How to Save the Universe Without Really Trying

by John Cusick

  This was not the profound thing Lola had intended to say.

  The profound thing was completely forgotten in the wake of what she saw standing before her. It wore a soggy blue jumpsuit, waved a translucent green hand, and wobbled with the vibrations of the ship.

  It said, “Hello, my name’s Jeremy! What’s yours?”

  21

  A DOZEN DECKS ABOVE, Phin kicked open the door of his royal suite and twirled through the first three entrance arches. He leaped over the megasofa, made a graceful bow to the hat rack, danced with it across the edge of the infinity pool, gave it a wink when it blushed at him, and skipped over to the massive spread of before-bed snacks he’d ordered up. It could have fed a small nation.

  He was in a fantastic mood.

  This, after all, was what he always wanted, what he always suspected space travel would be like. His parents had been on countless cruises, and now here he was, not only part of one, but positively being the best at it, ever. For the first time in his life, Phin was surrounded by people. He was actually interacting with real people—not just in digichats and on Mobius boards, but in real life. The smells were richer, the jokes were funnier. He was dancing.

  And what was wrong with that? Nothing. He was in a fantastic mood, and no one better suggest otherwise.

  The grandfather clock chimed twelve. When it was done, a hollow silence filled the room. Below it all was the thrum of the SunStar’s engines, but otherwise it was quiet. Too quiet. A certain sound he’d almost completely not gotten used to the past few nights was absent. It was the sound of Lola’s snoring.

  “Hello?” he said, knocking on the door to her half of the suite. “Lola, are you in there?”

  Her room was dark. He sniffed the air. He listened. He said, “I’m turning on the lights now,” and did. But she wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t in the bathroom either. She also apparently hadn’t accidentally locked herself in the Look-e-Me automatic outfit generator again.

  There was an ache in Phin’s chest that had nothing to do with bumping into a massive table of before-bed snacks. It was concern. Concern for someone other than himself.

  “Snuggling snuggle snugs,” grumbled Phin, and went to find his friend.

  “Hello,” he said to the porter he met in the hall. “You haven’t seen my w-wife . . .” It still felt funny to call her that. The word stuck in his throat like a walnut. “Have you?”

  The porter scratched one his three noses and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know, sir. Could you describe her?”

  “About yea big.” Phin measured a distance from the floor with his hand. “About yea smart.” He measured a different distance between his two hands. “And about yea brave.” He measured a third distance, much larger than the other two, which involved running from one end of the hall to the other.

  “Human, sir?”

  “Technically.”

  “Female?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “Was she wearing a T-shirt and jeans with a string of Nectarian pearls, her hair in a Bolesian twist, and an expression at once awestruck and slightly dopey?”

  “Yes!” said Phin. “That’s her!”

  “Then no, sir,” said the porter. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen her.”

  “Oh,” said Phin.

  “Perhaps she’s on the holodeck?”

  Lola definitely did not know how to use the holodeck.

  “Let’s hope not,” said Phin, and tipped the man thrice his annual salary.

  Above deck, the party had wound down and some of the more amphibious guests had passed out in the pool. Phin tapped his foot. It wasn’t like Lola to wander off for so long.

  “Have you seen . . . ?” he began to ask a drunk sluggoid, then, “Oh, never mind.”

  “The stars?” the sluggoid offered. “I have seen them. Have you?”

  “Yes,” said Phin. “I know, they’re lovely.”

  “Mmm,” said the sluggoid. “They appear to be . . . wobbling.”

  “You’ve been partying too hard,” said Phin, annoyed and trying to extricate himself from the conversation.

  “That’s definitely true,” said the sluggoid, and hiccuped. “But the stars are definitely wobbling. Won’t you look at them?”

  “I certainly will not,” said Phin.

  He left the sluggoid at the railing and decided to try the upper decks. A pair of amoeba-like creatures were canoodling there and told him to shoo. He searched the entire deck front to back, and finally found himself at the prow of the SS SunStar. The ache he’d been feeling had grown to a full-blown burn, and it wasn’t due to the half dozen Sarkusian truffles he’d eaten earlier. He was profoundly, almost deliriously worried about Lola. He decided he needed to calm himself down. Relax a little bit. And so he did what all life-forms have done throughout the history of the universe when they need a little perspective. He took a deep breath and considered the stars.

  They were wobbling.

  Normally, when hurtling through hyperspace, stars appear as wispy contrails. They shimmer, they streak, but they do not wobble. These stars were most definitely wobbling. It was as if the entire universe was drunk.

  Did Phin Fogg know what this meant? He did. And his considerable intellect began to fume.

  They were all in terrible danger.

  “I have to get to the captain, immediately,” Phin said aloud.

  “He’s probably in the captain’s quarters. He’s usually there, for some reason,” said the creature mopping the deck a few feet away. Phin whirled to face it.

  “Oh, wait a minute,” the creature said, pausing in its work to put a gooey finger to its gooey chin. “Captain. Captain’s quarters. I just got that!” The creature smiled. “Hello,” it said. “My name’s Jeremy. What’s yours?”

  22

  LOLA WAS SCREAMING. IT sounded like, “Ahhhhhhhh!!!!”

  The Bog Mutant was screaming. It sounded like, “Aaghghghghghgh!!!”

  Some other Bog Mutants, who were standing nearby, felt a bit left out and wanted to be part of whatever was going on, so they started screaming too. It sounded like eleven Bog Mutants going, “Aaghghghghghghgh!!!”

  Gabby was also screaming. But hers sounded like this: “Stop screaming! Everyone, stop! Why are you screaming?”

  Lola had leaped behind a reactor column. This had been her third choice of hiding places. The first was behind Gabby (which would have been rude); the second was behind herself (which proved impossible).

  “Get away from them!” she shouted at Gabby. “They’ll liquefy you! They’re evil!”

  Gabby did not get away. Instead she stood with her hands on her hips, cocking a thin eyebrow in a way that perfectly expressed the phrase Girl, what on Zibulon are you doing?

  The Bog Mutants kept screaming until Gabby shushed them. Now Lola was the only one screaming—at intervals, and with decreasing intensity.

  “AHHH,” she screamed. “Ahh . . . ah . . .” She cleared her throat. “Um . . . ah?”

  “What have you got against Bog Mutants?” Gabby said. “They run the ship!”

  “What?”

  Lola stepped out from behind the reactor column. Getting a closer look, she saw their badges did not read Temporal Transit Authority, but rather, Staff.

  “Oh,” said Lola. “Oh!”

  “This is Jeremy,” said Gabby, making a sweeping motion to all the Bog Mutants in the room.

  “Hello!” they said.

  “I’m Jeremy!” said one near the back.

  “H-hi,” said Lola. “Sorry about that. It’s just . . . I’ve had some bad experiences with Bog Mutants.”

  “So have I!” said one. “Jeremy stepped on my toe this morning.”

  “That wasn’t me! That was you!” said another.

  “Oh, that’s right,” said the first, and turned back to what he was doing, stepping on his own toe in the process. “Ow!”

  They were running the ship. Or rather, they were running the engine. Or rather again, they were stoking the engine.
It looked like a giant coal furnace, only much bigger, and outfitted with sensors, dials, and electronic readouts. The mouth of the furnace was simply a massive iron grate into which the Bog Mutants were shoveling piles of coal.

  Or what looked like coal.

  “Dark matter,” said Gabby, kicking a few briquettes across the floor. Every surface was dusted with dark-matter residue. Some of it had even seeped into the bodies of the Bog Mutants themselves, making their slime cloudy.

  “We like Gabby!” shouted one of the Bog Mutants.

  “Yeah!” said another. “We don’t know why. But she seems neat.”

  “We don’t like most solids,” said a third, shoving his shovel into a crate of black, chalky fuel. “But Gabby’s great.”

  “We like Gabby!” said the first, who’d already lost track of the conversation.

  Gabby shrugged and smiled.

  Lola considered the conditions the Bog Mutants were working in. It was cramped and sweltering. Not only did the dark-matter dust choke everything, the heat seemed to be melting the Mutants slightly. They smiled whenever they looked at Gabby, but when they returned to work, their expressions were solemn, even pained. They grunted with the exertion of their constant labor.

  “Do you have to do this for the whole trip?” Lola asked.

  “Someone’s gotta keep the engine going,” said one.

  “But,” said Lola, “don’t you get a break?”

  “Oh yeah!” said another, nodding sloppily. “Sometimes, you die! Then you get to stop.”

  “Oh,” said Lola.

  “It’s great,” said the Bog Mutant with gusto.

  Just then a great wrenching, tearing, grinding, screeching, shuddering sound ripped through the heart of the ship. The floor beneath them shunted violently to one side and Lola was thrown to the ground. A plume of toxic dark-matter exhaust erupted from the furnace, engulfing one of the Jeremys.

  “What was that?” Lola shouted.

  “I . . . I don’t know!” said Gabby, who had been tossed against a pylon. She winced and brought her hand from behind her head. It was covered in green blood.

  “Hey, look,” one of the Bog Mutants shouted. “Jeremy’s been poisoned!”

  They were all pointing to the Bog Mutant who had taken the exhaust blast straight to the face. He clutched his throat with one hand and coughed violently. With the other he gave a thumbs-up. The Bog Mutants cheered.

  “Hooray! Good for you, Jeremy!”

  “Enjoy your break, buddy.”

  The Bog Mutant wheezed, extended his other hand so that he could give two big wobbly thumbs-up, and collapsed on the pile of dark-matter briquettes, dead.

  “Good old Jeremy,” said one Bog Mutant.

  “Lucky son of a gun,” said another.

  The ship gave another violent heave.

  “Did we hit an iceberg?” shouted Lola, then caught herself. “I mean, like a space . . . iceberg?”

  “Those are called asteroids,” said Gabby, wincing at a readout from one of the wall-mounted terminals. “And that’s impossible . . . unless . . .”

  “Unless what?” shouted Lola. The room around them had begun to tremble, the solid steel walls rippling like . . . well, like Bog Mutants.

  “Something pulled us out of hyperspace,” said Gabby, considering the blood seeping from her head wound. “Or someone.”

  And with that, she promptly passed out.

  23

  AN ENORMOUS STAR LINER flung out of hyperspace and smashing into an asteroid is a sight to behold. The tractor beam—for that’s what it was—that had pulled the SunStar out of hyperspace had also decreased its speed and adjusted its position so that the ship merely grazed the asteroid. The collision obliterated the ship’s thrusters. Intact but crippled, the vessel hurtled through the darkness toward a red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri. All things considered, it was an incredibly lucky break. Though to the passengers on board, it hardly felt that way.

  The asteroid, by the way, was the very place from which the tractor beam had emanated.

  Everything was transpiring according to a very precise and intricate plan.

  On board the SS SunStar, the sirens were deafening. So deafening it was hard to hear all the screaming. And all the screaming and all the sirens made it almost impossible to hear the great cruiser rending and buckling under the massive g-force, which the ship’s antigrav computer was working madly to combat.

  The ship twisted and flipped, until at last the antigrav computer got a grip on which side was supposed to be down. Passengers, deck chairs, teacups, and complimentary bottles of shampoo, all of which had been tumbling through the air, fell at once to the floor. For now, at least, to everyone on board it felt as if the SunStar was right side up.

  In fact, it was still tumbling willy-nilly into a star.

  Lola moaned. She was covered in dark-matter dust, as well as regular dust, and a few chunks of piping and ductwork that had come loose from the machinery around her. She coughed and worked herself into a sitting position. Gabby lay a few feet away, unconscious but breathing. The Bog Mutants were scattered like debris from an exploded jelly doughnut. One by one they picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and separated themselves from one another.

  “I think you’ve got my nose, Jeremy.”

  “Hey, looks like I do! Can I keep it?”

  “Sure! I always liked your nose better anyway.”

  “What happened?” said Lola. She hacked. “Are we sinking or . . . whatever the space equivalent is?”

  “ATTENTION, PASSENGERS, ATTENTION, PASSENGERS,” came a voice over the loudspeakers. Lola quivered. Voices on loudspeakers were almost never a good thing in her experience.

  “THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING. WELL, I’VE GOT SOME NEWS. FIRST, TONIGHT’S SCREENING OF STARSHIP TITANIC HAS BEEN CANCELED.”

  “Aww,” said one of the Bog Mutants, who’d been looking forward to it.

  “I KNOW THERE WAS A LOT OF ARGUMENT OVER WHETHER SHOWING A FILM ABOUT A HORRIBLE INTERSTELLAR CRUISE SHIP CATASTROPHE ON AN INTERSTELLAR CRUISE SHIP WAS INAPPROPRIATE. AND I KNOW THE DETRACTORS ARE STILL A BIT SORE. BUT I’M HERE TO TELL YOU, THE WHOLE THING HAS BECOME MOOT.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Lola said, getting to her feet.

  “THE SECOND BIT OF NEWS, WHICH I’LL GET TO IN A MOMENT, HAS REALLY THROWN THE WHOLE SHOULD WE SHOW A MOVIE ABOUT A STAR SHIP CRASHING WHILE ON A STAR SHIP DEBATE INTO RELIEF, LET ME TELL YOU. THE IRONY IS . . . WELL, IT’S JUST PRETTY ASTOUNDING.”

  There was a mumbling sound off mic.

  “QUITE RIGHT, ENSIGN. ENSIGN SANDERS INFORMS ME, CORRECTLY, THAT THIS ISN’T AN EXAMPLE OF IRONY, PER SE. BUT RATHER MERE COINCIDENCE. AND I’M SURE WE’LL ALL TAKE GREAT COMFORT IN THAT KNOWLEDGE. THANK YOU, ENSIGN SANDERS.”

  Lola took it upon herself to see if the hatch out of the engine room was jammed shut. It was.

  “SO, TO THE SECOND BIT OF NEWS. WELL. IT SEEMS WE’VE STRUCK SOMETHING, AND NO, IT WASN’T AN ICEBERG, SMARTYPANTS. THAT WOULD BE ABSURD.” The captain cleared his throat, a sound meant to be small and unassuming, which was loud and bone-rattling when transmitted through the loudspeakers. “WHAT WE’VE STRUCK IS AN ASTEROID, WHICH, YES, SOME MIGHT COMPARE TO AN ICEBERG IN SPACE. THOUGH THIS ONE, IT SEEMS, ISN’T MADE OF ICE, THE WAY SOME ASTEROIDS ARE—A FACT MANY OF YOU WILL RECALL FROM TUESDAY’S AFTER-DINNER SCIENCE LECTURE: SPACE JUNK AND YOU. ANYWAY.”

  “Come on!” Lola said, gesturing to the Bog Mutants. “You’ve got to help me get this open!”

  The Mutants looked at one another. They glanced at the piles of dark-matter briquettes that needed to be cleaned up. They glanced at the engines, which weren’t going to stoke themselves. They glanced at the floor, sheepishly, and had no idea what to do.

  “I’m ordering you,” Lola tried, feeling a bit bad about bossing them around but deciding she could live with it under the circumstances, “to help me get this hatch open.”

  “THE ASTEROID HAS DESTROYED OUR PROPULSION SYSTEM, AND WE
’RE UNABLE TO CONTROL THE SHIP,” the captain continued. “WHICH WOULDN’T BE SUCH A BIG DEAL IF WE WEREN’T ON A DIRECT COLLISION COURSE WITH A RED DWARF, WHICH WILL CONSUME THE SHIP IN A FIREY CATACLYSM IN—ENSIGN?”

  There was a pause.

  “ENSIGN SAYS WE’VE GOT ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES. SO WHAT YOU SHOULD DO,” the captain continued, “IS GO AHEAD AND GET TO YOUR EMERGENCY TELEPORT RAFTS IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE PROCEED IN AN ORDERLY FASHION, BUT, YOU KNOW, DON’T WORRY ALL THAT MUCH ABOUT BEING ORDERLY. THE PRIORITY HERE IS GETTING OFF THE SHIP BEFORE IT FALLS INTO A STAR, IS WHAT I’M SAYING.”

  Lola had an idea. “Hey, Bog Mutants!” she called. “Congratulations, you’ve all been promoted! You’ve all been promoted to official, uh, door openers!”

  Expressions of pure wonder and delight consumed their faces. Never, in all their peoples’ history, had anyone ever been promoted.

  “Hooray!” the cheered. They high-fived each other splashily.

  “Can we have a party?” asked one.

  “Yes!” said Lola. “And there will be cake and streamers and hot chocolate, but first you’ve got to help me get this door open!”

  “Stand aside, miss,” said the nearest Bog Mutant. “That’s our job!”

  “LET’S SEE,” boomed the captain. “IS THERE ANYTHING I’M MISSING? WELL NO, I SUPPOSE THAT’S ALL. IT’S BEEN AN HONOR TO BE YOUR CAPTAIN. SHAME ABOUT THE SHIP, BUT THEN, I’M SURE SHE’S INSURED UP THE WAZOO, SO REALLY I’M NOT TOO BROKEN UP ABOUT HER FALLING INTO A STAR.

  “OKAY, THANKS EVERYONE! YOU’VE BEEN GREAT! THIS MESSAGE WILL NOW REPEAT.”

  24

  EVERYONE ON DECK WAS running to the emergency teleport bays and blinking away to safety. Everyone, that is, except Phin. He scrambled over upended deck furniture, leaped over a cello, and slid under a spindly table that was, against all common sense, still neatly set for cocktails.

  The crash had tossed him several yards from the bridge, but at last he reached the steely double doors, which had been rent apart by the collision. The control room was a maelstrom of tangled wires, blinking lights, and screaming alarms.