Futures : A hypertext short story

5B3: Loot

With a casual flick of his wrist, a grinning Michael Darnby tossed Ł445 back onto the table in the manner of someone used to throwing vast amounts of money around. As he started to make his breakfast, he decided to put half of his windfall in the bank and to blow the rest on some clothes and other essentials; like a bottle of decent Scotch.
   A couple of days later, during the evening of Banking Monday, a long double-ring on his doorbell caught Darnby up to his forearms in soapy water, doing the washing up. He found two hard-eyed men on the doorstep; a detective sergeant and a detective constable, who wanted to know where he had got the money that he had paid into his bank during the morning.
   Darnby asked them why they wanted to know, which failed to improve the attitude of his unwelcome visitors. They also wanted to know where he had been on the night of the 22nd of that month, when a safe had been robbed in a town less than ten miles away.
   Realizing that he was on the edge of something serious, Darnby fell back on the truth. He sensed that his trawled money had been stolen and stashed, not lost. Even so, he felt confident that the detectives would have serious problems with trying to link him to the thieves or the scene of the crime.
   The detectives neither laughed nor groaned in disbelief when they heard his explanation. They just invited him to think again at the police station. Darnby insisted on showing them his psionic amplifier and the article in Futures. The detectives were not impressed. He opened the bottom drawer of the sideboard and took out two bundles of notes, most of them new, the results of his efforts with the psionic amplifier on Saturday and Sunday nights.
   Darnby had been planning to invest in some new hi-fi equipment at the weekend, given the same rate of recovery through the week. He had been hoping to negotiate some sort of discount if he waved a large amount of actual cash under a salesperson's nose.
   The detective constable took the cash out to the radio in their car to check on the numbers. He returned looking puzzled. Darnby had trawled cash from five separate robberies between London and central Scotland.
   The detectives knew that they had stumbled across either a major criminal mastermind or a very minor mad scientist. Looking at Michael Darnby, they found themselves having to settle for the latter.
   They allowed him to finish his washing up, then they hauled him down to the police station to tell his story to their inspector. He didn't believe it either but he was forced to admit that it had an illogical ring of truth.
   In the end, the inspector got Darnby to sign a statement, which he referred on to his superiors. The decision on whether to prosecute Darnby for being in possession of stolen money belonged to someone at a higher level. If it was up to him, the inspector felt, he would prefer to forget the whole business. The case, if it ever came to court, could quite easily make a laughing stock of the local police force.
   When a police car dropped him off at his home at last, Michael Darnby wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or terrified. The evening had been an interesting look at police procedures from the sharp end, but it could have ended with him looking at a cell door from the wrong side.
   Darnby contemplated screwing up the psionic amplifier diagram and using it to light the fire after all the trouble that it had caused him. But a mercenary quivering shivered at the back of his mind. All right, so he couldn't keep the money that the psionic Treasure Trawler provided not now that the police knew about him. But there had to be a finder's fee due, a ten per cent reward on anything that he recovered.
   Perhaps there were elements of a business available. His nightly take had fluctuated between two and over four hundred quid. If he could just average Ł300 per day over the week, his ten per cent would come to a decent Ł210 per week, which wasn't to be sniffed at. And he would be able to keep any trawled cash that wasn't claimed within three months.
   He would be happy with that sort of a 'salary' - even happier if he could develop his talent and bring in more cash at each attempt. The police and the lawful owners of the money would be happy. Only the criminals, who had carried out the robberies, would not be happy. And as long as they didn't find out his address, Michael Darnby felt able to live with that.

END of this route through the story.

In Conclusion

I wrote this short story in September of 1980, before the computer technology needed to create a hypertext story was available to the home user.

Fifteen years later, in September of 1995, there were much fancier hypertext programs on the market than the one which I wrote [using QBasic 4.5, for anyone interested in that sort of thing] to display the hypertext version of the story, but what really counts is the content of the story, not how it looks, and the author chosing to make the effort to go all the way with his vision.

The story is featured in the second volume of my collected short stories [first edition 1997] and this HTML version was created in January, 2000.

This is the end.

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