily.
Cabal looked cautiously into the top. The beer, when he had excavated down through the dense, tan head of foam, with a pencil, he discovered to be as black as treacle and only slightly less viscous. He sucked experimentally at the droplets on the pencil and discovered the beer to be some form of porter, probably brewed from dark malts, fast-fermenting yeast, and slightly coagulated dragon’s blood. It seemed likely the dragon was very drunk when it died.
He noticed the barman looking at him, so he lifted the stein and took a good gulp, giving himself an undignified if manly foam moustache in the process. He wiped the moustache away with his handkerchief and nodded in a comradely way to the barman, who gave an answering nod and got back to his work. The gulp had barely touched the level of the beer. Cabal realised that he would have to engineer some way to be called away in order to avoid drinking it all. If he had to finish the whole stein, he would probably be drunk for two days, and heaven alone knew what he might say in his cups.
That said, it was actually a pleasant enough drink. It coated his throat all the way down in such an assured and thorough way that it felt as if it might last for some weeks. On the other hand, he had spent enough time in laboratories to know all about organic chemistry and, without resort to a hydrometer, he could still make a fairly accurate guess, from the faint scent of ethyl alcohol, that the beer had an alcoholic content somewhere in the region of ten per cent, possibly a few points more. Given the cavernous dimensions of the stein, this meant there was enough alcohol in it to burn down a mid-size bonded warehouse. Cabal was only an occasional drinker, and knew that he would be singing about goblins before he was even a quarter of his way through it.
He was just thinking of ways that he could abandon it without having his essential Mirkarvianness called into question when a small bag made of greaseproof paper and filled with strange brown shavings appeared under his nose.
Cabal looked sharply to his right to discover that the bag was being held by Bertram Harlmann. He was smiling widely, apparently of the opinion that Cabal should be glad to have a collection of strange brown shavings appear beneath his nose. “I know what you’re thinking,” said Harlmann.
Cabal was confident that, no, he didn’t.
Harlmann continued, “You’re thinking, That’s a lot of beer to drink with no solid sustenance to complement it. What I could really do with is a lovely bar snack. But what? Beer nuts? Beer nuts are a bit tired, aren’t they? Pretzels? You can choke on pretzels. Meat sticks? Bits always end up floating around your beer. No, no, no, no. You don’t want any of that old rubbish.”
Cabal said nothing, but watched him levelly, not even slightly agog to hear what new rubbish Harlmann was peddling.
“You want …” Harlmann nodded at the bag with an encouraging smile, and shook it temptingly.
“I’m not letting one of those anonymous … objects pass my lips without a full description and, ideally, an analytical chemist’s report,” said Cabal.
“Save yourself the trouble, sport,” said Harlmann, a man difficult to put off his stride. In contrast, Cabal had never been called “sport” in his life, and was inwardly reeling at such effrontery. “I can tell you exactly what you’re getting here. Zero carbohydrates, sixty per cent protein, thirty-two per cent fat, all of which is unsaturated, mostly oleic acid, which is good for you, and most of the rest is stearic acid, which is harmless. Bit of salt for flavour, but a little goes a long way. Go on! Try one!”
He still had misgivings, but the breakdown of the snack’s chemical composition sounded reassuring enough. In fact, it sounded vaguely familiar. He took one of the puffy brown shavings and chewed slowly on it. Actually, it wasn’t bad, and he said so.
“Y’see? Y’see?” Harlmann regarded the greaseproof paper bag as if it contained the philosopher’s stone. “The bar snack of the future, these little babies.”
“What, exactly, are they?” asked Cabal, taking another. He’d heard Harlmann use that phrase at the embarkation dinner — “the bar snack of the future” — but Cabal hadn’t been paying much attention on that occasion. What had Harlmann called them? Cabal suddenly remembered, and stopped chewing.
“Pork scratchings,” said Harlmann proudly.
“Pork scratchings,” echoed Cabal, his voice empty of expression. The name suggested that where there were pork scratchings there were pork itchings, and mental images of pigs with terrible skin diseases filled his mind. Had he just been chewing on hog scabs?
“It’s the skin, you see. Basically, cold crackling for the casual peckish market.”
“Pig skin,” said Cabal, starting to chew again. That didn’t sound so bad; after all, pork crackling and rinds were all part and parcel of eating pork. “What process do you use to get rid of the hairs?”
“Just burn them off. What do you think?”
“You may have to do something about the name, but that’s not bad at all, Herr Harlmann.”
“Thank you, Herr Meissner. I respect your opinion. Please, have the bag with my compliments.” He waited until Cabal had taken it from him, before saying in a casual tone, “You’re something in the government, aren’t you?”
So that was it. “A very minor cog in the great Mirkarvian machine, Herr Harlmann. Specifically, a docket clerk, first class in the Department of Administrative Coordination.”
If Harlmann was disappointed with the rank, he didn’t show it. The department, however, seemed grounds for optimism. “Administrative Coordination, eh? Why, that means you have contact with all other departments, including Military Logistics, doesn’t it?”
Cabal had no idea, but it seemed likely. “We have dealings with most other departments, that’s true. Why do you ask?”
“Those little wonders,” he answered, gesturing at the bag in Cabal’s hand. “High-energy food, gives you pep right when you need it! Perfect for troops on the march, eh?”
“It’s an interesting idea, certainly,” said Cabal, for whom war was already such a ludicrous idea that the addition of thousands of soldiers marching off to butcher one another while chewing on slightly salted deep-fried chunks of pig skin added not a jot of absurdity. “I could mention it to my superiors on my return.”
Harlmann smiled patiently and shook his head. “No, no, no, no, my boy. You’re getting this all wrong.” He sat on the next stool and then, to Cabal’s profound discomfort, put his arm around his shoulder. “Your bosses will just take all the credit. That’s not the way to do it at all. You have to present it as a fait accompli, with your name all over it. Look, you can get at the SCF, can’t you?”
Could he? Cabal tried to look noncommittal while working hard to guess what the “SCF” could possibly be. To buy himself some time, he attempted to turn the conversation around. “You seem to know a great deal about it, sir.”
“Well, of course I do. It’s my business. I’ll not lie to you, Herr Meissner. A government contract for my scratchings would be a great boon for my business, and … it could do you a lot of good, too.”
