Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (11 page)

And, insofar as it was
very, very interesting
to him, it
was
important. He never really felt the urge, as almost every other human in the universe did, to interject with his own anecdotes or opinions or experiences, finding enough joy and excitement in the ones he was hearing. It was an extremely rare characteristic for a human being to have, and if it weren’t coupled with his characteristic inability to grasp and intuit the
following
stages of conversation, it would have been a massively beneficial psychological force.

Even with his shortcomings, Contro was often asked why Janus Whye was ship’s counsellor instead of him. To which Contro invariably replied, “aww, but Whye is nice too!”

And … well, Contro had
worked
in the engine room, technically, before now. It wasn’t such a huge leap to station him there again, as far as he was concerned. Yes, it was all a bit different-y, but that was good. And things seemed to be working out. Again, as far as he was concerned. In a way – and although he’d always be too modest to say it this way, Decay had said it for him once or twice – they were fortunate that he had survived The Accident. Certainly
Contro
was fortunate, ha ha. But without him, the
Tramp
’s big old transpersion engines would probably have fallen silent long ago and they would most likely never have remained in motion.

So the extension of jurisdictions around each surviving human – and in Decay’s case, Blaran – using their original areas of employment and expertise as epicentres naturally meant that main engineering became Contro’s domain. Even though Z-Lin and Waffa both had more practical expertise and usually had to do any work that wasn’t either directly nuclear-transpersion-related or controlled by the
Tramp
’s automated systems. Because they had their own jobs to do and everyone had to pull their weight. And that was just fine with Contro, even if it did mean he was sometimes
dead
weight, metaphorically speaking.

Controversial-To-The-End was named in the tradition of the Mygonite society that had birthed and raised him. The Mygonites were culturally and legally proscribed from performing or receiving psychoanalysis and therapy even if Whye hadn’t already been such an excellent counsellor for the rest of the crew. And although he wasn’t really a
practicing
Mygonite – or even a particularly
observing
one – his personality more than made up for the lapses in ritual.

The Mygonites believed in The Good Old Days, and Muddling Through. There was something magically compelling about the idea of Muddling Through, of course, that Contro really felt applied to his daily life. Plus, when anyone asked him about his background and he said he was a Mygonite, it tended to cut out a lot of the difficult questions and Contro was in favour of that.

Now, however, was not a time to dodge the tricky ones.

“Does this mean our culprit licked the foot and then threw it back at us, or did he put the whole thing in his mouth and
spit
it at us?” he mused aloud, and this idea was so visually entertaining that he had to give another laugh. “Ha ha!”

“I’d like to believe the latter, purely for its comedy value,” Glomulus said, “but as pulpy as the foot was, and as big as a Molran’s mouth is, I just can’t see it in my mind’s eye.”

“I’m not certain why I’m involved here,” Contro admitted.

“We want to try to coax more power out of the core,” Janya said. “For speed or shields or weapons, whatever we might need. We’re not sure. Evasion, perhaps. Protocol sort of says you should be here for this examination and response discussion, but beyond protocol we were hoping you might be able to work something out anyway.”

“I could ask Waffa,” he suggested hesitantly.

Clue, fair-minded to the last, said it was because Contro had somehow managed to fit nuclear transpersion physics into his brain, and it occupied 100% of his psychological capacity.

“Have you seen a transpersion engine?”
she’d asked Waffa once, back when he’d still bothered to complain about Contro.
“It’s like an ant farm made of glass, a labyrinth of tubes and bubbles and it has a big black spike in the middle and red ones around the edges poking into it and there’s water and ice and there’s no computer, just the man and the maze. If you know how it works, there’s no room in your brain for anything else. There just can’t be.”

Contro thought it was jolly nice of people to make excuses for him, but he knew he could be an awful duffer at times. He knew that his position as Chief Engineer was equal parts accident and charity. He didn’t mind. It was jolly nice of
everyone
.

And this whole thing with the foot coming out of their airlock and then coming back was, in his opinion, very exciting and amusing. The world outside the labyrinth was bright and primary-coloured and as simple as a stack of blocks, but the
way
those blocks could be stacked, and the intuitive way everyone else seemed to think the blocks
should
be stacked, never ceased to surprise him. And they were different every time and people thought that was obvious. Except when they
weren’t
different, and then people thought it was obvious that they were meant to be
the same
every time. It was funny and made Contro laugh.

It wasn’t that the world was simple. It was just a completely different kind of puzzle. And Contro couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t quite real. It was a different puzzle. A very funny one, usually. Come on, a frozen foot popsicle that had been licked and then thrown back at them. That was funny.

“We have a visitor out there,” Janya was saying. “Now, remember that thing with the black hole? The cultists? You did something with the engine that made us invisible.”

Contro blinked. “Oh! I did? I say, that was a darn good trick! How did I do that? Did I then go ‘ta-daaa’ and pull us out of a top hat?”

“No,” Janya said. “No you didn’t.”

“
That
would have been neat,” Glomulus admitted.

“Okay, another question,” Janya went on, sparing Glomulus an unreadable look. At least, unreadable to Contro. “Can we abort the whole cycle-up acceleration thing and return to all-stop, and if so, how quickly? If we wanted to batten down and wait for our friend to contact us–”

“I thought that wasn’t evolutionary–” Cratch fell silent at another glare, this one slightly less taxing to understand.

“Now now,” Contro said jovially, “let’s not start stabbing and popping again.”

“Stabbing and … popping?” Glomulus glanced at Janya, whose face was carefully blank.

“You know, stab-stab, pop-pop,” Contro gave a merry laugh and poked his fingers vaguely. “Didn’t you two have a fight once?”

“That’s … I suppose you could say so,” Glomulus admitted. Janya cleared her throat.

Contro had already moved excitedly on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ve got it. Picture this,” he fanned his fingers into a little tableau-frame. “A Molran, somehow able to survive in space, is following us–”

“Why is he following us?” Glomulus asked, at the same moment Janya asked “how is he surviving in space?”

“I don’t know! Ha ha ha, honestly! But if space whales can, then surely to goodness–”

Janya raised her hand. “Hold on, space whales?”

“Why does nobody believe me about whales?”

“Okay, setting aside the question of space whales for a moment,” Janya said, “he’s following. How and why?”

“Maybe we’re the only people out here. Maybe it was an accident,” he snapped his fingers and then spread them back into his little hypothetical-scene-border. “Maybe he was on board, and he went off on his own at some point!”

“There wasn’t anything definite about this guy
not
being a crewmember, right?” Glomulus said, reasonably enough. Janya grimaced and tipped a hand back and forth uncertainly.

“Right,” Contro said. “He could be in an escape pod or something. He might be hanging onto a rope, like he’s water-skiing out there.”

“Water
what
?” Janya exploded.

“You never water-skied? Honestly, we did it all the time back in Þursheim. Ask Sally about it. I mean, she’s not from there but–”

“Yes yes,” Janya said, “but towing becomes a far larger problem once we hit relative speed.
Any
sort of tailing motion becomes a challenge, really. As you no doubt know better than any of us.”

“Right, obviously you’d have to match our relative field and merge with it, and hitchhike along when we skip,” Contro agreed. “Very tricky, very tricky indeed.”

“And yet, we have this,” Glomulus pointed at the blob of meat and shredded shoe.

“Maybe we’re ignoring the obvious,” Contro said. He’d read a line like this in a book, and it always lent a delicious sense of logic and rationality to whatever the next sequence of words happened to be. No harm in trying, was his theory.

“Which is … ?”

“Um.”

Glomulus snapped his fingers and jabbed his index fingers at the others. “Molran clinging to the hull, gets Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 sprayed across his faceplate, the foot goes
through
his faceplate and he ends up wearing it in his mouth.”

“Yeah!” Contro enthused, missing Janya’s eye-roll. “Emergency seals or whatnot would slam down all through the suit, and probably save him. A human might have a hard time of it but a Molran would be okay.”

“Exactly,” Glomulus said, “or maybe a ‘
Blaran
’,” he exaggerated the finger-quotey-marks-gesture, “since this whole adventure would put a Molran over the Dirty Deeds limit and land him on the Naughty List, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t think Molren get disqualified from the species for getting saliva on a piece of able meat,” Janya demurred. “But that’s really the least of my concerns with this theory.”

“So he crawls away from the impact, along the hull,” Cratch went on.

“That’s the spirit! And works the lump of foot back out of his suit and tosses it overboard,” Contro added.

“Only he doesn’t get it to escape velocity,” Glomulus went on, raising his hands high, “sending it looping back to be retrieved by the catchers.”

“It’s flawless!” Contro exclaimed, and gave Glomulus a hearty and unexpected high-five.

“Ouch.”

“Ha ha ha! You’re a wuss! Anyway, it’s much better than my other idea,” Contro concluded, “which was about a superluminal comet of frozen Molran saliva and well, it was quite silly now I come to think about it.”

“It’s a very … vivid theory,” Janya said, “but none of it is borne out by
any
of the sensor data,” the little researcher tapped a nearby console for emphasis. “A giant spitball moving at light speed would actually make more sense than a Molran clinging to the hull. Maybe we can go back to the towing or tailing question,” she suggested, “where it seemed like your expertise might have been, you know, lending something to the endeavour.”

“A fellow on the hull
would
circumvent the problem of matching our relative field profile,” Contro suggested hesitantly.

“But not the problem of that
not being what the sensors saw
.”

“Or the problem of not being as funny as a spitcomet,” Glomulus put in, then spread his hands. “The sensors didn’t spot any ship or entity out there that might catch and throw a foot at us, either,” he pointed out innocently.

“Maybe the computer made up the sensor information because it was bored,” Contro reasoned in a surge of triumph.

Janya sighed. “I–”

“In fact, it’s the computer that runs the main drive engines and field settings anyway,” Contro remarked. “If he
was
trailing us, and didn’t just start doing so after we last came down into normal flight, about the only way he
could
match our field profile would be with the help of the computer,” he laughed. “Or a quite-good
guess
, I suppose.”

“He could
guess
it?”

“Sure.”

“How
good
a quite-good guess?” Glomulus asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Contro flapped his hands. “Like correctly guessing the exact number of hydrogen atoms in the galaxy?”

“That would be quite a good guess,” Glomulus agreed.

Janya nodded. “So he couldn’t, in other words.”

“Sure he could,” Contro said. “He’d just have to be lucky!”

“But with the computer?”

“Easy.”

“Easy like guessing the number of hydrogen atoms in … ?”

“I don’t know,” Contro was starting to get dizzy from all the super-precise specifics they were demanding of him. “The number of hydrogen atoms in a single hydrogen atom?”

“So either practically impossible, or practically impossible to get wrong?”

“Well, same computer means same field!” Contro laughed. “Honestly! You people!”

“See,” Janya said, “
this
is why you’re here.”

Contro beamed.

“Of course, not to burst your bubble, but we were already sort of aware of the difficulty of two objects matching fields and keeping up with one another at relative speed,” Glomulus pointed out. “Not only is it basically one of the only things everyone knows about travelling at relative speed, but it was one of the first things Whitehall brought up when we started thinking about the possibility of a ship following us. We didn’t think about the computer, though,” he added positively. “That was good.”

“Yes it was,” Janya said, “although I’m not sure about the idea of it changing sensor readings and other stuff. That’s a
lot
of effort and a
lot
of different systems, and all the hiding is sort of ruined by the, well…”

“The throwing body parts,” Glomulus agreed.

“Exactly. Where’s the logic? If the
Tramp
’s computer is behind this–”

“I wouldn’t go looking for logic there,” Waffa stepped unexpectedly into the lab. He glanced at his wrist display, tapped it, and crossed to the examination table.

“Well hello there!” Contro exclaimed. “Gosh, what brings you here?”