Oh my brothers and sisters, you may have guessed how keen President Putin got to have more Ice-10 Bombs.  The results in China exceeded his expectations.  

Even though Putin wanted an exclusive on all Ice-10 bombs, more of the top executives at Munitions Galore voted for that.  The bomb was scalable, meaning it could work both as a tactical and a strategic weapon.  And there were richer players than Russia that would kiss, makeup, and pay now that Munitions Galore had proof the bomb worked.  It could destroy as many people as an H-bomb but without all that expensive damage to a target of conquest’s infrastructure.  

Lord Caligula discerned a 5-alarm fire in the global intelligence community.  M6 had sent those docile saps to one of Constance’s lairs to interrogate her.  All they succeeded in doing was stoking Constance’s mighty appetite for sadistic liaisons.  When boys from M5 showed at Peregrine’s London flat for a chat with him, Peregrine acquitted himself well but, lacking Constance’s penetrating insight into the human psyche, not as well as Constance. What did help Peregrine was getting the M5 boys to chatter about old Latin and Greek lessons and the beatings that went with learning dead languages in England.  Time sweetens all miserable experiences if there has been enough of it.  I dare say that if you waited 20 years after Omaha Beach, you’d have found chaps laughing about all the death and mayhem, not to mention insane orders. 

Munitions Galore practised advice a lawyer once gave mike. Despite all the bureaupathic claims that one must write stuff down, the lawyer was blunt with mike.  “I rather defend no notes than bad notes.”  Since mike has no common sense, he kept writing notes anyway.  It’s the curse of hypergraphia as mike put it.  

Peregrine went on about all the requirements related to doing Top Secret work and the related problem of stove piping within the organisation.  It is no wonder that he, as he represented himself, often had no idea what people in different shops at Munitions Galore were up to. 
To hammer his point home, Peregrine told the story of Bobbie Nosick.  She is not a relative of Robert Nozick. Munitions Galore hired her as a scientist, though her training was in philosophy.  She wrote numerous libertarian papers setting out new rights of man.  Man had a right to own vast arsenals of weapons of every imaginable kind to protect his holdings.  He had a right to sell himself into perpetual bondage. All taxes were theft unless voluntary.  She had papers explaining why property rights were absolute.  She had other articles explaining why charity was permissible but was a moral injury to the poor who might have learnt something if they were left to starve.  During her lunch breaks, she cruised to the canteen where she exchanged exposing her breasts for view—touch was a premium service–to junior scientists in return for them buying her lunch.  Touching the breasts required adding wine to her lunch

Lord Caligula adored this wonderful woman.  Then one day somebody wandered by his office.  The door was ajar, and a mild reek emanated from behind it.  Curious, the wanderer pushed the door.  At once, the wanderer’s eyes fell on Nosick dead at her desk.  Her lefthand showed a burn between her index finger and middle finger where a Lucky Strike cigarette had burned itself out.  The 1/4 full pack of Luckys rested adjacent Bobbie’s brimming ashtray.  Peregrine sighed, “The woman was too cheap to buy a cigarette case, even though Munitions Galore paid her more than any philosopher is going to make from the Open University.”  

The body posed a problem.  Because of all the stove piping, every office claimed they had no role in the removal of bodies.  Everybody at Munitions Galore insisted they specialised in body creation.   Some departments insisted the Department of Cadavers should be called, but either Munitions Galore had no such department or it was unlisted.  

The Jews on the staff whined about it taking too long to bury her, since as one of their co-religionists, even though Bobbie hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since her teens when passages in the Hebrew Bible hit her as being cavalier about property rights and also as having a collectivist tone.  When she demanded an explanation from her Rabbi, his story was so repellant to her principles, was such a “simpering” defence of the looters, that she never let the soles of her shoes hit the synagogue’s carpeted floors again.  

So, there in the office, decaying at its leisure sat Bobbie’s dilapidating cadaver.  Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, and months to, well, a year or so.  Nobody had a solution.  Why?  “It is,” said Peregrine, as he adjusted his snug waistcoat, “one of the dilemmas of modernity.  We have a security apparatus that necessitates, at least from time to time, playing fast with reality of death.”

The M5 boys asked what became of Bobbie’s body.  Peregrine replied, “So far as I knew, her clothing outlived the flesh.  In time, the stench went away, or so I am told.”  Of course, I heard a rumour that an HR person with profound anosmnia finally took over the office.  Perhaps she just moved the remains to a rubbish bin and hoped for the best.

When I heard this story, I was horrified.  I knew Ms Nosick.  I also didn’t like Peregrine’s way of telling it.  For example, he admitted to me that he had solved the problem.  In fact, part of the impetus for creating the Mr Clean bots was Bobbie’s stinking corpse.  Peregrine and his engineers created Mr Clean to dispose of Bobbie and all evidence of her demise.  To prevent expectations of productivity from her, Peregrine wrote a directory entry for her.  It read, “Bobbie Nosick, TENURED senior scholar/scientist, on research leave.”  If you asked Peregrine about the research, he described it as “very hush-hush, though I once heard it had something to do with the paranormal.”  

His stories made the eyelids of the M5s heavy enough that they departed and never returned.  Once again, they got no new news of the desired kind.