by Roman, Mark
jixX managed to steal a glance at him before dropping his eyes back down to the ground. It wasn’t difficult to see that TOT was not looking too pleased.
*
“Well, well,” TOT was muttering to himself, still staring at the ceiling. “Now I have heard everything.” He continued shaking his head in disbelief.
He turned to jixX. “Well, captain jixX,” he said with sarcastic emphasis, “it may interest you to know that while you were away, swanning around the Pseudogravitic Continuum, we were learning quite a lot about The Living Chrysalis from her black box flight recorder and the crew’s video diaries and reports. All were severely damaged in the crash, so took a lot of reconstructive work. But we still learnt a good deal more than you managed to, in the same time. We now have a reasonable picture of what happened.”
jixX looked stunned. “But...” His voice dried under the glare of the laser eyes.
TOT turned his frowning gaze to the report on his desk. “This is a report on your mission,” he said, turning the pages backwards and forwards. “Your failed mission.”
“It wasn’t a total failure,” put in jixX defensively. “We managed a few firsts for Humankind. That’s got to be worth something.”
“Oh, you did, did you,” said TOT sarcastically, looking up. “Now this I’ve got to hear.”
jixX blinked as he sensed the wall of coldness and disdain he was now facing. “Well,” he started, nervously. “We spent a long time in the Pseudogravitic Continuum – far longer than anyone else has ever done. That’s a first. And, er, while there we made contact with a race of English-speaking aliens. Another first for Humankind.”
“A race of English-speaking aliens,” repeated TOT mockingly, raising an eyebrow. “Were they slimy green blobs by any chance?”
“Yes, they were,” said jixX astonished.
“Speaking English.”
“Yes.”
“And did you, by any chance, stop to consider how it was these slimy green blobs happened to be speaking English?”
jixX gulped. “Um...,” he started. “Well... one of the crewmembers had a theory about that, sir.”
“A theory, eh?” said TOT, still mockingly. “I bet it was a good one.”
jixX gulped again as he recalled the theory and doubted TOT would be much impressed by it. “It wasn’t much of a theory, really,” he said, regretting he had ever mentioned it.
“That’s a surprise. Proceed.”
“It was the behavioural chemist, sir. His theory about God.”
TOT merely gazed at him long and hard. “What sort of imbecile do you take me for, jixX?”
jixX looked at the ground again.
TOT leaned forward. “It never occurred to you, I suppose,” he said softly, “that The Living Chrysalis might have got there before you. That it might actually have been in the Pseudogravitic Continuum far longer than you managed. That the crew might have lived with those English-speaking aliens of yours for many months and might have come to Tenalp having learnt a lot about those aliens, learnt their language and taught them ours? Which is how your English-speaking aliens came to be speaking English in the first place! That they might even have given the aliens some of our technology. Did none of these possibilities ever cross your mind?”
“They never mentioned it, sir.”
TOT’s gave a look of total disbelief. His breathing was fast, but he was clearly making a supreme effort to control it. “Does the name Alistair mean anything to you?”
“No, sir.”
“Mortimer? Reginald?”
jixX shook his head.
“Gilmore?”
“Nope.”
“How about Sir Roderick?”
“Ah, yes. Sir Roderick.”
“You met Sir Roderick?” TOT leaned forward with interest.
jixX shook his head again. “No, we didn’t actually meet him. He was too busy.”
“He’s their leader.”
“I know, sir.”
“You mean you didn’t even get to meet their leader? Or, in fact, any of the top blobs?”
jixX gave a feeble shrug.
“So who did you meet?”
“We met Chris. And his friend Bill. And... er... the Benjaminites.”
TOT’s eyes flickered as he accessed the databanks of the TCCC. When his eyes finished flickering, they darkened noticeably. “There’s no trace of either a Chris or a Bill in The Living Chrysalis reports. And, as for the Benjaminites, they get a one-line mention. I quote: ‘A bunch of religious fanatics to be avoided like the plague’.”
jixX nodded. It was a fair assessment.
“That’s it, is it?” said TOT, his eyes bulging. “Two nonentities, and a bunch of religious nutters?”
jixX looked sheepish. “I guess we landed in the wrong place, sir.”
“Goodness me!” TOT sat back again, staring into the distance behind jixX. Slowly he calmed himself. “Did you, at any point, ask how they knew English?”
“No,” admitted jixX.
“So, instead, you went and destroyed them. Totally wiped them out.”
“They destroyed themselves,” protested jixX. “It turned out that they were The Dogs.” He stopped himself short. It didn’t seem the right time or place to explain.
TOT gave a look of exasperation. “Okay. Let’s see what we do have. From the autopsy reports it seems that, while they were in the Pseudogravitic Continuum, the crew of The Living Chrysalis aged at a much increased rate. We think it was due to the food they ate on the planet. We need to assay you and your crew to test this theory.”
“Er,” started jixX.
TOT looked long and hard at him. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.”
jixX winced.
“You didn’t actually eat any of the alien food,” said TOT.
“No, sir. They never offered us any.”
“So there’s no scientific information we can obtain from you. Your mission was a complete waste of time. Would that be a fair summary?”
jixX didn’t consider it a particularly fair summary, but thought it best to say nothing.
“Now, let’s see,” continued TOT. “Page 5.” He picked up the file on his desk and turned to Page 5. “One stowaway found on board. Not detained.”
“But...”
“One crewmember. Missing, presumed dead.” He flicked through the file. “Page 11: Damage report.”
TOT looked up at jixX. “You are aware that, as captain, you are accountable for any damage sustained during the mission and will be expected to bear the cost in full.”
jixX’s mouth dropped open.
TOT started reading the damage report. “Main control room. Primary and secondary observation windows: both smashed. Undercarriage damaged during touchdown: hydraulic systems inoperable. Airlock door-handle: broken. Forward engine room: extensive fire damage. Computer circuitry: flooded. Engine room door: destroyed. Cleaning droid: a write-off. External heat shields: laser cannon damage. One planofocal, image-intensifying camera and one audiovocal, long-range, crystal-diode transceiver: both lost. One Tenalp flag: unaccounted for. One magnificent, hand-carved, mahogany dining table: vandalized. And, last but certainly not least, one fully-powered and primed emergency deep-space survival module... destroyed.”
TOT looked at jixX. “Do you have any idea what the going rate for an emergency deep-space survival module is nowadays?”
“No,” said jixX.
“Even second-hand?”
“No. I guess it’s a lot.”
TOT nodded. “A lot.” He looked back down at the file as though looking for anything he might have missed.
jixX felt about in his pockets. As he suspected, he still had the six-inch Tenalp flag on him. He took it out to hand over to TOT, but then had second thoughts and replaced it. He doubted that it would help his current situation.
“Not a very successful mission I guess, sir,” said jixX.
“No, jixX,” agreed TOT, looking up. “Successful is not an adjective
that would be at the top of my list when summing up this mission of yours. Good day.”
EPILOGUE
Warning: This Epilogue is not for those who fear and distrust happy endings
A year later, jixX was captaining The Misspelt Yooth, a small, Class II starship. This was the third Top Secret Space Mission he’d undertaken to try to pay off the damage from the first.
About half an hour after lift-off, there was a knock at his cabin door. He opened it and, to his amazement, standing in the corridor outside, was sylX. His mouth dropped open and then he beamed happily.
“Well, hello,” he said, opening the door wider and asking her what she was doing there.
“Stowing away,” said sylX predictably.
“Well, long time no see!” said jixX, beckoning her in. “Come in and take a seat. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
sylX took a seat in one of the armchairs and jixX sat in the other. They sat smiling at one another for a short while. sylX noticed a familiar-looking plant on the desk behind jixX. It was taller than when she had last seen it, now perhaps close to four feet. Also planted in the pot was a six-inch Tenalp flag.
“I’ve been on Earth,” said the stowaway finally. “On a round-the-world cruise.”
“Stowing away?” asked jixX.
“No. I was legit, for once. Holiday. It was great. My own cabin, proper meals, sunbathing, sightseeing, and even a game or two of deck quoits. How about you?”
jixX told her about his previous two missions – both disasters – and then they fell to reminiscing about The Night Ripple.
“I heard that LEP and anaX got married,” said sylX.
“I was best man.”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“Hmm,” said jixX. “It was a strange affair. All of LEP’s computer pals were there, so the level of humour was a bit low. And some of anaX’s scary ERP crowd were there, too.”
“ERP?”
“Equal Right for Psychopaths. Hadn’t you heard?”
“No, I’ve been travelling.”
“Well, anaX is a cyber-kinetic android. She qualified as a gynaecologist; did really well in the exams, apparently. But then she failed her Turing Test and couldn’t get a job. Worse still, she scored borderline sociopath.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Anyway, out of work, she fell in with the wrong crowd and became involved with the psychopathic liberation movement. They’re campaigning for equal rights for mass murderers and serial killers and persuaded her to sabotage our mission to strike a blow for equality.”
sylX gave a puzzled look. “The neutrino bomb?”
jixX nodded. “None of them made any sense. And their eyes were too close together. Fortunately for us, she never completed her mission because love saved the day.”
“So sweet.” sylX gave a little giggle.
They lapsed into silence, not making eye contact.
“How about the behavioural chemist?” asked the stowaway after a while.
“Oh, he went mad,” said jixX sadly. “He finally found a divine message in the Periodic Table which proved the existence of God. Whatever was in the message drove him insane.”
“What did it say?”
“Nobody knows. No one will ever know. He burnt it soon afterwards and can’t be persuaded to reveal it.”
“Wow, must have been some message!”
“Also, he was an atheist,” continued jixX. “Perhaps the shock of discovering a proof for God made him crack.”
The stowaway looked surprised. “Do you think he really found a proof?”
“I wouldn’t put my mortgage on it.”
Silence again.
sylX sat forward excitedly. “That reminds me! I discovered something amazing on Earth,” she said. “You’ll never believe it.”
“Go on.”
“They found twaX the carpenter!”
“Really? He’s alive?”
“Apparently,” continued the stowaway. “They came across him in a rain forest in South America.”
“South America?”
“He was gibbering, but in good health. No one could make sense of anything he said. And then he ran back into the rain forest waving his axe in the air. He’s been chopping down trees and making useless stuff out of wood. The local people buy the things he makes just because they feel sorry for him.”
“But how did he get there? How did he escape from the Pseudogravitic Continuum?”
“No one knows. He’s got a bit of a cult following, though. A whole bunch of people think he’s a genius. They believe he built himself a spaceship on Ground using only the carpentry tools he had with him plus several six-inch nails, a dirty handkerchief and a hinged extensible rule. And then he flew the thing to Earth.”
jixX blinked in amazement. “Perhaps we underestimated him.”
sylX laughed. “I don’t think that’s what happened.”
“How did he do it, then?”
“No idea. I guess we’ll never know.”
They lapsed into silent reflection once again, each staring down at the portion of floor between them.
jixX leapt from his armchair. “Wait!” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “I’ve got a little gift for you.”
“Oh, wow,” said sylX, sitting up straight.
“A little reminder of our trip together. I was going to give it to you when The Night Ripple landed, but you rushed off and I was dragged off to see TOT.”
sylX beamed as she watched jixX bustling off to the desk behind him, towards the dwarf Alberta spruce.
“Close your eyes,” instructed jixX.
She did as she was told and held out both her hands.
“Here,” said jixX, placing something into them. Her smile faded. The object felt neither as heavy nor of the right shape and texture to be what she had been expecting. “You can open your eyes now.”
sylX opened her eyes and looked down at the object. It was a brick. With a note tied to it. The note said, ‘Landing permission granted’.
“Oh,” she said. “This is... lovely. I’ll treasure it forever.”
jixX sat down, pleased with himself, watching her as she examined the brick with a great show of interest and gratitude.
After a while, they again lapsed into silence, both staring at the brick.
“Life’s a funny old game,” said jixX philosophically.
“Yes,” agreed the stowaway, with equal philosophical insight, placing the brick on her armrest. “I wonder what will become of us.”
jixX shrugged. “I suppose we’ll end up getting married and living happily ever after,” he said.
And, of course, they did.
Though not to each other.
*
Meanwhile, a long way from living happily ever after, were the contents – sentient and otherwise – of the Pseudogravitic Continuum. The place was a mess. There were fragments of rock and rubble and dust everywhere: the debris of countless stars and planets. Boulders floated aimlessly, occasionally colliding into one another and coalescing, accreting dust and smaller particles as they did so.
And, floating in amongst all this debris, were billions upon billions of tiny droplets of green slime. This was all that was left of the Mamm species: tiny droplets of green slime. However, these droplets had the uncanny ability of forming back into the slimy green blobs from which they had come.
And they were reforming now. It was a slow process because of the vast distances across which the droplets had been dispersed. But, nevertheless, reforming they were. Just as LEP had reassured anaX they would.
It would take a long time. A very long time. But eventually they would do it. And, when they did, they would rebuild their Universe as best they could. They would make it just as it had been before that fateful Monday.
And, as the slimy green blobs reformed, some of them realized what had happened. As their neural connections met up, fused and triggered, there was one thought – and one thought only – that continually fi
red in their nascent minds. It was, ‘Wait till I get my hands on that Jeremy! Just wait till I get my hands on him!!’
Of course, there was one Mamm who was not thinking this one thought. This Mamm was Jeremy. His thought was a totally different one.
It was: ‘There!! More proof! I am the Chosen One!!!’
GLOSSARY
AXOSYNAPTIC PROCESSING. Processing by one or more (usually about a billion) axosynapses. The more complex the problem the more axosynapses become involved in its processing. The more axosynapses involved, the quicker the problem is solved. Interestingly, the system tends to be inherently non-linear, so very complex problems are often processed and solved more quickly than very simple ones. Put another way, it means that simple, or even trivial, problems take ages to solve. This apparent paradox is overcome by employing auxiliary scramblers to make simple problems more difficult and so speed up their processing. Sometimes, however, instead of getting a simple answer to a simple problem, one ends up with a scrambled answer to a scrambled problem.
BACK ENGINE ROOM. (See Forward Engine Room)
CHRONOGRAPHIC WRISTWATCH. Reed-switching, pendulum-driven watch, complete with a quadroluminescent microdigital display, a radioscopic magnetometer arrow giving the direction of true North, and an ultraheterodyning beater which can be set to massage the skin of the arm directly under the watch. This massage, it is claimed, prevents chafing, peeling, bleeding, and dandruff. The watch also has an OFF-switch to conserve the batteries when it’s not in use.
CRANIKEN, DEREK VON (2021- ). Derek von Craniken – world-famous crank, and author of the best-selling book, ‘Harriet of the Clods’. In this best-selling book, von Craniken proposed that life on Earth originated from the microbes left behind by a group of extraterrestrials visiting our barren home planet several billion years ago. Specifically, the microbes came from a can of soup that had gone off during their journey here and had been discarded. The makers of the soup, according to von Craniken, were Pry and Mordial, a well known soup manufacturer on the aliens’ home planet. It is not clear how von Craniken came by this piece of information. Few real scientists agree with his theory. However, the one thing in its favour is that, even though life has been evolving for billions of years, evolution still occasionally throws up specimens like von Craniken.