The Lifeboat

by Keith Fenwick

  Chump regarded Sue, then Leaf, who had not uttered a word. Chump sensed Leaf was unable to really comprehend what was going on around her and ignored her. Sue Harwood, on the other hand, he knew a little more about.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Well what?” Sue responded with a complete lack of the kind of respect he was used to and felt with a sense of entitlement he was owed. However, despite this lack of respect he was much more at ease with her than he was with her husband.

  “You have been harbouring an enemy of the state,” Chump began. “That’s treason pure and simple, and once we are out of here I’ll make sure you end your days in prison with all the other terrorists you have ganged up with to try and defeat this mighty nation.” Chump had decided that if the threat was real it must be terrorists – he agreed with his pastor that an asteroid heading for Earth could not be part of God’s plan for all his people on Earth. It just couldn’t be true.

  “Try again, Mr Chump.”

  Chump took an aggressive stance in front of Sue and started on her with a tirade of abuse. “Look here, young lady, you know who I am, and you’re nothing. You need to tell me what I need to know or I’ll make your life a misery for the rest of your days.”

  “And you,” he added, having to look up at Leaf who towered over him, “are nothing more than an ignorant alien.”

  Whack!

  Chump had no idea what hit him and he wondered for a moment if he had been blindsided by a truck.

  “I am a representative of the most powerful and sophisticated society in the known universe,” Leaf informed Chump. “I have no respect for your leadership, if the examples I have been exposed to are anything to go by. Your leaders are corrupt and do not have the best interests of their electorate at heart!”

  “I …” Chump began.

  “I will not be addressed in that manner by a being I consider to be a lower form of life. Be seated and leave us alone!” Leaf demanded.

  Chump looked to the Pastor and Reid, and then to Sue for some level of support.

  “You go, girl!” Sue looked at Leaf with newfound respect. She had just shown more spunk than any other Skidian she had ever met. This was such a momentous event that even the MPU took notice.

  “Let us pray for forgiveness in this time of need,” the pastor began, holding his arms wide towards the heavens, clearly expecting Sue and Leaf to join him, but only Chump knelt before him and asked forgiveness for all his sins. The pastor stopped midstream and gawped at Chump as he prayed for absolution for his drinking, illicit drug-taking, and womanising.

  Leaf’s blow had momentarily stunned and disoriented Chump. He momentarily imagined his wife had discovered his infidelities and whacked him one with her handbag so he felt he needed to beg her forgiveness. He feared her reaction more than anyone else’s and was especially fearful she would cut him adrift without his allowance. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he sobbed. “Forgive me for allowing myself to be tempted by the flesh of young, immoral women. Forgive me for being a pawn of big business and bending to their will.” Chump paused and seemed to gather his wits. “You hit me. Why did you hit me?” he asked Leaf.

  “Because you are an old windbag and a bully,” Sue told him as the pastor and science advisor Reid gaped at him.

  Just then the door pushed open and Bruce poked his head inside. He looked at Chump kneeling in front of his pastor, who looked more than a little stunned, and at the smirk on Reid’s face, and wondered what was going on. “OK, you two, we’re off to make history. Don’t shag around otherwise we’ll leave you behind.” The last comment was for Sue’s benefit. He had thought about it on the way down the hall and despite his better judgement decided Leaf and Sue should be along to witness the asteroid being nudged into orbit about planet Earth.

  Chump and the pastor made to follow Bruce. Chump, at least, was used to being at the centre of momentous events, and the pastor was used to basking in Chump’s reflected glory, so neither of them were particularly surprised that Bruce had seen the light and decided to include them on this momentous campaign to save the world.

  “Nah, not you three idiots. Come on, ladies.”

  “Are we free to go now?” Chump asked.

  “Hardly,” remarked General Smith who had pushed past Bruce into room. “You will never be free to do anything without my say-so again. And that goes for the two of you as well,” he added, pointing to the pastor and the science advisor. “You two are complicit in allowing our special friend Mr Chump to behave the way he has and get away with it.” The general held Chump’s mobile in his hand. “There are some very interesting numbers on this phone.” The general recognised at least two of them from his own nocturnal activities in the capital.

  “You hypocrite!” Chump blustered. “I know you frequent some of those establishments yourself; you are not without sin.”

  “No, Mr Chump. It’s you who are the hypocrite. I haven’t trumpeted my piety, mounted moral crusades and driven good men and women from public office in the name of a god you do not honour, simply because you consider their behaviour to be immoral – all the time indulging yourself in a number of questionable activities.”

  Chump felt his whole world crumbling around him. An hour or so ago he had been one of the most powerful men in the country, if not the world. Senators, congressmen and women, business leaders, military leaders and foreign dignitaries looked to him for leadership, for direction and for patronage. He was idolised by his followers, lionised by conservative groups across the country, and he truly believed he was going to be the next President of the United States. However, now, here in this no-account office building, in a very short space of time, the wind had been completely taken out of his sails. He had been broken and worn down by the nameless time servers and servants, the bureaucrats he had always railed against. The nameless, selfless servants of the people who laboured to keep the nation safe, the faceless dedicated servants of government and the agents of the world government. The bastards!

  “It won’t be so bad,” the general assured him as he handed back the phone. “You’ll see.” And with that he walked out to the basement and the waiting cars which would deliver them to the remote site the MPU had decided to use as a staging post for the space patrol ship to pick them up.

  Chump tried the door handle. To his surprise, the door swung open and he found himself staring one of Wisneski’s men in the face.

  “Please make yourself comfortable, Mr Chump. My orders are to hold you here for the next two hours, after which you will be free to go about your business.”

  Chump opened his mouth to speak but he couldn’t manage to utter anything intelligent.

  “The general will contact you in the next few days with further instructions,” the guard continued. “My instructions are to inform you that if you try to make public any aspect of the danger posed by the asteroid or the attempts being made to divert it, or seek to take advantage of the situation, you will be dealt with. Severely.”

  “You can’t talk like that to me, young man. Reid, remind him who I am and who my friends are, how powerful an enemy, or what a powerful friend I could be.”

  “Mr Chump, sir,” Reid began with a quavering voice. “I think there are some political and personal realities here we need to recognise and address.”

  “What do you mean, Reid?”

  “Well, General Smith is in possession of some extremely sensitive and damning evidence regarding your improper behaviour and even though we knew nothing – as in the pastor’s case or very little, in my own – we are heavily implicated ourselves. We will be seen as guilty by association; we have as much to lose, if not more, than you in this situation.”

  “I’m still not with you. I don’t understand what you are saying. I will deal with the general and his cronies as soon as I am able to make a call.”

  “No, Mr Chump. You can’t win this time. Your constituency will lynch you if word gets out about your behaviour, so that is a powerful enough reason for it not
to. The general has you boxed into a corner.”

  Chump felt his heart sink. It was like a physical thing and he thought for a moment he might be having a heart attack. He put his hand out against the wall to steady himself while Reid and the pastor looked on without any sympathy at all, while they calculated what they might be able to personally retrieve from the situation.

  “You won’t tell my wife, will you?” Chump pleaded at last, more afraid of her than anyone else.

  “You and God have a lot of catching up to do,” Pastor Ryan said, breaking his silence. He, like Reid, understood that if any of Chump’s peccadillos were made public he would also be guilty by association. But this didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn the situation to his own advantage if he could. “I am here to help you gain his forgiveness. Let us pray.” He motioned Chump to kneel before him. “We will talk about what we will and won’t discuss with Mrs Chump later.”

  Reid watched Chump bow his head before Pastor Ryan and grinned as the pastor placed a hand on Chump’s head and smiled up at him.

  Poor bastard, Reid reflected. Chump had no idea just how interesting his life was going to get, and that was before General Smith started giving him directives.

  Nine

  “Why can’t you just beam us up from anywhere?” Bruce asked the obvious question as they drove away. “Why do we have to go way out of town to get to the ship?”

  This isn’t like something out of one of your science fiction movies, Bruce. I can beam you up, as you so eloquently put it. I can beam any number of people up, from anywhere. One or two I might get away with. I did it with your dogs, but that was an act of bravado and had some risk attached to it.

  However, if I try and beam the whole group of you up to the ship from some densely populated site, somebody is likely to notice your bodies flying through the air. At the very least people will start asking questions, and the worst-case scenario is the ship will be exposed. Stealth technology is designed to shield the ship from electronic systems, not offworlder eyeballs at fairly close range.

  From a publicity and security perspective I think it is a much sounder approach to land the ship in a secluded spot where you can board without any fuss. The MPU paused and then added after a moment, some of your guests will probably appreciate it as well.

  Bruce failed to grasp this logic but decided against trying to argue with it. In actual fact he felt a bit silly arguing, well discussing things, with what was effectively a computer, albeit a very sophisticated one.

  Without even consciously trying to engineer the situation (and being obvious about it) he found himself sitting next to Shelly Shaw in the rear of one of the SUVs. In fact, he was surprised to find he was squashed between both Leaf and the delectable Shelly Shaw while Sue sat in the front seat. She turned to glower fiercely at them every few seconds as they moved off. Bruce had given her ample opportunity to be pissed off in more ways than one that morning – including not sticking up for her when she was unceremoniously locked away with Ronald Chump. Watching him sitting between the two women just gave her more ammunition to use on him afterwards.

  Myfair squeezed in beside Leaf even though there was hardly any space for him. Bruce was squashed even harder up against the two women, which gave him a chance to compare the lithe, bony frame of Shelly Shaw and the much larger, more athletic physique of Leaf. Bruce stared up at her with newfound interest and remembered the night, well hardly a night, they had spent together on Skid. Leaf looked across at him with an expression on her face which suggested she knew what he was thinking. Bruce was normally unable to fathom what was going in in her mind; her expression was pretty well inscrutable. However, she seemed to have a lot more spunk about her than Myfair had at the moment.

  Bruce was also conscious he needed to keep his hands to himself and placed them on his lap, which caused him to hunch his shoulders uncomfortably. “I hope this trip doesn’t take long. It’s bloody uncomfortable sitting here between you two!”

  Shelly smiled mysteriously at him but did not respond, except to wriggle and shift her backside around slightly so her thigh was pressed against his even more firmly.

  “How long is this trip going to take, Wisneski?” Sue asked.

  “About fifteen minutes according to the GPS,” he replied. “As long as the coordinates we have are accurate.”

  Right on the button the big SUV pulled into a large, empty, car park and there, hovering just off the ground, the spaceship revealed itself as it shed its stealth cloaking.

  The outer skin glistened with moisture, as if it had just been through a rain shower, and parts of it seemed to slip in and out of visibility, disappearing momentarily, then reappearing as the cloaking device did not fully conceal the ship from close visual inspection.

  “My God!” muttered the General. “I wasn’t convinced until right this moment this could be real.” He reached forward to touch the hull, gently stroking his hand along the metal surface, followed closely by Dr Roach, both of them looking as though they could not quite believe their eyes.

  A gap opened in the hull and a ramp extended outwards. Even before the end of it hit the ground a large, furry frame charged out of the opening and into the sunlight. “Woof woof woof!” Punch charged across the empty car park like a bloody maniac suddenly let loose from an asylum.

  “Get in here, Punch!” Bruce shouted angrily enough to make those who hadn’t heard him yell at the dogs before to get their attention, cringe at the sudden outpouring of rage, part real and part effect. The big huntaway took no notice of Bruce even when he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The piercing sound momentarily stunned everyone who were wondering what the hell was going on but made no impression on Punch – or Can, who had joined him on his romp around the car park. Frustrated by their disobedience Bruce looked around for something to throw at them but there was nothing handy.

  “Get in here, you ignorant fucken animals,” Bruce bellowed. “Or I’ll boot your arse when I catch you!”

  Both dogs charged pell-mell around the car park once more just to show who was really in charge and then trotted over to Bruce and sat on their haunches beside him, panting and looking quite pleased with themselves. Punch took a few quick licks at Bruce’s hand just to make him feel better.

  “OK, guys,” Bruce said. “Let’s get on board as quickly as possible before someone notices us.” He hustled the team up the ramp, aiming a kick in Punch’s direction as the big dog loped past him and gave him a big, sloppy, good-natured grin.

  As soon as they were all in, the door slid closed behind them and the ship lifted silently into the air.

  “Get out of it, dog!” Bruce bawled, batting Punch away as he jumped and put his paws on his chest and tried to slobber all over his face.

  The other two dogs busied themselves sniffing the newcomers disconcertingly about the crotch.

  “Whet the fuck are you doing, Cop?” Bruce demanded of the old dog. “Are you just trying to be difficult?”

  “We got a bit lonely up here by ourselves.”

  “I don’t know why the MPU didn’t take you home like I told it to,” Bruce grunted, suddenly aware the old dog was probably just having him on.

  I thought you might like to bond a little.

  Bruce didn’t quite know how to respond to this statement so he ignored it.

  “OK, everyone.” Bruce began taking charge for the moment because he felt it was expected of him, although he suspected the MPU would manage the process and complete all the required actions. His role was like that of a pilot of a modern passenger jet – there to keep up appearances and make the passengers feel better about the journey, by pretending to be in control. The machine could and would complete its mission without input from any Skidians or humans. They were all there simply to witness history being made, not to actively participate in the process.

  The old doctor and the general looked around the control area in awe. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I would not have believed it,” said the gener
al, astounded. “It looks so basic and over simplified. Where are all the flight controls? Where is its propulsion system?” he asked without really expecting much of an answer. The Skidians had clearly managed to solve some of the challenges of space flight human scientists and engineers had only just begun to grapple with. He was in momentary awe of the technology and started to quiz Myfair about it.

  “I couldn’t really tell you,” Bruce interjected when Myfair remained silent. Which meant he had no idea at all. “And I am pretty sure Myfair won’t be much help in that area either. I was never that interested in finding out what the propulsion systems were. I was more interested that it got me from A to B.”

  The general and Dr Roach gathered around the bridge trying to make some kind of sense of the controls. The console itself was dominated by a large touch screen displaying all manner of information that was largely lost on the humans. Bruce knew which icon to press if he was in the middle of the galaxy and wanted to get to Earth, but that was about it. But, to be fair, now he had a direct connection with the MPU he didn’t need to know how to operate the controls.

  He did, however, know how to open the windows – or, more correctly, provide an outside view of the ship. There were gasps all round from the doctors and the general as monitors came to life and displayed the external view. After all, it was spectacular, so much so that even Bruce, who had seen it all before, was suitably impressed with the receding satellite image view of Earth.

  There was no real appreciation of the fantastic velocity they were travelling at until they observed the moon grow rapidly in size. Then suddenly they were flashing past and it was lost from sight in their wake.

  “How fast are we going?” Dr Roach asked as he did some rough calculations in his head. “How soon will we intercept the asteroid?”