The Ultimate Inferior Beings (12 page)

“Ah,” put in LEP profoundly.
“But think of the symbolism.”

jixX laughed. “Such as?”

“A black rectangle above a
white one.”

*

 “Oh, and you’ll need the
planofocal, image-intensifying camera and the audiovocal, long-range,
crystal-diode transceiver,” added LEP.

jixX opened a few more
drawers until he found what looked like a rusty camera and a damaged
walkie-talkie. Both were positively ancient and weighed a ton.

“Masterpieces of
micro-miniaturization,” jixX muttered as he struggled to get them out of the
drawer. “Okay, let’s go,” he said at last.

“Right,” said Chris. “Walk
this way.” He slid slimily along the floor to the door. The three humans
followed him.

As they walked along the
passage behind him they took care not to step in his green, slimy trail. sylX
asked jixX, “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

“The gynaecologist’s not
feeling very well and the carpenter seems to have gone AWOL,” answered jixX,
still struggling with the heavy planofocal, image-intensifying camera and the
even heavier audiovocal, long-range, crystal-diode transceiver.

“I take it you’ve crossed him
off the crew register and stopped his pay,” said the stowaway, looking at him
pointedly.

“Of course,” lied jixX.

“Standard procedure.”

“I am aware of that,” he said
as calmly as he could.

They reached the airlock and
filed out of The Night Ripple.

“Farewell and good luck,”
said LEP. Then, as jixX was about to go through the door, he said, “Psst,
cap’n.”

“Yes, LEP?”

“You know why anaX is staying
behind on the ship, don’t you,” he whispered.

“Yes,” said jixX, wondering
why LEP was whispering. “Because she has a headache.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

“No, she has an ulterior
motive.”

“Does she?”

“And she’s been behaving very
strangely ever since she came on board.”

“So?”

“It’s obvious.”

jixX pondered for a moment,
unable to think of anything obvious at all. “All right, why, then?” he asked
finally.

“She fancies me.”

jixX gave a snort. “She
what?” He blinked as though dazzled by a bright light.

“A guy can tell these
things,” continued LEP. “It’s the way she looks at me.”

“I see,” said jixX, feeling
an even stronger urge to leave than before.

“And now she just wants to be
left alone with me,” LEP was saying. “And who can blame her? Here she is, an
attractive woman stuck on a spaceship with no desirable males …”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. And the
only suitable macho character is a ship’s computer with an amazing personality
and a fantastic sense of humour. Can she help but fall madly in love?”

“No, I guess not,” said jixX,
humouring him.

“But don’t be jealous,” said
LEP. “I think you’re in with a chance with the other one.”

“The stowaway?” said jixX,
stunned by the very idea. “Are you kidding? That woman’s got to be one of the
most annoying people I’ve ever met.”

“Just your type, then.”

“Anyone would think she’s
after my job!”

“If she were, she’d get my vote,”
said LEP. “On account of being more experienced, more widely travelled and far
better looking.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“Don’t mention it,” said LEP.
“But, don’t worry. You two will make a great couple.”

Chapter 7

anaX
strode down
the
corridor towards the forward engine room with an expression of grim
determination on her face. She clutched her shoulder bag to her breast, though
not too tightly as she feared her pounding heart might trigger the neutrino
bomb inside. She stopped at the door of the engine room and looked about her
furtively – first left, then right, then behind her. Satisfied that no one was
watching, she opened the door and went in.

If anyone had been watching
her at that moment, they would have been surprised by the strangeness of her
behaviour. For, she had totally ignored all the large, garishly coloured, and
blatantly visible, warning signs on the door, which said:

‘PRIVATE’

‘KEEP OUT’

‘NO ADMITTANCE TO
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL’

‘DANGER – RADIATION’

‘ACRYLO-HERMETIC LABCOATS MUST
BE WORN: THAT MEANS YOU!’

But, most significantly, she
had failed to take heed of the sign that said ‘MIND THE STEP’ and had tripped
and fallen headlong, dropping the sensitive bomb to the floor...

*

“This way, please,” said
Chris, leading his three companions away from The Night Ripple.

As they walked, jixX surveyed
the landscape. Except, there wasn’t any. The land was black and absolutely flat
all the way to the horizon, in all directions. No features, no landmarks,
nothing. To jixX’s professional eye it presented an incredible landscaping
opportunity. “Is it far?” he asked Chris, covering his nose against the smell
of the planet’s noxious atmosphere.

“Yes, a long way,” said
Chris. “But don’t worry, we’re going by ‘pulse’. It’s our wave-powered form of
transport.”

“Wave powered,” said sylX,
impressed. She, too, put her hand to her nose.

Chris slid on and they
continued to follow. jixX was still struggling with the heavy equipment he was
carrying. He kept glancing at sylX in her blue evening dress and high-heeled
shoes. Meanwhile, fluX, walking a short way behind them, was looking troubled.

After several minutes of
trekking across the flat, black ground, when the glistening hull of The Night
Ripple looked little more than a small, shiny toy in the distance behind them,
Chris suddenly stopped.

“Here we are,” he announced.

His three guests looked about
them. ‘Here’ looked very much like everywhere else.

“This is the pulseway
station,” explained the slimy green blob. “This is what we do. First, you get
on the pulseway.” He stepped forward onto a wide strip of black material on the
ground. Because of its colour his companions hadn’t noticed it before. Now they
saw that it stretched right across the black landscape, disappearing at both
ends over the horizon. There was another pulseway, parallel to the first, just
beyond it.

“Then,” continued Chris, “put
two drops of your slime into this hole at the side of the path. Like this. And
then... just sit and wait for the pulse to whisk you away. Couldn’t be
simpler.”

Indeed it couldn’t. They
looked at Chris and then at the path.

“Look, there it is,” called
sylX excitedly, pointing into the distance. And there it was. Coming towards
Chris at a ferocious pace was a transverse, travelling wave in the black
material of the pathway.

“See you at the other end,”
said Chris, fractionally before the wave-pulse hit him and whisked him away.
They watched him surfing on the crest of the wave, lubricated by his outer
layers of slime and waving a slimy limb in the air.

“Hey, that looks like fun!”
giggled sylX, turning eagerly towards jixX, her eyes sparkling. She bent down
to remove her high-heeled shoes. Then she noticed his frown. “What’s the
matter?” she asked.

“What do we do for slime?”

“Ah, good point.”

*

txaX hurried on, half running
half jogging, wheezing and panting as he did so. Where were the damned trees?

Everywhere he looked was the
same: a black, featureless landscape. Where on Earth was he? Not so much as a
shrub in sight. And the ground was too hard and solid to support any form of
vegetation. Oh, what he would do if he could find a shrub! He imagined hacking
at it with his axe, whittling away its twigs and branches, and then chiselling
merrily at whatever wood might be left. What carpentry he would perform!

“Chop it, saw it, plane it,”
he muttered to himself as he stumbled on. “Nail the bits together. Chop it, saw
it, plane it...”

At last, he saw something on
the horizon and he came to a stop. Not a tree, but something large. Possibly a
building, or a city?

“Civilization,” he gasped.

With renewed energy, he set
off again.

But, after a few hundred
yards more of panting and stumbling, he stopped again. The object in the
distance was larger and now he recognized it. It was the glistening hull of The
Night Ripple.

“Damn!” he said, throwing his
axe to the ground. “I’ve gone in a circle.”

He stared bitterly at the
spaceship in the distance for a while. Then, with a frustrated grunt, he picked
up his axe, turned, and headed off in the opposite direction.

*

In the forward engine room,
anaX lay frozen on the floor where she had fallen. She hardly dared move in
case she triggered the neutrino bomb. In fact, she was a little amazed, and
mightily relieved, that it hadn’t gone off already.

Slowly, she picked herself up
and dusted herself down. The room was in complete darkness as the door had
slammed shut behind her. Gently she groped about the floor for her shoulder bag
and then, even more gently, lifted it. She edged towards the wall and groped
around for the light switch. Finally, she found it and turned on the lights.

When her eyes had adjusted to
the brightness, she looked about her. There, purring and humming in the middle
of the room, was the 10
-
megagramme nuclear capstan pump-engine. To the
left was an accumulative rotary generator and to the right a solenoidal
ferroxic bivalve piston. She smiled a sly smile as she walked directly to the
10-megagramme nuclear capstan pump-engine. She examined it from this side and
that until she had located its coaxial dimagnetic lead. This carried the
displacement current from the heat turbine that powered the pump engine.

Working carefully, she opened
her shoulder bag and took out the neutrino bomb. She flipped open a small flap
in its side. Then she took the four low-reactance, three-phase high-Q batteries
from her bag and, with trembling fingers, inserted them one by one. She closed
the flap.

Kneeling on the ground she
attached the bomb to the coaxial dimagnetic lead and pressed a small red button
on the handle of the former hairdryer. This initiated the bomb and started its
primary timing device.

A message appeared on the
hairdryer’s LED. It said, ‘Congratulations! You have successfully activated
your Sigh Co neutrino bomb. Countdown has begun. Enjoy.’

Below this was displayed the
special 5-digit PIN number that would deactivate the bomb. anaX spent a few
seconds devizing  a mnemonic by which to remember it. Then she pressed the
CLEAR button to delete it from the display.

The LED showed a picture of a
smiley face. ‘Smile, please,’ it said.

anaX gave a nervous smile.
There was a blinding flash of light and the click of a shutter. anaX’s smile
faded and she got to her feet, satisfied. The bomb now had a photograph of her
in its memory.

The gynaecologist left the
forward engine room, not in the least concerned that the bomb had her image –
potentially damning evidence of her guilt. She knew that the image was
encrypted and meant only for the bomb’s personal use as part of its highly
sophisticated anti-tampering system.

Had anyone been watching her,
though, they would have been baffled by her actions. Surely, the accumulative
rotary generator would have been a far better place to plant the bomb.

*

And, indeed, somebody
had
been watching her. BUF, the computer that controlled the forward engine room,
had not taken his scanners off her from the moment she had entered his small
domain. The more he had watched her, the greater his horror at her actions and
the greater his panic.

Now that she had gone, his
entire concentration focused on the small, ticking form of the neutrino bomb.
His circuits buzzed as he tried to work out what to do.