by Roman, Mark
“Then,” continued Chris, “put two drops of your slime into this hole at the side of the path. Like this. And then... just sit and wait for the pulse to whisk you away. Couldn’t be simpler.”
Indeed it couldn’t. They looked at Chris and then at the path.
“Look, there it is,” called sylX excitedly, pointing into the distance. And there it was. Coming towards Chris at a ferocious pace was a transverse, travelling wave in the black material of the pathway.
“See you at the other end,” said Chris, fractionally before the wave-pulse hit him and whisked him away. They watched him surfing on the crest of the wave, lubricated by his outer layers of slime and waving a slimy limb in the air.
“Hey, that looks like fun!” giggled sylX, turning eagerly towards jixX, her eyes sparkling. She bent down to remove her high-heeled shoes. Then she noticed his frown. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“What do we do for slime?”
“Ah, good point.”
*
txaX hurried on, half running half jogging, wheezing and panting as he did so. Where were the damned trees?
Everywhere he looked was the same: a black, featureless landscape. Where on Earth was he? Not so much as a shrub in sight. And the ground was too hard and solid to support any form of vegetation. Oh, what he would do if he could find a shrub! He imagined hacking at it with his axe, whittling away its twigs and branches, and then chiselling merrily at whatever wood might be left. What carpentry he would perform!
“Chop it, saw it, plane it,” he muttered to himself as he stumbled on. “Nail the bits together. Chop it, saw it, plane it...”
At last, he saw something on the horizon and he came to a stop. Not a tree, but something large. Possibly a building, or a city?
“Civilization,” he gasped.
With renewed energy, he set off again.
But, after a few hundred yards more of panting and stumbling, he stopped again. The object in the distance was larger and now he recognized it. It was the glistening hull of The Night Ripple.
“Damn!” he said, throwing his axe to the ground. “I’ve gone in a circle.”
He stared bitterly at the spaceship in the distance for a while. Then, with a frustrated grunt, he picked up his axe, turned, and headed off in the opposite direction.
*
In the forward engine room, anaX lay frozen on the floor where she had fallen. She hardly dared move in case she triggered the neutrino bomb. In fact, she was a little amazed, and mightily relieved, that it hadn’t gone off already.
Slowly, she picked herself up and dusted herself down. The room was in complete darkness as the door had slammed shut behind her. Gently she groped about the floor for her shoulder bag and then, even more gently, lifted it. She edged towards the wall and groped around for the light switch. Finally, she found it and turned on the lights.
When her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, she looked about her. There, purring and humming in the middle of the room, was the 10-megagramme nuclear capstan pump-engine. To the left was an accumulative rotary generator and to the right a solenoidal ferroxic bivalve piston. She smiled a sly smile as she walked directly to the 10-megagramme nuclear capstan pump-engine. She examined it from this side and that until she had located its coaxial dimagnetic lead. This carried the displacement current from the heat turbine that powered the pump engine.
Working carefully, she opened her shoulder bag and took out the neutrino bomb. She flipped open a small flap in its side. Then she took the four low-reactance, three-phase high-Q batteries from her bag and, with trembling fingers, inserted them one by one. She closed the flap.
Kneeling on the ground she attached the bomb to the coaxial dimagnetic lead and pressed a small red button on the handle of the former hairdryer. This initiated the bomb and started its primary timing device.
A message appeared on the hairdryer’s LED. It said, ‘Congratulations! You have successfully activated your Sigh Co neutrino bomb. Countdown has begun. Enjoy.’
Below this was displayed the special 5-digit PIN number that would deactivate the bomb. anaX spent a few seconds devizing a mnemonic by which to remember it. Then she pressed the CLEAR button to delete it from the display.
The LED showed a picture of a smiley face. ‘Smile, please,’ it said.
anaX gave a nervous smile. There was a blinding flash of light and the click of a shutter. anaX’s smile faded and she got to her feet, satisfied. The bomb now had a photograph of her in its memory.
The gynaecologist left the forward engine room, not in the least concerned that the bomb had her image – potentially damning evidence of her guilt. She knew that the image was encrypted and meant only for the bomb’s personal use as part of its highly sophisticated anti-tampering system.
Had anyone been watching her, though, they would have been baffled by her actions. Surely, the accumulative rotary generator would have been a far better place to plant the bomb.
*
And, indeed, somebody had been watching her. BUF, the computer that controlled the forward engine room, had not taken his scanners off her from the moment she had entered his small domain. The more he had watched her, the greater his horror at her actions and the greater his panic.
Now that she had gone, his entire concentration focused on the small, ticking form of the neutrino bomb. His circuits buzzed as he tried to work out what to do.
For a brief moment, he considered informing LEP. But he was still not on speaking terms with LEP, and now never would be.
Besides, what could LEP do? Was there any more to LEP than feeble puns and childish practical jokes? Of course there wasn’t!
*
The three humans stared at the point on the horizon where they had last seen Chris being whisked along by the pulseway. sylX crouched down to see if there was enough of Chris’ slime left on the ground for them to use, but it all seemed to have dried up. “So much for the first momentous contact between humans and aliens,” she said, looking around at the flat and empty landscape around her.
jixX put the camera and communicator down on the ground as his arms were starting to ache.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
“You’re the captain,” she said pointedly.
jixX bristled a little, but said nothing. What an annoying woman, he thought.
To take his mind off her he sat down on the ground and examined the communicator. Fleetingly, he thought of giving it a go and contacting LEP in The Night Ripple, but immediately banished the idea from his mind. And yet, the thought stayed there. Slowly it grew, like a malignant tumour, until it had half-convinced him that he actually wanted to talk to the ship’s computer.
So he examined the communicator again. It looked fiendishly complicated, with buttons and dials and switches and knobs covering its every surface. One of these had to be the aerial, he thought. He pulled at them, one by one, and discovered they were all aerials.
*
A green streak caught twaX’s eye, his head instantly swivelling towards it. But it was no plant matter. It looked like a large blob of green slime surfing the crest of a black wave.
twaX rubbed his eyes and looked again as the green blob sped off into the distance.
“What on Earth was that?” he asked aloud, still staring at the receding smudge of green.
He turned his head left and right to look at the emptiness all around him. Deep within his mind a small, brass-coloured coin fell with a clink.
“Ah,” he said.
*
anaX turned left and headed up a ramp. She knew she would have to work fast as she had only eight hours before the neutrino bomb exploded. Eight hours was the default timer setting; deemed long enough by its manufacturer for the user to either reconsider the wisdom of their action or to get the hell out of there. anaX’s thoughts were now focused on the latter.
A large steel door swished open in front of her and she entered the ship’s vast, brightly lit boat-hangar. This was where th
e emergency, deep space, survival modules were parked. She stopped and surveyed the hangar. In front of her were the four emergency modules, their matte-grey, steel-plated hulls resting on iron-braced, protoactinium exoskeletal support struts. They faced her like sleeping giants, their lights dead and their drive tubes silent.
She raised an eyebrow momentarily as she read their identification numbers from left to right: No 4, No 1, No 3 and No 2. Then her eyebrow settled back into place. Very amusing, she thought. The modules had been parked in alphabetical order.
*
jixX was busy trying to get the communicator to work. He had located a pair of army surplus headphones and an army surplus microphone and was now sitting over the communicator, wearing the former and speaking into the latter. “jixX calling The Night Ripple. Do you read me, Night Ripple?” He kept pressing the various buttons and twiddling the various knobs until finally the army surplus headphones burst into life with a deafening surge of static.
jixX gave a yelp of pain as he tore the headphones off. But then, as he listened to the static, he detected a voice buried deep within. He gingerly placed the headphones back on his head. Masked by the white noise, and only barely audible, he could just make out LEP’s voice saying, “Hello? Anybody there? Come in. Over.”
The static stopped and the headphones became silent again.
“Hello, LEP?” said jixX. “Over.”
The static exploded out of the headphones again.
“Hello, captain,” said LEP’s cheerful, acoustically masked voice. “Long time no hear. You want something? Over.” The headphones became silent again.
“Yes,” said jixX into the army surplus microphone. “How do I get rid of this interference? Over.”
The first half of LEP’s answer was lost in a surge of static, and the second half was not really worth hearing. “...the audiovocal long-range crystal-diode transceiver is one of the finest, most efficient communicators known to Humankind. So be very careful with it. Over.”
jixX looked at the glistening hull of The Night Ripple in the distance, hardly more than a mile away, then down at the communicator and then back at The Night Ripple. “Why me?” he wondered.
“Look, LEP,” he said as loudly and clearly as he could. “Our alien friend, Chris, has left us like lemons in the middle of nowhere. We’ve no idea how far he’s gone or if he’ll come back for us. I was thinking that perhaps there might be some sort of land vehicles on board The Night Ripple we could use to go after him. Have you any idea what there is? Over.”
“Sure,” said LEP’s distant voice. “Let me see. There are three polyprome swivel-slung steel-sprung lifeboats complete with eight oars, a diesel-powered aluminium outboard motor, one life jacket, four flares, and a first aid box. Over.”
“I said land vehicles. Over.”
“So you did. Sorry.” LEP paused for thought as jixX strained his ears all the harder to catch what LEP was about to say. “Well, there are fourteen pogo-sticks.”
jixX sighed.
“There’s one snowshoe and one flipper,” continued LEP. “These would be good if they weren’t both for the right foot. And, of course, two skateboards.”
“That’s useful, LEP,” said jixX wondering why he bothered. “Anything else? Over.”
LEP’s answer was lost in a burst of static.
“Pardon?” asked jixX. “Over.”
“I said: ‘three space hoppers. Over.’ Over.”
jixX sat up, suddenly interested. “Space hoppers?” he asked. At last he was getting somewhere. “What are space hoppers? Some sort of jet backpacks, or something? Over.”
“Not exactly,” came LEP’s answer. “You must remember space hoppers. They’re those big, orange, rubber inflatable things with two handles and a kangaroo face painted on them. You sit on the body, hold on to the handles and bounce up and down. Over.”
jixX’s shoulders sagged again as he regretted having started the conversation. “Tell me, LEP,” he said as patiently as he could. “What use are these space hoppers in our present predicament? Over.”
“They’re amazingly good fun,” said LEP. “Something to while away the hours. You should try one. Over.”
Chapter 8
Right in the heart of the forward engine room, tightly hugging the coaxial dimagnetic lead, was the neutrino bomb – the deadliest weapon of mass destruction known to Humankind. It purred softly to itself. The purring sound came from the bomb’s first-stage timing device. This is how it worked. The bomb’s shaded-pole motor turned a fan. As the fan turned, its rotating blades reflected low frequency virtual photons from the 100-watt light bulb in the hairdryer’s handle. Each reflected photon passed into the rapid-response liquid-crystal photodivider where, after successive subdivision, it triggered a unit of the binary-digital counter. The net result was a precision time measurement accurate to the nearest milliday (or 86.4 seconds).
Exactly two millidays after anaX had activated the bomb, the scalar flipped a switch that triggered the seismophobic Rayleigh-wave detector (one of the bomb’s sophisticated anti-tampering devices) and engaged the bomb’s second-stage timer.
But something was wrong.
The second-stage timer should have been activated after exactly 20 millidays, not after exactly 2. It had thus been triggered nearly 26 minutes too early! The time of the bomb’s detonation had been brought forward by nearly half an hour!
*
jixX sat and thought about space hoppers. He wondered whether there really were space hoppers on The Night Ripple, or LEP was being LEP.
“How’s anaX feeling?” he asked by way of changing the subject, speaking loudly and clearly into the army surplus microphone. “How’s her headache? Over.”
“No idea,” said LEP’s faint and crackling voice, deep within the white noise. “However, I do know that she’s just been in the forward engine room. Over.”
“What was she doing in there? Over.”
“Beats me,” said LEP. “My little buddy, BUF, isn’t on speaking terms with me at the moment. Over.”
“Can’t think why,” said jixX. “Where is she now? Over.”
“In the ship’s boat-hangar. Over.”
jixX frowned deeply. What was the gynaecologist up to? First the forward engine room, and now the boat-hangar. Probably following LEP’s directions to the aspirins, thought jixX with a shrug.
“She’s acting more and more strangely. Over,” said LEP.
“In what way? Over.”
“She hasn’t spoken to me once. Not a word. Over.”
“In what way is that strange?” asked jixX. “But don’t tell me, let me guess. She’s playing hard to get, right? Over.”
“Great minds think alike,” said LEP. “Over.”
jixX didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He looked at his watch, then at his two companions sitting on the ground a short distance away and then at the featureless planet around him. “Over and out,” he said.
But the static burst through the headphones again. “Wait, don’t go,” said LEP. “Don’t forget to plant the Tenalp flag and claim...”
But jixX merely unplugged the army surplus headphones and the army surplus microphone and tried to stuff them back into the compartments from whence they had come. Then he pushed all the assorted aerials back into the communicator and tried to make the dial reading ‘OVERLOAD’ go back down to zero. After a while he gave up and went over to the other two.
It proved a bad moment to arrive as fluX was all hand gestures, crazy bulging eyes and earnestness as he described his latest remarkable discovery.
“Listen to zis,” he was saying animatedly. “Take ze vord ‘GOD’. Using my zeory of Quantum Semantics ve can calculate its vord number. And vot do ve get?”
sylX gave a polite little shrug but then her eyes reached imploringly to jixX for some means of escape.
“Vell, it is not difficult,” continued the behavioural chemist. “G is seven, O is fifteen, and D is four. Zat’s zeir alphabetical
positions. Zo, ve add ze numbers togezzer and ve get zat ze vord-number for GOD is 26. Tventy six! Ze same as ze number of letters in ze alphabet!! Is zat not remarkable?” He looked at the others to check that they appreciated how remarkable this was. “Huh, you may say,” he went on. “Zat is just coincidence. But vait. Zere is more. Take ze vord DEVIL. Calculate its vord-number and you get 52. Vich is exactly tvice ze number of letters in ze alphabet!!! Zat is no longer coincidence, my friends. Zat is a significant discovery. It is telling us zat GOD is Number One in ze Universe and ze DEVIL is Number Two. See? And it is also pointing to ze alphabet – to ze wery letters from vich our language is composed!”
jixX glanced across at sylX, and sylX glanced back at jixX. Both were wondering when Chris was coming back.
“And now furzer proof,” fluX was saying. “Zese aliens speak English! Zese slimy green blobs, as unlike us humans as you can get, vich have evolved outside of our Universe, speak our language! Again, zat cannot be pure coincidence. Ze odds against it are astronomical. So, just sink of ze philosophical implications! Zere can only be one explanation.”
He looked at them, waiting for their cries of astonishment and enlightenment. As none were forthcoming he threw his eyes heavenwards. “Ze English language is God-given!” he almost shouted. “Not just to us, but to zese aliens too, and possibly to all ozzer alien species around ze Universe. Even on Earth and Tenalp ze English language is coming to dominate all others. It is ze language of business, ze language of Science.”
“Um, surely,” said jixX with a frown, “there could be another explanation for the Mamms speaking English.”
“Such as?” asked the behavioural chemist almost aggressively.
jixX shrugged. “Perhaps they’ve visited Earth or Tenalp. Or have some kind of universal translator. Like ALI, the Alien Language Interpreter, only not so rubbish.”
fluX scoffed explosively as though it was the most ridiculous suggestion he had ever heard. “Slimy green blobs? Travelling in spaceships? Universal translators?” he burst out mockingly. “Do me a favour! Zat’s just science fiction nonsense, zat is!”