by Adam Roberts
‘Don’t just go for a little lie-down,’ Linn called after him. ‘You go find us some breathing equipment, you hear? You hear, Doctor?’
There was no answer.
‘Doctor?’ she called again. ‘Have you gone off to have a little lie-down somewhere? Don’t you have a little lie-down! You fetch us some equipment, so we can go exploring on this world and sort out the apostrophe business on this planet! Do you hear?’
Nothing.
‘Doctor?’ screeched Linn. ‘We’re doing this for your benefit you know! Neither of us wants to go gallivanting about this strange planet. We’re trying to help you!’ She waited, with her ear to the door. ‘You have gone to have a little lie down, haven’t you!’ she called.
‘I think he may, actually,’ I offered, ‘indeed have gone for a little lie down.’
‘Curse him,’ said Linn without vehemence. ‘Do you think we should try and winkle him out of whichever room he’s run off to?’
‘There are hundreds of rooms back there,’ I pointed out. ‘He could be in any of them. We’d be searching through them for hours and hours. Best let him have his lie down. He’ll come back through when he wakes up. It might even recharge his batteries.’
‘It’s a—most—provoking—thing . . .’ Linn said, shaking her head.
‘He certainly seems to like his little naps,’ I agreed.
Linn was despondent for a few moments, and then she rallied herself. ‘Hey! We don’t need him. D’you know what I think? There’s bound to be all the equipment we need right here, in the control centre. I mean, this is where you’d leave it, don’t you think? If you needed it?’
‘I suppose so,’ I agreed.
Linn went over to the central control panel and opened a little door in its side. ‘Aha! First place I look!’ she exclaimed, delighted. She reached in and pulled out a helmet. It looked a little like a deep-sea-diver’s helmet: a metal globe a little larger than an average adult human head, with a small glass screen in the front. ‘I knew it!’ she declared, sounding very pleased with herself. ‘I knew there’d be something!’
‘Will it fit?’ I asked.
‘It’s exactly the right size. I wonder if it comes with, you know, oxygen tanks and such?’
‘According,’ I observed, reading from the side of the helmet, ‘to this little plaque on the side it’s all integrated into the device. Self contained air supply, water and even food. Nutrition Pap Brand three-five-one-one, apparently. Your Time Gentleman Breathing and Life Support Equipment is Guaranteed for One Thousand Years. Sounds just the ticket.’
‘Doesn’t it just?’ she agreed. She reached back inside the cupboard and pulled out an identical-looking helmet. ‘Here you go - one for you too.’
‘You don’t think,’ I said, hesitantly, ‘that the thousand-year guarantee has expired, or anything?’
‘Nonsense,’ she returned. ‘They look positively brand new.’
I peered at the helmet in my hands. It was certainly a gleaming item, undusty and unscuffed. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Right,’ said Linn, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘This is what I suggest. We put these on. We pop outside, have a look around, and hopefully work out what needs to be done to straighten the timeline here - find that sign, insert the apostrophe. It’ll be good practice for me, and we can sort it all out before the Doctor even wakes up from his afternoon nap.’
‘If you’re sure that’s a good idea—’
‘Of course I am! Can you imagine his face when we come back? Look Doctor, we sorted it all out whilst you were napping! Ha-ha!’
‘Well,’ I said, uncertainly. ‘OK.’ I lifted up my helmet ready to put it on. Linn did the same.
Then something peculiar happened. In the split-second before I dropped the helmet over my cranium, Linn disappeared.
One minute she was there, and the next she had vanished. Completely vanished ! I opened my mouth to shout in surprise, but my fingers at that precise moment let go of the helmet to drop it onto my shoulders. I barely had time to cry out.
Then everything went black.
The next thing I knew was an enormous crash and an earthquake-like shudder that knocked me from my feet. I’d like you to imagine - if you’ll indulge me - a large warehouse built of reinforced steel girders and iron cladding, with a huge metal domed roof; and that this warehouse had then, somehow, been elevated six feet above the ground, suspended there, and then dropped onto a concrete or stone ground. That was the nature of the ear-splitting clatter that greeted me. It almost burst my ears. The reverberations from the collision echoed and re-echoed.
I picked myself up and looked about me. I had somehow been transported into a huge enclosed space, some kind of circular barn or hangar, lit by a dim window very high up in an enormous curving wall. The floor stretched thousands of yards away from me in every direction. A huge duct, wide enough for me to climb inside had I been so minded, dangled from the wall before me. I stared at this huge structure. It ended in a bizarre truck-sized sculpture in black rubber. It looked as though it might fit inside a giant’s mouth as his gum-shield.
I turned slowly to examine my new surroundings. The roof was curved and groined like a giant version of the inside of the Dome of Saint Paul’s. It towered so enormously over me that thin and wispy clouds were visible floating in at the zenith.
It took me only a moment to understand what had happened. Of course: the helmet was TARDY technology. It was, accordingly, much bigger on the inside than the out. I ran to the nearest portion of the wall - it was a brisk, ten minute jog away - and tried to slide my hands under the rim and lift the huge dome off me. But it was hopeless: It was like trying to - no: let me be precise, it was exactly the same as - trying to lift an entire eight-hundred-metre tall aircraft-hangar built of steel girders and iron claddings with my bare hands.
I couldn’t even get my hands underneath the lip of the helmet. It was being pressed into the floor with a weight of many hundred thousand tonnes.
I sat back. This was bad. The space was chilly and I wasn’t even wearing a sweater. Not even a cardigan.
The situation was dire.
‘Help! Somebody!’ I shouted. ‘Doctor? Can you hear me? I’m trapped inside here! Lift up the helmet Doctor - take hold of this helmet and lift it up . . .’
My words re-echoed. It was hopeless. I bashed my fist against the wall and it rebounded. The metal felt at least a metre thick: a huge and impenetrable barrier between myself and the outside world. And even if I could have communicated through this wall, the Dr was snoozing in some alcove deep inside the TARDY. And Linn - Linn must be trapped just like me.
I stepped back, and walked towards the middle of the dome again. Craning my neck I could see the window high above me - clearly I was looking at an inside view of the face-plate of the helmet: it might only be the size of a postcard on the outside, but it was a colossal expanse of glass on the in. For a while I idly speculated about climbing up to it - but it was many hundreds of meters above me and any climb would be a dangerous prospect indeed. And even if I could scale the sheer, curving wall, what would I do then? Wave at the Dr through the glass? But what if he didn’t see me? He was still napping, somewhere in the bowels of the TARDY. If a spacecraft could be said to have bowels. Which, come to think of it, I rather doubted.
It was alright, I told myself. He would eventually wake up. Then he could come back through to the control room, and pick up the helmet. Though fantastically heavy on the inside, it weighed a matter of a few grams on the outside. The Dr would notice it lying on the floor, and lift it up to put it away - revealing me underneath it. All I had to do was wait out the intervening time.
It was a bore. But, I was unlikely to freeze to death in the space of a few hours. Even without a sweater.
I ran my fingers of my right hand up my left arm. The goosepimples there spelt out, in Braille (a script I had had to learn as part of my prose-tailor training) the message: HYPOTHERMIA CAN KILL IN MINUTES. I ignored this me
ssage. And, to be absolutely exact, because of the chance positioning of a large mole on my forearm next to a small crescent-shaped scar, it actually spelt out: HYPOTHERMIA CANNED KRILL IN MINUTES, which sounded more to me like a advertisement for a brand of tinned seafood. Which, by a strange chance, I have actually eaten. In a Krill restaurant upon my home world. But this is by the bye.
There was no immediate danger, then. But, insofar as I have always been an impatient fellow, I will confess that the prospect of several hours of shivering did not appeal to me. I decided that I had to think of a way out of this prison.
I turned myself about through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to scan the whole inner surface of the thing. But I discovered that, whilst three-hundred-and-sixty degrees would have been enough to rotate the helmet through one entire turn on the outside, inside it barely covered a fifth of the perimeter on the inside. I turned and turned and turned until I was dizzy, and eventually I was again looking at the giant hose.
It took me a moment to stop feeling nauseous.
No more turning about, I decided.
The thing to do, clearly, was to take a closer look at this hose. From a distance its purpose seemed clear: it would feed oxygen into the mouth of anybody wearing the helmet. Of course, on the inside it was much too large to fit into any actual mouth. But I wondered if it would be possible to - for instance - climb inside it, work my way up the tube and perhaps find some egress to the outside world? It was a long shot, I knew; but I couldn’t think what else to do.
As I walked towards it, the oddly pronged and curved shape of the thing grew larger and larger, until it lost all resemblance to a mouthpiece and became nothing more than a vast ebon blob, suspended in space. It looked like something Henry Moore might have sculpted out of eight tonnes of partially chewed liquorice. Which is to say, it looked extremely unappealing.
Finally I arrived at the foot of the structure. It was connected to the wall, some thirty metres above me, via a tube large enough to run trains underneath the English Channel. In both directions. The mouthpiece itself hung perhaps five metres from the floor - maddeningly too high to reach, even if I stood on tip-toes. Even if I stood on tip-toes and jumped up. I tried doing this, standing on tip-toes and leaping up, four or five times before it occurred to me that the muscles in my toes might be less effective at propelling my entire bodyweight into the air than, you know, the muscles in my legs. So I stood on the flat of my feet and bent my legs and tried jumping again. I jumped higher this way, but it was still useless.
What to do?
What happened next surprised me. A rope dropped from the open mouth of the huge rubber object above me. It trailed down like the first tendril of water from a giant black rubber bath-tap, silvery and glinting.
A moment later a figure came shinning down the rope - the figure, in point of fact, of a beautiful young female. She was dressed in a silvery top that was large enough to cover her upper body; and also in tiny green shorts that seemed to be made of some silky material which were quite inadequate to cover her lower body. When I say ‘shorts’, I could perhaps qualify the phrase and note that they were, in point of fact, knickers. As I later discovered. Her legs were long, lithe, lovely, and possessed several other alliteratively legsy ‘l’ qualities. They were wrapped tightly about the rope. She slithered down and came to a halt standing upon the floor facing me. For a while she did nothing but blink in the light. Then she said ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
This was a puzzler.
I said: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to.’ That looks a bit ridiculous written down, I know. It sounded pretty ridiculous coming out of my mouth. But when a beautiful woman abseils down a silver rope in her knickers from the cavernous entrance to a fifty-metre-wide rubber mouthpiece suspended five metres in the air and demands to know why you didn’t wake her up, it’s hard to think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous. In fact, ridiculousness-sounding was the appropriate response, I feel.
‘I can’t believe I slept through it!’ she cried in rank frustration. ‘Whom was it who lifted the helmet? Was it you?’
‘It—I—er, yes.’
Her next question was: ‘whom are you?’ But before I could answer her eyes left me and stared at the cavernous space in which we were both standing. Her jaw fell, leaving her mouth completely open in astonishment. She gawped as if seeing her environment for the first time. ‘It’s so huge!’ she gasped. ‘Oh it’s been so long since I saw it! So very long! I had forgotten - no matter how many times I felt my way around the perimeter with my fingers’-ends, it’s not the same as actually seeing it like this. It’s astounding!’
‘Who are you?’ I asked. I was ravished by her beauty. Her beauty was like an anchor, fixing me to that spot. She, in other words, was a ravish-anchor.
‘It’s so good to see another living being!’ she cried, throwing her arms around me. ‘It’s been so long . . .’
‘Nice to meet you too,’ I said, politely, in a squeaky voice. I could feel the soft and lovely warmth of her body in close proximity to mine. It had been a very long time since any woman, of whatever physical disposition (let alone one as beautiful as this one) had been in close proximity to me. Or middling proximity. Or far proximity, come to that. I was gobsmacked.
‘Forgive me for my rudeness,’ she said, stepping back and facing me squarely. ‘And allow me to introduce myself. I am Lexanco, daughter of Panzpipl, from the planet Tapov. I am from the country of Lithe.’
‘I am delighted to meet you, Lexanco,’ I said. ‘From the planet of . . .?’
‘Tapov.’
‘I see. You are not human, then?’
‘I am Lither.’
‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ I said. ‘My name is Prose Tailor. I’m a tailor of prose - a human, from the twenty-third century. Might I ask about how you came to be here? This,’ I added, gesturing to the relevant area, ‘is my helmet.’
She looked amazed.
‘Surely not!’ she cried. ‘How can it be yours? You seem so young! For I have been here for many years - too many years to count easily upon the fingers of my hands and my feet.’
‘More than twenty years?’ I gasped.
‘More than thirty-one years,’ she corrected. When I looked a little startled, she added: ‘I am not human, after all.’
I glanced at her hands - each of which contained exactly five digits - and boggled briefly. But, I reflected, the ways of alienkind are generally strange. And in all other respects this figure was gorgeously and alluringly feminine. Now, I would like to describe her to you (I am, after all, a tailor of prose) but I’m afeared that my words would be inadequate - that they would merely skate over her figure; that they could not stay abreast of her breasts, would pip her hips, that I would, to put it in plain words, be telling lies about her eyes, being unfair to her hair. For my words could never capture the rapture of her stature. Which wasn’t flature. I mean, flat. I mean it was curvy . The truth of the matter is that her figure was in all respects shapely.
I seem to be losing the thread a little.
Let me put this in as simple a manner as I can: I fell instantly in love with Miss Lexanco. Have you heard the phrase love at first sight? Have you ever experienced love at first sight? - or, I should say, have you ever experienced sight? Because until you have fallen in love at first sight you don’t know what sight, in its fullest possibility, is. Unless you have fallen in love yourself then you can have no sense as to how I felt, at that moment, inside that aircraft-hangar-sized helmet, standing before that gorgeous, curvaceous and twenty-one-toed woman.
‘You are staring,’ she observed.
‘I—I—apologise,’ I stammered. ‘It’s just that I have never before seen so beautiful a woman!’
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘Then you and I have something in common,’ she said, smiling kindly. ‘For as I stand here before you, I can comment that I have never
seen so handsome a man. At least not for the same period of time to which you alluded.’
‘You’ve never seen a better looking man than me?’ I asked in frank disbelief.
‘Not in the last twenty-nine years at any rate.’
‘But you’ve been inside this helmet for . . . oh I see what you mean.’ I was momentarily a little discouraged; but then the enormity of Lexanco’s fate finally sank in. Three decades alone inside a gigantic helmet! It was beyond belief. It was so far beyond belief that it circled the planet of incredulity and arrived at the back of the head of the same belief of which it was beyond. I mean that I believed her. You see? That was the point of my metaphor.
’Three decades inside this prison?’ I gasped. ‘Without a single other sentient creature to keep you company? How terrible!’
‘Indeed.’
My chivalrous instincts were aroused. I was, as it happens, aroused in other ways too, but let me not dwell upon those in what is, after all, a memoir designed for family reading. ‘I shall rescue you!’ I cried.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘How?’
‘Well—’ I said. ‘In a couple of hours I’m pretty sure that somebody outside will lift this helmet up.’
‘You’re pretty sure?’
‘Pretty sure, yes.’
‘It doesn’t - forgive me for saying this - it doesn’t sound like a plan, exactly. More a sort-of wait-and-hope strategy.’
My chivalrous instincts, formerly aroused, were now piqued. ‘In that case,’ I said, boldly, ‘I shall rescue you straight away! We need not wait on the vagaries of fate. We shall make our way out of this prison without delay.’
‘I am impressed,’ she said. ‘What will you do?’
I had no idea. To give myself time to think I asked. ‘How have you survived for so long in here? Is your race of aliens one that has no need for sustenance?’
‘On the contrary, I must eat all the time. My race of aliens, dear Prose, is not so very different to humanity. In my former travels I encountered humans many times, and I am very familiar with them. My people and yours are close enough genetically to permit friendship, marriage and even divorce.’