The Ultimate Inferior Beings (13 page)

For a brief moment, he
considered informing LEP. But he was still not on speaking terms with LEP, and
now never would be.

Besides, what could LEP do?
Was there any more to LEP than feeble puns and childish practical jokes? Of
course there wasn’t!

*

The three humans stared at
the point on the horizon where they had last seen Chris being whisked along by
the pulseway. sylX crouched down to see if there was enough of Chris’ slime
left on the ground for them to use, but it all seemed to have dried up. “So
much for the first momentous contact between humans and aliens,” she said,
looking around at the flat and empty landscape around her.

jixX put the camera and
communicator down on the ground as his arms were starting to ache.

“So what do we do now?” he
asked.

“You’re the captain,” she
said pointedly.

jixX bristled a little, but
said nothing. What an annoying woman, he thought.

To take his mind off her he
sat down on the ground and examined the communicator. Fleetingly, he thought of
giving it a go and contacting LEP in The Night Ripple, but immediately banished
the idea from his mind. And yet, the thought stayed there. Slowly it grew, like
a malignant tumour, until it had half-convinced him that he actually wanted to
talk to the ship’s computer.

So he examined the
communicator again. It looked fiendishly complicated, with buttons and dials
and switches and knobs covering its every surface. One of these had to be the
aerial, he thought. He pulled at them, one by one, and discovered they were all
aerials.

*

A green streak caught twaX’s
eye, his head instantly swivelling towards it. But it was no plant matter. It
looked like a large blob of green slime surfing the crest of a black wave.

twaX rubbed his eyes and
looked again as the green blob sped off into the distance.

“What on Earth was that?” he
asked aloud, still staring at the receding smudge of green.

He turned his head left and
right to look at the emptiness all around him. Deep within his mind a small,
brass-coloured coin fell with a clink.

“Ah,” he said.

*

anaX turned left and headed
up a ramp. She knew she would have to work fast as she had only eight hours
before the neutrino bomb exploded. Eight hours was the default timer setting;
deemed long enough by its manufacturer for the user to either reconsider the
wisdom of their action or to get the hell out of there. anaX’s thoughts were
now focused on the latter.

A large steel door swished
open in front of her and she entered the ship’s vast, brightly lit boat-hangar.
This was where the emergency, deep space, survival modules were parked. She
stopped and surveyed the hangar. In front of her were the four emergency
modules, their matte-grey, steel-plated hulls resting on iron-braced, protoactinium
exoskeletal support struts. They faced her like sleeping giants, their lights
dead and their drive tubes silent.

She raised an eyebrow
momentarily as she read their identification numbers from left to right: No 4,
No 1, No 3 and No 2. Then her eyebrow settled back into place. Very amusing,
she thought. The modules had been parked in alphabetical order.

*

jixX was busy trying to get
the communicator to work. He had located a pair of army surplus headphones and
an army surplus microphone and was now sitting over the communicator, wearing
the former and speaking into the latter. “jixX calling The Night Ripple. Do you
read me, Night Ripple?” He kept pressing the various buttons and twiddling the
various knobs until finally the army surplus headphones burst into life with a
deafening surge of static.

jixX gave a yelp of pain as
he tore the headphones off. But then, as he listened to the static, he detected
a voice buried deep within. He gingerly placed the headphones back on his head.
Masked by the white noise, and only barely audible, he could just make out
LEP’s voice saying, “Hello? Anybody there? Come in. Over.”

The static stopped and the
headphones became silent again.

“Hello, LEP?” said jixX.
“Over.”

The static exploded out of
the headphones again.

“Hello, captain,” said LEP’s
cheerful, acoustically masked voice. “Long time no hear. You want something?
Over.” The headphones became silent again.

“Yes,” said jixX into the
army surplus microphone. “How do I get rid of this interference? Over.”

The first half of LEP’s
answer was lost in a surge of static, and the second half was not really worth
hearing. “...the audiovocal long-range crystal-diode transceiver is one of the
finest, most efficient communicators known to Humankind. So be very careful
with it. Over.”

jixX looked at the glistening
hull of The Night Ripple in the distance, hardly more than a mile away, then
down at the communicator and then back at The Night Ripple. “Why me?” he
wondered.

“Look, LEP,” he said as
loudly and clearly as he could. “Our alien friend, Chris, has left us like
lemons in the middle of nowhere. We’ve no idea how far he’s gone or if he’ll
come back for us. I was thinking that perhaps there might be some sort of land
vehicles on board The Night Ripple we could use to go after him. Have you any
idea what there is? Over.”

“Sure,” said LEP’s distant
voice. “Let me see. There are three polyprome swivel-slung steel-sprung
lifeboats complete with eight oars, a diesel-powered aluminium outboard motor,
one life jacket, four flares, and a first aid box. Over.”

“I said
land
vehicles.
Over.”

“So you did. Sorry.” LEP
paused for thought as jixX strained his ears all the harder to catch what LEP
was about to say. “Well, there are fourteen pogo-sticks.”

jixX sighed.

“There’s one snowshoe and one
flipper,” continued LEP. “These would be good if they weren’t both for the
right foot. And, of course, two skateboards.”

“That’s useful, LEP,” said
jixX wondering why he bothered. “Anything else? Over.”

LEP’s answer was lost in a
burst of static.

“Pardon?” asked jixX. “Over.”

“I said: ‘three space
hoppers. Over.’ Over.”

jixX sat up, suddenly
interested. “Space hoppers?” he asked. At last he was getting somewhere. “What
are space hoppers? Some sort of jet backpacks, or something? Over.”

“Not exactly,” came LEP’s
answer. “You must remember space hoppers. They’re those big, orange, rubber
inflatable things with two handles and a kangaroo face painted on them. You sit
on the body, hold on to the handles and bounce up and down. Over.”

jixX’s shoulders sagged again
as he regretted having started the conversation. “Tell me, LEP,” he said as
patiently as he could. “What use are these space hoppers in our present
predicament? Over.”

“They’re amazingly good fun,”
said LEP. “Something to while away the hours. You should try one. Over.”

Chapter 8

Right
in the
heart of
the forward engine room, tightly hugging the coaxial dimagnetic lead, was the
neutrino bomb – the deadliest weapon of mass destruction known to Humankind. It
purred softly to itself. The purring sound came from the bomb’s first-stage
timing device. This is how it worked. The bomb’s shaded-pole motor turned a
fan. As the fan turned, its rotating blades reflected low frequency virtual
photons from the 100
-
watt light bulb in the hairdryer’s handle. Each reflected
photon passed into the rapid-response liquid-crystal photodivider where, after
successive subdivision, it triggered a unit of the binary-digital counter. The
net result was a precision time measurement accurate to the nearest milliday
(or 86.4 seconds).

Exactly two millidays after
anaX had activated the bomb, the scalar flipped a switch that triggered the
seismophobic Rayleigh-wave detector (one of the bomb’s sophisticated
anti-tampering devices) and engaged the bomb’s second-stage timer.

But something was wrong.

The second-stage timer should
have been activated after exactly 20 millidays, not after exactly 2. It had
thus been triggered nearly 26 minutes too early! The time of the bomb’s
detonation had been brought forward by nearly half an hour!

*

jixX sat and thought about
space hoppers. He wondered whether there really
were
space hoppers on
The Night Ripple, or LEP was being LEP.

“How’s anaX feeling?” he
asked by way of changing the subject, speaking loudly and clearly into the army
surplus microphone. “How’s her headache? Over.”

“No idea,” said LEP’s faint
and crackling voice, deep within the white noise. “However, I do know that
she’s just been in the forward engine room. Over.”

“What was she doing in there?
Over.”

“Beats me,” said LEP. “My
little buddy, BUF, isn’t on speaking terms with me at the moment. Over.”

“Can’t think why,” said jixX.
“Where is she now? Over.”

“In the ship’s boat-hangar.
Over.”

jixX frowned deeply. What was
the gynaecologist up to? First the forward engine room, and now the
boat-hangar. Probably following LEP’s directions to the aspirins, thought jixX
with a shrug.

“She’s acting more and more
strangely. Over,” said LEP.

“In what way? Over.”

“She hasn’t spoken to me
once. Not a word. Over.”

“In what way is that
strange?” asked jixX. “But don’t tell me, let me guess. She’s playing hard to
get, right? Over.”

“Great minds think alike,”
said LEP. “Over.”

jixX didn’t know how much
more of this he could take. He looked at his watch, then at his two companions
sitting on the ground a short distance away and then at the featureless planet
around him. “Over and out,” he said.

But the static burst through
the headphones again. “Wait, don’t go,” said LEP. “Don’t forget to plant the
Tenalp flag and claim...”

But jixX merely unplugged the
army surplus headphones and the army surplus microphone and tried to stuff them
back into the compartments from whence they had come. Then he pushed all the
assorted aerials back into the communicator and tried to make the dial reading
‘OVERLOAD’ go back down to zero. After a while he gave up and went over to the
other two.

It proved a bad moment to
arrive as fluX was all hand gestures, crazy bulging eyes and earnestness as he
described his latest remarkable discovery.

“Listen to zis,” he was
saying animatedly. “Take ze vord ‘GOD’. Using my zeory of Quantum Semantics ve
can calculate its vord number. And vot do ve get?”

sylX gave a polite little
shrug but then her eyes reached imploringly to jixX for some means of escape.

“Vell, it is not difficult,”
continued the behavioural chemist. “G is seven, O is fifteen, and D is four.
Zat’s zeir alphabetical positions. Zo, ve add ze numbers togezzer and ve get
zat ze vord-number for GOD is 26. Tventy six! Ze same as ze number of letters
in ze alphabet!! Is zat not remarkable?” He looked at the others to check that
they appreciated how remarkable this was. “Huh, you may say,” he went on. “Zat
is just coincidence. But vait. Zere is more. Take ze vord DEVIL. Calculate its
vord-number and you get 52. Vich is exactly
tvice
ze number of letters
in ze alphabet!!! Zat is no longer coincidence, my friends. Zat is a
significant discovery. It is telling us zat GOD is Number One in ze Universe
and ze DEVIL is Number Two. See? And it is also pointing to ze alphabet – to ze
wery letters from vich our language is composed!”

jixX glanced across at sylX,
and sylX glanced back at jixX. Both were wondering when Chris was coming back.

“And now furzer proof,” fluX
was saying. “Zese aliens speak English! Zese slimy green blobs, as unlike us humans
as you can get, vich have evolved outside of our Universe, speak our language!
Again, zat cannot be pure coincidence. Ze odds against it are astronomical. So,
just sink of ze philosophical implications! Zere can only be one explanation.”

He looked at them, waiting
for their cries of astonishment and enlightenment. As none were forthcoming he
threw his eyes heavenwards. “Ze English language is God-given!” he almost
shouted. “Not just to us, but to zese aliens too, and possibly to all ozzer
alien species around ze Universe. Even on Earth and Tenalp ze English language
is coming to dominate all others. It is ze language of business, ze language of
Science.”