The Ultimate Inferior Beings (32 page)

“I wouldn’t put my mortgage
on it.”

Silence again.

sylX sat forward excitedly.
“That reminds me! I discovered something amazing on Earth,” she said. “You’ll
never believe it.”

“Go on.”

“They found twaX the
carpenter!”

“Really? He’s alive?”

“Apparently,” continued the
stowaway. “They came across him in a rain forest in South America.”

“South America?”

“He was gibbering, but in
good health. No one could make sense of anything he said. And then he ran back
into the rain forest waving his axe in the air. He’s been chopping down trees
and making useless stuff out of wood. The local people buy the things he makes
just because they feel sorry for him.”

“But how did he get there?
How did he escape from the Pseudogravitic Continuum?”

“No one knows. He’s got a bit
of a cult following, though. A whole bunch of people think he’s a genius. They
believe he built himself a spaceship on Ground using only the carpentry tools
he had with him plus several six-inch nails, a dirty handkerchief and a hinged
extensible rule. And then he flew the thing to Earth.”

jixX blinked in amazement.
“Perhaps we underestimated him.”

sylX laughed. “I don’t think
that’s what happened.”

“How did he do it, then?”

“No idea. I guess we’ll never
know.”

They lapsed into silent
reflection once again, each staring down at the portion of floor between them.

jixX leapt from his armchair.
“Wait!” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “I’ve got a little gift
for you.”

“Oh, wow,” said sylX, sitting
up straight.

“A little reminder of our
trip together. I was going to give it to you when The Night Ripple landed, but
you rushed off and I was dragged off to see TOT.”

sylX beamed as she watched
jixX bustling off to the desk behind him, towards the dwarf Alberta spruce.

“Close your eyes,” instructed
jixX.

She did as she was told and
held out both her hands.

“Here,” said jixX, placing
something into them. Her smile faded. The object felt neither as heavy nor of
the right shape and texture to be what she had been expecting. “You can open
your eyes now.”

sylX opened her eyes and
looked down at the object. It was a brick. With a note tied to it. The note
said, ‘Landing permission granted’.

“Oh,” she said. “This is...
lovely. I’ll treasure it forever.”

jixX sat down, pleased with
himself, watching her as she examined the brick with a great show of interest
and gratitude.

After a while, they again
lapsed into silence, both staring at the brick.

“Life’s a funny old game,”
said jixX philosophically.

“Yes,” agreed the stowaway,
with equal philosophical insight, placing the brick on her armrest. “I wonder
what will become of us.”

jixX shrugged. “I suppose
we’ll end up getting married and living happily ever after,” he said.

And, of course, they did.

Though not to each other.

*

Meanwhile, a long way from
living happily ever after, were the contents – sentient and otherwise – of the
Pseudogravitic Continuum. The place was a mess. There were fragments of rock
and rubble and dust everywhere: the debris of countless stars and planets.
Boulders floated aimlessly, occasionally colliding into one another and
coalescing, accreting dust and smaller particles as they did so.

And, floating in amongst all
this debris, were billions upon billions of tiny droplets of green slime. This
was all that was left of the Mamm species: tiny droplets of green slime.
However, these droplets had the uncanny ability of forming back into the slimy
green blobs from which they had come.

And they were reforming now.
It was a slow process because of the vast distances across which the droplets
had been dispersed. But, nevertheless, reforming they were. Just as LEP had
reassured anaX they would.

It would take a long time. A
very long time. But eventually they would do it. And, when they did, they would
rebuild their Universe as best they could. They would make it just as it had
been before that fateful Monday.

And, as the slimy green blobs
reformed, some of them realized what had happened. As their neural connections
met up, fused and triggered, there was one thought – and one thought only –
that continually fired in their nascent minds. It was, ‘Wait till I get my
hands on that Jeremy! Just wait till I get my hands on him!!’

Of course, there was one Mamm
who was not thinking this one thought. This Mamm was Jeremy. His thought was a
totally different one.

It was: ‘There!! More proof!
I am the Chosen One!!!’

GLOSSARY

AXOSYNAPTIC PROCESSING.
Processing by one or more
(usually about a billion) axosynapses. The more complex the problem the more
axosynapses become involved in its processing. The more axosynapses involved,
the quicker the problem is solved. Interestingly, the system tends to be
inherently non-linear, so very complex problems are often processed and solved
more quickly than very simple ones. Put another way, it means that simple, or
even trivial, problems take ages to solve. This apparent paradox is overcome by
employing auxiliary scramblers to make simple problems more difficult and so
speed up their processing. Sometimes, however, instead of getting a simple
answer to a simple problem, one ends up with a scrambled answer to a scrambled
problem.

BACK ENGINE ROOM
. (See
Forward Engine Room
)

CHRONOGRAPHIC WRISTWATCH.
Reed-switching,
pendulum-driven watch, complete with a quadroluminescent microdigital display,
a radioscopic magnetometer arrow giving the direction of true North, and an
ultraheterodyning beater which can be set to massage the skin of the arm
directly under the watch. This massage, it is claimed, prevents chafing,
peeling, bleeding, and dandruff. The watch also has an OFF-switch to conserve
the batteries when it’s not in use.

CRANIKEN
,
DEREK VON (2021-    ).
Derek von Craniken – world-famous crank, and author of the best-selling book,
‘Harriet of the Clods’. In this best-selling book, von Craniken proposed that
life on Earth originated from the microbes left behind by a group of
extraterrestrials visiting our barren home planet several billion years ago.
Specifically, the microbes came from a can of soup that had gone off during
their journey here and had been discarded. The makers of the soup, according to
von Craniken, were Pry and Mordial, a well known soup manufacturer on the
aliens’ home planet. It is not clear how von Craniken came by this piece of
information. Few real scientists agree with his theory. However, the one thing
in its favour is that, even though life has been evolving for billions of
years, evolution still occasionally throws up specimens like von Craniken.

CURRENCY
. (See
Tenalp Currency
)

EINSTEIN, ALBERT (1879-1955)
. A very famous scientist.

EINSTEIN TELESCOPE.
A clever device, this. It
employs the curvature of the telescope, as opposed to the curvature of
spacetime, to enable one to see the back of one’s head. It thus obviates the
need for impossibly good eyesight and an implausibly long lifespan.

FORWARD ENGINE ROOM.
Vast, noisy, oily, dirty,
smelly sort of place where most of a spaceship’s engines are kept. Usually
operated by a mini-computer.

Back Engine Room.
Small, noisy, oily, dirty,
smelly sort of place where the rest of a spaceship’s engines are kept. Back
Engine Room is short for Backward Engine Room. Controls in the Backward Engine
Room are manually operated by a member of the crew. The room contains no
computer. Manual control is adequate as most spaceships spend more time going
forwards than they do going backwards.

GLIBBERY
,
ASQUITH VERNON
(1835-43).
Pioneer of the Asquith Glibbery Defence in chess.

GLOSSARY
. (See
Glossary
)

HIGH-MASS PHOTONS.
High-mass photons were first
discovered throughout parts of the world during October 1993. Unlike ordinary,
low-mass photons, these were found to possess a non-zero rest-mass.
Consequently, high-mass photons cannot travel at the speed of light. In fact,
their velocity is not even remotely relativistic. It is about 1 millimetre per
second, or about 3 kilometres every 100 years. Most slugs can move faster than
that.

The high-mass photons
discovered during October 1993 came from the Sun’s chromosphere and their
production commenced shortly after the Sun had formed – over 4.5 billion years
ago. They had not been discovered before October 1993 because, due to their
extremely slow propagation velocity, it took them all that time to traverse the
distance between the Sun and the Earth.

No theory has yet been put
forward to explain why these photons exist and why, though still a form of
electromagnetic radiation, they don’t travel at the speed of light.

High-mass photons are also
known as heavy photons. Low-mass photons are occasionally referred to as light
photons.

HYPER-INDUCTION TRIRAIL
JET-TRAIN.
As far back as the 1960s, economists noticed that travel by jet plane was far
cheaper per mile than travel by rail. Few economist, however, went as far as
Theodore T Groober in suggesting that jet planes should be used as the method
of propulsion for trains, towing them from station to station. He called his design
the hyper-induction trirail jet-train. At the time, Groober’s suggestion was
largely ignored, and has been ever since. In fact, it will probably be ignored
until the end of Time.

However, one of Theodore T
Groober’s fans, although not a supporter of any of Theodore T Groober’s ideas,
did rather like the name: ‘hyper-induction trirail jet-train’. He liked it so
much that he adopted it for the ordinary electric trains one sees on the
Southern Region. And the name has stuck ever since, even though the method of
propulsion has nothing whatsoever to do with trirails, jets, hyper-induction,
nor for that matter, with Theodore T Groober.

INFRAVIOLET SURFACE SCANNERS.
Used for scanning planet
surfaces and detecting indigenous lifeforms. They are sensitive enough to
register a lifeform density of one microbe per hectare. Thus, when used at
maximum sensitivity on a inhabited planet – with its billions of teeming
microbial creatures and billions of scuttling, walking, and crawling macrobial
creatures – the scanners tend to overload and explode. Their infraviolet colour
makes it easy to locate them for repair.

jXqQ?:&V.
One of Tenalp’s first
politicians proposed that
all
Tenalp inhabitants should be called
jXqQ?:&V. His idea was that this would save on administration, and the name
itself was a suitably futuristic kind of name for space colonists. When put to
a vote by the ruling council, however, his proposal was rejected by a narrow
margin (two votes to one). This is why the people of Tenalp have sensible names.

LEADING STAGE REACTORS.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion
(action = reaction) often leads to the term ‘leading stage reactors’ being
confused with the term ‘leading stage actors’. The reader should note that the
two are not the same. Both the spelling and pronunciation are different.

LOW-MASS PHOTONS.
(See
High-Mass Photons
)

MAGNETO-HYDRAULIC AMPLIFIER.
A highly compact device
employing 10 litres of ferrofluid and a 10 Tesla superconducting magnet. Signal
to noise ratio is negligible.

ZANIALPHOS.
A word that disrupts the
alphabetical order of a glossary or dictionary.

MEGALOMANIA.
A million
lomanias
.
(See
Million
)

Another unit commonly
expressed in millions is the
phone
. (See also
Microbe
)

MICROBE.
A millionth of a
be
.
(See
Million
)

Other units commonly
expressed in millionths include:
biologist
,
cosm
,
phone
(see
Megalomania
), and
scope
.

MILLION.
A thousandth of an
on
.

Other units commonly
expressed in thousandths include:
onth
,
ard
,
ner
,
onaire
,
onfold
, and
pede
(also measured in hundredths).

NEUTRINO BOMB.
The neutrino bomb is one of
the deadliest, most devastating weapons known to Humankind. On exploding it
emits a vast flux of neutrinos and antineutrinos in all directions. These
particles are weakly-interacting and, of course, pass through most matter with
little effect. However, if there are any tanks of cleaning fluid about, or any
residual cleaning fluid on anything, or anything that chemically resembles
cleaning fluid, then the effect is devastating; the neutrinos interact with the
heavy isotope of chlorine,
³⁷
Cl, to produce radioactive argon,
³⁷
Ar.
Under normal circumstances, of course, this reaction is extremely rare, but so
great is the flux of neutrinos that the heat generated by the reaction can melt
even diamond. (See also
Sigh East Midlands Bomb Company
)