by Mark Roman
Adorabella watched on, first in bafflement and then with increasing annoyance at the unwelcome distraction until she could stand it no longer. Raising both her arms high into the air she yelled with all her might, “Not now, Bernard! Not now!”
In an instant, the wind had stilled and the air had become calm. The momentum of the cardboard boxes kept them tumbling for a little distance, but soon they slowed and rolled to a halt.
“What the friggin’ ‘eck were that about?” demanded Dugdale, nursing a bruised shin. Brokk got back to his feet, while Zak and Helmut dusted the sand off their suits.
“… Eight …” cried Adorabella, resuming her countdown.
The men sighed.
Behind them, the crowd of watching robots were thoroughly enjoying the spectacle despite not fully understanding what was going on. Eve passed around more popcogs. Just in time, too, for the next scene was about to commence.
Seemingly out of nowhere, and some distance behind the shouty woman with the explosives, a mighty, lumbering, mechanical giant appeared.
The robots gasped.
“… Seven …” shouted Adorabella, unaware of what was approaching behind her.
The four men gasped also. Helmut seemed the most astonished as his eyes focused on the white garment flapping from Karl Eckrocks’s flagpole. “Mein Marsipantz!” he muttered. “So that is where they are getting to.”
Closer and closer the mechanical monster came, its attention caught by Adorabella’s shiny spherical helmet.
“… Six …”
As he approached, Karl extended a gripper arm, opening its metal fingers wide enough to clasp the shiny object.
“… Five …”
The gripper arm was now within two feet and about to grab the helmet. Each man held his breath, heart pounding.
But this was not to be their moment of salvation. InspectaBot skidded to a halt next to Adorabella, booming, “Identify yourself!”
She jumped back with a shriek and then screamed on spotting the giant mechanical monster towering behind her. Her screams sent Karl Eckrocks staggering back several of his giant paces as he fought with the sensitivity of his audio receivers.
“Get back ... whatever you are!”
The giant recoiled even further.
Hope collapsed in the hearts of the watching men.
Except one.
With a burst of British have-a-go heroism, and taking advantage of the distraction, Dugdale made a charge towards Adorabella. Thundering along with the speed, aggression and agility of a rogue elephant he managed to cover about half the distance before a dip in the terrain took his foot from under him and sent him sprawling onto his fat stomach. He thumped a fist into the sand and roared with rage.
“Plucky, but unlucky,” observed Zak.
Adorabella turned back and screamed again. “Not so fast, Dugdale!”
Under the circumstances this was sound advice, albeit a little late.
“Everyone stay back,” she continued. “Or I will set this thing off before I even reach Zero.” She panted heavily as she kept turning from the spread-eagled Dugdale in front of her to the giant robotic monster behind her.
Time stood still, or at least Adorabella’s countdown had stalled while her gaze flitted backwards and forwards between the two sources of threat. All the while, Karl Eckrocks’s processors were working overtime. His interest in the shiny white marble, and the bits attached to it, had increased, for his sensors were indicating definite signs of life.
There was a flurry of excitement amongst his robot followers, despite the temporary radio-deafness they were all suffering.
From Karl’s grille, Webster poked out his eight arachno-eyes and blinked at them.
cried Cassie, and her cry was repeated by robot after robot.
Tude remained upright and rolled his shoulders.
Dura nodded, but seemed distracted by a high-pitched whistling sound.
Tude adjusted his sensors.
*
“... Five ...”
Dugdale raised his helmeted head from the ground and turned it to the others. “She’s bluffin’. Nowt to worry about.”
“Yeah, she’s just kidding,” said Brokk. “Aren’t you, my pretty one?”
“... Four ...” Adorabella’s eyes looked even more crazed.
“Aren’t you?”
“... Three ...”
Dugdale sat up. “Can’t you just tell her you’ll stay?”
“... Two ...”
“Tell her, man. Just friggin’ tell her you’ll stay before t’mad cow blows us up!”
Brokk’s lips tightened. Very deliberately and very slowly he shook his head. “No.”
“One” screamed Adorabella, raising her elbows and preparing to throw her full weight on the plunger.
But at that moment a miracle happened.
Tude and Dura were the first to see it. The high-pitched whistling sound they had picked up had been steadily increasing in volume and, indeed, had now become audible even to humans. Tude looked upwards, zooming his telescopic viewer until he could just make out a small white dot high up in the sky. Gradually it was increasing in size and Tude was able to make out that it had a human shape. He nudged Dura and Eve, pointing upwards.
Human and robot heads had now all turned up in the direction of the noise and were staring at the fast-approaching white shape.
Even Adorabella looked up. It was the last thing she ever did.
Thus it’ll never be known whether her mind fully registered the meaning and significance of what she saw in that split-second. It happened so quickly that the irony may well have been lost on her. It is possible she realized that the large white object heading towards her had a human shape. Perhaps she identified it as a spacesuit, slightly charred at the edges. Maybe, although this is unlikely, she had time to focus on what lay behind the space-helmet’s face-mask. And maybe, although this is even more improbable, she recognized the decayed and putrefied flesh that was all that remained of the pretty face of her murder victim, Penny Smith.
In any case, even if she was aware of any, or all, of these things, there was nothing she could do to save herself.
The corpse, with the momentum of an express train, crashed down on top of her.
Adorabella was dead in an instant.
*
The watching robots burst into a clatter of applause.
roes. There wasn’t much ‘swoop’. It was all ‘splat’. See, a robot superhero like Superbot would never have done that. Superbot would have swooped down and snatched the plunger and taken it away to a safe place, probably disconnecting it just to be sure. There’s your basic difference between human and robot superheroes.>
The robots next to Karl Eckrocks were cheering wildly and falling to their knees.
they were signalling amongst themselves.
*
Inside Botany Base the colonists were looking on, stunned with shock and relief.
“Gung!” exclaimed Brian Brush.
“Can anyone explain what just happened?” Emily asked.
“Gung!” repeated Brian, lost for words, although not for strange sounds from the back of the throat.
Delphinia did her best to fill Emily in.
“But isn’t that, like, totally improbable, Dad?” asked Gavin. “Like, if this happened in a book or a film, no one would believe it, innit?”
Brian Brush was nodding his head. “Like, totally,” he agreed. “I’m trying to work out the probability, son, but the numbers are incalculable.“ He buried his head in his hands. “Incalculable. It may even have been a genuine ‘miracle’.”
The others gasped,
“Poetic justice, I guess,” observed Delphinia.
Harry’s ears pricked up. He suddenly felt a poem coming on.
*
Later, as the bodies of Dr Adorabella Faerydae and Penny Smith were being buried in the desert, another high-pitched whistling came from high up in the sky, closely followed by a loud crash that sent the humans and robots ducking for cover. Within the wreckage of the site office Portakabin was discovered a second space-suit. Inside, a knitted bag with a flower on it and, inside that, the somewhat incomplete mortal remains of Commander Chad Lionheart.
About half an hour later, as the space elevator headed up towards Mayflower III, a third space-suited corpse fell to Mars. This one came down a few miles to the north, plunging through the glass roof of the German base, narrowly missing a giant chicken and leaving a gaping hole through which the precious air started to escape.
As all the startled fowl gazed up at the new opening in their sky, they wondered, insofar as their chicken brains allowed, what significance, if any, the break in the roof held for them.
*
On board Mayflower III, the shaken travellers floated out of the space-elevator with their belongings. Willie greeted them warmly, although was momentarily taken aback by the size of Otto Bungelly’s head. Brokk carried HarVard’s neatly wrapped oil paintings, while Andy Marsman clutched the enlarging ray. As the supercomputer’s HologrAmbulator floated out of the lift its avatar morphed into an urbane and dapper traveller who, under poor lighting conditions, might have been mistaken for Alan Whicker.
“I hope it is soon that we will be going, Kapitan Wubbla,” said Helmut, as Willie showed them to their quarters.
“Yes, very soon. I want to get home as much as you guys do.”
“Ja, das is good.”
Helmut turned to his compatriots and there was much German muttering. “We must go quickly,” was the gist of it. “Before Commander Dugdale finds out ...”
11. German Weasels
As Flint Dugdale made his way to his new living quarters inside the German base, he glanced up at the top of a scaffold-tower under the domed roof where a one-armed robot wearing a gaffer-tape neck-brace was pointing at a crudely repaired roof panel and giving a thumbs-up sign to his foreman far below. Flint frowned before continuing into the passage leading to his room. He unlocked the heavy oak door and stepped inside. The splendour of Helmut von Grommel’s former lodgings made him catch his breath. A crooked grin spread across his face as he took in the layout of study, bedroom and bathroom. “Magic!”
Behind him, Disa staggered in, her motor wheezing. Weighed down with the commander’s luggage, and venting through her suction tube, she headed for the bedroom.
A sign on a door at the far end of the study caught Flint’s attention. It read ‘KEEP OUT’. He raised an eyebrow and started towards it, but then decided to leave it for later. Instead he turned to watch Disa wobbling under her heavy load before she and the luggage crashed in a heap on the carpeted floor.
“Let me give yer a hand, Di,” offered Dugdale, heading in the opposite direction. “After I’ve ‘ad a drink to get me strength up.” He put down the ultra-lightweight shoulder bag he’d been carrying and took out a can of Stallion.
As he slurped he looked about the study. It was crowded with books and ancient journals. A large oil painting of von Grommel, dressed in full military regalia, stared down at Dugdale and the eyes seemed to follow him around the room. Laid out on top of a wooden writing desk were scribbled drawings of rockets and flying saucers. Flint peered at the same words written in bold lettering over and over: ‘Das Mars Escapenzie Projekt’. He snorted at the thought of the Germans plotting and planning an escape from Mars for all those decades.
He ran his fingers over the hand-carved furniture. “Chuffin’ Nora, ‘appen t’daft beggars must’ve whittled all t’furniture wi t’penknife.” He raised his voice to call louder. “Did yer ‘ear me, luv? I were sayin’ ‘ow they carved all t’furniture.”
Disa managed to raise herself upright and chirped a weary acknowledgement.
On top of an old fashioned sideboard were various framed sepia photographs Helmut had left behind, presumably because he had been unable to fit them into his luggage. Flint’s disinterested eyes drifted over them: A photo of Helmut’s ‘farter’ in a chicken costume alongside Buster Klinsman, star of the German silent movies. And one showing his ‘mutter’ in full welding gear surrounded by her nineteen boys, a young Helmut hanging off her huge left bicep. Then, there was a photo of Otto and Helmut on a trip to Vegas in an old Kaiser Firebird with the top down. In those days Otto’s head had been a normal size.
Dugdale’s concentration was broken by the agitated bleeping of Disa in the bedroom.
“Alright, alright, keep yer mop on. Flinty’ll be there in a minute to sort things out. Don’t go damagin’ any of yer delicate suction tools.”
By the time Flint had entered the bedroom, Disa had abandoned the cases and was looking inside a poorly constructed wardrobe. Of more interest to Flint was the room’s main feature: its large double bed. In two strides he had crossed over to it and stretched himself out with a contented sigh. From his prone position he found himself staring up at a glaring anachronism on the wall opposite and, in an instant, the mystery of Botany Base’s missing 100” Superslim 4D TV was solved.
“That thievin’ rogue, Fritz, ‘ad me telly all t’time!”
Disa squeaked and playfully jumped onto the bed next to him throwing a flexible hose over his ample belly. The commander propped himself up with a pillow and reached for the remote control on the bedside table. To his surprise, the first thing the screen showed was the message: “A Note for Kapitan Duggdail”. Then, the craggy face of Helmut von Grommel appeared, sporting a sly smile. Flint sat bolt upright, smelling a rat.
“Ah, Herr Kapitan. I trust you are settling into my apartment. Please be feeling free to use my pyjamas. They are under ze pillow along with a block of pipe tobacco.”
Flint hit the Pause button before lifting his pillow. The sight of the threadbare pyjama trousers made him shudder. He pinched them between thumb and forefinger and dangled them in front of Disa. “In t’bin, please, luv.” Then, as the ladybot scuttled away, he slipped the tobacco pouch into his pocket and cast a suspicious look at the frozen image of the German on the screen.
“What’s this all about, Fritz?” he asked before pressing Play.
“I expect you are wondering what is this all about. Well I am needing to make a tiny confessioning. But, knowing what an excitable chap you are, I am thinking it is best if you are in a state of relaxationings
and I am a long, long way away. It would be such a shame to mar our sad departure with scenes of ugliness.”
“A confessioning, eh? I knew you were up to summat, you sly old dog!”
Disa had returned and was now snuggling up to her human, wondering about the movie starring her favourite German.
“You are remembering ze story I told you about how we are getting here to Mars?”
“How could I forget that load of bollocks?”
“Some of it was true ... and some of it ... to steal an expression of yours ... was bollocks.”
“Gerraway.”
“My childhood, my farter and mutter, my friendship with Otto Bungelly. All true. Und we really were famous rocket scientists during the war, coming to Nevada to work for the Americans afterwards. But Otto never did quite invent an anti-gravity cake mixture. I was amazed you fell for that one!” On screen, Helmut’s head rocked back as he laughed.
Flint’s eyes narrowed as he tried to work out where this might be leading.
“On ze big day of the Grommelsaucer test flight in 1947 we are using only the technologies we are familiar with: rockets. Four German army surplus V-2s. And you will not be believing this, but the part about our encounter with ze grey baldy UFO guy was true also. Otto really is knocking him clean out of the sky. And that was the start of our troubles.”
Flint turned to Disa whose various attachments had started stroking and probing his body. “Not now, luv. Can’t you see I’m watchin’ telly?” She withdrew them in a huff.
“Because, after ze baldy chap is crash-landing in the desert, his alien friendies in the mothership are as angry as wasps and they are swooping down to chase us. There is no escaping them, and their huge ship is swallowing our craft. Und we are finding ourselves prisoners. As punishment they are flying us all the way to Mars and putting us here, in this experimental facility they are building.”
Flint’s mouth dropped open, and the words ‘experimental facility’ echoed around his brain. From his position he could just see the door with the KEEP OUT sign. A shiver went down his spine.
“Now, you shouldn’t stress too much about these aliens,” Helmut continued. “They’re fine ... most of the time. But now und then they come to visit. You will find they are a little ...” Helmut paused as though searching for the right word, “... obsessed about the gathering of experimental data. It’s no biggy. Just a little running on the treadmills and the samplings of your blood and scheisse. That kind of thing. Oh, und ...” He hesitated, although it looked more like he was trying to suppress a snigger. “They are big into the anal probings. Always the anal probings. You are getting used to them after a while. Andy Marsman even says he likes them.”