Out to Launch

by Colin Thompson

  Radius called every hour for the next two days.

  Radius Limpfast had many qualities. Some of them were not very nice and the rest were awful. Patience was not, and never had been, one of his qualities. During those two days, he got angrier and angrier. He sacked twenty-five of his staff members, set his own bed on fire and chopped down a row of three-hundred-year-old oak trees.

  And all the while, the Contrasts and everyone else were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the all-clear to launch the spaceship.

  After the third day of waiting, Radius couldn’t take any more.

  ‘We are going to launch first thing tomorrow morning,’ he announced.

  In his brain, a special filter, which he’d had for as long as he could remember, turned itself on. It was the filter that had helped him build his billion-dollar empire, the filter that had never let him down. It had protected him from his conscience. It had blanked out any and all forms of criticism.

  It was his ‘but’ filter.43

  When it was activated, it simply meant that he was completely unable to hear any sentence with the word ‘but’ at the beginning. If the word ‘but’ was somewhere else in the sentence, this special part of his brain examined the sentence and nearly always blanked it out too. Obviously there were exceptions, but they were pretty rare.44

  So when he announced that the spaceship was launching the next day when everyone knew that rRego had just told him that things on the moon were NOT ready, the air was filled with hundreds of sentences beginning with ‘but’.

  Everyone thought that Radius was ignoring them, but the truth was he didn’t hear a single one of them. To allow his eyes and brain to make sense of what looked to him like people silently opening and shutting their mouths, another part of his brain translated the ‘but’ sentences into stuff telling him how brilliant he was. So, for Radius Limpfast, the air was filled with a million wonderful compliments.

  A feeling of contentment swept over him as he thought about this time tomorrow, when the entire world would be watching LIMP-TV and he would be heralded as the greatest showman ever (and probably the richest too).

  Oh, that’s right, I’m both of those things already, Radius said to himself just before he fell into a deep peaceful sleep – unlike every other person involved in Watch This Space, who spent the night worrying, panicking, praying, rushing to the lavatory, checking their blood pressure, drinking loads of tea, agonising and being totally unable to sleep and being generally very, very discombobulated.

  Meanwhile, rRego was not filled with contentment, either. He hauled himself out of his oil bath, installed his extra back-up battery and raced around as fast as he could, finishing everything off. By morning, the MUD was almost nearly completely finished and kind of safe.

  Just before countdown, the launch team gave each of the Contrasts and Granny Apricot pills to make them sleep for the whole journey to the moon. Even though they knew it would make better TV if they were awake, no-one on the team actually thought the spaceship would make it, so they didn’t want the family to be awake if an accident occurred in space.

  When it was her turn, Granny Apricot winked at Primrose and secretly spat her tablet out. Primrose did the same. They pretended to be asleep like the others when the engineers lifted them up, carried them onto the spaceship and strapped them into their seats.

  At the back of the cabin, Crumley, wishing he’d had one more pee before he’d been put in his custom-made spacesuit, curled up in his crate and also went to sleep.

  The sound of three humans and an old dog gently snoring filled the cabin. Primrose and Granny Apricot opened their eyes and settled down for the journey.

  Through the window they could see people running around the lawn with spanners and coils of wire. Now and then the sound of a hammer hitting metal echoed through the cabin, accompanied by the whole ship shuddering.

  Rows of lights across the dashboard flickered on and off in an erratic manner. Crackling sounds came out of a small loudspeaker followed by a soundtrack of reassuring sci-fi noises that were designed to sound good on TV.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Radius from his mission control room in Limpfast Manor’s dining room. ‘All looking good. We just have to wait for the whole world to turn on their televisions and we’ll be ready to launch.’

  Over the next fifteen minutes, more people around the world tuned in to the Watch This Space launch than had ever tuned in to a single TV broadcast before. When accounts had added up and collected all the licensing fees to broadcast LIMP-TV’s transmission from all the tens of thousands of TV stations, Radius Limpfast had already earned more money than he had spent on the entire project so far.

  ‘You are a genius,’ Fiona Hardly whispered in his ear as they sat at mission control, with their fingers poised ready for launch.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Radius, clapping his hand to his forehead. ‘There’s something else. It’s really important. I can’t believe I forgot it.’

  Everyone in the control room stopped what they were doing and got ready to panic.

  Were one of the life-support systems faulty?

  Was there rocket fuel leaking out across the lawn?

  Was the navigation computer programmed back-to-front and would it send the spaceship crashing into the sun or into Belgium?

  Was the blue touchpaper for launch too short?

  All eyes were on Radius.

  ‘We forgot the launch,’ he said.

  ‘We’re going to do that just now, aren’t we?’ someone said.

  ‘No,’ said Radius, ‘not the launch. I mean the launch.’

  ‘Huh?’ said everyone. Followed by, ‘You what?’

  ‘The launch, like you do with a ship,’ Radius explained, ‘where you break a bottle of champagne on the bow of the ship and give it a name.’

  ‘I think, RR,’ said the chief engineer quietly in Radius’s ear, ‘that if you smash a bottle of champagne anywhere on that spaceship, you will probably break it.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Radius.

  ‘I mean break the ship, not the bottle,’ the engineer explained.

  ‘Ah, right,’ said Radius. ‘No problem.’

  Followed by Fiona Hardly and the engineer and, of course, several LIMP-TV cameramen, Radius went out into the garden with a bottle of champagne, which he began shaking as hard as he could.

  ‘Um, RR,’ said the chief engineer, taking Radius to one side, ‘if that cork flies out with too much force, it will probably break the ship too.’

  ‘Right, OK,’ said Radius.

  With his back to the camera, so no-one could see exactly what he was doing, Radius aimed the champagne towards the spaceship, took a small pistol out of his pocket and shot the top off the bottle. Champagne shot out of the broken neck, splashed against the spaceship’s gaffer tape and silver foil, and ran down into the grass.

  Radius turned towards the cameras, held up the broken bottle and shouted, ‘I name this ship in honour of my beloved mother, the late lamented Grizelda Limpfast.’

  Everyone retreated towards the house. Radius leant down and lit the blue touchpaper before shutting the French windows of the control centre, and the countdown began.

  The blue touchpaper fizzled across the lawn, chased by a small kitten.

  The kitten leapt on the blue touchpaper and caught on fire.

  A junior trainee engineer’s assistant ran round the corner and threw a bucket of water over the burning kitten.

  The water put out the burning kitten …

  … and the blue touchpaper.

  A lot of swearing came live to air from the control centre, followed by the junior trainee engineer’s assistant running away with the wet kitten, and running back with a packet of tissues and a box of matches.

  The first five matches failed to relight the blue touchpaper.

  The next five matches failed to relight the blue touchpaper.

  There were only four matches left in the box. Three of them failed to relight the blue touc
hpaper.

  The last match relit the blue touchpaper. The countdown resumed.

  The junior trainee engineer’s assistant ran as fast as he could as big flames and smoke poured out from the bottom of the Grizelda Limpfast spaceship and set the lawn on fire.

  Everyone around the world held their breath. It was the quietest moment in global history since just before the dawn of time when the first caveman stubbed his toe on a rock.

  Nothing happened apart from more smoke, which ended up completely filling everyone’s TV screens with a total grey nothing.

  The silence was gradually broken as the ground began to shudder.

  The smoke got thicker.

  The ground shook some more.

  There was a flash, a squeak, a dull thud, a very big bang and then …

  The global silence grew even silenter.

  And then, very slowly, the smoke began to drift away.

  Two ambulances and three fire engines raced around from the front of the house in preparation to put out the flames and recover the bodies.

  The last of the smoke slipped away between the trees and there, where the Grizelda Limpfast had stood, was an enormous hole where the ground had collapsed to reveal a cave full of dinosaur fossils.

  There was nothing left of the Grizelda Limpfast, nor of her passengers. Not even a nut, a bolt or a pair of pants. Every single atom had vanished.

  ‘I thought this might happen,’ said the chief engineer to Radius Limpfast in his most I-despise-you voice. ‘Your spaceship and its poor witless passengers have been burned and blasted into microscopic dust. Right now their remains are drifting on the wind and eventually their atoms will settle over the entire world.’

  Bright sparkly rain began to fall gently from the clouds.

  A bright sparkly rain made of thousands of little bits of silver foil.

  ‘Oops,’ said Radius Limpfast.

  One hundred per cent world coverage, a wicked voice inside him said with a laugh. Just what you always wanted!

  Except it wasn’t like that at all.

  ‘Wow, that was some bang,’ said Primrose.

  ‘Yes,’ said Granny Apricot. ‘But it looks as if we’re OK, though I wouldn’t like to think about what’s happened to everyone around us.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Primrose. ‘Probably blew out all the windows in the house.’

  ‘I’d be surprised if it hadn’t injured people, maybe even killed a few,’ said Apricot. ‘I mean, that was one hell of an explosion.’

  A thick layer of dust covered the spaceship’s windows, completely masking the view of the outside. Luckily, part of the cost savings in the construction of the Grizelda Limpfast had been to use the front half of an old Ford Transit van and, as luck would have it, that included an excellent pair of windscreen wipers. Primrose took off her safety harness, went over to the dashboard and turned the wipers on.

  ‘OMG times fifty,’ she said. ‘We’re in outer space.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Granny Apricot, standing beside her. ‘So we are.’

  Earth was far below them and they watched it get smaller and smaller.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Apricot. ‘It looks like we really are on our way to the moon.’

  ‘Wow. I mean, yeah, wow,’ said Primrose. ‘I wonder if I can get a signal up here.’ She pulled out her phone and turned it on. A message appeared on the screen: ‘All mobile phones and electronic devices must be switched off while the seatbelt signs are on.’

  ‘There aren’t any seatbelt signs here,’ Primrose said. Another message appeared on the screen: ‘Yes there are. They’re above your head. And anyway, there’s no signal up here.’

  Primrose cursed and switched the phone off. It had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to use her mobile phone in space.

  ‘I mean, we could be up here for weeks,’ she moaned. ‘I can’t be off Facebook for that long. Everyone will unfriend me and say lies about me.’

  ‘Really?’ said Granny Apricot. ‘What about when they see you on TV? You’ll be the coolest girl in the universe, then.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Primrose.

  As Earth receded into the distance, the moon, which they could see out of a tiny window, got bigger and bigger. Not only were they in outer space, it looked as if they were actually heading in exactly the right direction.

  They passed a long-dead space station, where a skeleton was pressed up against one of its windows, its empty eye sockets seemingly following them as they flew by. There was also a long-dead astronaut in a spacesuit, floating out at the end of a lifeline, which exploded into a small cloud of bones drifting in all directions as the Grizelda Limpfast went by.45

  There wasn’t much Granny Apricot and Primrose could do on the flight. There were notices on almost every switch telling them NOT to touch, and there were sensors that screamed at them if they put their fingers anywhere near the really important buttons on the control panel.

  There were only a few things that were not labelled HANDS OFF: the microwave, the food cupboard, the radio, the windscreen wipers and all the knobs and buttons that worked the onboard lavatory.

  ‘Let’s have a look in the food cupboard and see what they’ve given us,’ Granny Apricot said.

  Inside was the latest hi-tech, state-of-the-art, zero-gravity space food from America. At least, that’s what it said on the packets. Someone had carefully removed the use-by dates with a solvent that had started eating into the plastic grey packaging. There was no way of knowing how old the packets were, and when they opened some of them, there was no way of knowing what the contents were either, because what it said on the label bore no resemblance to the contents. Radius had obviously bought them cheap.

  The instructions said:

  There was another label with very, very tiny writing, which someone had tried to erase. The few words that Primrose could read said:

  ‘This says it’s a burger in a wholewheat bun with onions,’ Primrose read out from one packet. ‘It looks like something Crumley leaves on the lawn.’

  Then she added, ‘Smells a bit like it too.’

  She took a tiny bite.

  ‘I think I’m going to be si–’ she started to say, but then, ‘Wow, it tastes really great, especially the green bits.’

  They opened two more packets, one labelled Steak and Kidney Pudding, the other Chicken Tikka Masala. The contents of both looked and smelled identical but tasted different and, like the first packet, both were delicious.

  ‘It’s crap with chemicals,’ said Granny Apricot. ‘A rumour used to go round that space scientists had invented a magic chemical that made anything taste fantastic. For all we know, we’ve just eaten bags of cow poo.’

  And sure enough, in microscopic writing on the back of each packet, it said:

  Contains NCH (Nonvomiphite Cramplate Hydroxivileoxide) – totally, yes, TOTALLY safe for human consumption (as far as we can tell).46

  The rumour had indeed been true. Scientists could now make anything taste brilliant.47 And it worked with absolutely everything. So when Primrose and Granny Apricot both ate a bag of Chocolate Pudding with Raspberry Coulis, they were in fact eating bleached blue-green algae with brown and red dye.

  And there was even food for Crumley – Rabbit and Fart-Free Cabbage, which was made from twigs and brussels sprouts.

  ‘I just hope we don’t have to live on this when we’re on the moon,’ said Granny Apricot. ‘There were also rumours of the effect NCH had on people and why it got banned.’

  ‘No, I think there’s, like, sort of proper food up there and even a gardening module where we can grow stuff,’ said Primrose.

  Just as Primrose was saying this, rRego was in the Gardening Module, watering the seeds he’d planted when he’d first arrived there.48 It was then he discovered that, as long as they were indoors with access to oxygen, things grew a lot faster on the moon. There were bright green leaves popping up everywhere and tomato vines, with their yellow flower
s growing larger by the hour, were already snaking up the module’s framework.

  Excellentness, rRego said to himself. It looks like my humans will have plenty to eat.

  rRego knew what a cheapskate Radius Limpfast was and how some of his corner-cutting could place the humans – his humans, as he now thought of them – in danger. He had done everything he could to make the MUD as safe for them as possible and his loyalties were with them, NOT with Radius Limpfast.

  It was a good ten hours before someone suggested that the reason they couldn’t find any remains – blown-up spaceship or humans – at the launch site might have been because the Grizelda Limpfast had actually been successfully launched into space.

  ‘You think?’ said Radius.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the chief spaceship engineer, who was surprised, but not as surprised as his boss.

  Unknown to Radius Limpfast, the engineering team had done their utmost to bypass the corner-cutting and built a spaceship that they were nearly but not quite confident about. In fact, they were sort of confident enough to hope that it might actually, perhaps, maybe, work as it was supposed to.

  ‘I think,’ they said to each other, ‘that it’s nearly got an almost fair chance of getting into space if nothing goes wrong.’

  The engineers had all their fingers crossed behind their backs when they’d said it. Though what none of them had admitted to each other was that every one of them had crept back at night and added secret stuff to make the whole ship stronger and safer.49

  And so far it seemed to be working.

  Perfectly.

  Radius Limpfast and Fiona Hardly sat at the communications desk in the control centre, which had been moved to an upstairs bedroom after the launch had blasted all the glass out of the windows downstairs. Radius switched on the satellite communications system receiver. They knew that everyone was meant to be asleep on the ship, but Radius thought it was worth trying to contact them anyway, if it meant he could prove the ship was in space.