Out to Launch

by Colin Thompson

  About the Book

  Radius Limpfast is one of the world’s richest men. His reality TV shows have made him billions. The next series is always greater than the one before and yet he is never satisfied.

  Then one night, after a particularly creative bacon curry, Radius dreams up the ultimate reality show. No matter what anyone else comes up with, they will never top it.

  Radius is going to send a family to the moon.

  Limpfast TV will pick an ordinary family, just like yours, build a rocket and a big glass dome, and put them all together on the moon for the whole world to watch.

  This will be reality TV at its finest.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Out-of-this-world laughs from the bestselling author of The Floods

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Notes

  Extras to the Contrasts’ Spaceship

  Intergalactic Spacewear

  Recipes from Limpfast Publications’ Wonderful Cookbook

  The Wonderful World of Chemicals

  In the Pink

  Also by Colin Thompson

  Nigel Davenport

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the Book?

  If you have ever gone outside on a moonlit night, laid down on the grass1 and looked up at the stars and thought, ‘Um, er, I wonder if there’s life out there with like, er, tiny bodies and huge eyes and, like, massive brains and superpowers or whatever,’ or something equally deep and meaningless, then this book is for you.

  If you haven’t ever done that, then it’s about time you did.

  On Monday morning a notice appeared in every newspaper, on every TV, in everyone’s inbox and, just to make sure no-one missed out, billions of pieces of paper floated down from the sky in every country of the world.2

  The announcement said:

  On the back of the paper there was a whole lot of boring stuff, terms and conditions about how you had to be a family consisting of one mum, one dad, one or more boys and one or more girls and maybe a really old granny and possibly a pet of some sort, as long as it wasn’t as big as a pony. Hundreds of losers complained that it discriminated against them because they didn’t have a partner or children and/or a dog or a cat. Those people all got an email that read:

  The reason you haven’t got a partner is because you are a pathetic whingeing loser. So let us all give thanks that you haven’t got a partner who you might well bore to death.

  This message, of course, caused an even bigger uproar, but because there were only a few hundred complainers, no-one had any sympathy for them and locked as many of them as they could in small dark cupboards with all the alternative organic vegetarians, who were also forbidden to apply.

  The flyer also explained that the winning family would be shown LIVE on television EVERY WEEKEND and the WHOLE WORLD would watch them being the MOST FAMOUS people ever. It didn’t actually tell the winning family where they would be or what they’d be doing, but hey, FAMOUS, FAMOUS, FAMOUS.

  They got one hundred and fifteen million applications, which was one hundred and fourteen million more than their wildest dreams told them they might possibly get.

  So the next message said:

  There will be a short delay.

  When it gradually sank in just how many people one hundred and fifteen million was, the TV company sent a follow-up email with the exact same message but missing the word ‘short’.

  When they realised that each of the one hundred and fifteen million application forms covered a family of at least four people, they sent a third message.

  Due to the wonderful enthusiasm such huge numbers of you have shown, we are currently unable to tell you when the finalists will be announced.

  The message went on to explain that a lot more people had applied than had been anticipated so could everyone please be patient until they heard further. The message ended with the inspired sentence that went on to become the most famous sentence in the whole of television history and the title of the show itself:

  It had all started about three years earlier, with the most fantastic idea ever for a reality TV show. They would put an ordinary family on the moon – not scientists or astronauts, but a nice family like what you and I have, who everyone could identify with, so the whole world would feel like they were part of it all.

  Watch This Space would be the ultimate reality TV show, guaranteed to break records, with ratings that would leave the producers of all other shows weeping in the dust. Each week everyone would tune in to see the lunar pioneers living their incredible, groundbreaking, exciting lives. Nothing anyone would come up with in the future would ever be able to top it.

  The show was the brainchild of Radius Limpfast, a superstar producer in the world of reality television and the owner of the global entertainment corporation LIMP-TV. It was Radius who had invented two of the decade’s biggest shows, Hey, Hey, Fatty Bum Bum3 and The Slax Factor,4 which had made him a billionaire several times over and chairman of the world’s most powerful television station, which, of course, was nearly all owned by Radius Limpfast too.

  To everyone who worked for him, from his top producers to the trainee toilet-seat polisher, Radius Limpfast was known as ‘RR’, which he used because it also stood for Rolls-Royce, the greatest and poshest car to exist. When it was pointed out to him that his initials were actually ‘RL’, not ‘RR’, he changed his name to Radius Radius Limpfast.

  ‘No-one will ever top this show,’ Radius told his board members. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘But how much is it going to cost?’ the accountants asked.

  ‘Billions,’ said Radius Limpfast. ‘Lots of billions. But it will be peanuts compared to how much it will make. And,’ he added, ‘by my calculations, we will make all our money back before our winning family even leaves Earth.’

  Everyone who worked at LIMP-TV agreed with everything Radius Limpfast said, even when they didn’t. Radius Limpfast was that sort of person – which didn’t so much mean that his staff adored him and thought he could do no wrong as it meant that anyone who disagreed with him, even over something as small as how many lumps of sugar made the best-tasting coffee, usually found themselves either being suddenly out of work or being a contestant in the grossest reality shows, the latest one being number two in the ratings, which was very apt as it was called Number Twos and involved two teams, two rows of very dirty lavatories and two very small toothbrushes.

  So no-one asked the obvious question: ‘Won’t it get boring watching these people stuck in a glass dome, week after week, on a dead rock with no life or plants or anything?’

  Of course, if they’d said that, Radius would have replied: ‘I’ve got a few little things that will liven it up.’

  So everyone had agreed that Watch This Space was a totally brilliant idea and that there was no way anything could go wrong.

  ‘Unless we want it to,’ said Radius, with a knowing smile.

  Radius Limpfast did a lot of knowing smiles. It reassured people that he was on top of things and had planned for every eventuality. What it act
ually meant was that he was a very, very clever conman, who so far had managed to stay one step ahead of disaster, mostly because lots of the disasters had been his own inventions created to make his shows more popular.

  ‘While the engineers are building the spaceship to get our family to the moon, we will hold worldwide auditions to find the right family,’ he said.

  ‘And,’ he added, ‘a crack team of Patagonian engineers are building the ultimate robot to go along with our family and to maintain the spaceship. After all, we don’t want our family running out of food or oxygen and dying horribly, do we?’

  Which meant, ‘We don’t want them running out of food or oxygen and dying horribly as long as the show is top of the ratings.’ And as Radius Limpfast’s life was governed by the cash register, he had already worked out the cost difference between bringing them all safely back to Earth and letting them die horribly on the moon.

  The TV station was overwhelmed. People didn’t just write, ring and email to apply, but they actually turned up at the TV studios, tens of thousands of them, some having travelled across continents to get there.

  It was chaos. The people who worked there couldn’t get into the station, even with hundreds of police and security guards clearing the roads for miles around. The only way they could keep the station running was to bring staff in by helicopter and, once they were in, they had to stay there.

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Radius Limpfast as he stood in his penthouse office, looking down at the crowds that stretched as far as the eye could see. ‘I told you we’d make a profit before we even launched.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said his right-hand man, who was actually a right-hand woman called Fiona Hardly, who was, in fact, left-handed. ‘How? Advertising?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Radius. ‘Every single applicant is paying for an official application form and, by the way things are looking, the five million forms we printed aren’t going to be nearly enough.’

  ‘OMG, RR, you are a genius.’

  A rumour started that there were not enough application forms for everyone and eBay was brought to a halt with people selling application forms, most of which were fake. The world went Watch This Space crazy, and it felt as if the whole thing had taken on a life of its own, which was exactly what Radius Limpfast wanted. By the end of the second week, Radius Limpfast was the richest, the second-richest and the third-richest person in the world.

  Sorting that many forms would have taken years, so over ninety per cent of them were secretly converted into a very big bonfire in a very remote valley in Patagonia. The TV station’s Top Cleverest Science/Maths Person, Professor Smallparts,5 calculated that by the time they’d manage to interview one hundred and fifteen million applicants and their families, quite a lot of them would probably have died of old age.

  ‘We need a shortcut,’ said Radius Limpfast. ‘We’ve got masses of technology. Surely you can come up with something to eliminate the millions of families we all know would be totally useless?’

  Professor Smallparts thought about it. Being a scientist as well as being a TV executive meant he’d soon come up with a great list of ideas. The trouble was, the very qualities that had got him the job at LIMP-TV – a very sharp mind and no moral scruples – meant that most of his ideas were terminally dangerous and illegal.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Professor Smallparts, feeding pages and pages of brilliant, original and creative dead-making ideas into the paper shredder. ‘Back to the chopping block. Oops, sorry, back to the drawing board.’

  It took a while, but eventually Professor Smallparts came up with a solution. It involved a camera and some clever software, which was referred to by Radius’s office as the Moron Machine or, to be precise, the Moron Machines, as they’d built a lot of them. The machines were taken to all the major cities around the world, and fresh messages were sent out telling applicants where to go and when.

  ‘Basically, in the blink of an eye, the computer will filter out all the unsuitable people,’ said Professor Smallparts.

  ‘By “unsuitable”,’ said Radius, ‘I assume you mean anyone who is too ugly, too nerdy, too fat, too scary …’

  It took over an hour for Radius to get through his ‘unsuitable’ list, which he’d written down when he had first dreamt up this reality show.

  ‘And there are other people who you might think would be just what we want, but are actually unsuitable too,’ he added. ‘For example, if the father is too ugly it’s obvious we won’t want him, but if he’s too handsome we won’t want him either.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Fiona.

  ‘Well, the women would adore him, so the men would be jealous and hate him,’ Radius explained. ‘Same if he’s too clever. Let’s be honest, most of our viewers are thick. Sorry, I meant to say ALL our viewers are thick. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be watching the wonderful garbage that is making us rich. Their stupidity is the reason they love all our shows. It makes them feel intelligent because they are more intelligent than the idiots we put on their screens.’

  ‘But that means we’ve got to choose a total brain-dead zombie,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Mmm, that won’t work either. He could end up killing them all, which would make for brilliant TV, but probably a very short series – though of course we could then have a spin-off series with the police going to the moon,’ said Radius. ‘No, we need our man to be ordinary, pleasant-looking with just a touch of loser, who makes silly mistakes in the sort of way that will endear him to everyone.’

  ‘But you can’t put a bunch of idiots on the moon,’ said Professor. ‘Even if the entire space station is totally automated, it will need at least one person with a bit of intelligence to keep an eye on it all, otherwise the entire family could be dead within a week.’

  ‘That’s why we’re going to send a super-clever robot with them,’ said Radius.

  In the end, it was agreed that the wife could be a lot more intelligent than the husband (while not making him feel stupid) as long as it was in an endearing way, too.

  ‘Because women viewers won’t be jealous of her,’ said Radius. ‘They will identify with her.’

  So Professor Smallparts worked on his computer to tweak the software to pick out exactly the right male and female candidates.

  ‘And the children,’ said Radius. ‘Ideally, the boy should be the younger of the two, a sort of clone of his dad, say about ten years old, and the daughter, say about fourteen, should be like her mum – and it would be great if she could be the cleverest one in the family. Nice bit of potential infighting there – daughter rebelling against mum, brother resenting clever sister, dad taking daughter’s side – oh yes, I can see it all.’

  Fiona wrote down all of Radius’s instructions.

  ‘So, Professor, can you get your Moron Machines to pick a family with all those qualities?’ Radius asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Professor lied. ‘Probably take a week or so, though.’

  Of course there was one potential problem that no-one dared talk about. Suppose they found the perfect man, but his wife was awful? Or the wife was exactly what they were looking for, but the husband was useless? Radius Limpfast had thought of this, but before he considered making any plans that might involve using a husband and wife who had never actually met each other before and maybe having to sort of kill off their partners,6 he reckoned that with so many applicants there was a good chance they would find a suitable husband and wife who were already married to each other.

  So that solves that, he thought.

  In the end, though, the family were chosen almost by chance. In the boardroom there was a wall of large TV monitors, tuned in to all the different LIMP-TV stations round the world. There was also a row of screens relaying live pictures of the crowds queueing up around the TV studios.

  Radius idly scanned the boring lines of hopefuls.

  ‘We need a shortcut,’ he said, half-watching the screen. ‘We all know that there are probably tens of thousands of families out there who’d be all ri
ght and I know the Moron Machines are doing a brilliant job, but we haven’t got time to go through every single one of them.’

  On the other hand, he said to himself, we want every single one of them to think that they’ve been considered, otherwise we could have the biggest riot in history on our hands.

  ‘Yes, RR,’ said Fiona Hardly, ‘but we don’t want anyone to think they haven’t been considered, otherwise we could have the biggest riot in history on our hands.’

  I should marry this woman, Radius Limpfast thought.

  He had always avoided getting married in case it all went wrong and he had to give some of his money away, but in Fiona Hardly he saw someone who had so much in common with him – they were like reflections of each other and your reflection is something you spend your whole life with and with which you are usually deeply in love.7

  He also thought, Mega-riots – I wonder if there’s a series in that?

  ‘Especially those disgusting dags out there with their tracksuits and bags of chips,’ Fiona added. ‘We don’t want crowds of them rioting everywhere.’

  Radius nodded. Those disgusting dags were his most loyal viewers and he was making yet another fortune from his fleet of fast-food vans moving through the crowds selling them the chips.

  ‘Might make a good reality series, though,’ Fiona said. ‘And,’ she added, as she knew on which side her bread was buttered, ‘Watch This Space has to be the most brilliant name for a series ever.’