I’m a pompous theocratic fool

His eminence Grand Sheik Sayyed Tantawi of the al-Azhar in Cairo — the most respected religious authority in the Sunni Islamic world — won’t let go of the Muhammed caricatures. In an interview with Berlingske Tidende he now condemns their publication nearly a year ago as “one of the worst crimes ever,” and demands the following punishments:

* For the newspaper Jyllands-Posten: banning for several years.

* For its editor-in-chief: 1-3 years in prison.

* For its cultural editor, Flemming Rose: to be drawn as a pig.

No, I’m not making this up!

Memo to the Grand Sheik, his like-minded ulama, and their followers: the day you non-violently protest Israeli aggression with half the zeal which you have put into this farce, it will be possible to take you seriously again.

Times they are a-changing on the Hill:

And maybe all of you will finally realize one day that fried potatoes is a Belgian dish.

Headline: ‘Fuel may be running out but the falafel still flows’.

“It’s a war and that’s all those pervs can think about?” says Bill O’Reilly in a comment.

What’s wrong with this dude? I mean, seriously?

A flashback to April:

Now this:

Even if you can manage literally nothing else, just keep your fingers off the foreign leaders, George. Surely you can do it if you focus.

In a post on the underwhelming American command of world geography, I mentioned that the US President does not seem to soar above the national average. Thanks to an open mike in St. Petersburg, we now have proof:

Strains credulity that this bumbling imbecile is the brightest the USA is able to produce. Strains credulity that this bumbling imbecile is the brightest the USA is able to produce. Strains credulity. Russia’s big and so’s China and so’s the USA.

Crossposted from European Tribune, Booman Tribune, and My Left Wing.

[Throws down blogpost printouts which he has been reading. Excitedly combs his steel wool-like hair with his fingers; pounds the table with his fists; lets off brisk volleys of unsanctified language at brief intervals, repentantly drooping his head, between volleys, and kissing the Vladimir Putin crucifix hanging from his neck, accompanying the kisses with mumbled apologies; presently rises, flushed and perspiring, and walks the floor, gesticulating]

—- —-!! —- —-!! If I had them by the throat! [Hastily kisses the crucifix, and mumbles] In these three years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemispheres quiet, and still these leaks keep on occurring. I have spent other millions on democracy and human rights, and what do I get for it? Nothing. Not a compliment. These generosities are studily ignored, in print. In print I get nothing but slanders — and slanders again — and still slanders, and slanders on top of slanders! Grant them true, what of it? They are slanders all the same when uttered against a king.

Miscreants — they are telling everything! Oh, everything: how I went pilgriming among the Powers in tears, with my mouth full of Bible and my pelt oozing with piety at every pore, and implored them to place the vast and rich populous Iraqi State in trust in my hands as their agent, so that I might root out terrorism and stop the resistance, and lift up those twenty-five millions of gentle and harmless Muslims out of darkness into light, the light of our blessed Redeemer, the light that streams from his holy Word, the light that makes glorious our noble civilization — lift them up and dry their tears and fill their bruised hearts with joy and gratitude — lift them up and make them comprehend that they were no longer outcasts and forsaken, but our very brothers in Christ; how America and thirteen great states wept in sympathy with me, and were persuaded; how their representatives met in convention in New York and made me Head Foreman and Superintendent of the Iraqi State, and drafted my powers and limitations, carefully guarding the persons and liberties and properties of the natives against hurt and harm; forbidding oil contraband; providing courts of justice; making commerce free and fetterless to the merchants and traders of all nations, and welcoming and safe-guarding all mercenaries of all corporate affiliations. They have told how I planned and prepared my establishment and selected my horde of officials — “pals” and “pimps” of mine, “unspeakable Americans” every one — and hoisted my flag, and “took in” a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and got him to be the first to recognize it and salute it. Oh, well, let them blackguard me if they like; it is a deep satisfaction to me to remember that I was a shade too smart for that nation that thinks itself so smart. Yes, I certainly did BushCo a Brit — as those people phrase it. Pirate flag? Let them call it so — perhaps it is. All the same, they were the first to salute it.

These meddlesome American aid workers! these frank British reporters! these blabbingblabbing French-born traitor UN officials! — those tiresome parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for three years I have ruled the Iraqi State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over an oil-rich domain as large as Texas — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the New York-made Iraq resolution under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are old friends of my Royal Father and of my Vice-Roi; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the oil, the gas and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by Halliburton.

These pests! — it is as I say, they have kept back nothing! They have revealed these and yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about, since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage and immune from reproach, by right of his selection and appointment to his great office by God himself; a king whose acts cannot be criticized without blasphemy, since God has observed them from the beginning and has manifested no dissatisfaction with them, nor shown disapproval of them, nor hampered nor interrupted them in any way. By this sign I recognize his approval of what I have done; his cordial and glad approval, I am sure I may say.

Blest, crowned, beatified with this great reward, this golden reward, this unspeakably precious reward, why should I care for men’s cursings and revilings of me?

A tip of the hat to readers who have identified the model.

Digby posts this photo of a cat — yes, a cat — chasing a bear up a tree:

Let the bear be the US, the cat be Osama bin Laden, and the tree be Iraq. Voilá, you have the story of the last five years.

Squaak! Zarqawi wants a bisquit!

Marwaan said: “We asked `Abdullaah Ibn Mas’ood, may Allaah be pleased with him, about the following verse: (which translates as): “And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allaah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision.” (Aal-`Imraan: 169).’ He, may Allaah be pleased with him, replied: “We asked the Prophet sallallaahu `alaihi wa sallam about this verse and he replied: “Their (i.e., the martyrs’ souls) will live inside green birds that dwell in designated lamps which hang on the throne of Allaah, they will roam freely in Paradise as they please, then return to these lamps”” (Muslim).

Osama Khayyaat: The Virtues of Martyrdom (1478).

As to the 72 delectable ‘virgins’, they turn out to be, well, white grapes.

Of course, this is the best-case scenario.

A characteristic example of Greenpeace integrity:

Rove should hire these types. Their minds work the same way as his — and differences of view have been settled before.

A cri du coeur from a despairing Freeper soul:

Sometimes — actually, often — you have to laugh.

There are those of us who feel The Onion has gone a little stale lately. But it might just as well be the Tom Lehrer effect: the actual news consistently outdoes any possible satire.

So, do you like chickenhawks?

Courtesy of Texas… *drum roll*… say hello to the chicken minutemen!

All hail Lordi, the winners of yesterday’s 2006 Eurovision Song Contest! Capturing the protest vote in the 51st europop kitschfest, the creatures from the vast Finnish forests rocked to sensational victory with their performance of the Alice Cooper-inspired “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” Their all-time record score ended a national trauma for Finland, whose strongest showing in the dreaded competition was heretofore a sixth spot in 1973.

Lordi — the burly lead vocalist whom the press has dubbed “the Bat out of Helsinki” — welcomes the uplifting lack of prejudice against those with fangs, horns, red eyes, and retractable wings. The other band members are Amen the Unstoppable Mummy, Enary the Manipulative Valkyrie, Kalma the Biker Zombie from Hell, and Kita the Alien Manbeast with the Combined Strengths of All the Beasts Known to Man.

Asked by a reporter if the band will ever take off the masks, Lordi replied: “What masks?”

Here is the music video for the winning entry, featuring a commendable turning of cheerleaders into zombies: Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Hyva Suomi — and long live the will to be different!

PS. Equally, if less deliberately, monstrous and entertaining is this Finnish 1980s music video with a dance routine suggesting the Heaven’s Gate sect doing aeorobics on LSD. A must-see!

In Salon, Garrison Keillor has a long overdue apology to make:

As well he should. Not even the cadres of the GOP are into hurting kitties.

The representative of 1.2 billion Chinese found himself manhandled on the White House lawn on Thursday by the so-called leader of the free world.

But that — and screaming protesters — were not the worst indignities Mr. Hu had to endure: in another protocol gaffe, China’s national anthem was announced as the anthem of “the Republic of China.”

This brings to mind a Norwegian official visit to China sometime around 1980, during which the PM, at the formal banquet, called a toast to the Republic of China. And so it was that a dining hall of Communist cadres were forced to drink to independent Taiwan.

I fondly think of that as an unintended high spot of Norwegian diplomacy.

From the blog of one of Britain’s better print journalists, Andrew Brown.

Astronomers have discovered a giant cloud of alcohol, spanning about 288 billion miles, in the W3(OH) area of the galaxy.

— It’s incumbent upon us to liberate our brothers in W3(OH) from fascism, says a well-known British writer in a comment.

It’s a story that is dead but won’t lie down. Egyptian Sandmonkey reports that the Syndicate of Egyptian Cartoonists now strikes back “as a response to those who fell under the thrall of racism, forgery and crime.”

The somewhat tardy riposte ran as a spread in Al Fagr — the newspaper which, as Sandmonkey revealed back in February, was the first outside Denmark to republish the doodles from Hell. Unsurprisingly, several of the counter-cartoons trot out the good ol’ Evil Joos:

Well, what to say? Classy.

Arthur Koestler’s neologism ‘mimophant’ clearly applies to the folks behind this: they combine the robustness of a mimosa with the delicate tact of an elephant. But in the same breath to cry up about racism is, I’m afraid, outright pathological.

One more thing, to both the hapless Danish draughtsmen (still with police protection, sadly) and these Egyptians: it is possible to be hard-hitting, elegant and witty all at once. Actually many cartoonists manage to, including my award-winning compatriot Finn Graff at Dagbladet. Here, for instance, is Graff on mandatory religious education in kindergartens:

On the mindset of Ayatollah Khomeini:

On neo-colonialism:

Just saying.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Following up this, I have translated another story by existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe — an animal fable from his 1941 masterpiece, On the Tragic. Here a bunch of castaway cats face a deep dilemma in trying to survive on a desert island. The fable is an image of the human condition, of which Zapffe took a pessimistic view.

Once upon a time there was a ship carrying cats, a lot of cats of all kinds, to a World Exhibition on Hawaii. Underway, the ship sunk ‘with men and mice’, the cats clinging to matresses and other strange things and drifting ashore on a desolate island. There was no life on this island except certain sprightly and irresistibly funny, but sadly inedible beetles, so at first sight they appeared all condemned to miserable death.

Then it was discovered that the soft clay along the beach brimmed with fat and delicious clamshells, easily opened with a claw or two. Thus arose for most a terrible dilemma. The only decent path was surely to leap like tigers for the beetles, the alternative being a foul activity to which no cat of the genus Felidae would descend. They represented the Cat as it had jumped forth from the mind of God, as one of them had learned by mom’s knee while a kitten at Mrs. Bloom’s, and the very thought of it abhorred them utterly.

But ‘cat, schmat’, as the madam also used to say, and sure enough, it was not long before the first ones dipped their paws and were followed by others, there being soon a veritable rush. Indeed they displayed such indifference to feline standards as to lie in the pleasantly sun-warmed mud merely gorging and breeding — their progeny slurping clams as soon as weaned. At fitting intervals they would raise their mudstained faces to squint at the snobs ashore; scorn and ridicule altered with a glowing hatred as the sight of land cats reminded them of their betrayal against the family’s precious heritage.

Optimism became a treasured way to dull their awareness of guilt and inferiority. Before long, they had to extend their defences; the land cats were called neurotics and psychotics — tricky words, but stimulating to the mud colony. Finally an analyst was sent up from the beach; he found resistance against recovery and diagnosed a fear of water. The plebeians were in triumph, but the others too were convinced by the explanation and acknowledged it, knowing well what the bottom line was.

By contrast, the cats of prey became pessimists. Not due to such burdens as the others gave weight to — lesions and starvation, choking and cold — but to finding themselves put into a world of poor terms for the sacred formula in their hearts. In recognition of this fact they instilled reproduction, the future appearing darker day by day.

Then prophets arose among them to teach the art of hope: Once upon a time we all came from a land where the objects of our noble pursuit could also be eaten and digested. Yet many were slothful, neglecting to exercise their nimbleness and strength, and that is why the ship went ashore. Now death awaits the faithful, but after death a new ship will come for the ones who did not fail. And then all those who lived in sin shall perish, and no ship shall come to deliver them.

But hunger tore their bowels, and they would whine in many keys and say: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in unsrer Brust!” Still some became traitors and went into vulgus and sated themselves, whilst others converted by the prophet’s word and went ashore and cleansed their pelt and prepared for their great departure. The proudest of them formed a fraternity, publically declaring it the duty of any honest cat to die before selling one’s soul for a dish of clams. And when the leader felt his powers waning, he laid down on a stub to die what humans call a tragic-heroic death. Many would revere him as a saint and follow his lead, as they could not bring themselves to useful resignation; those stayed faithful to the highest ideals of felinity, though they saw through the prophet’s consolation and fought despair in their hearts.

Yet a majority in both camps became slaves of eternal doubt, dividing their time between uneasy satedness and abstinence with devouring wants. It was of course a relief to be rid the aristocrats; but the new maxim of merging with the crabs proved unrealisable in the end.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Here is the second and final part of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Science Fiction fable from 1936, as translated by yours truly. Professor Dreistein has successfully returned to earth after his revolutionary co-discovery of a perished civilization on Venus. His new challenge is to decipher the alien document he brought along.

The inscribed-upon, or more accurately, nucleostilographed cylinder, now preserved in the Professor’s laboratory where it has already begun to corrode, is believed to be a kind of matrix for audiographic replication… The cryptic tokens are of course resisting any and all interpretation at the present time. – Thus declared the official communiqué.

Yet the Professor did not begin work on the cylinder before having paid his respects to his brave colleague’s bereaved ones; his old lonely mother and pregnant wife. He personally felt it a poor consolation that the earthly shape of the deceased had gained eternal preservation by freezing to -273 degrees, now being as hard as diamond. But he did, at any rate, promise them a copy of the translation when available, complete with a personal dedication, and this seemed to help a little.

Professor Dreistein then went into total seclusion in his highly modern laboratory, to which no sound, beam, or living soul was allowed – except the two young philologists who had shared the last Nobel prize for their work on cryptogral coefficients. The thousand-headed crowd besieging the building all day and all night, preferring to starve and freeze rather than to miss any opportunity of whatever nature, had to be dispersed by the police as it began to assume a threatening attitude. The silence from within the building caused psychosis; many would kneel and pray out loud while others presented their ailing children to the Professor’s blackened windows. Armed sentries had to guard the entrance; nothing, it was felt, was quite impossible anymore.

The frantic efforts of the three gentlemen did not fail to bear fruit. On the 24th of December the press, in inch-thick headlines, announced that the Professor and his co-workers, by a supra-brilliant synthesis, had discovered the key to interpreting the cylinder, it being now a matter of time before the first word from transglobal cultures would come forth in intelligible form.

Already on the next morning the trinitarian team, in the Professor’s name, dared offer a waiting world the prospect that he, on the following Monday at 20.00.00 o’clock, in a lecture at the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften, would outline the phases of the interpretive process and likely, allow a preliminary glimpse of the result. His sole caveat concerned the eventuality that ill health might preclude his public appearance. The Professor’s old age, combined with a lengthy period of late hours and with the absorbing excitement of it all, gave his physicians cause for concern.

The key discovered, the philologists retreated leaving the old enthusiast bent in cosmic solitude over the final hermeneutic meta-theses. One wished to allow him the glory of being alone about this gift to humankind; the apex of his life and of his century.

“There is every reason”, wrote Berliner Abend in high-flown Aryan syntax, “to anticipate the deciphering’s impending announcement, not only with the utmost interest, but even with disquieting unease. A world that has lived its life to the fullest measure can be presumed to have attained such outer and inner maturity, such harmonious balance of technology and spirit, as humans too anticipate at our journey’s end – the end that shall validate our efforts and bestow meaning upon the self-denial and forgotten heroism of all perished generations, upon their shining, unfaltering faith, their productive labours, suffering, and struggle. A world that has passed through the concluding phases of its thousand times ten thousand years of history, onto the final stage, and engraved its profoundest insight into a material everlasting1 – that insight which is now spilling over to our own world in one fertilising flash, a spark from the singing forge of Depth itself – whatever may it not divulge to a humankind still so painfully on its way, so ravaged by the storms of mature existence? Whatever may not be awaiting us in terms of scientific impulses, of occult apocalyptic revelation, of food for popular thought and conversation, of novel spiritual domains – indeed, in plain terms: of gates flung wide open into the ultimate, so yearningly desired deliverance of the human soul? Surely we do not go too far when anticipating that Professor Dreistein’s lecture on next Monday will signify no less than a mutation in the history of the human spirit, without thereby losing sight of the awe-inspiring fact that culture does not die as planets do, but instead, carries on its elated crusade across universes ever new…”

Every room in the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften was crammed to capacity. From all over Europe, indeed, from the remotest corners of the globe, distinguished scholars had gathered to fully savour the impressions of this event and its creator, while every transmitter on earth was attuned to the little steely lectern in the Hörsaal für Sinnesempfang.

It was already a quarter past eight, yet none would dream of taking offense at this slight academic delay. The Professor’s excuse would doubtless be a valid one.

At about nine o’clock a certain unrest was felt in the lecture hall, and at half past nine the Presidency decided to make for the Professor’s study. One knocked on the door, but there was no reply. One waited another fifteen minutes before knocking again – with the same result. One then withdrew to cancel the meeting. At five o’clock the next morning, after exhaustive deliberation, one determined to force open the door.

For a moment the little assembly stood as if nailed to the floor – before scrambling to the rescue. Lying on the isolopyrium tiles in front of his desk was Professor Dreistein, his hair whitened overnight, with a bloody wound in his temple and an expression on his harried face suggesting to the gaping adepts the profoundest human despair. His bony, sinewy graybeard’s hand convulsively clutched a short-barrelled laser gun.

At the center of the desk were papers indicating various stages of interpretation, and in front of these, at the table’s edge, was a sheet with the first few sentences in modern German.

With throbbing heart, the President leaned over the table and recited:

“The prohibition of sale of intoxicating drink will lead to bitterness in wide circles of our people.”

—————–
(1) In a sterile atmosphere, that is.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars, right? As a Saturday amusement I have translated a humorous fable from the mid-1930’s by the Norwegian existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990). A lampoon of golden age Science Fiction, it features two daring Europeans venturing upon Venus in a homemade rocket. Their journey is more than a space flight: It is a quest for the Meaning of Life.

To fully appreciate this story it helps to know the outline of Zapffe’s philosophy, which can be stated thus:

Like all living species, humans are endowed with a certain number of physiological and social needs; the need for food, rest, security and so on. These needs are quite easily satisfied. However, we humans have an additional need, lacking in all other species, for an overarching meaning of life. This need, according to Zapffe, can never be satisfied unless we deceive ourselves. We can thus either delude ourselves into belief in a false meaning of life, or we can remain honest and realise that life is meaningless. Unlike Sartre’s existentialism, which was ultimately an optimistic doctrine, Zapffe’s existential view was bleak. His great survey of tragedy in literature, politics and the arts indicated that all human endeavour was ultimately futile. He was a worthy heir to the great German pessimist Schopenhauer, and his view on the human destiny was simply that we ought to stop procreation immediately.

Here goes, for the first time in English, AFAIK (I adopted British spelling conventions for the occasion).

Berlin was in seething fever. And as the voice from Grosse Rundfunken collapsed upon the planet like a cloth, the peoples held their breath until the whole of earth, hirsute with humans, trembled in painfully tense expectation. Month after month the rumours had been swirling, at times met by disdainful snorts, at others, by exultation, at still others, by solemn silence. For this was something else and more than all the technical adventures that had so far come to life before people’s eyes; this was the epoch of the epochs, the leap and the metamorphosis, the most decisive crisis in the life of humanity, the realisation of its boldest dreams. And now it had actually happened; now it would no longer do to make a skeptical face; now it was a matter of historical fact!

On the Fourteenth of March Nineteenhundredandninetythree, Professor Amadeus Dreistein, the world-renowned astrophysicist and philosopher, accompanied by his loyal disciple, Dr. Viertelstein, began his journey to the planet Venus. At 21.51.33 ½ o’clock, a sky-threatening pillar of smoke arose from Tempelhofer Feld, followed by a million staring eyes all unable to believe themselves. On its top rode a rocket on which Dreistein had been working for a lifetime – his own, not just anyone’s - and baptised in champagne, ‘Flos Veneris’. Inside the rocket, suspended in clever anti-gravitational springs, were two men with less regard for their lives than for the ecstatic consummation of a thirty year long mass at the altar of science. The Argus eyes of telescopes traced them to the edge of emptiness, where they could no longer be distinguished from a mote on the lens.

When the estimated time expired, everyone on earth outside of camps and prisons went on lookout. Endless debates arose on the morning tram and swept around the globe like breaker waves. Had the rocket missed its target, to be consumed by infinity? Many still remembered the transmission from the moonbus ‘Hubris XV’, which in 1987 passed an Ameuropean astronaut; presumably one ejected during the collision of ‘Hubris II’ with the unmanned ‘Lunatic VIII’. In its obituary, Space Times had pointed out that this was the third of those austronauts who, after the big shipwrecks in the heavily polluted whirls of northern light, continue in orbit ‘on their own’. Dressed in their white spacesuits and lit by the set sun, they are, during interlunar periods, visible by ordinary telescope. Unfortunately they can only be identified by position, but their birth certificate names have been retained, and the Institute for Astrology, in cooperation with the Salvation Army, may on request provide their families with the azimuth at the next culmination.

This could have been the destiny of ‘R/K Flos Veneris’, but the heroic pioneers might also have been caught, slain and devoured by Venuvians. Or was one in store for a triumph to shake the Milky Way? At the least unusual noise, people would leave their desks and workshops and dash to the windows. Crowds, staring and clashing in midroad, behaved threateningly toward buses trying to pass. A state of emergency had to be declared in Berlin, but there were also grave effects elsewhere. In the South of Norway a cult arose which, in accordance with Malachi 4,5, believed that Eliah would join the return to appoint a date for the Day of Reckoning. The hopes invested in the expedition knew no bounds; unfathomable amounts of gems, gold, and radium would be anyone’s as soon as a permanent link was established. The Office of Migration spawned an interplanetary department and The Oslo Evening Gazette planned an ambulatory branch.

The 9th of September the following year, the bomb went off: ‘Flos Veneris’ had landed in the Mediterranean, the Professor being on his way to Berlin. As the morning papers came out on the 10th, the newsstands were rushed and paperboys all across Europe obliterated by the advance of their customers. Indeed, the stacks of the special edition might be so obnoxiously described as ‘worth their weight in blood’. The editor of The Swedish Central Times, who had never, even in the heat of polemic, used a stronger word than ‘quite’, met his secretary with the following morning salutation: “Scimitars in my kidneys, lad, today we have one god-damned, storm-ridden, enormous-as-hell sensation!”

Dreistein and his heroic companion had discovered an extinct planet, its surface so shot through with architectonic filigree as to seem, from a distance, like a hovering bone-coloured lacework against the jet black sky. At landing the two scientists had just enough oxygen left four a half-hour stay outside the rocket. Singleminded as they were, they did not indulge in aimless sight-seeing as was certainly invited by the unutterably beautiful buildings, the strange contraptions of unknown purpose, and the grotesque wax-imbued figures of the crypts. Dreistein sought one matter only: archives and libraries. As the half-hour drew to a close and the quest remained unsuccessful, the Professor, with a heart as heavy as iridium, ordered the retreat.

Then it is that Dr. Viertelstein resolves to sacrifice his life. He shuts off his can of oxygen, and before the Professor can get a hold of the tap, his companion has unwrapped his Nirwana suit, whereupon he drops dead to the ground. Dreistein grasped the situation immediately. His assistant had donated his oxygen supply, not to him, but to Science. He was obliged to use it, and right away. And now the miracle occurs: the Professor makes his way to a vault full of steel cylinders with inscriptions. Semi-conscious and with waning powers, he pulls one of them back to the rocket, slots his respirator into the main supply – and sets course for 14 Unter den Linden.

To be continued.