Ah, sweet Mr E of life

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33776, 24 February 1975, Page 14

Ah, sweet Mr E of life

(By JOHN COLLINS) E breezed into the main office of Security {Section (Life and Death Division) and casually flipped his trilby on to the janitor in the corner. Moneypenny gave him her usual enthusiastic greeting: “Ah, sweet Mister E, of Life, I do adore you.”

M was expecting him, Moneypenny had said, but the security head was too wrapped up in the crossword to look up when E pushed open the door of the dimly-lit study. E stepped forward smoothly and loosened the newspaper from round his superior’s neck. “That's better,” said M. “Now I can look up. First I things first, mix us a couple[ |of drinks. I’ll have a lemon, I and paeroa. shaken not stir-; ired.” . | Something big was in the: (air. thought E. ducking to! iavoid an albatross as he; I stirred the lemon and! paeroa. Well, whatever it, was. it was about time, somebody else took it on.; He'd had enough. Still, you] couldn’t blame M for using: him so much: the branch; ! had lost a lot of agents over the summer. A week away, and even a top operative might forget where he worked. Besides, since the. I lunch-break had been i extended to half an hour, most of the afternoon was {spent in retraining the I agents. A muffled rustling in the I corner told him that M was I back into the crossword {again. “What’s a four-letter word beginning with T and

ending in RE, meaning a band of rubber placed round the rim of a car wheel to contain the inner tube?” M asked. “I’ve been stuck on that for two days.” E thought furiously. “Tare, I think, sir.” He allowed himself a little glow of pride, nothing extravagant. He had managed to keep up his reading in spite of the rigours of duty.

“My God, E,” said M. “I can see I’ll have to watch my step. You’ll be in this chair soon. Tare. Of course.” M’s face grew’ serious, without quite becoming a crisis. He flicked a switch which put the lights and the •cat out, reached back and casually pulled down a screen with a large diagram on it. “What does that look {like to you. E? he probed. “I’m not sure, sir,” E mused. “It looks rather like a kind of screen with some {sort of diagram on it.”

{ “Good lad. E. Security |needs people with your sort I of brains. But what is the diagram?" “Sir. It is an orgon-fuelled {ground-to-air multiple rei entry combat missile, known I in the Nato code as Sneaky (Ferret, maximum velocity (3600 m.p.h., payload 6000 ; pounds, all-up weight just {under eight tons. Sir.” “Excellent, E, excellent. Very close. Now listen closely. I am about to reveal the most dastardly threat to •New Zealand’s security since you dealt with Charabanca, the Man with the Golden Vaccine Gun. The diagram, in fact, show’s a milk bottle containing a small quantity of milk. Remember that. Now forget it.” He snapped on the lights. “We have already had two alphabets of security officers

• keeping a check on a Suspect, who is known to take home exactly such a bottle of milk with him from the office in his briefcase. For a while it puzzled us, until Mr 9, a mathematical genius in the code-cracking and laundry section, worked out his little game.” M smiled at E’s puzzled look and thrust forward a copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. “Look up the word, Milk.”

E looked it up: “Verb transitive. Dratf milk from (cow, ewe, goat); — the ram or bull, engage in hopeless enterprise; get money out of, exploit (person); (slang) steal message from (telegraph or telephone wire); extract juice, virus, etc.. from (snake, etc.). E then obeyed M’s inIstruction to look up the (verb, to bottle: “Bottle up, conceal, restrain for a time (resentment, etc.)” E was still confused, but M looked triumphant. “Can’t you see the enormity of it, man? This is evidence enough. It is a signal to say that the fiends need no longer conceal or restrain their resentment of New Zealand’s prosperity. Their agents, whom we know now to be armed with snake venom, have been stealing messages from our telegraph or telephone wires, and nave discovered that the dairy industry is in such a bad w’ay that any attempt to get money by drawing milk from cow, ewe, or goat has become a hopeless enterprise.

“It is clearly a tip-off for an all-out assault on Federated Fanners, perilously weakened and unsuspecting. E, you have not a moment to lose.”