The Ultimate Inferior Beings (21 page)

Chapter 5

“
Oh dear. That’s
them,” said Chris suddenly.

sylX, fluX and jixX looked to
where Chris was pointing. There, in the distance, and heading their way, was a
pulse carrying several slimy green blobs.

“That’s the Benjaminites,”
explained Chris. “Seems to be most of them. Including Jeremy.”

jixX looked anxiously down at
Chris. “Should we make a run for it?” he asked.

“Perhaps we should stay and
negotiate,” suggested sylX.

jixX frowned but said
nothing. He looked towards fluX for support.

“Nein,” said the behavioural
chemist shaking his head. “I am too veek. I cannot run.”

The group of slimy green
Benjaminites continued to hurtle towards them on the pulseway.

“I think you’d better step
back if you don’t want your clothes to get messy,” suggested Chris.

“Mein Gott, zey are crazy,”
muttered fluX under his breath.

The three humans stepped back
promptly as a brick wall leapt out of the ground and landed on the pulseway
nearby. The Benjaminites sped nearer and nearer, faster and faster. Then, with
an almighty, squelching splash they smacked into the brick wall, spraying green
slime in all directions. The three humans set to wiping their clothes while
Chris savoured the refreshing wetness that had rained down on him.

*

Zero.

Star Alien Ships Orange Swallows
. That
was it!

Zero.

Star Alien Ships Orange Swallows
.

Zero.

What did that make?

Zero.

45568.

Zero.

It had to be 45568.

Zero.

She’d have to try that.

Zero.

She bit her lip nervously.

Zero.

Crossing her fingers, she
prepared to type the number onto the microswitch keyboard. But she noticed
something odd. Something was wrong. The neutrino bomb’s casing was no longer
glowing red-hot. It was still pretty hot, to be sure, but no longer red-hot. It
seemed to be cooling rapidly.

anaX frowned. Surely it
wasn’t supposed to do that. At least, not until after the bomb had detonated;
quite a considerable time after the bomb had detonated.

With shaky fingers, she typed
45568.

Nothing happened.

That, at least was a good
sign: the bomb hadn’t exploded.

She waited for the bomb to
cool even further, wondering whether it was now truly inactive. She picked up a
small spanner lying on top of the fission-rod chamber and tossed it across the
engine room. Nothing happened. The laser-rifle didn’t respond.

When the neutrino bomb looked
cool enough, anaX touched it to make sure she could handle it. A doubt crossed
her mind about the trembler device. Might that still be active and trigger the
bomb?

She took a deep breath and
carefully unclipped the bomb from the dimagnetic lead. Gently, gently she opened
it to peer inside. She spent a few minutes examining the bomb’s circuitry to
work out what was what, and what did what. Gradually, she began to piece
together what in fact hadn’t done what, and what should have done what but had
done something else instead. All the time she was shaking her head in disbelief
at the incompetent design and shoddy workmanship.

By the time she had finished
she was appalled. “That’s the last neutrino bomb I buy from the Sigh East
Midlands Bomb Company!” she said angrily. She would most definitely be
demanding her money back.

She closed the bomb, musing
how near she’d been to death. Then a thought occurred to her. Why hadn’t the
bomb exploded after all? The fuse had been lit and burning. She took a second
look inside the casing and examined the fifteen-second fuse closely. It was
damp; just where the flame had stopped there was a damp patch. That was what
had saved her life (and everyone else’s).

anaX frowned even more
deeply. But how could the fuse be damp? Inside the red-hot casing, any moisture
would have dried out long ago. She mused over this puzzle for a little while.
Then she had it! The engine room’s sprinkler system. When the door had caught
fire the sprinkler system had briefly switched on. This must have been enough to
dampen the fuse. “Phew!” she said, realizing her close shave.

Feeling a mixture of anger
and relief, she placed the bomb back in her shoulder bag. She would have to
hide it somewhere as it might prove incriminating if discovered.

anaX walked to the doorway
and took one last look around the room before going out. She closed the
remnants of the charred door behind her.

*

The region around the brick
wall resembled the scene of a Mamm massacre. There was green slime everywhere.
Neither jixX nor the stowaway could bear to look at it, and both turned their
heads away. For fluX, however, it was a fascinating scientific curiosity and he
watched, entranced, as the mess gradually began its slow re-assemblage into its
constituent slimy green blobs. Bit by slimy bit, the pools and puddles of slime
began writhing and twitching and coalescing to form larger and larger
agglomerates. And finally, after a couple of minutes, these agglomerates had
completely reformed into the ten slimy green blobs that they had originally been
part of, each groggily wandering about wondering what time of day it was. The
brick wall leapt back into the ground.

“Welcome to our planet,
Ground,” said one of them, still a little shaken. “We greet you in friendship.”

This was clearly not Jeremy.
He introduced himself as Randolph.

“Er, pleased to meet you,”
said jixX.

Randolph
introduced the other Mamms,
one by one. Last, but not least, was Jeremy. “I believe you’ve already met
Jeremy,” he said.

“Yes, we’ve had the...”
started jixX, but felt unable to complete the sentence.

Jeremy glared at him with
hate-filled eyes. Then he glared at the other humans as they proceeded to
introduce themselves. He wanted to scream at them, to order them to die, to
abuse them, call them names, to destroy them. But he could do none of these
things. The loss of his voice was bad enough, but Randolph had made matters
worse by confiscating his brick.

“Er,” started Randolph uncertainly after all the formal introductions were done. “We are the
Benjaminites. Members of a fanatical religious sect called Benjaminism.”

“Chris has told us all about
you,” put in sylX.

“Ah,” said Randolph, glancing
uncertainly at Chris. “Well, did he explain our beliefs?”

“He mentioned something about
The Dogs,” said jixX pointedly.

“Er, yes,” said Randolph.

“The Dogs are the Ultimate
Inferior Beings,” explained one of the Mamms in the background.

Randolph
looked slightly embarrassed.
“Yes, well, I hope you’ll understand that, as a purely precautionary measure,
we need to check out whether any... visitors to our planet... are, in fact, The
Dogs.

“They are The Dogs!! They
are!!!” screamed Jeremy mentally, but no one was telepathic enough to hear him.

“I don’t see how we can be
The Dogs,” said jixX recognizing Randolph as being a fairly reasonable sort of Mamm.

“Liar!!!” screamed Jeremy
silently.

“You see, even on our home
planet there are billions of species who, I would say, are inferior to us. And
there must be billions of planets in the Universe where life is only just
beginning to evolve. All these life forms have to be pretty inferior.”

“Hah!” screamed Jeremy’s
agitated mind. “Proof enough!” He turned to Randolph to see whether the latter
would pounce on this evident lie and use it against The Dogs.

But Randolph just said, “I’m
afraid they don’t count.”

jixX looked puzzled.

“Why not?” asked sylX for
him.

Randolph
looked uneasily at her. “It
says so in The Book,” he answered, but didn’t elucidate.

jixX and sylX exchanged
glances.

Randolph
coughed. “Well, look. Would
you mind if we checked you out for caninity? Just to be on the safe side.”

jixX looked at the others who
both shrugged uncertainly. He looked down at Chris.

“Don’t look at me,” said
Chris. “This is nothing to do with me.”

“Alright,” said jixX with a
sigh. “You can check us for caninity, or whatever.”

“What a fool!!” yelled Jeremy
to himself. “The Dog’s fallen for it!” He glared at the humans with an evil
smile on his face. He was going to enjoy seeing them lose and be destroyed. It
would quite make his day.

“Thank you,” said Randolph. “If you excuse us, we just need to set up the equipment first.”

The Benjaminites gathered
round Randolph and started murmuring amongst themselves. Then they began
setting up their equipment. Several Mamms got back onto the pulseway and sped
off into the distance.

jixX looked anxiously at flux
and sylX and tried to signal with his eyes that they needed to get out of there
as soon as possible.

“Ironic is it not,” said fluX
suddenly. “Zat zey are trying to prove ze existence of ze Ultimate Inferior
Beings, while I am trying to prove ze existence of ze Ultimate Superior Being.”

The others looked at him, not
quite sure what to say.

*

“Where have you been?” asked
the all-too-familiar voice of LEP as anaX emerged from the forward engine room.

“In the forward engine room,
as you can see,” answered anaX, trying to hide the shakiness in her voice and
to sound as natural as possible.

“That’s no place for a
woman,” said LEP. “It’s got BUF in it.” He chuckled and then said, “What were
you doing in there?”

“That’s a secret.”

“A secret?”

“Yes. This is a Top Secret
Space Mission. Remember?”

“Ah yes.”

anaX made her way back to the
boat hangar and headed straight for the survival module she had spent so long
preparing for flight. She hid her handbag, containing the neutrino bomb, deep in
the pile of electronic equipment in the module’s food-store where no one could
possibly find it. She felt a huge sense of relief engulf her, as though, at
last, she was doing the right thing.

As she left the deep-space
survival module, her thoughts turned to LEP who was humming a variation of
“Daisy, Daisy” to himself. This, she realized, was another change she would
need to make: to either retune LEP’s laryngomatic vocal chords or, failing
that, to block them with cement.

She reached the main control
room, wondering what other aspects of LEP’s character needed tinkering with.
But, the moment she entered the control room, all these thoughts flew right out
of the window. For there, on the floor in the centre of the room, was a slimy
green blob. She stopped in her tracks, startled.

“Chris?” she asked
tentatively.

The slimy green blob swung
round to face her. It, too, looked startled.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon,”
it said timidly.

“You’re not Chris, are you,”
said anaX, noticing for the first time that this blob was slightly shorter than
Chris.

“No. I’m terribly sorry, but
I’m not.”

“Are you a friend of
Chris’s?”

“Er, no. We’ve never really
been close, my fault really. I don’t have any friends. Please accept my
apologies.”

“No need to apologize,” said
anaX, slightly taken aback by the blob’s meek manner.

Silence.

“My name’s anaX,” said the
gynaecologist by way of introduction.

The slimy green blob waited
for a few seconds and then said, “Carry on.”

anaX looked puzzled. “I’m a
gynaecologist,” she offered.

The blob waited again and
then said, “Go on.”

“That’s all there is.”

The blob looked upset. “I
mean go on and insult me. Call me names. Criticize the way I look. Humiliate
and embarrass me.”

anaX was startled. “What?”

“Pick on me. Hurt me. Make my
life a misery.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Everyone else does,” said
the Mamm bitterly. “That’s how everyone treats me.”

“Oh,” said anaX
sympathetically. “You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to insult you. Okay?”

“You’re not?”

“No,” said anaX firmly. And
then, without realizing what she was doing, she knelt down on the floor next to
the blob to offer him some comfort.

The blob gave her a strange
look and edged away.

“Tell me,” said anaX kindly.
“Why does everyone treat you so badly?”

“You don’t know?” asked the
blob.

“No. I’m new here.”