by Mike Ashley
“You don’t understand,” Paul interrupted. “No spaceports. No such thing. Haven’t been invented yet, except in Star Trek and stuff. Science fiction.”
Now he had a valuable insight into what he looked like when he was thinking hard. Not a pretty sight.
“Ah,” said the other. “I have an uneasy feeling that this is starting to make sense. Your culture hasn’t yet developed interstellar flight. Yes?”
Paul nodded.
“Bother.” This expression he knew well from his mirror. “Now that’s a pity. No hyperspace radio communications? No heuristic self-updating simultaneous translation units? No contact with alien races?”
Paul shook his head.
“Oh boo.” The other turned his head away, perhaps unwilling to betray emotion. “But just a moment,” he said. “That’s not right. When I was wearing the winged-messenger face, you recognized me. Said I was an angel.”
“Well, you are,” Paul replied. “Or, at least, you were.”
“So you do know who we—Oh, wait, I’m forgetting. You don’t believe in us.”
Paul nodded again.
“Got you.” There was a certain amount of relief in the voice. “Now I think I know what’s going on here. It’s a religious thing, right? Fine, now at least I know where we stand. You think I’m some sort of supernatural being; or at least you don’t, because you don’t believe. And quite right, too, because I’m not.”
“Not what?”
The other smiled. “Not supernatural,” he said. “Not in the slightest. In fact,” he added with a slightly bashful grin, “I’m a rep.”
“A what?”
“Rep. Sales representative. I go around selling things.”
For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, Paul heard himself asking, “What sort of things?”
The other shrugged. “The generic name is novelty items,” he replied. “Joke stuff, gifts, souvenirs. Junk,” he added. “But all high quality, tasteful, high-class merchandise, nothing but the best . . . Junk,” he repeated with a hint of sadness. “It’s what my species is best at. Burning bushes, seas that part down the middle, giant fingers writing on walls, hitherto unnoticed stars that seem to follow you about. I’d give you a catalogue, only I left them all in my ship.”
“Your ship.”
“Yes, poor thing. My own silly fault. Wasn’t paying attention to where I was going, slap bang into an asteroid, just enough time to eject. Incredibly lucky I was so close to this planet of yours; otherwise I’d be up there drifting about.” He sighed. “Got to count your blessings, after all,” he said. “However bad things may seem, they could always be a darned sight worse.”
Strange . . . Twenty minutes ago, Paul had been standing at a bus stop believing that he’d reached the very bottom rung of the ladder of misery. Now he was talking (apparently) to a creature from another world, stranded on a distant planet with no hope of ever getting home, and the creature was being far more positive and upbeat about this terrible calamity than he’d been about his own trivial misfortunes. Quite unexpectedly, he felt ashamed.
“Uhm,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”
He hadn’t intended to say that; it had just slipped out, like a cat squirming out of your arms to chase after a bird. Still, the words were out there now, and he couldn’t very well take them back.
“That’s extremely kind of you,” replied the other him, his face brightening. “Right; we’ll start with a hot bath, a change of clothes and a decent meal, and then we can get down to some serious engineering. Is it far to your house from here?”
“So this is where you live,” said the Strange Visitor, looking around. His eyes glided over the empty pizza boxes and lit on the pile of unpaired socks wedged into the far corner of the sofa. “Interesting.”
“It’s a bit of a mess—” Paul began.
“Really? How’s it different from the typical dwellings of your species? Those flat square containers, for example—”
“Sit down,” Paul said. “I’ll get you a cup of tea.”
When the tea arrived, the alien looked at it for two, maybe three seconds. Then he plunged his fingers into it and started to rub his face.
“No,” Paul said, “the bath is through there, in the bathroom. That’s tea. For drinking.”
“Oh.” There was an unspoken Are you sure? tagged on the end. “Well, thank you very much. Oh, I see. You hold on to the curved bit and use it to manoeuvre the vessel toward your mouth. Your own invention?”
“No,” Paul told him. “In fact, it’s been around for quite some time.”
“Remarkable,” the stranger replied. “You people come up with something as clever as that, but you’re still stranded on this one small planet. You know,” he added, “I could make a fortune selling these back home.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes.” He took a sip of the tea, shuddered, and put the cup down on the coffee table, as far away from himself as he could get it. “My company would pay through its third nose for a brilliantly simple novelty idea like that. More than enough to cover outfitting a full-scale search-and-rescue mission, if only we could get in touch with them. Which reminds me—”
“Yes,” Paul replied thoughtfully; then he said; “You mentioned something about serious engineering.”
The other him nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right,” he said. “Basically, what I had in mind was, build a simple hyperspatial beacon. Nothing fancy, you understand; just enough to send a simple repeating distress call. The next ship to pass through this space picks it up, marks the coordinates and informs the authorities; they send a ship to pick me up. It’d be different if this was some sort of Bronze Age planet, where everybody lived in mud huts and kept pigs, and reckoned portable communications modules were the cutting edge. But a race that can come up with integral beverage-container handles—” He shook his head in apparent wonder. “And there I was, beginning to lose hope.”
“Quite,” Paul said. “What sort of things do you think you’ll need?”
“Oh, nothing fancy,” the stranger replied. “Zebulon crystals, barconium chips, hyperconductor wire, some antimatter, a bit of hardboard and a screwdriver. You’ve probably got most of that right here on the premises.”
Paul pursed his lips. He had a screwdriver; at least, there was a screwdriver attachment on his Chinese copy of a Swiss Army Knife, but he’d bent it trying to pierce the foil on a milk bottle. “It may be a bit harder than that,” he said.
“Oh. You mean we may have to buy some things? Well, of course, as soon as I get home, obviously I can send you a cheque.”
“It’s not that,” Paul said, as tactfully as he could. “Truth is, I’ve never heard of zeb-whatsit and the other stuff you mentioned – which isn’t to say we haven’t got it, because you could write what I don’t know about science on the back of North America, assuming you’ve got very small writing. But you mentioned antimatter—”
The stranger nodded. “Just the regular commercial grade,” he said. “Unleaded.”
“Right,” Paul replied. “Well, I know for a fact that we haven’t got any of that, because I saw something on the telly about scientists trying to invent it, and the bottom line was—”
“Telly?”
“Television. Sound and pictures broadcast through the air. Every house has a receiving device. It’s very popular here.”
“Really.” The alien nodded twice, slowly, deliberately keeping any trace of expression off its face. “So,” he said, “no antimatter. Nuisance.”
“Of course,” Paul said, “if you know how to make the stuff—”
“Piece of cake,” the alien replied.
“Hey!” A grin burst out all over Paul’s face. “I could make an absolute – I mean, I’m sure that given time we could get some big company interested in, um, helping you out. On humanitarian grounds.”
The alien shook his head. “Piece of cake,” he repeated, “provided you’ve got a quadriphasic par
ticle scoop hooked up to a megatherium dolly slaved to a tritoberyllium ram. And maybe I’m slandering your people rotten, but something tells me—”
Paul nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Look, is there anything else you could use instead? Like putting honey in coffee when you’re out of sugar?”
The expression on the stranger’s face gave Paul the impression that the simile wasn’t particularly helpful. “Not really,” the stranger replied. “Antimatter is antimatter, there’s not much you can do without it. And I wish I could tell you how to build a quadriphasic particle scoop, but I can’t. Like I said, my company’s more into novelty items. Toys. Gadgets. Fridge magnets.”
That seemed to be that. The stranger hunched forward a little, possibly facing up to the true ghastliness of his situation for the first time. Once again, Paul felt the unfamiliar itch of compassion on the inside of his mind, where he couldn’t reach to scratch.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The stranger looked up. “Name,” he repeated. “Oh, you mean my ID code? 6340097/227/3.”
“Ah. I’m Paul.”
“Paul,” 6340097/227/3 repeated. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
Silence again; and Paul’s thoughts began to drift slightly. So, he thought, this is really an angel; angels actually do exist, and this is one of them. Except that they aren’t divine heralds or celestial social workers who get their wings every time a child claps its hands (or whatever); they’re salesmen, the alien equivalent of the scumbags who overtake you on the inside lane, with their jackets hanging from little hooks . . . Somehow, that made rather more sense than the orthodox version. A shame, nevertheless; right now he’d be glad of the intervention of a guardian angel, someone who could straighten out his life and make everything all right again.
As if. He could (apparently) bring himself to believe in angels, and whooppee-cushion vendors from distant galaxies, but even he wasn’t that stupid.
Nevertheless; “Sounds like you’ve had a pretty rotten day,” he said.
6340097/227/3 nodded. “You could say that.”
“Me too,” Paul said. “First, my car breaks down and I’m late for work. Then my girlfriend calls me and says she’s dumping me. Finally, I get the sack from my job. I’d call that a pretty rotten day, myself. What do you think?”
6340097/227/3 looked up at him. “Let’s see,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ve understood all the culture-specific terminology, but I think I get the drift. You own a malfunctioning piece of technology. Your intended mate has deselected you in favour of another. Your work group has released you from your non-genetic-clan labour obligations, in the process terminating your rations entitlement. Is that about the size of it?”
Paul nodded. “There or thereabouts,” he said. “Sounds like the same sort of thing happens where you come from.”
“Indeed,” 6340097/227/3 replied. “But I thought you said it’d been a bad day.”
“Too bloody right it’s been a bad day. Didn’t I just . . .?”
6340097/227/3 shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, “I must’ve misunderstood. Or things are different here. For example, where I come from, discovering that you own a piece of technology that doesn’t work is generally a cause for celebration, since it means you can sue the manufacturers for punitive damages equal to twenty times their average annual turnover. On the other hand, our service obligations to our non-genetic clan structure are fairly strict. Basically, you work for them 88 hours a day, 769 days a year until you die in return for the basic minimum calorific value required to sustain life. Rather a bind, really, considering that most of us live to be at least, let’s see, in your terms well over seventy thousand. That, I ought to point out, is why employment is a punishment reserved for criminals whose offences are too serious for the death penalty – whereas our social security system is extremely generous, and accounts for 69.2% of our population dying of cholesterol poisoning before they reach the age of twelve. As for being rejected by your destined sexual partner . . .” He pursed his lips and shuddered just a little. “Unless it’s completely different here, and your females don’t devour their males two hours after mating . . .”
“I see what you mean,” Paul said. “Actually, things are rather different here.”
“Really?” 6340097/227/3 looked rather wistful. “Sounds like this is quite a nice place to live, then.”
“I suppose so,” Paul replied thoughtfully (and he was thinking, two hours later; eeww!) “All depends how you look at things, really.”
6340097/227/3 nodded. “Well,” he said, “let’s do something to cheer ourselves up, shall we? I know,” he added, with a grin Paul couldn’t quite fathom. “Let’s have a look at this television of yours.”
Nothing else to do, Paul thought; and while he’s staring at the goggle-box, maybe I can find some tactful way of telling him that, much as I feel for his plight and the desperate situation he finds himself in, he can’t stay here indefinitely . . . Though exactly what the marooned alien was supposed to do next, he really couldn’t imagine. Maybe the day would come when someone would finally invent the multiphasic whatever-it-was and start pumping out antimatter in handy family-sized packs, and he could finally go home; he’d dropped hints that his species had rather more staying power than the measly human threescore-and-ten. Until then, presumably, he was going to have to settle down and get a job. (And that’s curious too, Paul reflected. In his case, that seems like an awful tragedy, a worst-nightmare scenario – living on Earth, going to work every day, paying off a mortgage, coping as best he can with blocked drains and the Single European Currency and tennis elbow – whereas I’ve never seriously contemplated life not being like that. If I’m lucky.)
“What’s that?” 6340097/227/3 asked suddenly.
It was one of those cosy-detective series, where people get horribly murdered in the heart of the idyllic English countryside.
“What’s that?” Paul replied, squinting at the screen in case he’d missed something. “That’s a church.”
6340097/227/3 was staring, his mouth open; then, quite suddenly, he kicked both his heels up in the air, yelled “Woo-hoo!” and started prancing round the room. Nervously, Paul reached for the remote and changed channels. Ah, the snooker. That ought to calm him down.
“That thing,” 6340097/227/3 panted, pausing to catch his breath. “Where is it?”
Paul frowned. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Looked like any other church to me.”
“You mean there’s others?”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
6340097/227/3 sank to his knees and smiled. For a split second, Paul was jealous. That was an exact copy of his face, and he was sure he’d never in his life looked so beatific. “What’s so wonderful about a church?” he asked.
6340097/227/3 shook his head. “Is there one near here?” he asked.
“I suppose so. Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed. I mean, they’re so common you just take them for granted . . . Did I say something funny?”
“No, really.” 6340097/227/3 had his hand clamped to his mouth. “Listen, I’m really sorry to impose on you like this, but it’s vitally important that we find one of these – what did you call them?”
“Churches.”
“. . . One of these churches, as quickly as possible. Please?” the alien added, with a lost-puppy look in his eyes that Paul couldn’t have figured out how to do in a million years.
“Sure,” he replied. “Now this minute?”
“Yes.”
Embarrassingly, there was a church not three minutes’ walk from Paul’s front door, and he’d forgotten all about it until he saw the steeple against the skyline. He wasn’t sure of the rules about going into churches after dark; but the door wasn’t locked, so he guessed it was probably all right. “Is this the sort of thing—?” he started to say; then he realized that 6340097/227/3 wasn’t next to him any more. He’d vanished.
“Hey,” the alien’s
voice bounced off the vaulted roof. “This is quite old, yes?”
“Could be,” Paul replied. “Lots of churches go back hundreds of years, but I really don’t know . . .”
“Yes! Oh, this is . . . Get up here, quick. I’ll need your help with a few things.”
He found 6340097/227/3 kneeling before the altar; a reasonable thing to do, Paul figured, in a church. But the alien seemed to be looking for something. Weirder still, it wasn’t long before he found it.
“Marvellous,” 6340097/227/3 muttered, pulling away an access panel. “Of course it’s been a while, but I did my basic training on these babies. Now then, which of these is the circadium feed?”
Paul stared. Behind the panel was a dense chow mein of glowing fibre-optics and glinting metallic conduits, with a keyboard of some kind fixed to the back wall, its keys marked with bizarre symbols. 6340097/227/3 was grabbing handfuls of cables and swapping them over, plugging them in or splicing them together. “Got it,” he said, and slammed the panel shut. “Now then, let’s get this beauty warmed up, and then I can lay in a course out of here. No disrespect,” he added, “but I don’t think I’d have liked it here. The thing with your females is tempting, but your night’s the wrong colour and the sky’s a bit low for my taste. Besides, there’s no place like home, is there?”
Paul took three steps back. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that this church is really a spaceship?” 6340097/227/3 laughed. “A late model ZZ885 Starglider,” he replied over his shoulder. “Must’ve been left behind by some of my people at some stage. Either a colonizing party landed and never went home, or we were planning to build a base here and the project got abandoned. These things happen. Did you say there’s a lot of these?”
“Lots and lots,” Paul replied. “God knows how many, all over the world. You’re saying they’re all spaceships?”
6340097/227/3 shrugged. “Don’t know,” he replied. “What do you use them for?”
Paul wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Religion,” he said.