The Power(41)

Two balding middle-aged men, one with a toothbrush moustache and wearing a dark suit, shake hands as a meter shows the liquid from the lorry slowly going down.





‘Just a tiny amount in the drinking water will be enough to protect an entire town. This single tank is sufficient to treat the drinking water for 500,000 people. Coventry, Hull and Cardiff will be the first to receive the water treatment. Working at this pace, the entire country will be covered within three months.’





A mother on the street of a northern town lifts her baby out of the pram, rests it on a cloth on her shoulder and looks up, concerned, to the clear sky.





‘So Mother can feel secure that her baby need no longer fear nerve-gas attack. Rest easy, Mother and child.’





The music reaches a crescendo. The screen darkens. The reel ends.





2. Notes distributed to journalists to accompany the BBC programme The Source of Power.





The story of Guardian Angel was forgotten shortly after the Second World War – as with so many ideas which worked flawlessly, there was no reason to re-examine it. At the time, however, Guardian Angel was a tremendous success and a propaganda victory. Tests on the general population in Britain proved that the substance accumulated in the system. Even a week spent drinking Guardian Angel-laced water would provide never-ending protection against nerve gas.





Guardian Angel was manufactured in great vats in the heartland of the USA and in the home counties of the UK. It was transported by tanker to friendly nations: to Hawaii and to Mexico, to Norway, to South Africa and to Ethiopia. The enemy’s U-boats harried the vessels, as they did every shipment coming to or from the Allies. Inevitably, one dark night in September 1944, a tanker was sunk, with all hands, sixteen miles off the coast of Portugal, on its way to the Cape of Good Hope.





Subsequent research has found that over the following months, in the coastal towns of Aveiro, Espinho and Porto, strange things washed ashore – fish much larger than any they’d seen before. Shoals of these unusually sized creatures had apparently hurled themselves at the beaches. The people in the villages and towns along the coast ate the fish. An analysis by a conscientious Portuguese official in 1947 revealed that Guardian Angel was detectable in the groundwater as far inland as Estrela, near the Spanish border. But his suggestion that the water table should be tested across Europe was rejected; there were no resources available for the task.





Some analysis suggests that the sinking of this one ship was the critical moment. Others maintain that, once the liquid had entered the water cycle at any point, in any reservoir, in any place in the world, it would inevitably spread. Other potential sources of contamination include: a spill from a rusted container in Buenos Aires several years after the war and an explosion at a munitions dump in southern China.





Nonetheless, the oceans of the world are connected to one another – the water cycle is endless. Although Guardian Angel had been forgotten after the Second World War, it continued to concentrate and magnify its potency in the human body. Research has now established it as the undoubted trigger, once certain concentrations had been reached, for the development of the electrostatic power in women.





Any woman who was seven years old or younger during the Second World War may have skein buds on the points of her collarbones – although not all do; it will depend on what dose of Guardian Angel was received in early childhood, and on other genetic factors. These buds can be ‘activated’ by a controlled burst of electrostatic power by a younger woman. They are present in increasingly large proportions of women with every birth-year that passes. Women who were about thirteen or fourteen years old around the Day of the Girls almost invariably possess a full skein. Once the skein power has been activated, it cannot be taken away without tremendous danger to the woman’s life.





It is theorized that Guardian Angel merely amplified a set of genetic possibilities already present in the human genome. It is possible that, in the past, more women possessed a skein but that this tendency was bred out over time.





3. SMS conversation between the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, classified and released under the thirty-year rule.





PM: Just read the report. Thoughts?





HS: We can’t release it.





PM: The US are set to release in a month.





HS: Fuck’s sake. Ask them to delay.





PM: They’re adopting ‘a policy of radical openness’. They’re evangelical about it.





HS: As usual.





PM: You can’t stop Americans being American.





HS: They’re 5,000 miles from the Black Sea. I’ll talk to the Sec. of State. We need to tell them it’s a NATO matter. Releasing the report will harm the stability of fragile regimes. Regimes that could easily get their hands on chemical and biological weapons.





PM: It’s going to leak, anyway. We need to think about how this impacts on us.