AtDDtA(15): A Perfect Record of Doing as You are Told

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

(sent to Dave's email first, in error, and with
even more problematic wording (sorry, Dave))


...taking off from that last clause:
"left the Mysteries of Time to those with
enough of that commodity to devote to its proper study"

what the Chums did in following the spoor of the
Time Machine to Candlebrow was way out of their
purview or bailiwick

the FICOTT, however tainted its revenue, is an
assemblage of experts -- at its proceedings, by comparison,
the Chums are feebs, tankers...their small-fish nature
brought home to them in this big pond, so much so
that they retreat into a different, more infantile,
conception of their situation...

...hinting at the possibility that the beleaguered
Chums Command employs Alonzo Meatman as a stringer:
since the Chums Command is having to
deal with much such un-cohesiveness in the ranks about
this time, quite likely their resourcefulness allows them
to develop just such "resources" (what LeCarre's
Smiley would call an "asset"? -- someone down in the Cold War
(or in this setting, the "time travel war") trenches,
with connections on both "sides", supplied with some kind of
mysterious red beverage that Darby, for one, hankers after
and which could provide a "trip" for the Chums which smacks
of a group version of Slothrop's Kenosha Kid venture...
where instead of following his harp down the toilet,
they each take up their harmonicas, as it were, and 
fall in (to a similar microcosm of booger and pee 
references, but nowhere near the amount of shit...)

Although Doctor Zook had deemed Meatman
untrustworthy, an impression nothing in the text
has contradicted, they accept
from him (unquestioningly) the map they were looking for
in Venice -- he's passed through the surface tension of
their group by participating in their hallucination...

In fact, maybe the HMBA is the hallucinatory version
of the Chums High Command...Alonzo's "sheep" comment
(remember Dr Zook's "hook") - may be revealing him
as the shepherd with the crook, pulling them back into line