Cargo Cult (19 page)

“Er, yes,” Marcus was saying. “I,
er, have to give it another situation report.”

“Marcus? Marcus? Are you still
there?” asked the radio.

“Yes, yes, still here. Everything
is fine, thank you.”

“What? Marcus, what’s the matter?
Can you talk?”

“Of course it can talk!” snapped
Braxx. What foolishness! His previous high opinion of the on-board
computer took a nose-dive. “You can hear it talking, can you
not?”

“Braxx? Is that you? Marcus, is
Braxx with you?”

“Yes, this is Braxx. What do you
want? Are you functioning correctly?”

There was the muffled sound of
people in the background asking “What the...?” Then Chief Inspector
Sullivan came back on. “Braxx, my name is Sheila. I need to know
where you are taking that bus and I need to know what you want with
all those people. Can you tell me, Braxx? If you tell me, I promise
I will help you in any way that I can but we all want to keep
everybody safe, don’t we, Braxx. I’m sure you want that as much as
I do.”

Braxx smiled in bemusement. “It is
very interesting that you give your vehicles names, just as we
Vinggans do,” he told Marcus. He reached for the microphone and
held down the talk button. “We are all safe and well, thank you
Sheila. You should just do what the driver tells you and all will
be well.” He smiled at Marcus. “You humans would do well to make
your machines a little less concerned about safety. This vehicle is
positively neurotic.”

“Braxx? I don’t understand,” Sheila
said, through the radio. “Braxx? Are you still there? Marcus?”

Braxx shook his head sadly. “Do not
communicate with it again,” he told Marcus. “It serves no purpose.”
Then he returned to his seat.

Marcus sat and listened to the
Chief Inspector’s plaintive questions with a hopeless
resignation.

“Marcus? Marcus? What did she mean
‘do what the driver tells you’? Marcus? Marcus? God damn it! Is
this thing broken?”

-oOo-

Chief Inspector Sheila Sullivan
threw down the microphone and stomped away from the desk muttering
invective. So much invective, in fact, that a young police
constable standing nearby found himself blushing deeply. “What’s
the matter with you?” she snapped, rounding on him. “Are you
crook?”

“No Ma’am. I feel fine, thank you,
Ma’am.”

“Well just keep it that way.
Where’s bloody Barraclough?” This last was shouted to the room in
general. About forty police officers were running about with boxes
and chairs and computers trying to get the Major Incident Room
assembled. Not one of them paid the Chief Inspector’s bellow any
attention, preferring to focus instead on the floor in front of
them, or that nice wall over there. Things were not going well.

“Chief Inspector.” A uniformed
sergeant had appeared beside her. She glared at him, daring him to
give her any more bad news. The sergeant, with twenty years’
service in the Queensland Police Service, was totally immune to
superior officers and their tantrums. He looked her squarely in the
eye. “One of the helicopters has spotted the D.I.’s car. It’s in a
ditch, ten kilometres back from the bus.”

“It’s what?”

“It’s in a ditch, Ma’am. It seems
to have run off the road.”

“He’s managed to drive his car into
a ditch in hot pursuit of a bus doing less than fifty kilometres an
hour?”

“Yes, Ma’am. There’s something
else...”

“Never mind that. Get him on the
radio. I want to talk to him right now.”

“That’s just it. The chopper pilot
says there’s no-one near the car and that a big hole has been
drilled through the roof and the floor and the driver’s seat has
been removed.”

People aren’t really made to take
in information like this, especially when they’re trying to deal
with a gang of renegade celebrity lookalikes who have reduced a
major CBD thoroughfare to rubble and kidnapped a busload of old
dears. Try as Sheila might, she just couldn’t make the information
go in. Blokes would know the feeling. Like when the wife says, “I
don’t want that racing bike magazine cluttering up the lounge room.
Put it away somewhere.” So they pick up the magazine and look
around for somewhere to put it and they just can’t think of
anywhere it could go that wouldn’t be at least equally likely to
cause trouble. Then, after a minute or two of dithering, they just
put it back down, telling themselves they’ll deal with it later.
Anyway, there Sheila’s mind stood, metaphorically speaking, with
this racing bike magazine in its hand, looking around for somewhere
to put it and coming up blank.

“I’ll deal with that later,” she
said, firmly, and went off to see how the analysis was going of the
witness reports from the morning’s shooting.

-oOo-

“Look, Boss, I don’t mean to be
funny or anything but you’re not really thinking of capturing a
human for that thing are you?”

The little group of kangaroos was
hopping along at a good fast pace. They could keep up this steady
speed for kilometre after kilometre over the lightly-wooded hills.
Shorty held up her right paw where the Vinggan blaster had been
attached. The vicious little weapon lay snug against the doe’s
forearm, ready to spring forward into her paw at her command. Of
course, the nature of a kangaroo’s paw and the positioning of its
short arm on its body meant that accuracy would never be very
great. However, as the ship had shown them before they set off,
they could still do a lot of damage.

“You heard the deal,” she said. “We
bring back at least one live human and the ship makes the call for
us.”

“Yeah, I know, but what if it was
lying?”

“Oh, right! I never thought of
that!” Shorty mocked. “Oh I wish you’d said something at the time.
I feel such an idiot now.”

They bounced along in silence for a
while. No-one daring to say anything. They all knew how quickly the
Boss could go from sarcasm to violence. But Shorty was in a good
mood. In fact, she was feeling great. At the very least, their
encounter with the spaceship had given them weapons and universal
translators. Even if they didn’t get back to Frofrifrathalionion,
they could have a much better time in exile. For three hundred
years, they had had to put up with the humans throwing sticks at
them, setting their dogs on them and, more recently, shooting them.
Now the time had come for a bit of payback.

“Don’t worry, guys,” she called to
them. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

“Yeah!” shouted one of them.

“Whoohoo!” shouted another and they
started jumping higher and frisking as they bounded along.

After a few minutes of this they
settled back into their steady hopping.

“Hey Boss, where are we going to
get this human then?” asked Fats, it having just occurred to
him.

On any other day, this might have
earned the big buck a good kicking but Shorty was feeling
benevolent. “You remember that farm with the dopey humans in it
that like to feed us and pet us?”

“Yeah, I know it. They give us good
nosh. Are we going there?”

“Yep. I reckon we can grab a couple
of those bozos without too much trouble. What do you think?”

Fats chuckled to himself. “Yeah.”
He remembered the dilapidated farm building and the big sign at the
end of the drive with a picture of a stupid Zozz D’ai on it. He
chuckled again. “Bozos.”

-oOo-

“We’re lost again,” wailed Marcus.
“I’ve got to get out and ask for directions.”

Braxx, who was sitting just behind
the driver, was losing patience with the whole adventure. What did
religion mean to these creatures if a major religious leader could
live in such obscurity? Why was the place they sought not back
there in that population centre they had left, instead of out here
in the wilderness? How much longer could he put up with the Kanaka
Downs Garden Club singing
Waltzing Matilda
at the back of
the bus?

“Very well,” he shouted back. “Stop
and ask those police humans again if you must.”

With a sigh of relief, Marcus
slowed the bus and stopped. The air brakes hissed and he pushed the
lever that opened the doors. Oven-hot air swept in as the cool air
of the bus tumbled out. Marcus readied himself. This time he was
definitely going to make a run for it. Sod the police and sod the
massacre. He was going to get out of here and that was that. As
soon as he was near the police cars, he would just run like hell
and let everyone else sort out the consequences.

He began to climb out of his seat
but Braxx was suddenly there beside him saying, “Wait, human, what
is that?” There was a sudden murmur from the passengers and several
of the identical women got to their feet. Marcus could see they
were all staring forwards through the big windscreen. Knowing he
wouldn’t like what he would see, he looked anyway and, having seen
it, collapsed back into his seat with a groan of despair. There,
not 20 metres from the bus, was a huge billboard with a
hand-painted picture of a skinny, green alien. The alien wore a
dopey smile and was holding its three-fingered hands out to show a
collection of techno-junk of which it seemed quite proud. Marcus
read the words, "Church of the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty" with a
sinking heart. The "All welcome" below it, seemed like a personal
affront.

“I suppose we’re here,” he said in
a voice of doom, starting the bus again.

“Is that your religious leader?”
one of the women asked. They were crowding forward in the aisle now
to get a look.

“Yeah,” said Marcus, flatly. “Cute
little fella, ain’t he?”

“He looks like a Zozz D’ai,” said
one of the women.

“But with too few legs.”

“And not really green enough.”

“No, I suppose not, but it could be
a Zozz D’ai if you sort of squint at it.”

“What’s all that stuff in its
hands?”

“Looks like kids’ toys.”

“Or Zozz D’ai sex toys, maybe!”
Several of the Vinggans sniggered in a rather immature way at
that.

They continued to debate the stupid
painting as Marcus steered the lurching bus through the farm gates
and started it up the long track to the farmhouse. He was
devastated. He knew now there would be no further chances for him
to escape. They’d drag him inside and the police would surround
them and the shooting would start and he’d be dead. Dead! And his
life had hardly begun. He had so much more to do. So much to
accomplish. All that potential, wasted, just because he had to
drive this stupid bus!

His self-pity was momentarily
interrupted as their destination came into view—a dilapidated old
high-set farmhouse with a crowd of scruffy youngsters outside.

-oOo-

Wayne followed Sam along the
hallway and out onto the porch. There he stopped in gobsmacked
amazement.

“Bloody hell,” he said softly, as
the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty bowed down in supplication to their
alien deity.

“You can’t do this!” shouted Sam,
clearly as taken aback as her brother was. The sight of these
drongos bowing down in worship was too much for her to take.
Biggest story of all time my arse, she told herself. This was just
pure insanity. She stepped forward to appeal to the masses, not
even noticing that she was stepping out of her role as reporter and
into the story itself.

She waved her arms for attention
and shouted “Oi!” a couple of times. “You can’t worship Loosi
Beecham for Heaven’s sake!” she yelled at them. “She’s an air-head
blonde who makes a living flashing her oversized boobs in front of
cameras, not a Goddess! You might as well worship Coca-Cola or,
or,” she thrashed about for an example. “Shit! I don’t know,
something equally stupid. Look, she’s just a woman. Like me.”

“No I’m not,” said Drukk. He’d
found the past few minutes rather difficult to follow but he had
understood Sam all right, and he was getting pretty fed up with
this gender mix-up thing. “I’m not a woman. I’m not even human. I
am Drukk, Space Corps Operative, sixth class and I want to make it
clear right now that I am totally and utterly masculine. I and my
colleagues have come here from the planet Vingg to bring you humans
the greatest gift in the universe.” He’d meant the knowledge of the
Great Spirit, of course, so the cheer from the crowd was for quite
the wrong reason.

He looked at John, who seemed to be
staring distractedly beyond the crowd. Probably in some kind of
religious ecstasy, Drukk thought. So he looked down at the upturned
faces of the humans below him. He wasn’t quite sure what emotion
their hideous features might be expressing but he certainly had
their fullest attention and this encouraged him to think that
things were going well. “Actually, I wish they were here right now
as I suspect that this is something of a pivotal moment in your
conversion and I’m not really experienced in this sort of thing. Of
course, I did take the mandatory religious indoctrination courses
at CorpsSchool but mostly that just covered the penalties for
various transgressions, how to do the Five Rites of Obedience in a
space suit, and so on. Useful stuff, of course, but not quite what
I need right now, if you see what I mean.”

“Hang on, everyone. What’s that?”
John said, still staring into the distance, but no-one was
listening.

Sam was still in a lather. She
pointed accusingly at Drukk. “Can’t you see this woman is off her
trolley? She’s been talking rubbish like this ever since I found
her. She’s nuts, I tell you. Nuts!” The Receivers turned to stare
at her in confused silence and it dawned on her that, on balance,
these people thought it was her, not Loosi Beecham, who was two
wagons short of a road train.

“Actually, Sis, I think Loosi
really is an alien,” said Wayne, grimacing and ducking his head to
show how reluctant he was to contradict her.

“Of course you do,” said Sam,
suddenly deflated. She let her arms fall to her sides. Why did she
bother! “Of course you do. Everybody thinks this walking Barbie
doll is an alien sent to take them off to the Happy Land, except
me. I’m the one out of step here. I don’t know why I stubbornly
persist in this ridiculous belief in the real world.” She turned to
the crowd and shouted, “I’ll just go and get this troublesome
sanity treated, shall I? Perhaps you could recommend a good
lobotomist? God knows you must have plenty of experience with
radical psychiatric procedures between you!” She glared for a
moment and was warming up for real tirade when John spoke.