The Ultimate Inferior Beings (18 page)

“What’s the matter?” asked
sylX.

Chris looked behind again. “He’s
gaining on us. I think we’d better make a run for it. Now!” Chris increased his
pace. The others increased their pace to keep up with him.

“Who is it?” asked jixX.

“Jeremy,” was all that Chris
said before upping his pace even further. The three humans had to jog to keep
up.

“Is he dangerous?”

“Probably.”

They were practically running
now. But still the slimy green blob behind them kept getting closer and closer.
When it was within shouting distance it started shouting. “You Dogs!!”

They increased their speed
even further.

“You Dogs!! You will die!”
came the cry from behind. “I order you to stop! Stop right now! Obey my order,
you Dogs.”

But obey they did not. They
continued running. However, fluX was finding it hard to keep up and, gradually,
he started dropping further and further behind. jixX and sylX glanced back at
him in concern. And beyond him, they could see that Jeremy was closing the gap
with every step they took, closer and closer.

Suddenly, fluX tripped and
fell to the ground. sylX screamed. jixX stopped and turned back to help him.
Jeremy came nearer and nearer, shouting without end. “Curs! Mongrels!”

jixX managed to pull the
behavioural chemist up by the hand just before Jeremy reached him, and together
they resumed their flight.

“Die!” screamed Jeremy in
frustration, coming to a halt. All this exertion and all this shouting had
taken a heavy toll on him, and he had to stop and rest. He was too exhausted to
continue. And he was also annoyed with himself. In his hurry to get to The Dogs
he had forgotten to arm himself with a brick. He would not make the same
mistake a second time. He watched them getting further and further away.
“Dogs!” he yelled after them in disgust.

He watched them some more.
“Dogs!” he yelled again, but not as loud. Then he stopped yelling and turned
back the way he had come. Puffing heavily, he headed back, his mind working on
how he was going to rid the planet of The Dogs and so fulfil Benjamin’s
prophecy and save the Universe.

*

Meanwhile, the four walked
slowly on, also puffing heavily, but relieved that they seemed to be out of
danger for the time being. fluX had twisted his ankle slightly, but other than
that he was alright.

“You know,” said Chris
looking at them. “I don’t think he likes you.”

*

anaX staggered slightly under
the weight of the electronic components she was carrying out of the boat
hangar’s Spares room. This was her fifth journey to and from the emergency
deep-space survival module. To LEP she looked both beautiful and vulnerable,
yet it was beyond his powers to lend her a helping hand. All he could do was to
gallantly lend her his moral support.

“You’re working mighty hard,”
he said supportively.

“There’s lots to do,” said
anaX, pausing for breath. “And not much time to do it in.” She entered the
survival module and deposited the electronic components in the food store. LEP
waited for her to re-emerge.

“But surely there’s no
hurry,” he said to her when she was once again heading towards the Spares room.
“Seven months.”

anaX stopped in her tracks,
wondering what LEP was talking about.

“Seven months before your
baby arrives,” he explained.

“Ah yes,” said anaX, her mind
busily calculating. “Er.”

“There’s nothing wrong with
my arithmetic, is there?” asked LEP. “It’s supposed to be something of a strong
point for us computers. Nine months, minus two, makes seven. Right?”

“Well … yes,” said anaX
slowly. “But … you haven’t made any allowance for bio-obstetric engineering.”

“No, I haven’t,” admitted
LEP. “How it slipped out of my calculations I can’t imagine.”

“There you go,” said anaX,
smiling confidently now. She walked into the Spares room before LEP could say
anything more.

But the moment she was out,
LEP said, “What’s bio-obstetric engineering?”

anaX sighed. “It’s a surgical
technique that reduces the gestation period from nine months to just over two.
So the baby’s due any day now and I really need to get out of here soon. Within
the next 6 hours or so.”

LEP was astonished. How was
it that, if her baby was due any day, she was able to keep such a fantastic,
shapely figure?

“The wonders of modern
science,” he thought to himself. “She is truly one of the wonders of modern
science.”

*

“It’s sort of against his
religion to like you,” Chris was explaining, sounding slightly embarrassed.

“His religion?”

Chris gave a cough. “He
thinks you are The Dogs.”

“He did call us that quite a
lot, didn’t he,” put in sylX.

“And what are The Dogs?”
asked jixX.

Chris hesitated. “It’s a very
silly religion,” he said, defensively. “It doesn’t have many followers. And I’m
not a believer myself.”

“Go on.”

“Well, they believe in the
existence of The Ultimate Inferior Beings,” said Chris in a slightly mocking
tone to distance himself as far as possible from what he was saying. “Beings
that are really, really bad at everything they do. So incompetent, in fact,
that they will one day destroy the Universe. Not deliberately, you understand,
but by accident. They refer to this as the ‘Big Oops Moment’, or ‘BOM’. This
will be some innocuous bungle with such far-reaching consequences that it will
bring about the End of Everything. And the only way this can be prevented...”

“Is...?”

“Is if these beings are
destroyed first.”

“He means us, right?” asked
jixX.

“I believe so.”

“And we’re in danger?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Terrific.”

sylX, on the other hand, was
fascinated. “This is really very interesting,” she said. “Tell us more about
this religion.”

“I’m not an expert,”
protested Chris.

“Well, tell us what you
know,” she insisted warmly.

Chris seemed to blush. “All I
know,” Chris was saying, “is that Benjaminism has a long history. The religion
is named after Benjamin who lived a long time ago. He made a number of
prophecies. One of them says that The Dogs will destroy the Universe and that
in the End will be The Lie. They call this the Hour of The Lie.

“Every Monday the
Benjaminites assemble together and hold a ceremony. They gather round the
smallest of their number and hurl abuse at him. That’s Henry, poor chap. They
call him all sorts of names and boss him about. He’s their sort of token dog,
you see.”

“Pah! Bonkers!” snorted fluX
suddenly. “Vot unscientific mumbo-jumbo.” These were the first words he had
spoken for some time.

“So they intend to kill us?”
jixX asked Chris. “Is that right?”

“Seems so,” said Chris.
“Sorry.”

Chapter 3

By
now, the
Reader
has probably forgotten all about the neutrino bomb in the heart of the forward
engine room. But it was still there. Still in the heart of the forward engine
room; still ticking inexorably towards its considerably advanced detonation
time.

BUF had certainly not
forgotten it and had not taken his scanners off it for a second.

Currently, the fourth-stage
timer was active. It ticked every time a cosmic ray (perhaps coming from a
distant supernova explosion) passed through its sensor chip. This seemingly
random method of time measurement was not as random as might at first seem; in
general, the cosmic ray flux averages out to give a fairly steady sort of time
instant.

At the end of several
thousand of these fairly average sorts of time instants the alarm bell rang.
This was a dangerous moment. The bell had to ring without triggering the bomb’s
highly sensitive trembler device; a device so sensitive that it could pick up a
footfall at twenty paces. As a precaution, the bell itself was encased in a
complex vibrational-damping mechanism made of springs, hydraulic levers and
sticking plaster.

The sound of the alarm bell
triggered the next-stage timer and activated the bomb’s next highly subtle
anti-tampering device. The latter consisted of a 10,000 watt laser-rifle that
fired at anything that moved in the bomb’s vicinity. An optical scanner
surveyed the area around the neutrino bomb and, any object that it detected
moving at a speed greater than a ten-thousandth of an inch per second, was
instantly vaporized by a blast from the rifle.

Within minutes, the
laser-rifle had decimated the forward engine room’s entire rodent and insect
populations. The floor became littered with the corpses of flies, spiders,
cockroaches, moths, fleas, mice and rats. This sudden dirtying of the floor was
detected by the room’s cleaning droid, which automatically whirred into life.
Its lights flickered on and its engines revved up. But no sooner had it lurched
into action and started busily sucking and sweeping the floor than it was
blasted out of action by the laser-rifle.

The Reader may recall that
the neutrino bomb had taken a photograph of anaX shortly after she had planted
it. The reason for this must now be apparent. It was a safety measure in case
she returned to deactivate the bomb. The optical scanners would be able to
recognize her and prevent the laser-rifle blasting her head off the moment she
came into view. It was a nice touch, cleverly thought out by the bomb’s
designers at Sigh Co.

So, the bomb now seemed to be
operating correctly. It continued to scan the area around it, detecting
anything that moved, comparing the object against its stored image of anaX, and
then, on finding a mismatch, blasting it out of existence.

But, once again, there was
something wrong. Something the people at Sigh Co had not allowed for. The flux
of cosmic rays in the Pseudogravitic Continuum was far, far higher than that in
Normal Spacetime. Thus, once again, the next timing device had been triggered
much too soon! So soon, in fact, that the bomb now had only forty-five minutes
left to detonation. Forty-five minutes to go before one of the largest man-made
explosions ever. An explosion that would wipe out everything in the
Pseudogravitic Continuum and bring about the End of the Mamms’ Universe...

*

Jeremy was anxiously
wandering about the landscape – clearly searching for something. At last he
found something, although it wasn’t quite what he’d been looking for. He found
Henry, the smallest of the Benjaminites.

“Hello, you miserable
wretch,” he said to the small, cringeing blob in front of him.

The small green blob cringed
some more. It knew that, this being a Monday, it was particularly vulnerable to
all forms of abuse.

“Seen any bricks lying
around?” asked Jeremy, his eyes still scanning the ground.

Henry, clearly surprised at
Jeremy’s relative civility, sat up and said, “No, oh Master.”

“Dog!” spat Jeremy, looking
up. “Where are the others?”

“They’re looking for you.”
Henry cringed for effect. The effect it produced was not a good one.

“How dare you answer back!
Why are they looking for me?”

“They want to prevent you
harming the humans.”

“The Dogs,” corrected Jeremy.
“And I’m warning you. No answering back.” Jeremy looked around at the flat
landscape. “Which way did they go?”

This time the small green
blob didn’t answer back.

Jeremy looked at Henry
contemptuously. “Damn your impudence,” he said. He turned and walked away.

He walked a few paces and
stopped. “Aha,” he shouted with joy. “A brick! The very thing I was looking
for.” He stooped to pick it up. He turned and held it aloft for Henry to see.

“Congratulations,” said
Henry, genuinely pleased.

“I thought I told you to be
quiet!” said Jeremy angrily. He threw the brick at Henry.

It missed by a number of
yards.