Nothing But Blue Skies by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online

for a moment, trying to remember if he was still married. The issue was entirely relevant to the matter in hand. Jennifer would have his scalp if he started turning on lights and playing with computers at one in the morning, but he was morally certain that Jennifer had left him after the sea lion-in-the-bath incident. What he couldn’t recall offhand was whether Jennifer had come before or after Trudy, and whether one or the other of them still lived here. There was only one certain way to find out and that was to turn on the light, an experiment that quickly gave him the answer he’d been looking for. Various subtle clues about the way the room looked - the trousers draped over the back of the sofa, the half-empty vindaloo cartons on the floor, the craggy yellow growth in the necks of several milk bottles - strongly suggested to the trained eye that he was once again a single man and perfectly within his rights to start up the computer any time he felt like it.
    A little archaeology duly revealed the computer plug and matching wall socket, and soon the system was humming merrily - surely the whirring of a Pentium fan ranks with the soft gurgle of a brook and the distant click of bat on ball across a village green among the most soothing sounds available to a distempered mind - and the screen was urging him to buy more Microsoft products now, while stocks lasted. Somehow managing to resist the allure of these offers, he carefully unfolded the beer mat, typed in the address, hit ‘Send’ and went to sleep.
    The common or garden office chair, as sold for computer workstation use, is a masterpiece of design, arrived at after hours of painstaking research and input from the CBI, Department of Industry and a number of consultants recruited from former members of the Haitian secret police. One of its most valuable features is the way it wakes you up, with extreme prejudice as regards the back of the neck, if you’re slothful enough to fall asleep in it. The deterrent effect of this design has so far saved British industry enough man-hours to staff the next industrial revolution; but it was easy to overlook these positive aspects if you woke up in one after a night on the razzle.
    â€˜Agh,’ said Gordon, and opened his eyes. He was in that uncomfortable transitional stage of being both drunk and hung-over at the same time, and the glare and movement of the screen saver was already doing peculiar things to his eyes. Experience had taught him some time ago that slapping the side of the box with the flat of his hand made the screen saver go away, so he did that, and found himself staring at the words -
WEATHER FORECASTERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
    - in lurid green letters several inches high against a disturbingly purple background. His first reaction was that it was marginally better than pink elephants and crawling bugs; then he remembered, and narrowed his eyes to read the small print.
    If you want get even , it advised him, get MAD .
    He lifted his head and blinked once or twice. Maybe crawling bugs would have been preferable after all. He read on.
    MAD - Meteorologists Against Dragons - is a direct-action organisation whose aim is to end once and for all the misery, suffering and humiliation caused to thousands of weathermen right across the globe by the recklessly malicious activities of so-called dragons. From our purpose-built headquarters securely hidden in a cavern somewhere beneath the Andean deserts of South America - the only place on Earth where rain has never fallen - we monitor dragon activity worldwide, coordinate anti-dragon initiatives, research potential dragon-prevention technology and support a far-reaching campaign of public education and opinion-reprofiling. If you want to know more about MAD and how it can help you get even, click HERE .
    â€˜Fuck off,’ Gordon sighed, and went to hit ‘Exit’; but the mouse slipped from his hand and landed on its own left-hand button. The