Out to Launch

by Colin Thompson

  ‘I have immobilised everything except the things you need to stay alive,’ said rRego, ‘and I will tell you why.’

  ‘You’re going to put us out of our misery by killing us?’ said Primrose.

  ‘Of course not,’ said rRego, and then he told them his life story about how he had been built from cheap second-hand parts, which by a wonderful turn of luck had come from one of the most powerful, experimental, untested super-computers ever built.

  ‘And while we are completely cut off from Earth, I will investigate this time-lock,’ he said. ‘And find a way of disabling it.’

  ‘Won’t they get suspicious down there?’ said Granny Apricot.

  ‘I emailed them, saying I was shutting everything down for a while because I’d picked up a mysterious tracking signal heading towards us that might be from aliens,’ said rRego. ‘You can imagine how excited they were about that – they kept telling me to turn everything back on and to try to make contact.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Primrose.

  ‘So you can come and help me,’ rRego said to Primrose, ‘and the rest of you can have a bit of a rest while we get this sorted.’

  ‘Do you think you can do it?’ said Stark.

  ‘Of course,’ said rRego. ‘The people who invented this system are about as scientifically advanced as kindergarten kids.’

  rRego took Primrose into the Creation Module. She was the first and only human who’d ever been or who would ever be taken in there.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘this is a really cool place.’

  rRego felt his circuit board tingle with excitement. He liked Primrose. He felt she had a huge amount of potential, so the fact she admired the Creation Module, which he and he alone had created, filled him with pride.

  ‘Look at all those chemicals,’ Primrose said, scanning the wall, which was filled top to bottom with jars and a few lead radiation-proof cylinders. ‘You must have a complete collection.’

  ‘I do, I do,’ rRego said, beaming.

  He turned on one of his computers and sent a program running through every single wire in the MUD and The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast.

  ‘Oh, it’s pathetic,’ he said, three minutes later. ‘A two-year-old child with a plastic spoon could have built a better lock than that. For goodness sake, hyper-pyro-nucleic-fractoid thermograpples went out with the Ark. In fact, it was probably Noah himself who last used them, and as for fluoro-callisthenic-plasma boltoids, even Noah would have thought they were old-fashioned.’

  ‘All right,’ he said to Primrose, ‘run and get a jar of treacle and two pickled onions from the kitchen cupboard and meet me at the door into The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast.’

  Five minutes later, the spaceship’s door was open and Primrose had gone back to fetch everyone. They’d all agreed that they wouldn’t tell Radius or anyone else on Earth what was happening. They would leave everything in the MUD switched off until they were well away from the moon and on their way home.

  Naturally, rRego would leave with them, partly because he was the only one who could fly The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast and partly because he was bored on the moon too. It was decided that when they were about halfway back to Earth, rRego would remotely switch everything back on. He and Primrose had made some green slime from rRego’s chemical collection and poured it around the Lounge-Room Module, writing a big notice on the wall in some other slime that looked exactly like human blood. It said:

  rRego plotted a course back to Earth that would allow them to slip in pretty much undetected and land in a very remote part of America famous for hillbillies who claimed to have had hundreds of alien abductions. So if anyone did report seeing The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast land, no-one would believe them except the other hillbillies.

  Everyone was strapped safely into their seats. rRego lifted The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast gently up into the sky.

  ‘OK, people, lie back and relax,’ he said. ‘We’re on our way home.’

  While rRego looked after everything, the humans nodded off to sleep.

  At the halfway point, rRego switched everything on the moon back on, and the whole of planet Earth went into a flat panic seeing that the Contrasts were no longer there. When they saw the notice on the wall, they went into a very bumpy panic, a curly panic and an upside-down panic. In fact, whatever shape of panic you can think of, there were millions of people feeling it. And then when they finally saw that The Late Lamented Grizelda Limpfast had gone too, they went into the ultimate panic, which words cannot describe.74

  Primrose and Granny Apricot woke up to hear the robot chuckling to himself.

  They looked out of the window, towards home.

  ‘My god,’ said Primrose, ‘it looks so different from up here.’

  And as they got nearer and nearer, it looked more and more different.

  Much, much more.

  Earth looked a lot smaller than it should be. And, in the short time they’d been away, it seemed to have got a second moon.

  And a third moon.

  And it was pink – not the moon, Earth.

  Except obviously it wasn’t Earth.

  ‘Oops,’ said rRego. ‘Not sure what happened there.’

  Then he reprogrammed EVERYTHING.

  ‘OK, we should be all right now,’ he said, but nothing changed.

  Earth was still pink. It still had three moons.

  It still wasn’t Earth.

  ‘Oh well,’ rRego said, as they got nearer and nearer to the pink planet and finally entered its atmosphere. ‘At least it’s got oxygen and something with a heartbeat.

  ‘Actually, millions and millions of heartbeats.’

  Notes

  1 It has to be grass. Concrete is too hard and you won’t be able to concentrate on the sky. Earth is too wet and will make you want to go to the toilet.

  2 Not even anyone as far away as Tristan da Cunha and that little outside toilet halfway up Mount Everest would have missed it, unless the little outside toilet had run out of paper and someone had used the notice as a substitute without reading it first.

  3 Where eight normal-sized contestants were fed a super-diet of high-fat meat pies and deep-fried banana thickshakes over a period of twelve weeks. The contestant who had grown the fattest bottom in that time got a brand-new house with extra-wide doors and a lifetime supply of Lardo’s Finest Pies. Hey, Hey, Fatty Bum Bum had been a phenomenal success and when one of the contestants had actually exploded live on TV, the ratings had gone through the roof.

  4 This show had been aimed at the more discerning viewer, and featured a very glamorous but serious (she wore glasses) reporter who travelled the world taking the mickey out of people’s terrible trousers. This, of course, resulted in huge sales of really dreadful nylon tracksuits to people who wanted to be on TV.

  5 To save time with university and studying, Professor Smallparts had changed his first name from ‘Terry’ to ‘Professor’ by deed poll. Radius Limpfast knew this, but that was just the sort of devious cunning he admired in his employees, especially when he could pay them a lot less because they weren’t properly qualified.

  6 He did actually have a well-organised plan that could do this. It was filed away in his very, extremely top-secret Safe of Last Resorts.

  7 Unless your reflection is hideous and gross, but then those people usually avoid mirrors or live under rocks, only coming out after dark to go shopping in those creepy weird supermarkets that stay open all night. I know about this because I’ve seen them.

  8 A prenuptial agreement is a contract a couple sign before they get married. It means that if the couple end up getting divorced, the richer one of the two gets to keep it all for themselves.

  9 Which had not been a great success. It had not so much reached space as collided with an albatross and reached the bottom of the sea. The space shuttle had, however, shuttled, and fifty-seven years from now, when a salvage team will recover the wreck, Stark’s special nuts will still be as shiny as the day they w
ere made.

  10 ‘Stupid’ is a very variable word. Compared to me and a lot of you, Stark Contrast was stupid. Compared to all his friends and the rest of you, he was clever.

  11 ‘Take care’ as in ‘Take care not to miss any when you take them all to the local fish and chip shop.’

  12 Because birds don’t have hands, they can’t actually ‘handle’ anything. They can hold things in their beaks and some can hold things in their feet too, but there is no such word as ‘beakle’ or ‘footle,’ so ‘handle’ will have to do.

  Comment from a very well-educated editor: ‘Actually, there is such a word as footle, but it means “to waste time”, so it wouldn’t work in this context. And the only use for “beakle”’ is as someone’s surname, so that wouldn’t work either. We will stick with “handle”, even though no hands are involved.’

  13 Meaning, ‘In a way that made lots of money without having to bother with all those stupid things like morals and honesty.’

  14 An invention of Radius’s of which he was particularly proud. It was a special barbed wire that reached out and grabbed people if they went too near it and then, in the space of a few hours, dissolved them, leaving no trace they had ever existed. It had proved invaluable in several series of reality shows Radius had created where the contestants – or ‘idiots’, as Radius liked to call them – were taken out into the middle of nowhere to try to win a lot of very dangerous games. Naturally, some of the less stupid idiots always tried to run away, which is where the Bio-Dynamic Barbed Wire came in so handy.

  15 ‘Thoughtful’ because Radius had thought of it, and ‘caring’ because he didn’t care if they did find out, as by then there would be nothing they could do about it.

  16 She had given up trying to control the dog’s mind. He seemed immune to her charms and was totally devoted to Stark.

  17 She had been there as a rookie journalist. The newspaper she was working for made a habit of sending out their new recruits to the most boring assignments they could find. If the recruit could actually write an article that made the assignment interesting, they were kept on. If not, they’d have to leave at the end of the month. Laura had stayed for several years.

  18 This wasn’t as complicated as it sounds, because Radius had several fake internets at Limpfast Manor for when important people, who might have useful information or secrets, came to stay.

  19 Jack had smelled like this ever since birth, and it was enough to put his parents off cabbage forever, so no-one in the family ever ate it. Smelling of cabbage is a recognised disease called Smelling of Cabbage Syndrome or Stinky Boy, because it only happens to boys, especially ones who never eat cabbage. So far it has never occurred to anyone that eating cabbage might actually cure the disease – which it does.

  20 It is so secret that even I don’t know where it is and have just put down a shortlist of what I think are the most likely places. It may well be none of them because they all seem too likely.

  21 Which are like solar panels, but with lots of bricks tied to them to stop them from floating away in zero gravity. They also bought lunar underpants, which are like Earth underpants but also fitted with anti-gravity bricks.

  22 I actually have one of these. It can make bacon out of thin air, though it’s not as good as bacon made out of fat pigs.

  23 The meaning of ‘live’ in this case actually meant, ‘No way is this going to be live. No-one is allowed to see anything until we have gone through it and edited out all the bits we don’t like.’

  24 See footnote 20.

  25 See footnote 24.

  26 Probably best if you don’t think about that.

  27 This would be a good time for you to learn the REAL meaning of the word ‘unique’. Things CANNOT be ‘a bit unique’ or ‘very unique’ or even ‘totally unique’. They can only be ‘unique’, because it means ‘one of a kind’ and NOT ‘one of several’. Unique means unique.

  28 Though he’d got his grandmother back, eventually – in fifteen jam jars.

  29 Fiona had spent years practising with her special glasses until she could not only see the tiniest detail, like a PIN, in their hinges, but she could also remember every single one of the tiniest details she had seen.

  30 Radius himself had painted the picture of his mother when he had been eight years old. It was dreadful and made her look like a lumpy goldfish, when she actually looked like quite a smooth haddock.

  31 Yet. So, to use the name of a very famous TV show, watch this space.

  32 I have been told to say, Don’t try this at home.

  33 This one is SO secret, even I’m not allowed to know where it is.

  34 With repeats on Wednesdays at 2 am and a monthly Adults Only episode, which Radius had somehow forgotten to tell the Contrasts about.

  35 Cost Saving Bonus Schemes were something that Radius used in every part of his business. The rules were that if money was saved on anything it mustn’t look any cheaper, and if the money-saving could actually make whatever it was look like it had cost even more, then the bonuses were doubled. The only time this scheme almost went wrong was when a producer replaced half the ‘actors’ in a survival reality show with dead people, though it wasn’t till five episodes later when the viewers realised this, and it did lead to another very successful series – The EX Factor – where the entire cast was dead.

  36 And, as EVERYONE knows, graphene is the latest super-cool thing and will save the whole world from, er, um, sort of, er, disaster and stuff.

  37 The engineers had also arrived in cardboard boxes so that they wouldn’t know where they were when they arrived. This was a waste of cardboard, because most of the engineers hadn’t known where they were for years.

  38 Actually, I think it was karma, not bananas.

  39 Obviously there were a few exceptions to this, mostly due to size. The currency of the Flaunt Islands was not available due to the smallest denomination – about five dollars value – being a seashell half a metre in diameter. Also, the Krakastan Flem was not available due to it being a dark red liquid extracted from the Krakastan yak.

  40 In case you’d forgotten.

  41 Closer inspection revealed that Crumley was actually looking adoringly at Granny Apricot’s slice of chocolate cake.

  42 Which meant that he had to be hypnotised again so he could remember his own name and family.

  43 Not his ‘butt’ filter – it had nothing to do with his bottom. His but filter.

  44 Here is an example of a sentence that would get through so Radius could hear it. ‘I was going to pay back the twenty dollars you lent me, but I’ve only got a hundred-dollar note, so please take that instead.’ However this is actually a stupid example, because Radius Limpfast had never lent anyone a single cent.

  45 Many years later, one of the bones would fall to Earth, landing in a bowl of summer vegetable soup that an amateur astronomer was eating in his back garden. All the time the bone had spent in space with the associated radiation and contact with alien dust had altered its DNA, so that when it was analysed, it was heralded as the first one-hundred-per-cent-guaranteed proof that there was life similar to our own on another planet. ‘At last,’ the scientists said, ‘proof that we are not alone.’ It was, in actual fact, the left kneecap of a Welsh astronaut called Derek. You can go and see the bone in the London science museum.

  46 See the back of this book for details of this and other chemicals.

  47 Apart from Vegemite, obviously. We’re talking about scientists here, not magicians or wizards.

  48 This would be a good time to clarify something about rRego. Although he is referred to as ‘he’, rRego could equally be referred to as ‘she’, though of course that would mean I would have to type ‘s’ a lot of times, which might give me RSI (look it up on Google).

  49 See the back of this book for some of the extra things the engineers had secretly added.

  50 The full name, Radius eventually realised, was inaccurate. Radius had hated his mother so much, he partied when sh
e’d dropped dead. By the way, ‘dropped dead’ is one of the correct and cute-free phrases that people pretend don’t exist by saying pathetic things like ‘she crossed the rainbow bridge’.

  51 Plan B/tx/27 involved claiming part of the moon as an independent country – Limpland – and setting up a bank where he could keep all his money tax-free and cosy.

  52 NOT the sort of teenage brother who tries to push his little brother’s head down the lavatory (DON’T!!), but a nice teenager who loves his baby brother and wants to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.

  53 I mean REALLY rude jokes, which are much too bad to tell you about. Some of them are SO RUDE even I don’t know what they mean.

  54 It was that famous one of him with an omelette on his head and smudgy red lipstick on his face. And just in case people weren’t sure who he was, Radius Limpfast’s name scrolled slowly across the screen.

  55 Yeah, OK, most of you are too young to know what on Earth rRego’s talking about. Pink Floyd are a British rock band and The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the bestselling albums EVER. (‘Album’ means a big plastic thing with lots of music on it – like a CD, which is a small plastic thing with lots of music on it. They’re both pretty well obsolete now.)

  56 It was the modern equivalent of old Victorian smelling salts.

  57 Which looked exactly like a jam jar, on account of the fact that it was a jam jar. It was a very clean jam jar, though – really well licked out and with most of the label removed.

  58 Which is like a spoon with a laser, though some people think of it as a laser with a spoon.

  59 Which looked exactly like a cheap microwave, even though it had actually been quite expensive.

  60 See the back of this book for a few recipes, and hey, maybe there will be a picture book later on with a lot more recipes – or not. I mean, there should be, but who knows?

  61 Which is actually a really stupid thing to say because NO clouds have silver linings. They all have water linings or sometimes ice or snow linings, but that’s just water in disguise.