Greegs & Ladders (13 page)

In which much
is Explained, and much is made more Confusing

“Buuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrppppppp! So where are we?” belched Krimshaw
casually.

“
You
mean
when
are we?”
snooted Rip condescendingly.

“You’re both
not going to like either of the answers,” said Wilx ominously.

“Oh no, why’s
that?” Krimshaw and Rip exclaimed, lurching forward.

“Nothing.”

“What do you
mean nothing,” yelped Rip, gripping Wilx by his shoulder like
things and shaking him violently. “Don’t you go about making
ominous and cryptic statements and then withholding information
from me you bastard!”

“I was joking,
I was only kidding, I just don’t know where we are, thought I’d
lighten the mood after all that cannibalism,” lied Wilx through his
teeth like things.

“Shall we go
for an unrelated stroll into the adjacent and sound proof
corridor?” suggested Rip, sensing Wilx was hiding something, which
he clearly was.

“Fine.”

Oblivious to the deceptive transaction taking place,
Krimshaw delved into
Very Rare Planets
, scouring for hidden clues about the Greegs. For
some reason he was compelled to flip back to the entry about Pluto
and Rip. He looked out the window. Then he looked back at the
book.

“Hmm,” he
thought, but didn’t know why.

He peered back
out of the window again for three point seven times longer than the
first glance. He then studied the entry about Pluto for nine and
eleven thirteenths as long as the previous stint.

“Interesting,”
he mused, sure that he was on to something, but still not aware of
what it was.

He picked up
the half eaten leg of an Obotron crew member and chewed it
thoughtfully, gazing out of the window for enough time that Rip and
Wilx finished their top secret conversation and re-entered the
room.

“Ahem,”
coughed Wilx.

“Oh my tit
faced cunt muffin sandwich on rhye to the power of six!” blurted
out Krimshaw. “That’s Pluto! Outside! We’re at Pluto guys! It’s
right there! Same as book. Me read!”

“I bet you it
isn’t,” quipped Rip, since there was no point in restraining from
betting on Pluto any more.

“We’re not
technically on Pluto, so it wouldn’t count against you Rip… plus
you have nothing to bet,” said Wilx, casually firing up a
holographic digital star map. “Unless one of your long shot wagers
comes true and you suddenly re-acquire vast amounts of
bettables.”

“One of them
is bound to come through sooner or later with all this time
travelling and visiting of solar systems in which I’ve been to in
the past going on.”

“
Yeah,
we’ll see about that,” prodded Wilx. “For now, we may just
be the luckiest folk to ever
emerge from a time travelling wormhole looking to fuel up and get
some food.”

“Why’s that?”
asked Rip and Krimshaw, who were getting quite good at
synchronizing their questions.

“If my star
maps and research are correct, the alignment of these planets and
this solar system indicates we are merely a few billion kilometres
from what is essentially the greatest gas station ever to exist.
More or less untapped at this point, the life forms on the planet
consist almost entirely of investment bankers and tasty fish.
That’s pretty much all there is on the planet.”

“You couldn’t
ask for a better place to pop by and fuel up your space ship!”
Exclaimed Krimshaw.

“Uh… yeah.
What luck! Let’s go there quickly.” re-affirmed Rip, failing
miserably to conceal his and Wilx’s sinister and as of yet
un-revealed motives.

“So how did
such a planet come to be?” queried Krimshaw genuinely.

“
If
theories had been circulated about such things, which they never
have been, they definitely would never have even suggested that the
whole evolution of the dominant life form
on the planet was just the result of a drunken bet
placed by Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third, suffering from
PNBOAPFTFTIHS,” assured Rip, in his usual non-assuring
manner.

“That’s Post
Not Betting On A Planet For The First Time In History Syndrome,”
clarified Wilx.

“I don’t
follow you,” said Krimshaw.

“It’s really
quite simple,” said Wilx. “The need and desire to place a wager was
so deeply engrained in Rip after such an insane streak of betting,
that the act of not placing a bet while on the planet Pluto drove
him to concoct the most absurd and ludicrous bet ever made up until
that time.”

“Wow, how long
could this streak possibly have been going on?”

“You don’t
want to know,” said Rip in a shameful manner implying the topic of
how long he had been placing absurd wagers for was not a topic to
be discussed.

“So what was
the bet?”

“He bet, er,
someone, that he could completely annihilate the surface
environment of a biologically utopian planet he’d stumbled upon
simply by introducing a savagely over-aggressive population of
Investment Bankers into the ecosystem.”

“Not just any
investment bankers!” cried out Rip in his defence. “The most
diabolically inter-spliced species of investment bankers ever
devised! I isolated strains from the genome of Torniolic
Speculation Gnomes, sprinkled in the potent and unrivalled
Remorselessness and Lack of Care for Consequences DNA from the
Ruthless Ruddigerian Financing Board, and countless other
infinitely impressive bits of investment banking biology. Then I
found a simple little hairy beast and injected it with the
formula.”

“What possible
bet could involve such diabolical and pointless activities?”

“Well that
much even we don’t quite know,” said Wilx, punching information
into his gigantic and confusing looking computing machine, which
did all sorts of things other than computing, like spitting out
dissolvable mind history tablets… which it did as Wilx stroked a
large red button emphatically. “Here, eat this.”

“What are
they?” asked Krimshaw and Rip.

“
Dis
solvable mind
history tablets.”

“What do they
do?” asked Rip and Krimshaw.

“
Instantly bring us all up to speed on the information I
just procured regarding the details of Rip’s bet. Rather than
research extensively and explain my findings to all of you, I
simply encrypted the necessary information from
T
he
Complete and
Unabridged Historical Records of All Things,
into this tiny tablet which, once
dissolved in our mouths, will send the information to our
respective brains without all your annoying questions making it
take forever for you to understand.

“That sounds
like a splendid way to avoid endless and painfully detailed
explanations and move on with things.”

“It sure
is.”

The trio
swallowed the pills. Krimshaw saw and processed a full BBC
Documentary series worth of information instantly and was shocked
and awed… awed, and then shocked. A quick look around at the other
two showed they were fairly shocked as well, but not nearly as awed
as Krimshaw. They were more amused by the details of events they
had buried under a pile of other equally insane events in their
memory banks.

“Let’s compare
our unique takes on the information received to make sure we’re all
on the same page,” suggested Wilx. “It appears to me that Rip bet…
er, someone, that he could hop into a wormhole, pop out in a random
solar system, refrain from betting on the furthest planet from the
sun, then cultivate a species of investment bankers on the one
planet capable of sustaining life. He insisted that investment
bankers were not only a great source of fuel, but that if unchecked
by another more intelligent species, they would take over and
dominate every square inch of the surface of the planet, destroying
and polluting everything in sight, but leaving a fair amount of
tasty fish buried deep in the ocean, untainted by the savage
recklessness of the Investment Bankers. Then he would return from
his time travels to reunite with… er, someone, and one day him and…
er, someone, would randomly stumble out of a sideways time
travelling worm hole in desperate need of both investment bankers
and fish with a fully reformed Greeg named Krimshaw.”

“So just to
recap,” said Krimshaw, “Basically Rip destroyed the potential of a
decent planet and all of its decent life forms to evolve naturally
by introducing this savagely over aggressive population of
Investment Bankers… and he won this horrific bet and that’s why
there’s a perfect gas station waiting for us in this solar system
as we emerge from a time travelling worm hole?” asked Krimshaw, for
the first time seeing Rip for what he was; a reckless, pathological
maniac.

“More or
less,” said Wilx.

“That’s pretty
much what I got,” said Rip. “Except that the anonymous person I
made this preposterous bet with was you Wilx.”

“Dammit, you
blew my cover!”

“How could you
possibly not remember all of this?” said Krimshaw, in a way that
implied not remembering this would indicate insanity like this
happens all the time. “Does insanity like this happen all the time
to you two or what?”

“Well we
didn’t actually know it had happened until just now, why else would
we bet on it?” Wilx said calmly. “At the time, I was likely certain
we would never see the planet again, and besides, there's a very
good chance the incident and the bet hadn’t actually happened until
we came out of the wormhole. It just means we've travelled sideways
in time.”

“What?”

“Very common
phenomenon. Happens all the time. Look, we flew into a time
travelling worm hole, and when we emerged a series of completely
incomprehensible coincidences occurred. That’s what tipped me off
that it was time for some mind history tablets. It’s very simple,
with well seasoned time travellers like me and Rip always
recklessly jumping through hyperspace, the Universe couldn’t
possibly make sense of all the reckless and potentially
catastrophic things that well seasoned time travellers like us do,
namely setting off destructive and nonsensical chains of events
rippling throughout space and time… generally screwing things up
for everything and everybody. So Universes, being clever and rather
flexible things, will simply alter events in the past and present,
re-aligning themselves so they can make sense of things.”

“Completely
lost.”

“When we first
met you and picked you up in the Greeg cage, oh by the way you were
a Greeg before, an especially dumb and savage one too…”

“I was a
what?!”

“
Please,
let me finish. So when Rip made his bet about turning you into a
normal, intelligent being and all that other jazz that led us up to
this point, he and I had never even remotely made a bet involving
genetic splicing and investment bankers and fish. However, when we
shot through the time travelling worm hole, the only possible way
for the Universe to make any sense of us arriving here was if
we
had
made such a
bet, and were approaching such a planetary gas station. Without
such constant re-alignments of reality, things would never make any
sense in any of the Universes. It’s just the way things
are.”

“I see,” said
Krimshaw, only barely comprehending the significance of all of
these nuggets of information. “So I was a Greeg at some time is
what you’re saying? That’s what those officials were after before
we hyper-jumped into the maze? That’s what those spidery creatures
were really angry about? I’m nothing but a good for nothing Greeg
that you taught how to read and behave somewhat normally just so
this jackass could win a bet, which it turns out was just a minor
piece of a much larger and more confusing bet, that never actually
happened until we just recently shot out of a worm hole, because
the Universe doesn’t like to be confused?”

“Close
enough,” said Wilx.

“Oh look we’re
here!” said Rip, failing to change the subject since they were
quite clearly just floating past Neptune. Realizing it didn’t
remotely work, he tried a different tactic. “Well, hey, look pal we
still like you just the same… friend.”

“
You
don’t like me all, I’m not your friend, you just
used
me in a bet.”

“I use
everyone in a bet, it’s kind of what I do.”

“That doesn’t
make it okay!”

“Sure it
does!”

“Alright you
two, that’s enough, cut it out, etc.” interceded Wilx. “The
important thing here is that the bet now exists, and Rip has won
it, which changes things around here quite a bit.”

“Damn straight
it does,” exclaimed Rip. “This is my fleet again, and I’ve got all
sorts of other belongings and possessions back in my gambling
arsenal. I’m back baby!”

As the
information overloaded Krimshaw’s brain, he reeled and collapsed
into a heap, slipping into unconsciousness. The telescreen
flickered.

“
Congrats on regaining control of the fleet Doc. We’ve
always liked you more than that
Astro-whatever-the-who-cares-ologist sidekick
…
you usually send us on much wilder and
unpredictable adventures.”

“I bet you
every one of my superfluous internal organs you can’t fly into the
giant rings of that planet and survive,” said Rip, unable to
contain the ability to make bets again.

“
You’re
on boss,” happily replied the soon-to-be-dead, self-appointed
leader of Obotron 4, Krimshaw’s last memory was the cheer erupting
from Rip as the ship exploded immediately upon coming in contact
with the rings of Saturn. Krimshaw passed out.