Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Math,” said Miz, clutching desperately for an activity—any activity.

  Tyrra frowned. “Huh?”

  “Math. We could do math,” Miz said. Cal’s words rang loudly in the mostly empty space inside her head. “It’s, like, important. Or whatever. Everyone needs to know math. We should totally do math.”

  Tyrra’s bench creaked a little as she sat back and contemplated this. “Math,” she said, rolling the word around inside her cavernous mouth, as if tasting every letter. “I have heard of it, but have never tried it for myself.” Finally, she nodded. “Yes. Let’s do that. Let’s do math. It sounds fun.”

  “Oh, totally,” said Miz, relieved that her boundless apathy and lack of motivation was no longer under scrutiny. “It’ll be great.”

  She looked to the ceiling. “Kevin?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do you know, like, math stuff?”

  “I can run twelve bajillion calculations a second,” Kevin replied.

  Miz waited.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a yes, ma’am,” Kevin confirmed. “I know ‘math stuff.’”

  “OK, that’s awesome. Can you teach Tyrra?” Miz asked.

  “I can certainly give it a try.”

  “Cool,” said Miz. “And, like, is ‘bajillion’ even a real number?”

  “Oh, it’s a very real number, ma’am,” said Kevin. “It’s arguably more real than the other numbers, in fact. And I know all the numbers. Six. That’s one. And one, in fact. That’s two.”

  Miz blinked slowly. “Right…”

  “Two examples of numbers, I mean. I’m not saying that one is two,” Kevin explained. “The point is…”

  He hesitated.

  “Actually, I don’t recall what the point is, but I’m sure it was a good one,” Kevin said. “Now, if everyone would be so kind as to settle down and face this way…”

  A slide was projected onto one of the kitchen’s white walls. It showed a series of bewildering looking equations, all upside-down.

  “Then we shall begin.”

  If anything, their second encounter with Perko had been even more frustrating than the first—something which Cal would have said was impossible just ten seconds before the immigration interview had started.

  Each of the questions came with a number of possible answers, and each answer then drilled down to a deeper level of questioning related to the initial choice. At least, that was the theory. The questions were all simple enough—Where have you come from? What is your business on Logus? Are you here with the intention of committing crime or terrorist offences?—but the process of answering them was made tediously painful by the grinning Perko and his inability to follow basic fonking instructions.

  At one point, somewhere around question Seventeen C (ii), Loren had been forced to hold Cal back and stop him challenging Perko to a fight. During the argument that followed, the timer had elapsed on the immigration quiz, and they’d been forced to go back to the start and begin all over again.

  But then, finally, they made it. They answered the questions to Perko’s satisfaction, he wished them a safe onward journey, then he fonked off to make someone else’s life a living hell for the next forty minutes.

  Cal had immediately sprinted for the door and out onto the street before any other friendly animated assistants could intercept him.

  Outside, his stress quickly started to ebb away, as the warmth of the afternoon sunshine caressed his face. He stood there, eyes closed, face upturned to the heavens, just enjoying the sense of freedom. The sense of liberty. The sense of not having Perko misunderstanding every single thing he said and going back to the start every two minutes to begin over.

  The sidewalk was soft and spongy beneath his feet, like the rubber mats often placed under playground equipment in the hope that children would miraculously bounce, rather than shatter every bone in their bodies when they plunged from the top of the climbing frame.

  All around him, the glam rock goggle army swarmed in all directions through the wide, traffic-less streets, their eyes covered by those windowless headsets they wore. They swerved to avoid him whenever they drew close, backing up his theory that their saw with some other part of their body. Otherwise, there was some extremely lucky guesswork going on.

  “So, where to first?” asked Loren, stepping onto the sidewalk beside him.

  As she did, a purple-skinned man in a garish suit jacket and, to Cal’s mind, the least convincing hairpiece in the history of the universe, jumped out of the crowd brandishing a round object in the palm of one hand and staring at it intently.

  “Hey!” the man yelled, stopping directly in front of Loren.

  Splurt reacted instantly. He launched himself off Cal’s shoulder, expanded rapidly, then flomped down over the man, encasing him from head to toe in a mound of gelatinous green gloop.

  Trapped inside Splurt’s body, the man’s eyes flicked up from the device in his hand, gazed briefly and hopelessly out at Cal and Loren, then returned to their original position. A single bubble rolled up from his mouth and went plomp when it reached Splurt’s surface. When it popped, Cal could’ve sworn he heard the word, “Help.”

  “Hey, buddy, I don’t think he was going to hurt us,” Cal said, smiling reassuringly at Splurt. “Great reactions, though. Top marks. But, I think you can safely let him go.”

  Splurt remained motionless for a while, his eyes rotating between Cal, Loren, and the man currently trapped inside Splurt’s own body.

  He rippled faintly.

  “No! God, no, don’t do that,” Cal said.

  Splurt wobbled.

  “No, it won’t grow back,” Cal said. “Just let him go before he suffocates. If we later decide that, yes, in hindsight we should rip his head off, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Splurt stood his ground for a few more seconds, then sproinged into the air, shrank to normal size, and splatted onto Cal’s shoulder.

  Once Splurt was settled, Cal reached up, carefully removed the toupee from Splurt’s head, and replaced it on the head of the man in the awful jacket. The man said nothing, but adjusted it absent-mindedly, never once tearing his eyes away from the device in his hand.

  “Sorry about that. You startled him,” said Loren. “Are you OK?”

  “What?” He spared her the briefest glimpse. “Uh, yeah. Yeah,” he said, still distracted by the object he held. “I’m fine. Map?”

  Loren frowned. “Sorry, what?”

  “Map,” said the man. “You want a map? I got maps. I’m the map man.”

  “They have a map man!” said Cal, in a way that suggested this was the most adorable thing he’d ever heard.

  “You want one?” asked the map man.

  “Uh, yes. Sure,” said Loren, but Cal quickly stepped in.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let’s not rush into this. Let me handle this. I’ve dealt with his type before,” said Cal.

  Loren frowned. “Map men?”

  “Not… No, not map men specifically. I’ll be honest, I’ve never actually heard that term until now.” Cal’s eyes narrowed. “I mean charlatans. Con men.” He eyeballed the map man. “How much?”

  The map man said nothing, just chuckled gently as he stared at the device.

  “Hey, guy. Guy!” said Cal, clicking his fingers in the man’s face. It seemed to temporarily break the spell, and the man looked up, annoyed.

  “What is it?” he asked tetchily.

  “Hey, you stopped us, buddy!” Cal reminded him. “This map you’re hawking. How much is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s free,” the map man replied. Before he’d reached the final word, he was back to watching the palm-sized device.

  “Free? Seriously?” Cal spluttered. “Awesome! We’ll take six.”

  Loren shot him a sideways look. “Why six?”

  “In case we lose five,” Cal said.

  “How are we going to lose five maps?” Loren asked, then she remembered who she was dealing wi
th. “Yeah, sure. Let’s take six.”

  They waited for the map man to respond. Meanwhile, several dozen Ziggy Stardust era David Bowies swerved around them and walked on by.

  “Hmm?” asked the map man, after a while.

  “Jesus, what the fonk is that thing? What are you looking at?” Cal asked, reaching for the device.

  The man whipped it away, his face twisting in rage. “Don’t touch it!” he hissed, and Cal caught a glimpse of movement on a little round screen.

  Cal held his hands up to calm the situation. On his shoulder, Splurt rippled.

  “No! Still no with the head thing,” Cal warned, shooting the blob a stern look.

  “Here, take the maps,” yelled the map man. “Take all of them!”

  A bundle of papers were thrust against Cal’s chest. “Take them! Now you can be the map man!”

  “What? No, I don’t want to be the map man,” Cal said. He shot Loren a pleading look. “Don’t let me be the map man.”

  His protestations went unheeded. The (now former) map man’s eyes had drifted back to his screen, and his expression had slackened off to the point of being almost completely vacant.

  “Take them all,” he mumbled. Then, leaving Cal with the maps, he shuffled off and was soon carried along by the passing crowds.

  “What a weird guy,” Loren remarked.

  “Yeah, we map men are a quirky bunch,” said Cal, unfolding one of the maps. “I mean, who the fonk has a round TV? Why is that a thing?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be a thing?” Loren asked.

  “Because we see in rectangles,” said Cal, smiling just a smidge too patronizingly for Loren’s liking. He snorted. “I mean, it not like our eyes see things as…”

  He looked around them, his eyes rotating in their sockets. After a few seconds of this, they both widened in surprise. “Holy shizz… This changes everything,” he whispered.

  “Cal,” said Loren.

  “Huh?”

  She pointed to the bundle in his hands. “The map.”

  “Oh! Right. Yes. Sorry.”

  He stole another wide-eyed look at the city around them, then opened up the map.

  Cal spent the next few seconds solemnly regarding the page.

  He turned it over and checked the back.

  “Blank,” he sighed.

  “What do you mean?” asked Loren, leaning in.

  “I mean it’s blank.”

  Sure enough, Loren saw that Cal was holding a rectangle of featureless black paper. “Did you check the other side?”

  “This is the other side,” Cal said. He flipped it back. “That’s the first side.”

  “There’s nothing on it,” Loren pointed out.

  “I’m aware there’s nothing on it,” said Cal. “That’s what I said. It’s blank.”

  He was about to fold the map up again and check one of the others when a pale green light illuminated just below the surface of the paper.

  “Wait… Hold up. Something’s happening,” he said.

  The light brightened. Another light appeared beside it. Then a few more. At first, Cal thought they would form the outline of the city. The terrible realization of what was actually happening hit him just a fraction of a second too late for him to put a stop to it.

  “Hey there, pardner!” said the smiling face that now filled the page. “I’m Perko, your friendly animated assistant! Where would you like to go today?”

  “Kill me,” Cal sobbed.

  “You asked for… Suicide Booths!” chirped Perko. “Is this correct?”

  Screwing up the page, Cal tossed it into the air, then kicked it on the way down. He and Loren watched as it went sailing above the pedestrians, before becoming impaled on a particularly well-gelled head of spiky hair.

  “Fonk it,” Cal said, tossing the rest of the maps over his shoulder. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Twelve

  An hour later, Cal and Loren returned to the ship to find an alarm blaring and smoke billowing along the corridor. They also found Mech stomping out the last remnants of a fire in the kitchen.

  “What the hell happened?” Cal demanded, as Mech frantically extinguished the last of the flames with a giant metal foot. “What did you do?”

  “This wasn’t me!” Mech barked.

  “Kevin? What happened?” asked Loren.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really know, ma’am,” Kevin said. “I was trying to teach Mistresses Mizette and Tyrra math, when things went rather… awry.”

  “Awry?” said Loren. “In what way?”

  “In an ‘everything caught fire’ kind of a way, ma’am,” Kevin said.

  “That sound awry, all right,” Cal confirmed.

  “It was most unexpected, sir. Everything had been going so smoothly until that point.”

  “Until the point that everything spontaneously caught on fire?” asked Cal.

  “Precisely, sir.”

  Cal and Loren looked Mech up and down. His lower half, like most of the kitchen, was blackened with soot, and his face was all knotted up in anger. One of his feet glowed faintly red where it had been standing too long in the flames.

  “You, uh, you know we have a fire extinguisher, right?” said Cal.

  Mech’s jaws ground together. “What?”

  “We have a fire extinguisher. It’s literally right there on the wall.”

  Mech’s eyes very slowly followed Cal’s finger.

  “No,” he grunted, after spending quite a long time staring at the bright red cylinder fixed to the wall beside the replicator. “I did not know we had a fire extinguisher.”

  “Loren made us get one,” Cal explained. He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “She’s so safety conscious!”

  “You couldn’t have fonking told me?” said Mech.

  “I mean, it’s bright red, we screwed it to the wall in a prominent position and it has ‘Fire Extinguisher’ written on it in big letters,” Cal replied. “So, I didn’t think we really had to… But sure. Make this our fault, if it helps you feel better.”

  He gave Loren a final squeeze, then directed his attention back to the ceiling. “Are Miz and Tyrra OK?”

  “Yes, sir. They are both fine. They ran out around the time the fire started, and are taking cover in Mistress Mizette’s room.”

  Cal’s brow furrowed. “Taking cover? That doesn’t sound like them.”

  “Wait, Kevin,” Loren began. “When you say they ran out around the time the fire started, was it before or after?”

  Kevin’s reply came hesitantly. “I’m not… I’m not really sure, ma’am. I was rather caught up trying to break down the mathematical formulae involved in faster than light travel, and had come across rather an interesting problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” asked Mech.

  “Well, I ascertained that it’s impossible. Faster than light travel, I mean. It’s completely preposterous. It can’t be done,” Kevin said. “This led me to conclude that none of this is real, and that we’re living in a simulation created by some higher intelligence that…”

  He fell silent for a moment.

  “Wait, no. I forgot to carry a six,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Well, we sure dodged a bullet there.”

  “Anyway, sir, I was working through the problem, point out some of the more fascinating aspects of string theory when everything caught fire and they ran away. It was most peculiar.”

  “Did they say anything?” Cal asked.

  “Before or after they left, sir?”

  “Well… before. Obviously before.”

  “Not really, sir. Mistress Mizette did request that I open the door a few times.”

  “Wait, what do you mean?” Cal pressed.

  “Well, I’d invested rather a lot of effort in putting that presentation together, sir,” Kevin told him. “And I felt it only fair that everyone stuck around and listened until it was finished.”

  Cal, Loren, and Mech exchang
ed glances. Splurt, meanwhile, watched protectively over Loren.

  “What did Miz say exactly?” asked Mech.

  “I believe it was something along the lines of… ‘Kevin, open the door, or I swear I will set this place on fire.’”

  Cal nodded. “Right. And then everything caught fire a moment later?”

  Kevin let out a gasp. “Wait! You don’t think…? No! You don’t think Mistress Mizette had something to do with this?”

  Cal sighed and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll go talk to her,” he said. “You guys do what you can to clean up in here.”

  “What? Why the fonk should we clean up?” Mech barked, as Splurt hopped from Cal’s shoulder onto Loren’s. “Miz should be the one who cleans this shizz up. She made the mess.”

  Cal patted him on the arm. “Yeah, good luck with that,” he said. “You want to go be the one to tell her?”

  Mech’s fingers bunched into fists. He muttered quietly, then uncurled them again.

  “Fine. We’ll clean up. But I ain’t happy about it.”

  “Your dissatisfaction is noted,” said Cal. He made a show of scribbling something in a small notepad cupped in his hand, then leaned closer to Loren and whispered, “Look. There’s nothing here. I’m just pretending to write it down,” just loud enough for Mech to hear.

  “I hate you, man,” Mech said to Cal’s back, as Cal turned on his heels and left the kitchen.

  “Noted,” said Cal, scribbling on his imaginary pad again. “And look, I’m even underlining it.”

  Most of the smoke that had been filling the corridor had now drifted out through the open hatch at the back of the ship. A series of extractor fans had gobbled up the rest of it, and there was only the fainted tang of charcoal in the air as Cal made his way back along the corridor to Mizette’s room.

  He was about to knock when the door slid open, revealing a petulant looking Miz, and an only marginally less petulant looking Tyrra. Miz was standing very close, and Cal was forced to lean back so he could meet her eye.

  “Like, it wasn’t even our fault,” Miz said, before Cal could say anything.

  “It’s—”