The Ultimate Inferior Beings (14 page)

“Um, surely,” said jixX with
a frown, “there could be another explanation for the Mamms speaking English.”

“Such as?” asked the
behavioural chemist almost aggressively.

jixX shrugged. “Perhaps
they’ve visited Earth or Tenalp. Or have some kind of universal translator.
Like ALI, the Alien Language Interpreter, only not so rubbish.”

fluX scoffed explosively as
though it was the most ridiculous suggestion he had ever heard. “Slimy green
blobs? Travelling in spaceships? Universal translators?” he burst out
mockingly. “Do me a favour! Zat’s just science fiction nonsense, zat is!”

*

Emergency deep-space survival
module No 3 was the nearest of the four, so anaX decided that would be the one
to use. She walked across the echoing boat-hangar and climbed the steps leading
to the module’s hatch door. Once inside, she made her way directly to the main
control room.

She flicked a few switches
and pressed a few buttons on the control panel and the survival module gently
awoke, its headlamps shining brightly into the boat-hangar and its drive tubes
humming quietly. anaX knelt on the floor and removed an inspection panel.
Working steadily she started unplugging and re-plugging the mass of wires
attached to the principal programming board. Within minutes she had
reprogrammed the module. When she had finished she fitted the inspection panel
back into place.

She looked at her watch and
considered all the work she still had to do. With less than eight hours to go,
she would have to act fast. She left the survival module and headed for a room
adjoining the boat-hangar. From there she wheeled out several vast cylinders of
compressed air, which she connected to the survival module’s automatic
atmo-press regulation pump. She turned the valves on each of the cylinders to
start the filling process.

Then she went over to a
workbench by the boat-hangar entrance and started rummaging about in a toolbox.
The toolbox contained pneumohammers, laser cutters, six-inch nails, assorted
screws, optical tape measures, ultrasonic drills, wire-strippers, wallpaper
strippers and several broken pencils. She searched a second time but still
couldn’t find what she was after. She looked up, wondering where to look next.
Then she remembered LEP.

“LEP?” she said.

“At your service, ma’am,”
came the near-instant reply.

“Where can I find a
screwdriver?”

“Er, there’s one in the
cupboard on the far wall behind you,” said LEP. “The blue one marked ‘DANGER –
TOXIC FUMES. DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’.”

“Thanks,” said anaX absently,
turning and walking over to the blue cupboard. It did indeed have a sign
saying: ‘DANGER – TOXIC FUMES. DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’. She put a
hand on the cupboard’s handle. Then, taking a deep breath, she opened the
right-hand door, found the screwdriver and quickly closed the door again. She
took several paces away from the cupboard before breathing in again. A cloud of
green-brown fumes, released by the opening of the door, swirled around and
started its slow diffusion into the air of the boat-hangar.

With the screwdriver in hand,
anaX went to the front of her chosen survival module and unscrewed the four
screws securing the module’s front number-plate. She unclipped it and tossed it
onto the floor underneath the craft. Then she went round to the back of the
vehicle and repeated the operation on the rear number-plate.

Anyone watching her would,
yet again, have puzzled over the strangeness of her actions. After all, she
hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow or batted an eyelid at finding the
screwdriver exactly where LEP had said it would be.

Chapter 9

The
neutrino bomb’s
second-stage timer clicked into action and continued the inexorable countdown
towards the bomb’s detonation and to the monumental devastation this would
cause.

The timer consisted of a
precision-engineered, thermister-looped, roto-motor that slowly lowered a
wedge-shaped chip of glass through one arm of a Michelson interferometer. As
the optical path of that arm lengthened, due to the light’s passage through
progressively thicker and thicker segments of glass, so the successive maxima
and minima of the fringe pattern were counted by a phototriode. At the end of
twenty counts a safety-catch was jettisoned and the acousto-responsive timing
mechanism triggered.

The safety catch activated
another of the bomb’s highly subtle anti-tampering devices: the ‘H.T. resistive
bomb protector’. This worked by passing a potentially lethal 100 amp current
through the bomb’s outer casing. Both the current, and the fact that it caused
the bomb’s casing to glow red-hot, were intended to deter any casual
interference with, or handling of, the device.

So, with the countdown progressing
and the bomb approaching red-hot, everything now looked to be on schedule.

But it wasn’t.

Again there was something
amiss. For, the acousto-responsive timing mechanism that had just been
triggered by the second-stage timer was, in fact, the bomb’s
fourth
-stage
timer. Somehow, the bomb’s third-stage timer had been completely by-passed.
Once again, the moment of the bomb’s detonation had been brought markedly
nearer; this time, by about an hour!

*

jixX, sylX and fluX had run
out of topics for discussion. Or rather, fluX had finished outlining his latest
Proof, and the others felt disinclined to continue any form of conversation at
all. They merely gazed at the empty landscape about them, trying to avoid one
another’s eyes.

“There he is!” cried sylX, pointing
into the distance. They turned to see Chris speeding towards them on the crest
of a pulse, travelling at a phenomenal rate. One by one, they stood up and
prepared to greet him.

Just then, a movement in the
corner of their eyes caught their attention as a large object leapt out of the
ground nearby. It happened so quickly that none of them saw it clearly. But
when they turned to look they saw a small brick wall land with a thud right
across the pulseway... it stood there, about three feet high, four feet across,
solid and sturdily built... and directly in Chris’s path.

There was no time for shouts
of warning. No time for speedy action. No time even for gasps of horror. It was
over in less a second. Chris hurtled straight into the brick wall, smashing –
or rather splashing – against it with such a ferocious force that blobs of his
slime sprayed for tens of metres in each direction. The pulse bounced back off
the wall and set off back the way it had come, seemingly unaffected. The same
could not be said of Chris. His fragile, soft, viscous body stayed, for the
most part, on the wall, although parts of him lay as puddles of green slime all
about them. It was a horrible sight.

“Chris!!” sylX screamed,
grasping her head in her hands with a look of anguish on her face.

jixX and fluX stared in
horror at the green puddles which twitched and pulsated in the most disturbing
way.

“Why?” beseeched sylX,
looking about her as though searching for whoever might have been responsible
for this. She turned to jixX. “What do you think happened here?”

jixX shrugged.

“Accident or murder?” pursued
sylX.

jixX shook his head and
looked away. The mess was too horrible to look at.

sylX, too, had to turn her
tear-filled eyes away. Only the scientist, fluX, looked on, fascinated. He even
knelt down to look more closely. The stowaway, appalled at his stonehearted
callousness, had to walk a few steps away from him.

“Vait,” called the
behavioural chemist to her, waving her back. “Look! Zis is amazing. Wery, wery
astonishing. Zey are recombining!”

The stowaway stopped and
turned around.

“Come beck. Look!” continued
fluX. “Ze slime is coming beck togezzer again.”

And indeed it was. Very
slowly the puddles of green slime were moving towards one another and
coalescing. sylX wiped away her tears and came back to look as another globule
of green slime slid off the brick wall to join the rest. More and more of the
slime regrouped and reformed until, after several slow and tense minutes, it
had all formed back into the globular form of one Chris, the Mamm alien. The
three humans stared at him in sheer joy-filled disbelief as he shook his head
slowly and groggily.

“What happened?” he asked,
slightly croakily, when he felt he could speak again.

“That brick wall sprang
across the pulseway,” explained jixX, pointing, “and you smashed straight into
it.”

“That’s not what I meant,”
said Chris, sounding a bit impatient. “What happened to you three? I waited and
waited for you at the other end of the pulseway, but you didn’t come.”

“Ah, yes,” said jixX with a
nod. “We didn’t have any slime. We thought about using the stuff on the
ground... but… it had all dried up.”

“Yes, it does that,” conceded
Chris.

“What about the brick wall?”
asked sylX, still sniffing. “What made it leap across the pulseway like that?”

“A very complex mechanism,”
said Chris. “Timed to perfection.”

“You mean it was supposed to
do that?”

“Of course. How else do you
think I would have stopped?”

*

 “Your turn now,” Chris said
to jixX as the brick wall gradually returned to its slot in the ground. “I’ll
put a few drops of my slime into the hole for you.”

“You’re joking, right?” said
jixX.

“I’m joking, wrong,” said
Chris. “Otherwise it’s a very long walk.”

“But what happens when I get
to the other end?”

“There’ll be a brick wall to
stop you,” said Chris as encouragingly as he could. “It’s perfectly safe. I’ve
done it hundreds of times.”

jixX said nothing. He looked
to the others for support, but got none.

“Any volunteers?” he asked
jokingly.

“You’re the leader,” said
sylX with a simple smile. “You lead.”

Irritating woman, thought
jixX. What an irritating woman. He picked up the heavy communicator from the
ground, and then the heavy camera, and, with the look of a martyr, stepped onto
the pulseway. “Wish me luck,” he said half-heartedly.

“Good luck,” they replied,
although it was like they were talking to a doomed man.

“Okay, here it comes,” said
Chris.

“Already?” asked jixX in
panic, casting a terrified glance behind him. He saw the distant pulse racing
towards him.

“Try to spread your weight
out a bit more,” advised Chris, somewhat impractically. “Lubricate the
underside. Be focused. Think blob.”

jixX turned to look
pleadingly at the others, but they merely stepped back a pace as the pulse sped
nearer and nearer. He closed his eyes, held his breath and braced himself for
the impact, tightening his grip on the communicator and camera. There was a
whoosh and the pulse hit him. It hit him hard and it hit him fast. It hurled
him forward, buckling his legs underneath him and throwing his arms outwards. A
fraction of a second later he was airborne, flying through the air at great
speed. And a fraction of a second after that, he was down on the ground again,
landing with a thud on his chest. The pulse had passed under his body and sped
off into the distance without him.

The others gasped and rushed
to his assistance as he lay spread-eagled on the ground. He feared that every
bone in his body was broken. His head was spinning and it was only with the
greatest of difficulty that he managed to pull himself together and raise
himself into a sitting posture.

“Are you alright, captain?”
asked sylX, sounding genuinely concerned.

jixX gave her a brave wave in
the affirmative and dusted himself down. The communicator and camera looked
damaged beyond repair.

“Tell me how you think that
went,” asked Chris.

“I’d say it didn’t go too
well,” admitted jixX.

“And I’d have to agree with
you there.” Chris sounded a little irritated and exasperated by jixX’s failure.
But then he forced a smile. “However, as a first attempt, it wasn’t too bad.”