by Roman, Mark
*
Emergency deep-space survival module No 3 was the nearest of the four, so anaX decided that would be the one to use. She walked across the echoing boat-hangar and climbed the steps leading to the module’s hatch door. Once inside, she made her way directly to the main control room.
She flicked a few switches and pressed a few buttons on the control panel and the survival module gently awoke, its headlamps shining brightly into the boat-hangar and its drive tubes humming quietly. anaX knelt on the floor and removed an inspection panel. Working steadily she started unplugging and re-plugging the mass of wires attached to the principal programming board. Within minutes she had reprogrammed the module. When she had finished she fitted the inspection panel back into place.
She looked at her watch and considered all the work she still had to do. With less than eight hours to go, she would have to act fast. She left the survival module and headed for a room adjoining the boat-hangar. From there she wheeled out several vast cylinders of compressed air, which she connected to the survival module’s automatic atmo-press regulation pump. She turned the valves on each of the cylinders to start the filling process.
Then she went over to a workbench by the boat-hangar entrance and started rummaging about in a toolbox. The toolbox contained pneumohammers, laser cutters, six-inch nails, assorted screws, optical tape measures, ultrasonic drills, wire-strippers, wallpaper strippers and several broken pencils. She searched a second time but still couldn’t find what she was after. She looked up, wondering where to look next. Then she remembered LEP.
“LEP?” she said.
“At your service, ma’am,” came the near-instant reply.
“Where can I find a screwdriver?”
“Er, there’s one in the cupboard on the far wall behind you,” said LEP. “The blue one marked ‘DANGER – TOXIC FUMES. DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’.”
“Thanks,” said anaX absently, turning and walking over to the blue cupboard. It did indeed have a sign saying: ‘DANGER – TOXIC FUMES. DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’. She put a hand on the cupboard’s handle. Then, taking a deep breath, she opened the right-hand door, found the screwdriver and quickly closed the door again. She took several paces away from the cupboard before breathing in again. A cloud of green-brown fumes, released by the opening of the door, swirled around and started its slow diffusion into the air of the boat-hangar.
With the screwdriver in hand, anaX went to the front of her chosen survival module and unscrewed the four screws securing the module’s front number-plate. She unclipped it and tossed it onto the floor underneath the craft. Then she went round to the back of the vehicle and repeated the operation on the rear number-plate.
Anyone watching her would, yet again, have puzzled over the strangeness of her actions. After all, she hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow or batted an eyelid at finding the screwdriver exactly where LEP had said it would be.
Chapter 9
The neutrino bomb’s second-stage timer clicked into action and continued the inexorable countdown towards the bomb’s detonation and to the monumental devastation this would cause.
The timer consisted of a precision-engineered, thermister-looped, roto-motor that slowly lowered a wedge-shaped chip of glass through one arm of a Michelson interferometer. As the optical path of that arm lengthened, due to the light’s passage through progressively thicker and thicker segments of glass, so the successive maxima and minima of the fringe pattern were counted by a phototriode. At the end of twenty counts a safety-catch was jettisoned and the acousto-responsive timing mechanism triggered.
The safety catch activated another of the bomb’s highly subtle anti-tampering devices: the ‘H.T. resistive bomb protector’. This worked by passing a potentially lethal 100 amp current through the bomb’s outer casing. Both the current, and the fact that it caused the bomb’s casing to glow red-hot, were intended to deter any casual interference with, or handling of, the device.
So, with the countdown progressing and the bomb approaching red-hot, everything now looked to be on schedule.
But it wasn’t.
Again there was something amiss. For, the acousto-responsive timing mechanism that had just been triggered by the second-stage timer was, in fact, the bomb’s fourth-stage timer. Somehow, the bomb’s third-stage timer had been completely by-passed. Once again, the moment of the bomb’s detonation had been brought markedly nearer; this time, by about an hour!
*
jixX, sylX and fluX had run out of topics for discussion. Or rather, fluX had finished outlining his latest Proof, and the others felt disinclined to continue any form of conversation at all. They merely gazed at the empty landscape about them, trying to avoid one another’s eyes.
“There he is!” cried sylX, pointing into the distance. They turned to see Chris speeding towards them on the crest of a pulse, travelling at a phenomenal rate. One by one, they stood up and prepared to greet him.
Just then, a movement in the corner of their eyes caught their attention as a large object leapt out of the ground nearby. It happened so quickly that none of them saw it clearly. But when they turned to look they saw a small brick wall land with a thud right across the pulseway... it stood there, about three feet high, four feet across, solid and sturdily built... and directly in Chris’s path.
There was no time for shouts of warning. No time for speedy action. No time even for gasps of horror. It was over in less a second. Chris hurtled straight into the brick wall, smashing – or rather splashing – against it with such a ferocious force that blobs of his slime sprayed for tens of metres in each direction. The pulse bounced back off the wall and set off back the way it had come, seemingly unaffected. The same could not be said of Chris. His fragile, soft, viscous body stayed, for the most part, on the wall, although parts of him lay as puddles of green slime all about them. It was a horrible sight.
“Chris!!” sylX screamed, grasping her head in her hands with a look of anguish on her face.
jixX and fluX stared in horror at the green puddles which twitched and pulsated in the most disturbing way.
“Why?” beseeched sylX, looking about her as though searching for whoever might have been responsible for this. She turned to jixX. “What do you think happened here?”
jixX shrugged.
“Accident or murder?” pursued sylX.
jixX shook his head and looked away. The mess was too horrible to look at.
sylX, too, had to turn her tear-filled eyes away. Only the scientist, fluX, looked on, fascinated. He even knelt down to look more closely. The stowaway, appalled at his stonehearted callousness, had to walk a few steps away from him.
“Vait,” called the behavioural chemist to her, waving her back. “Look! Zis is amazing. Wery, wery astonishing. Zey are recombining!”
The stowaway stopped and turned around.
“Come beck. Look!” continued fluX. “Ze slime is coming beck togezzer again.”
And indeed it was. Very slowly the puddles of green slime were moving towards one another and coalescing. sylX wiped away her tears and came back to look as another globule of green slime slid off the brick wall to join the rest. More and more of the slime regrouped and reformed until, after several slow and tense minutes, it had all formed back into the globular form of one Chris, the Mamm alien. The three humans stared at him in sheer joy-filled disbelief as he shook his head slowly and groggily.
“What happened?” he asked, slightly croakily, when he felt he could speak again.
“That brick wall sprang across the pulseway,” explained jixX, pointing, “and you smashed straight into it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Chris, sounding a bit impatient. “What happened to you three? I waited and waited for you at the other end of the pulseway, but you didn’t come.”
“Ah, yes,” said jixX with a nod. “We didn’t have any slime. We thought about using the stuff on the ground... but… it had all dried up.”
“Yes, it d
oes that,” conceded Chris.
“What about the brick wall?” asked sylX, still sniffing. “What made it leap across the pulseway like that?”
“A very complex mechanism,” said Chris. “Timed to perfection.”
“You mean it was supposed to do that?”
“Of course. How else do you think I would have stopped?”
*
“Your turn now,” Chris said to jixX as the brick wall gradually returned to its slot in the ground. “I’ll put a few drops of my slime into the hole for you.”
“You’re joking, right?” said jixX.
“I’m joking, wrong,” said Chris. “Otherwise it’s a very long walk.”
“But what happens when I get to the other end?”
“There’ll be a brick wall to stop you,” said Chris as encouragingly as he could. “It’s perfectly safe. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
jixX said nothing. He looked to the others for support, but got none.
“Any volunteers?” he asked jokingly.
“You’re the leader,” said sylX with a simple smile. “You lead.”
Irritating woman, thought jixX. What an irritating woman. He picked up the heavy communicator from the ground, and then the heavy camera, and, with the look of a martyr, stepped onto the pulseway. “Wish me luck,” he said half-heartedly.
“Good luck,” they replied, although it was like they were talking to a doomed man.
“Okay, here it comes,” said Chris.
“Already?” asked jixX in panic, casting a terrified glance behind him. He saw the distant pulse racing towards him.
“Try to spread your weight out a bit more,” advised Chris, somewhat impractically. “Lubricate the underside. Be focused. Think blob.”
jixX turned to look pleadingly at the others, but they merely stepped back a pace as the pulse sped nearer and nearer. He closed his eyes, held his breath and braced himself for the impact, tightening his grip on the communicator and camera. There was a whoosh and the pulse hit him. It hit him hard and it hit him fast. It hurled him forward, buckling his legs underneath him and throwing his arms outwards. A fraction of a second later he was airborne, flying through the air at great speed. And a fraction of a second after that, he was down on the ground again, landing with a thud on his chest. The pulse had passed under his body and sped off into the distance without him.
The others gasped and rushed to his assistance as he lay spread-eagled on the ground. He feared that every bone in his body was broken. His head was spinning and it was only with the greatest of difficulty that he managed to pull himself together and raise himself into a sitting posture.
“Are you alright, captain?” asked sylX, sounding genuinely concerned.
jixX gave her a brave wave in the affirmative and dusted himself down. The communicator and camera looked damaged beyond repair.
“Tell me how you think that went,” asked Chris.
“I’d say it didn’t go too well,” admitted jixX.
“And I’d have to agree with you there.” Chris sounded a little irritated and exasperated by jixX’s failure. But then he forced a smile. “However, as a first attempt, it wasn’t too bad.”
“Last attempt,” said jixX to correct him, “definitely a first and last and only attempt.”
Chapter 10
LEP watched anaX as she pumped a 50/50 mixture of ideal Fermi gas and low-pressure phonons into the depleted tanks of the emergency deep-space survival module. He was a little disappointed that she had now been working for over half an hour without once speaking to him.
So he tried to attract her attention with a polite cough. No response. He then tried a slightly less polite one. Still nothing. So he gave a thunderous, full-throated, lung-ripping, stomach turning, asthmatic, phlegmy expectoration that shook all the boat-hangar’s light fittings and blew out one of the magnetostatic capacitance loudspeakers through which his voice was transmitted. But still the gynaecologist ignored him and LEP felt well and truly snubbed.
But anaX simply couldn’t hear him as she was wearing a pair of degaussed ferromagnetic earplugs that she had found in the toolbox. The high-pitched whistle of the Ultrasonic Background Reverberation had been bothering her ever since The Night Ripple had entered the Pseudogravitic Continuum, and indeed had given her a bit of a headache.
At least she hadn’t been lying about that.
*
Chris looked somewhat irritably at jixX as he slowly picked himself up off the ground. “I guess we’ll have to walk,” he said, his tone one of annoyance.
“Is it really so far?” asked sylX.
“Yes,” said Chris, unsmiling and tight-lipped. He slithered off parallel to the pulseway. “Walk this way.”
The three humans exchanged glances. sylX followed after Chris and caught up with him. “It’s very good of you to take the time and trouble to look after us like this,” she said sweetly to pacify him.
Meanwhile, jixX was looking down at the damaged communicator and camera and wondering whether he could just conveniently forget about them.
“Bonkers!” fluX was saying.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ze aliens. Totally bonkers.”
jixX didn’t respond as his thoughts turned to pots and kettles and the colour black.
“Vot were zey sinking?” continued fluX, shaking his head and throwing up his arms in appalled disbelief. “Designing such a crazy system!”
“The pulseway?”
“Ja, and ze brick wall. Zey need to get a grip.”
Again, jixX said nothing as he dusted himself down.
“I sink ve should leave zis place soon. I am not comfortable with zese loonies.”
“Er, yes,” said jixX. “I know what you mean.”
He took one last look at the damaged pieces of equipment and decided he would retrieve them later. He and fluX set off after Chris and sylX, increasing their pace to catch up.
“Now’s a good time to ask him!” whispered fluX out of the corner of his mouth.
“I’m sorry?” said jixX.
“Ask him!”
“Ask him what?”
“Ask him vere he learnt to speak English.”
“What?”
“It is important.”
“Fine,” said jixX with a sigh.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Chris,” said jixX when they had caught up. “But you speak very good English.”
“Why, thank you,” said Chris with what jixX took to be a meaningful look. “You don’t speak so bad yourself.”
jixX gave a laugh. He looked at the behavioural chemist and transmitted Chris’s meaningful look, whatever it meant, as best he could.
They walked on in silence for a few paces. As they did, jixX had a feeling they were being watched. He glanced behind him and thought he saw a slimy green blob on the horizon far, far behind them. But when he looked back a second time, there was nothing there.
*
“By the way, I just saw one of your friends,” said Chris.
“Friends?” asked jixX.
“He was wandering about over that way, just over the horizon.” Chris pointed with a green slimy limb.
“twaX!” exclaimed jixX. “That must have been twaX. How did he look?”
“Totally lost,” said Chris.
*
twaX was indeed totally lost. More lost than he had ever been in his life.
Having realized he was not on Earth he knew he had to get back to The Night Ripple. He feared that they might take off without him.
But which way did the ship lie?
He spun around and around, trying to get his bearings, but each direction looked the same.
“Oh dear,” he whimpered.
*
“What’s Sir Roderick like?” asked sylX at last. “What kind of …” and here she suddenly became stuck for a word. ‘Person’ seemed inappropriate and ‘blob’ sounded rude. So she settled for ‘leader’. “What’s he like as a leader?”
she asked.
“Oh, he’s a very good leader,” answered Chris proudly. “He’s head of The Club, you know.”
“Go on.”
“I call it the Snob Blob Club. It’s very exclusive; cigars, port, formal evening dress. The whole caboodle, in fact.”
sylX raised an eyebrow. “Formal evening dress? I can’t imagine you wearing formal evening dress.”
“Try,” suggested Chris.
sylX tried.
“Looks ridiculous, doesn’t it,” said Chris.
sylX couldn’t help nodding.
“That’s why the club is so exclusive,” said Chris.
*
anaX was checking the tyre-pressure on the off-side hydrolastic water-damped landing shock-wheel. She unscrewed the valve cap and put her ear to it, but was unable to hear the hissing of the air because of her earplugs. So she made the mistake of taking one out.
“Ahem”, said LEP.
anaX started in surprise, wondering who was watching her. She dropped the pressure gauge and looked about her, but there was no one to be seen in the boat-hangar. Then, realizing with relief that it was only LEP, she picked up the gauge from the floor and continued with her work, screwing the nozzle onto the hissing valve. “Yes, LEP?” she said.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” started LEP timidly. “But what exactly are you doing?”
“I’m checking the tyre pressure,” she answered curtly, continuing to do just that.
“No. I meant to the emergency deep-space survival module as a whole.”
“I’m preparing it.”
“For what?”
“For emergency deep-space survival.”
“Hmm,” said LEP thoughtfully. “Sounds fairly reasonable.” Then he added, “Does that mean you’re leaving us?”
“Yes.”
“But why?” asked the computer, unable to disguise his disappointment. “Was it something I said?”
anaX gave a little laugh, but then immediately fell silent, thinking, planning, scheming. Hmm, she thought, LEP’s getting suspicious. I’ll have to tell him something.