The Red Planet

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of contact with another world, which turns out to be the weather.

Night. A hilltop, or the near-dry equivalent. A telescope made of two buckets and a hope. Rain holding off, suspiciously.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Red Planet; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, establishes that there is intelligent life upon the Griddle, and attempts to open diplomatic relations.

Interior. The kitchen. HORACE, feverish with discovery, a chart of smudges before him. MERCY unimpressed.

HORACE. Mercy. I have made a discovery that will shake the realm. You know the Griddle — the one dry place, the far high ground where it is said the rain has never once fallen?

MERCY. Everyone knows the Griddle, Horace. Nobody's been. That's rather the point of it.

HORACE. (triumphant) Precisely! Unreachable. Dry. Other. And last night, from the hill, I observed upon it — (dramatic) — lights. Moving lights. And where there are lights, Mercy, there is fire, and where there is fire, there is civilisation. There is life on the Griddle. Another world, another people, dry as gods — and I, Horace P. Dudgeon, shall be the first to make contact.

MERCY. (flat) It's a hill, Horace. A dry hill. The lights'll be somebody's lamp.

HORACE. (loftily) Nobody lives on the Griddle, Mercy. Therefore the lights are not somebody's lamp. Therefore they are the Griddle-folk. The logic is airtight.

Interior. The hilltop. BILLY holds the bucket-telescope. SOL has, inevitably, arrived to sell the expedition equipment. HORACE prepares to signal.

HORACE. Billy, the signalling apparatus. (BILLY hands him a polished pan-lid) We shall flash the light of our lantern off the lid, to the Griddle, in a pattern of peaceful greeting. If they are intelligent, they will flash back.

SOL. (comfortably) Signalling lids, polished, sixpence. Emergency second lid, in case first lid fails to summon aliens, also sixpence. And a Certificate of First Contact, blank, fill in the species, ready for framing.

HORACE. (flashing the lid earnestly at the dark hill) Flash... flash-flash... flash. (waits) Greetings, Griddle-folk. We come in peace. (flashes) ...Nothing. (flashes harder) We COME in PEACE, you dry devils, flash BACK —

SFX: across the dark, a light. Then another. HORACE gasps.

HORACE. (ecstatic) THERE! They answer! Contact! First Contact with the People of the Griddle! Billy, mark the hour! History —

SFX: the lights resolve into the bobbing of lanterns, and, faintly, grumbling voices and the clink of crockery.

BILLY. (peering through the buckets) ...I think it's people, Mr Dudgeon. With a hamper. They look cross.

Enter, up the hill, ASK VANCE, damp and dry-humoured, leading a bedraggled party.

VANCE. (flatly) Evening, Dudgeon. Would you kindly stop flashing a pan-lid in our eyes. We're trying to have a picnic.

HORACE. (reeling) A — a picnic? On the Griddle? But — the Griddle is unreachable — dry — other —

VANCE. It's dry, I'll give you. That's why we came up. Only dry ground for a picnic in the whole realm. (sourly) Every fine night, half of Drudgeford's up here with a hamper, because it's the one place your sandwich doesn't dissolve. The "lights" you've been signalling are the Widow Rush and the choir, trying to find the potted meat in the dark, and now half-blind from your lid.

HORACE. (hollow) ...So there is no — no ancient dry civilisation — no Griddle-folk —

VANCE. There's a choir, a hamper, and a very cross potted-meat situation. (beat, the realm's oldest wisdom) It turns out to be the weather, Dudgeon. It's a dry hill. People go where it's dry. That's not another world. That's just Tuesday, up the Griddle, with sandwiches.

Interior. The kitchen. MERCY. HORACE, subdued, the pan-lid on the table.

HORACE. (quietly) ...I made First Contact tonight, Mercy, with a choir and a hamper, and blinded the pair of them with a pan-lid, and there is no dry civilisation on the Griddle, only Drudgeford, having a picnic where the sandwiches keep.

MERCY. (mildly) It turns out to be the weather. It generally does.

HORACE. (a flicker) ...And yet. (rallying, thoughtful) Nobody has actually been to the very top, Mercy. The choir picnics on the near slope. What lies at the summit of the one place in the realm the rain never reaches — that remains —

MERCY. (firmly, but fond) — a Wondering for next year, Horace. Leave the Griddle its mystery. It's the one dry thing we've got and it does us more good unexplained. (beat) Give us the pan-lid. It's wanted for the pan.

HORACE. (handing it over, with dignity) ...The instrument of First Contact, returned to the frying of eggs. (sighs) There is a whole life in that sentence, Mercy, and I would rather not examine it.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented The Red Planet. There is no civilisation on the Griddle, only a choir, a hamper, and the realm's one dry hill, where the sandwiches keep. The summit remains unvisited, and, all agree, better so. It turned out, as it always turns out, to be the weather.

A distant, cross clink of crockery. The kettle. Slow fade.

— end —