by Various
Fortunately for George and Stanley, the 20468 sail was segmented into hundreds of individually adjustable panels, none smaller than an average rooftop and none larger than Piccadilly Circus, so cranking them manually into position was not impossible but merely a –
“Bloody pain in the ass.”
“Almost done for the day, George.”
“I was done two hours ago, mate.”
“Mind you don’t pinch your suit, George. You’d fire off like a rocket.”
“Mind this,” George replied, with an appropriate gesture.
Each had been tempted to shut off the radio, but pointless bickering was at least communication and companionship, something to listen to other than the sound of helmeted breathing, something to focus on other than the rocks and dust underfoot and the dark abyss above.
Or was that the other way around?
“This is the worst job I ever had.”
“Hmm. That’s rather interesting.”
“What is, Stanley?”
“That rock over there.”
George looked about. “Which one?”
“Well, do you see that rather dun-colored, lumpish one with the dents in it?”
“What, next to that largish, hedgehog-shaped, burnt-almond one with the ochre accents?”
“No, I mean the medium-sized, boulder-ish one with the russet spots.”
“Oh! You mean the one that looks like your Aunt Dolly.”
“Only, now that I think about it, George, when I close my right eye, it’s more like Uncle Bert, and then when I close my left, it’s more like Aunt Dolly.”
“What, with both eyes closed?”
“No, I meant, when I reopen my right eye, then close my left.”
“Ah! Gave me a bit of a turn, that did. I thought, if you see her with your eyes closed, Aunt Dolly must have made quite a set of impressions in the wet clay of your adolescent mind.”
“Quite a set, yes.”
“Still, it’s a fine demonstration of pareidolia, Stanley. The human tendency to see order, especially human features or voices, in random stimuli.”
“Like the Old Man in the Moon, George.”
“Yes, Stanley, and the Face on Mars.”
“The Shoulders on Juno.”
“The Phallus on Phobos.”
“The Great Bum on Ceres.”
“Since divided, Stanley, on closer observation, into the Greater and Lesser Bums.”
“The march of knowledge is a wonderful thing. Weren’t there a torso and some legs somewhere, George?”
“At least two legs, Stanley. We were mad for extraterrestrial body parts, in the early days of exploration.”
“And it does relieve the sameness of the landscape. Do you know, George, the first year we were here, after looking about a bit, I decided to list all the words that meant, basically, brown, then look them up, to learn the fine nuances of their meaning. Do you know how the OED defines ‘dun’? ‘Like the hair of the ass and mouse.’”
“Many a happy hour, Stanley, have I spent at the Ass and Mouse. It’s a pub in Chiswick, just down from the Merry Fiddlers.”
“Is that really true, George?”
“It’s not a million miles from the truth, Stanley.”
“Well, you’ve got rather fonder associations with the phrase than I, because now, as I gaze about this sere and unforgiving landscape, I soon find myself thinking, ‘ass and mouse, ass and mouse, ass and mouse,’ and then I have to look away, don’t I? For that way lies madness.”
“It’s the rut you’ve got in, Stanley, not the phrase per se. Why, when I was at university, Londoners from all walks of life sought refreshment and companionship beneath the sign of the Ass and Mouse. Funny that at the height of its popularity, on the very eve of my graduation, it closed its doors.”
“Did it, George?”
“Yes, and reopened them at the start of business the next day.”
“Say, George?”
“Yes, Stanley?”
“Speaking of a million miles – er, what I mean is, may I speak frankly to you?”
“Of course, Stanley.”
“It has come to my attention, George, that we recently seem to have drifted apart.”
“That’s probably my fault, Stanley. I’ve been a bit cross, what with the tea, and the Asteroids, and all. And I’m not of the warmest nature, in the first place.”
“I do not refer to our emotional relationship, George.”
“You don’t?”
“No. I refer to the fact that in the past few minutes of conversation, you, who were standing rather nearby, vis-à-vis me, on the surface of 20468, now seem to have drifted somewhat far away, on both x- and y-axes.”
“Ah, I see what you mean. So that when I look at you, I have to look a surprising distance downward, and squint against the reflected glare of the solar panels beside you.”
“Yes, whereas, when I look at you, I have to crane my neck a bit, and you’re something of a dwindling doll-sized figure, against the blackness of the void. Moreover, you seem to be spinning.”
“Funnily enough, Stanley, so are you, along with the rest of the minor planet you’re standing on. Stanley?”
“Yes, George?”
“I fear I may be in the process of becoming something of a minor planet myself.”
“Now, don’t panic, George. Remember your thrusters. Your Simko thrusters, George. Can you reach them? George!”
“Should I lose the thread of conversation, Stanley, please understand it’s nothing personal…only a result of vertigo…and the blessed respite…of unconsciousness…”
Far below George, the tiny Stanley-shaped figure bounded about in actions increasingly dissociated from Stanley’s tinny radio voice: “Mayday, Margaret. Mayday. Are you there? Margaret!”
“Welcome back, George,” said Stanley.
“Yes, George, good to have you,” said Margaret’s onscreen avatar, wearing a bit of glitter on her eyelids this time.
“Thank you, very kind of you both,” said George, esconced again on his favorite couch, looking none the worse for his adventure. He made a languid gesture of benediction. “I forgive you even the three broken ribs.”
“Well, you were lights-out, George,” Stanley said. “I had to trigger three of your suit thrusters in sequence, just to bring you in – with Margaret’s help, of course – and keep you in the crosshairs of the CO2 laser all the while. So in the circumstances, slowing you rather took a back seat to steering you. Good thing you came in at a glancing angle and, I daresay, a lazy speed.”
“One meter per second,” Margaret said.
“A temperate speed,” Stanley said. The two rescuers gazed fondly at one another.
“I hope they don’t hurt too badly,” Margaret said.
“In between breaths, scarcely at all,” George said. “But I’ve had more injuries, Margaret, than you’ve had hot dinners. Well, I suppose you’ve had no hot dinners, have you? So there’s a total easily bested. I must say I feel sorry for you, Margaret, having had no hot dinners in your life.”
He went on to tell a lengthy story about a memorable hot dinner with a non-stop dancer and a professional Jayne Mansfield imitator.
“My! That must have been a task,” Margaret said. “I must be off. Sleep well, George.” She turned to Stanley and mouthed, “Nine o’clock?”
“Yes!” he piped, voice breaking with excitement.
“What’s that?” asked George.
“Nothing,” Stanley replied. His back to George, he mouthed, “Nine o’clock,” and gave Margaret a thumbs-up. When her dimpled smile faded into the TSE logo, Stanley spun his chair to face George, who gazed at him with blank skepticism, or simply blankness. Stanley attempted to look both innocent and bored.
“I like the two of you together,” George said.
“Don’t know what you mean, George.”
“It’s rather like Aunt Dolly and Uncle Bert. If two people make one another happy – or, in this case, if one act
ual person and one sweet, charming, shy, mysterious, neurally networked, hybrid symbolic/sub-symbolic semi-embodied agent can mutually simulate happiness protocols – then who am I to muck about with it? I ask you.”
“Why, George. You’re a closet romantic, you are.”
“That’s what Daphne Meacham said,” George replied, gazing out the porthole. “Funny old world.”
“Something to read, George? Aldiss or Wyndham or E.C. Tubb, perhaps? Take your mind off your troubles.”
“Indeed they would. Interesting, isn’t it, Stanley, that twentieth-century science-fiction writers seldom wrote about the asteroid belt except in connection with mining? Take Asimov.”
“You mean Asimov, the master of sensuality?”
“Yes, though in this case, I more precisely mean Asimov, the master of occasionally dropping some stray mention of asteroid mining into a story otherwise about positronic robots and that lot.”
“Ah, but let’s apply a true test of literature. How is Asimov at playing Sausages and Mash?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that game.”
“Don’t be afraid, George, it’s very simply learnt. Whenever you’re reading a passage, you substitute each ‘S’ word with the word ‘sausages,’ and each ‘M’ word with the word ‘Mash.’ For example, let’s open this Asimov volume fairly at random, and take a look at his classic story ‘Mash off Vesta.’ ‘Mash off’ – that’s rather good, isn’t it?”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” George said. “Not the ‘rather good’ part, mind you, the ‘mash off’ part.”
“Ah, here’s a good passage. ‘He clicked on the mash grapple and very cautiously put a foot out into sausages. Clumsily he groped his way out to the sausages of the sausages. He had never been outside a sausages in open sausages before and a vast dread overtook him.’”
“I think the phrase ‘vast dread’ is awfully well chosen there,” George said, “what with all those sausages about.”
“Skipping ahead here. ‘Eagerly he sausages the sausages for the little blue-white speck that was Earth. It had often amused him that Earth sausages always be the first object sausages by sausages travelers when sausages, but the humor of the sausages did not sausages him now.’”
“I can identify,” George said.
“When you’ve made the close lifelong examination I have, George, you’ll find that very few authors favor both sausages and mash. One large cohort of authors cleaves notably unto the mash—”
“Proust comes to mash. Or mind, that is.”
“—Proust, exactly, or Kant, whereas Asimov, judging from these passages, seems to be firmly in the grip of sausages.”
“Or vice versa. Yet the point I groped for, Stanley, if we can beat our boats back that far upstream, is that the early sausages fiction writers, when writing about our quadrant of sausages, could envision it only as a sausages of mash resources, and otherwise cared about asteroids only when they entered the Earth’s atmosphere and became mash. Oh, bother.”
“Catching, isn’t it?”
George popped a Pontefract cake. “At any rate, our job among the asteroids was rarely envisioned.”
“I wonder why, George.”
“You may include yourself in the ranks of those who wonder, Stanley, but it’s crystal clear to me. I mean, it’s bloody boring, isn’t it? Asteroid mining, there’s a good robust, two-handed, red-blooded fictional theme, rife with color and incident. Ripping resources steaming from the guts of the universe. But here we are, doing nothing but peacefully averting violence, mucking about with reflective sheets.”
“Two weeks on, move it an inch—”
“Three weeks on, red-letter day, move it another half-inch—”
“Two weeks on, Hello, bit of a crinkle in that sheet, best to smooth it out—”
“I mean, it’s not enough to keep the mind alive, is it?”
“But for us, George, it’s a bit late in life, you see, to turn to anything else.”
“Oh, I’m not knocking the job for a moment, Stanley. We’ve got it made, you and me.”
“I agree, George. It’s a short life, but a merry one.”
“All I’m saying is, when one looks at it from the point of view of audience, one does not immediately discern the full dramatic potential of reflective sheet adjustment. I ask you, Stanley, who would read a story on that?”
“Tea’s up, George.”
END
—For Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Eleanor Bron
Copyright (C) 2011 by Andy Duncan
Art copyright (C) 2011 by Scott Brundage
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Inspector Wilde was in a fine mood when he arrived at the headquarters of Salmagundi’s Legion of Peace, carrying three paper-wrapped sandwiches and an armload of printed broadsheets. He had a spring in his step and walked in time to one of the latest music hall ditties, which he whistled cheerfully for the benefit of his coworkers. All along the gaslit passage, clerks and secretaries poked their heads out of their rooms and stared, in wonder and admiration at his audacity. Most of them smiled as he passed, and a few of the braver ones tapped their feet along with the tune for a few moments before dashing back to their desks to avoid the ire of their supervisors. Wilde laughed as he passed a room full of secretaries who somehow managed to type in time with the music.
Midway down the hallway was the Chief Inspector’s office, which was fronted by a small antechamber in which her secretary, Marguerite, was busy making sense of several unsightly piles of documents. Her work table was a model of efficiency. Her pens and pencils were all neatly arranged to one side, along with writing paper and a three-section typewriter for preparing documents in triplicate. A rack of empty pneumatic capsules waited nearby to be filled and dispatched.
Marguerite smiled as Wilde approached, delighted by the cheerful whistling. Wilde leaned down, eyebrows arched, and tossed Marguerite the top sandwich in his stack.
“And a girl in uniform’s just the thing for me…” Wilde said playfully, completing the refrain of the tune in Marguerite’s ear.
“Max!” Marguerite exclaimed, her cheeks flushing. She pushed him away and made a show of reorganizing the papers on her desk. “You mustn’t say things like that to me. People will talk.”
“Well, if ‘people’ are going to talk, don’t you think we should give them something to talk about?” Wilde asked, flashing one of his trademark recruitment smiles.
Marguerite was trying to come up with a reply when a third voice interrupted. “Max, get in here!”
Marguerite jumped in shock and pulled a handful of papers between herself and Wilde, as if to deny that they had even been speaking. Wilde was also caught by surprise, but retained his composure. He looked over at the polished voicepipe mounted next to Marguerite’s table just in time to hear the Chief Inspector’s voice again.
“Now!”
* * *
Wilde kept his head high as he sauntered across Chief Inspector Cerys’s cluttered office. Behind him, a sheepish Marguerite closed the door as quietly as she could. What might normally have been a sizable, bland, and dutifully bureaucratic office had, since the Chief Inspector moved in, been transformed into a nest of filing cabinets, pigeonhole shelves, and chairs covered in files and loose papers.
The room was lit entirely by gas lamps, for both of its windows had been tightly shuttered. Located on the top layer of Salmagundi, Legion Headquarters was gifted and cursed with an over
whelming view of the vast horizonless sky that surrounded the city. The silver-gray expanse of ether was a sight of unparalleled majesty and terror. Though sky-borne steamships traveled freely from one floating city to another, urban dwellers could not help but fear the mysterious beasts and horrors that lurked in the great beyond, thanks to old sailors’ stories of unfathomable monstrosities. However, even fear could not defeat the human drive for commerce. For every cargo ship lost to the ether, five more were already being built in Salmagundi’s shipyards, like heads of a great industrial hydra.
The largest piece of furniture in the Chief Inspector’s office was her massive Legion-issue desk, which was covered in papers, pens, and miscellanea. However, it was a metal coffee percolator resting on a stand nearby that was the true focal point of the room. A set of insulated pipes extended from the wall and into the percolator’s base, keeping the coffee hot by pumping steam through it from the building’s main line.
Chief Inspector Cerys looked up from a collection of reports, coffee cup in hand, and gave Wilde a look. “Max, I’ll thank you to stop flirting with my secretary all the bloody time.”
“Why, Chief?” Wilde asked, setting one of the sandwiches down by Cerys and then pulling over a chair. “If you ask me, I think she rather likes it.”
Cerys gave him another look as she began to unwrap her meal. “She does, Max. She likes it too much.” Cerys waved a typewritten form in front of Wilde’s face. The document was so complex as to be less legible than a massive ink spot, but it would drive some anonymous bureaucrat into a frenzy if even a single T was left uncrossed before filing. “Marguerite’s the only person in this blasted place who can read these damn things, and she’s useless for half an hour after you bat your pretty little eyes at her.”