by Mark Roman
Ding! “Doors closing,” announced the pleasant lift voice, and the doors slid towards one another.
“Nooo!” came the cries from inside the lift, and from Emily outside it.
In a flash, little Tarquin sprang to the rescue, locating the ‘Open doors’ button on the control panel inside the lift and pressing it just in time to reverse the doors’ sliding progress.
The trunk and hatboxes had crashed into the opposite wall. The impact had snapped the trunk’s clasps, allowing its lid to spring open and its contents to spew out into the corridor. Within seconds the air was filled with a cornucopia of feminine undergarments and an explosion of subtle, and not-so-subtle, fragrances. Billowing from the trunk was a whirling cloud of corsets, lacy brassieres, stockings, suspender belts, frilly knickers, pink dresses, feather boas and assorted ladies’ separates, as well as items of a personal feminine nature rarely discussed in polite company.
But worse was to come. The impact had also triggered Mr Darcy’s self-inflate button and, like a jack-in-the-box, he had sprung out of the trunk, reaching full inflation, and full speed, within 2 seconds. His trajectory took him towards the open lift and its cramped occupants. After brushing against Delphinia’s bottom he came to a halt pressed up against Adorabella. The presence of female pheromones triggered his ‘Smoulder Mode’ causing his eyes to narrow, stubble to blacken and chin dimple to appear.
Adorabella screamed. Emily Leach screamed. Dugdale roared in disbelief and the teenagers sniggered. The rest were too stunned to react.
Gavin, seeing an opportunity for a lark, solemnly offered Mr. Darcy a hand and introduced himself. “Yo. I is Gav. You must be, like, a close personal friend of Leachy, innit.” He gave a smutty wink on the word ‘friend’.
Emily, now bright red, wrenched her necklace free of the valve, sending pearls spinning into the zero-G air and then, like a geriatric otter, swam her way towards her life-sized doll. “He’s my literary companion,” she explained to the smirking crowd. “Programmed to read and discuss all the classics. We’re currently doing Thomas Hardy.”
For some reason, the last statement made everyone laugh which, in turn, made Emily blush even more.
Sensing the presence of his owner, Mr Darcy’s eyes widened and he ramped up to ‘Lover Mode’; a long slug-like tongue crept out from between moistening lips and started drawing weirdly hypnotic circles in the air, as though licking out the last drops from the bottom of a yoghurt carton.
“What’s he doing, Mummy?” asked Tarquin, hardly finishing the question before Delphinia had clapped a sweaty hand over his eyes and manoeuvred her ample form to block his view. “It’s nothing, poppet,” she said with a disgusted curl to her lips. “Just keep pressing that lift-button.”
Gavin invited Mr Darcy for a dance. “Cue music, maestro, please.”
A blast of techno-breeze issued from Oberon’s blablet and Gavin began weightlessly cavorting with the doll, mugging and grinning. Tracey cheered, Oberon applauded, and Miss Leach turned white with horror. She grabbed one of her pneumatic reading companion’s arms and tried to pull him away. But Gavin wasn’t about to relinquish his new comedy partner without a struggle. So, teenager and spinster engaged in a desperate tug-of-war, stretching Mr. Darcy’s body and causing his shirt buttons to pop off and his firm, rippling, hairy chest to heave into view.
When Mr Darcy appeared to be at the limits of his elasticity, Gavin let go, catapulting Emily and Mr Darcy back into the passage. They cannoned into Dugdale and the three of them tumbled through the miasma of feminine apparel.
Dugdale, fuming, returned to the lift, swatting ladies’ garments to the left and right as he did so. He turned back to see the receding Emily entangled with her rubber lover. “Leave t’friggin’ love puppet alone, Leachy, and get in t’lift!”
After bouncing off a few walls, Emily managed to steady herself and start back towards the open door, reluctantly leaving Mr Darcy behind. As she went she collected her clothing from the air around her, folding it and all the while muttering, “He’s just a literary companion, you know. Just a literary companion.”
“Leave t’friggin’ …” started Dugdale, but was interrupted by a sudden shriek of “Yeuch!” from behind. He turned just in time to see Tarquin thrashing with both hands at a pair of cami-knickers clamped to his face.
What happened next seemed to happen in the slowest of slow motions. With the boy’s thumb no longer pressing the crucial lift button, there was a Ding! and the lift announced, “Doors closing.”
Dugdale stared mortified as the metal doors slid shut, the image left ingrained on his retinas being of a grinning Mr Snuggles, staring out from the shrinking opening, giving a plaintive wave.
“Noooooo!” he yelled, pulling himself back to the lift doors and going into a frenzy of lift-button pressing, making a strange whimpering noise as he did so.
From behind the doors could be heard a cheerful electronic voice saying, “Welcome to Penge Shopping Centre. Gateway to a world of shopping adventures. Going down.”
“Oh, fiddle-sticks,” said Miss Leach with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “They’ve jolly-well left without us. So, it’s just thee and me, Mr. Flint.” She drifted toward him, fluttering her eyelids in what she imagined to be a seductive manner.
Dugdale, seeing his dreams going up in smoke, redoubled his lift-button pressing efforts.
Ding! The doors opened. “Level 2. Ladies’ lingerie,” announced the electronic voice.
Inside, the occupants appeared to be in a rigid and silent state of shock. Without uttering a word, Dugdale grabbed Miss Leach by the lapel of her blouse and dragged her into the lift after him, wedging her into a gap between Gavin and Adorabella. Maintaining a threatening silence, he punched the ‘Ground Floor’ button and the doors closed once again.
Ding! “Going down.”
Down plunged the lift, throwing the hapless passengers up at the ceiling. If any dared to think that the worst might be over, they were wrong.
26. The Knicker Man
In the cockpit, watching the CCTV images of the events unfolding in and around the space elevator, Lieutenant Willie Warner experienced a wide range of wholly negative emotions. First, the sight of the space colonists filing, and then piling, into the second-hand lift compartment filled him with an overwhelming, all-consuming, gut-wrenching resentment that these people ... these people, for goodness sake! ... would be the first to walk on Mars and, worse, the first to encounter the 12-foot alien bird-people that he alone had discovered.
“Where’s the justice in that?” he moaned aloud even though there was no one there to hear or sympathize with him. Although Willie had been the youngest of seven boys, the other six all high achievers, and had known injustice his entire life he had, sadly, never quite grown accustomed to it or learnt how to accept it.
“Look at them!” he wailed, pulling at his thinning hair in frustration. How was it fair that those morons would soon be making History while he, grade A* space academy cadet, was to be left alone on board. Three years of intensive astronaut training and, now that the big moment had arrived, here he was: relegated to bag-boy. If only he’d completed another year, maybe they would have let him wash and iron their space dungarees.
Just the sight of Dugdale, hovering outside the lift door, drove Willie to distraction. “Him! Representing Mankind? I ask you!”
Willie studied each of them in turn, wondering who had battered Penny Smith to death and for what reason.
He knew full well that the very pictures he was watching would be winging their way back to Earth, to be beamed directly into the homes of billions of people worldwide. What he was seeing, everyone on Earth would be seeing a mere 6 minutes later.
Willie put his head in his hands. There was no way of stopping the images reaching Earth and preventing the World witnessing the British way of space exploration and how a once-proud nation was making a total balls-up of one of the most important moments ever. It seemed a painfully long time before t
he lift doors closed for the final time and departed, plummeting towards the surface of the Red Planet.
Willie closed his eyes and moved his hands up to clutch the top of his head. On screen could still be seen the floating clothing and, at the end of the corridor, the full-sized blow-up doll bobbing about as though resentful at having been left behind. Not as resentful as Willie, though. Particularly as he knew he’d be the one having to clear up the mess.
His mind suddenly filled with bad thoughts, wicked thoughts. Wishes for disasters, evil hopes that things might go horribly, tragically, fatally wrong. Perhaps the lift would crash, or burn up on re-entry, or would be met by an army of hostile 12-foot bird-people who would merciless peck the crew and colonists to death. Mankind’s future in space would then lie with himself, Lieutenant William Hilda Warner. Ah, if only.
*
“Such a shame my space training never covered this,” muttered Willie through gritted teeth as he plucked various items of female apparel out of the air in the corridor – camisoles and corsets and cami-knickers and suspenders and crotchless panties. As he folded each item and popped it through the narrow opening in the trunk, he tried desperately not to picture Emily Leach wearing it. Not easy but, for the sake of his sanity, necessary. Particularly the crotchless panties. No man in the Solar System deserved that particular image in his head.
Willie had taken the precaution of wearing latex gloves. The thought of his bare skin making contact with any of these lacy, frilly, highly-perfumed things made him shudder. He wondered what additional precautions he’d need when it came to dealing with Dugdale’s underwear when he went to pack the commander’s suitcase.
Once all garments and personal nick-knacks had been packed in the trunk, he faced the problem of Mr Darcy. The doll was hovering at the far end of the corridor and seemed to be in ‘Simmer Mode’, eyeing Willie like some sort of unwelcome love rival.
Willie eyed him back. “Hmm, an inflatable literary character,” he mused. “What a brilliant invention. Five million years of evolution for ... that.”
He approached the doll warily. Somewhere there had to be a valve to deflate it, but Willie hardly fancied groping the doll from head to foot to locate it. Indeed, as he came closer the doll’s simmer mode switched to a more threatening demeanour.
He decided on a softly-softly approach. “My, my Mr. Darcy, how handsome you look, with your tousled hair, frilly wet-look shirt and tight riding britches. I can barely resist kissing you myself.”
Perhaps Willie should have realized that the inflatable doll’s program was not sophisticated enough to comprehend sarcasm. So, the moment Willie got close enough, Mr Darcy stretched out his rubber arms and switched to ‘Stage 1 Lover Mode’, wrapping himself around the lieutenant.
Maybe it was the romantic corridor lighting, or the subliminal eroticism of having just handled a trunk-full of female underwear, or because Willie had never actually been kissed before, but the young lieutenant was lost in the moment, and when Mr Darcy gently slipped his moist gel tongue into his mouth, Willie reciprocated.
But even a rubber sex doll has standards. Once the Mr Darcy doll had fully registered Warner’s ugliness at close quarters, he recoiled and, an instant later, flipped open the cap of his own deflation valve.
“Bastard!” screamed the rebuffed Warner as Darcy withered in his embrace and, once again, Willie was left to consider his romantic shortcomings.
*
Grim though the experience of packing Miss Leach’s trunk had been, the experience of packing Dugdale’s stuff promised to be far worse. The items floating in the commander’s cabin looked a lot less wholesome than those he’d just been dealing with. They were larger, greyer, more frayed and holey, more prominently stained, and emanating odours that were as far from the delicate scents of Miss Leach’s perfumes as Mars is from the other end of the galaxy. Warner took one look and closed the door, gagging slightly at the memory of what he had just witnessed. The worst part was that Dugdale’s suitcase was floating on the other side of the room, meaning he would need to battle his way through the aerial slurry of the commander’s garments to get to it.
“What a joy life is,” he muttered.
After a few deep breaths of clean, corridor air, he managed to summon the courage to open the door again and enter the cabin.
Carefully he threaded his way through the clothing, as though swimming through a densely planted minefield, shuddering every time anything touched him. But, as most of his efforts were directed at protecting his face, it was inevitable that legs, trunk and elbows brushed against soft things which immediately clamped themselves onto him, like overfriendly limpets.
Then, as he approached the suitcase, some hard object clunked against his skull. Willie turned to see what had whacked him and found himself staring at a floating cricket bat. The more he surveyed it, though, the less he cared about the minefield of soft menswear around him.
For, on the edge of the bat, was what looked like a bloodstain. The bloodstain instantly became the focus of all his attention.
“Penny Smith?” he wondered in a croaking voice. “Could this be Penny’s blood? And this the murder weapon?”
27. A Room with a Small View
Rare indeed was the occasion when Flint Dugdale found himself pondering the mysteries of the Universe. This might have been the perfect moment. As he peered out of the lift’s small viewing window, his bloodshot eyes took in the awe-inspiring sight of Mars, the Sun, Mayflower III – all set against the stardust of deep space – and the elevator’s super-laser light-cable plunging to the surface below. However, a swig from his can of Stallion extra-strong lager elicited a huge belch that misted the glass with beer vapour, obscuring the view and with it the opportunity for deep and meaningful thoughts.
Just then, a glitch in the super-laser power supply caused the lift to lurch and Brian Brush to bump against Flint’s beer drinking arm. Instinctively, Dugdale’s Saturday night, testosterone-fuelled, reactions kicked in and, with his free hand, he grabbed the weedy scientist by the lapels.
“Oi, watch where yer goin’, four eyes. Yer’ve spilt me beer. Say yer sorry, or I’ll plaster yer goggles over yer ugly mug.”
“Sorry,” said Brian meekly, pushing his heavy glasses up the bridge of his nose and turning his face away to avoid the draught of beer-breath.
Flint flung the planetary scientist away, although, in the crush, Brian travelled only a few inches before barrelling into Zak.
“Now, listen up,” announced Dugdale. “At bottom ert elevator I’ll be takin’ t’first ‘istoric steps on Mars and makin’ me ‘istoric speech. If any of you lot bollocks-up me big moment, I’ll piggin’ well skewer yer ‘ead and stick it on top ert dome as a warning. ‘Ave I made meself clear?”
Most of the colonists murmured an uneasy consent, apart from Harry Fortune whose upside down head appeared between Brian’s knees. “I’ve always felt I should be the one taking the first historic steps on Mars. After all, I’m the most famous one here and the people of Earth will expect to see me appear first.”
Just for a moment it might have been possible to hear a pin drop, were it not for Tarquin noisily chomping the soft centre of a mint humbug in his mouth. The lift became tense as Flint stared ambiguously at Harry’s legs. Then a gush of laughter splurged from the commander’s mouth. In an instant, the whole lift was laughing. Zak, Miss Leach, Mr Snuggles, everyone joined in.
With his tears floating into the lift, Flint slapped Harry on the back of his calves. “Chuffin’ Nora, Barry Fortnum, I always thought you wert unfunniest comedian alive but that joke were a reet cracker. The thought of a useless twonk like you takin’ t’first steps on Mars. Comedy gold.”
Harry said nothing, but merely added Dugdale, not for the first time, to his long mental list of those who had mocked him and who would find themselves on the receiving end of one his more vitriolic poems.
As Dugdale’s laughter subsided he caught sight of the large fishbowl-like object that T
arquin was holding. His smile vanished. “What the chuff is that?”
“It’s a space helmet, sir.”
“I thought I told yer: No personal possessions.”
“It’s not mine; it’s NAFA property,” retorted the ten-year old.
“Cheeky beggar. What d’yer want an ‘elmet for? There’s air in ‘ere. And on t’base.”
Delphinia cuddled her boy with two protective arms and sprang to his defence. “You can’t be too careful, commander. And my little space cub knows that.”
Dugdale scowled, but made no response.
*
Far below on Mars, last-minute preparations were being made in Botany Base. The Polish robotniki were working their electro-motive socks off, each giving vent to a continual stream of curses in Polish swear-lite. Maciek, brandishing his mastic gun, was filling in the gaps around the glazing gaskets of the BioDome. Andrzej was unclogging the water filtration system. Rysio was wiring up a cooker and microwave oven in the kitchen. And Witek was installing the central heating units. All the while the base was filling with oxygen, and only a little was leaking out. The English robots were hard at work, too. They were busy pinning tinsel to the walls, hanging up ‘Welcome humans’ banners and stringing bunting across the ceilings. Ero was gaffer-taping Stallion posters to the walls where they would be in shot of the cameras recording the historic arrival, although his overenthusiastic use of tape was obscuring much of the ads.
In the entrance hall, in front of the space elevator doors, a ramshackle group of robots were being taken through their paces in a last-minute dress rehearsal. This was the ‘Welcoming Committee,’ under the supervision of a HarVard hologram, smartly dressed in a black tuxedo, his hair slicked back, and a conductor’s baton in his right hand.