He started the engine and resumed his journey.
Newt's car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.
It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.
Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he'd enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.
In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view. He'd also wax slightly lyrical about the Korean-made radio, which picked up Radio Pyongyang incredibly well, and the simulated electronic voice which warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn't understand English, but didn't understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said.
The art in this case was probably pottery.
His friends nodded and agreed and privately decided that if ever it came to buying a Wasabi or walking, they'd invest in a pair of shoes; it came to the same thing anyway, since one reason for the Wasabi's incredible m.p.g. was that fact that it spent a lot of time waiting in garages while crankshafts and things were in the post from the world's only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.
In that vague, zen-like trance in which most people drive, Newt found himself wondering exactly how you used the pin. Did you say, "I've got a pin, and I'm not afraid to use it"? Have Pin, Will Travel… The Pinslinger… The Man with the Golden Pin… The Pins of Navarone…
It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said "ouch," nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn't feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.
Her name was Agnes Nutter.
She was the Witchfinder Army's great failure.
One of the early entries in The Nice and Accurate Prophecies concerned Agnes Nutter's own death.
The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.
One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter's death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witchhunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
"Ye're tardie," she said to them. "I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since."
Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.
"Tye yt well," she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, "Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judgéd, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande."
And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, "That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole."
And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.
The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they'd done the right thing, now they came to think about it.
Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.
There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter's cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes's petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails.
What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note cancelling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes's son, John Device.
The people who found it—who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion—considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes's note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.
The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.
His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, one of England's most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter's last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.
If he'd known what was actually going to happen when that descendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.
irstly, however, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.
It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.
It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.
The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of policemen already compiling the charge sheet in their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen foil, rapped on Newt's window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror-finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.