by Grant Naylor
A big, red, red, big clenched fist of metal.
As the shuttle accelerated towards the redness, details slowly emerged through the thick gloom of space. Gradually, Lister made out the thousands of tiny pin-pricks of windows and a tooth floss-thin line of light ringing the ship: the vessel's metro system.
A huge, shadowy carbuncle jutted out a mile or so from the red monster's belly - a small moon, tom out of orbit, had flung itself into the ship's solar plexus and was now embedded in the hull, hanging there like a giant stone leech.
As the shuttle swung out to align itself for docking, the red ship's nose-cone loomed into view - six half-mile steel poles, bound by magnetic cable, as if the fist were clutching a huge shuttlecock. This was the scoop. The scoop sucked hydrogen from the currents of space and converted it into fuel, theoretically making the ship capable of travelling forever.
Lister was aware of the hot whisky breath of the burly astro beside him, who was now leaning over him to share his window.
'The Dwarf,' he said in a Danish accent, ripping open another can of Glen Fujiyama.
'The what?' Lister tried not to inhale.
'Red Dwarf.'
'How big is it?'
'It could eat Copenhagen,' said the Dane, 'and have Helsingor for afters.'
Lister accepted a belt from the whisky can, and they swapped names.
'It's got to be five miles long.'
'Something like that,' said Petersen.
Lister squinted out of the window again. 'And God, is it ugly!'
'Ugly as my mother.' Petersen smiled through bar-brawl broken teeth. 'First trip?' Lister nodded.
Petersen belched, crumpled up the whisky can, tossed it into the aisle, and fished in his knapsack for another. 'I'd offer you one,' he said apologetically, 'but I have only twelve left. Been on Mimas long?'
'Six months.'
'It's a bit of a dump, right?'
'It's a lot of a dump.'
'Wait till we get to Triton. Triton's OK.'
'Triton?' Lister's brow furrowed. 'We're going to Earth.'
'Sure, we're going to Earth. But first we've got to go to Triton to get the ore to take to Earth.'
Lister closed his eyes. 'Where's Triton?'
'Round Neptune.'
'Oh,' said Lister. 'Neptune. Right.' He took a swig from Petersen's nearly-empty whisky can. 'Where's Neptune?'
'From here?' Petersen took out a calculator. 'I'll tell you exactly.' He punched a lot of numbers into the machine. 'It's two billion, seven hundred and seven million miles away.'
Lister sighed like a burst tyre. 'How long is that going to take?'
'Say, eighteen months,' said Petersen. 'Eighteen months, not counting Customs. And Triton Immigration Control is a son-of-a-bitch. It's worse than New York.'
'Eighteen months?'
'Then twelve months' mining,'
Twelve months' mining?'
Then two more years to get back to Earth.'
'Four-and-a-half-years?'
'It's an old ship. It only does two hundred thousand miles an hour.'
'Four-and-a-half-years,' Lister repeated like a mantra, 'Four-and-a-half-years.'
He turned and looked out of the window as the shuttle ducked into the trench cut deep into Red Dwarf's back. On either side, buildings flitted past: skyscrapers, tower blocks a hundred storeys high; monoliths of steel and glass. One minute it was as if they were flying through Manhattan; then without warning the architecture changed, and it looked like Moscow; then fluted pillars and elaborate neo-classic arches, and they could have been in New Athens: a tasteless mishmash of styles from the decades upon decades the vast mining ship had taken to build.
For a tantalising moment, between a huge mosque-shaped dome and a line of industrial chimneys, the tiny blue light that was Earth winked and flickered invitingly in the glow of the distant Sun, then just as suddenly was gone, as they swooped towards the yawning doors of the docking bay.
'Four-and-a-half-years,' said Lister catatonically.
NINE
Lister pushed through the crowded docking bay, fighting his way to the Intake Clearance Zone, a now moronically drunk Petersen in tow. They'd been stopped at Red Dwarf customs and Petersen had been bag-searched. His possessions had comprised a toothbrush, one pair of underpants, three socks and eleven cans of whisky. Informed that he couldn't bring the liquor aboard without paying duty, he had stood in the green channel and downed all eleven cans, one after the other, offering Lister a sip a can.
Now Petersen was walking sideways, his head cocked at a curious angle, singing a lewd Danish folk song, punctuated with appropriate gestures and slobbering leers, as Lister dragged him by his lapel towards the moving walkway.
High above, dominating the ship's shuttle port, was a monitor screen the size of a football pitch, from which a disembodied head was lugubriously dispensing information. The head was a digitised reproduction of a balding forty year-old man, with a voice that had a slight East London twang ' The floor's stopped moving,' said Petersen as they reached the end of the walkway; 'that's a very good thing.'
Lister scanned the various name-cards that Red Dwarf induction staff were holding above the heads of the jostling crowd.
***
'Hi, I'm Chomsky.'
'Chomsky? Pierre, right?' Rogerson ticked his clipboard.
'OK stand there a second. We're still looking for a Burroughs, a Petersen, a Schmidt and a Lister.'
'I'm a Lister,' said Lister.
'I'm going to be sick,' said Petersen. And he was. Exorcist sick.
'Yerrrrrrrrrgh.
'YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHH.'
A pause. A sigh.
'Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurh.
'Yurgh.' Petersen smacked his lips and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. 'That's better.'
Two skutters, claw-headed service droids which looked like miniature amputee giraffes on motorised bases, swept into view and cleaned up the mess. Petersen tried to tip them.
'We're still looking for a Burroughs and a Schmidt,' Rogerson said, trying to disguise his disgust.
'What's that thing?' asked Lister, pointing up to the disembodied head on the monitor screen.
'Holly, the ship's computer. He's got an IQ of six thousand. You want to ask him a question?'
'Like what?'
'Like anything at all.' Rogerson called up to the ceiling; 'Hey, Holly - this is Lister ...'
The huge eyes rolled down in their direction. 'I know. Lister, David. Date of birth, 14th October, 2155. Qualifications: GCSE, Technical Drawing, failed.
Rank: Technician, Third Class. Ambitions: to visit strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations: to boldly go where no person has gone before. All right, Dave?' A huge eyelid rolled over the digital eye and winked at Lister.
'Ask him something,' Rogerson urged.
'Who holds the all-time record for three-dimensional yardage in a single Zero-Gee football season?'
'Jim Bexley Speed, London Jets Roof Attack, season '74 75. Four thousand, six hundred and thirty-six square yards in the regular season.'
'And what colour tie was he wearing when he was interviewed by Mark Matheson after Megabowl 102?'
'Aquamarine, with a diagonal lemon stripe.'
'Brutal.' Lister grinned.
Chomsky chipped in: 'Who was the Chinese Emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1620?'
'T'ai-ch'ang,' Holly replied immediately; 'also known as Chu Ch'ang-lo Kuang Tsung. Born 1582.'
They all began shouting questions: 'Who was the ...'? 'How many ... ?' 'When did ... ?' and, one by one, Holly got them right.
Finally Petersen asked a question. 'Why is the room going round and round?'
'Because you're drunk,' said Holly.
'That's riiiiight!' Petersen clapped, delighted.
Burroughs and Schmidt finally arrived, and the ten of them were herded onto the Red Dwarf's Northern Line, one of a network of tube trains which criss-crossed the leng
th and breadth of the ship. Spread evenly throughout the carriage were more monitors displaying the genius computer, who was capable of conducting several thousand conversations simultaneously, ranging from what was on the ship's movie channel that night to discussing the melding of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Some thirty minutes later they boarded the Xpress super lift, which whisked them up to Floor 9,172, where they were met by a ship rover - a three wheel electric buggy-bus - and driven down two miles of corridors towards the sleeping quarter, Area P.
'OK,' said Rogerson, showing Lister into his sleeping quarters. 'Make yourself at home. I'll just go and fix up the other guys.'
Lister looked round the room which was going to be his home for the next four-and-a-half years. Dull, gunmetal grey walls reflected his mood. Neon strips around the walls simulated the time of day. Dirty yellow at the moment signalled the middle of the afternoon. A dirty orange would signal early evening, and a dirty blue would indicate night.
Two bunk cubicles were carved into recesses in the wall, one above the other. To the right stood a simple pedestal wash basin and mirror, which, when voice-activated, swivelled on its base to reveal an antiquated chemical toilet bearing the legend: 'Now please irradiate your hands'. Lister began to wish he was in his nice, cosy luggage locker back at Mimas Central.
Behind him was a bank of fitted aluminium wardrobes, and two steps led down to what was laughingly sign-posted 'Lounge Area'. The lounge area was about two metres square, with a three-seater reinforced steel settee, and a tiny coffee table welded to the floor.
Nice, thought Lister. Very homely.
The other occupant of the room left very little evidence of his existence.
Whatever he did possess was meticulously tidied away. On the wall of his bunk, the lower one, hung a homemade revision timetable in worryingly neat handwriting, and an array of startlingly complex colour codes. Beside it were a number of certificates, neatly framed, and a series of cut-out newspaper headlines, all along the lines of. 'Arne Does It Best'; 'Arnie Comes Out On Top'; and 'Arnold - A Living Legend'.
Lister scanned the titles in the bookcase built into a recess above the video screen: Astronavigation and Invisible Number Theory Made Simple; Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Made Simple; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for Beginners; An Introduction to the Liar Paradox and the Non-Mechanizability of Mathematics; and How to Get More Girls by Hypnosis.
He opened his bunkmate's wardrobe and peered in.
Twenty pairs of identical, military blue underpants hung on coat hangers in protective cellophane sheaths, next to seven pairs of pale blue pyjamas, with dry-cleaning tags pinned to the collars. Lister was disturbed to see that the pockets of the pyjamas bore an insignia of rank. Brightly polished boots stared unblinkingly in rows on the floor. A pair of monogrammed slippers on the shoe-trees stood beside them.
Lister closed the wardrobe, struck a match on the 'No Smoking' sign, lit up, and sat down on the metal settee.
'Nice. Very, very nice.'
Rogerson came back in. 'Oh, David, meet your bunkmate ...'
Lister looked up. Behind Rogerson stood a grey-suited technician; tall and rangy, flared nostrils and wide, slightly manic eyes and a hyperactive, constantly jiggling right leg that always seemed to want to be somewhere else.
Even without his false moustache, there was no mistaking the officer who'd hired his hopper.
'He's also your shift leader, so he's the guy who'll be showing you the ropes.
Lister, this is First Technician - '
'Arnold Rimmer,' said Lister. 'We've already met.'
'No, we haven't,' said Rimmer, smiling too much.
You're a technician,' said Lister, surprised. 'I thought you said you were an officer.'
'Shut up,' said Rimmer, pumping his hand and smiling even harder.
TEN
On the first morning into space, Lister sat in the lecture theatre, with the other eleven members of Z Shift, in his brand new technician's uniform which made him itch in nineteen different places, while his left arm and his right buttock competed for the title 'Most Painful Appendage', following his twelve inoculation jabs.
The rest of the previous morning and the whole of the afternoon had been a long process of multifarious humiliations: hours standing around in backless surgical gowns (Why backless? When did a surgeon ever need to get to your bottom in a hurry?) giving various bodily fluid samples - Petersen had, in fact, delivered rather more bodily fluid samples than was absolutely necessary, and nobody was pleased; IQ tests; genetic fingerprinting; hand-to-eye coordination work; centrifugal weightlessness simulation; then, finally, they'd all been marched like a serpent of school children down to the computer decks, where they each had their personalities recorded for storage in the hologram library. Lister had sat in the suite, a metal skull-cap bolted to his head, while his every memory and personality trait had been logged onto a depressingly small computer slug.
His entire life; his whole personality copied and duplicated on a piece of computer hardware the size of a suppository. Petersen's recording had crashed three times, with an error-message which read 'Non-Human Lifeform'. In the end, they had to drip-feed him coffee and subject him to several very cold showers before his brain was functioning sufficiently well to be recorded. If, in the highly unlikely circumstance of Petersen achieving the status of 'Indispensable Personnel', and then dying, he would be retrieved as a hologram with the mater and pater of all hangovers.
The lecture theatre hatchway breezed open, and Rimmer clicked up to the podium in boots so brightly polished you could see infinity in them.
***
The previous evening in the sleeping quarters, no mention had been made of the incident in the brothel. In fact, Rimmer had played the part of a man who'd never met Lister before very credibly indeed. He was, he had declared, not exactly in love with the idea of bunking out with a subordinate, but it was something that they both had to put up with.
'There's just one rule,' he'd maintained, polishing his boots for the third time, 'and that rule is K-I-T. D'you know what K.I.T. stands for?'
Ken Is a Transvestite?' Lister had offered.
Keep It Tidy. And if you K.I.T., then we'll GOJF. 'He'd left this hanging in the air for effect before translating: 'Get On Just Famously.'
Lister spent the rest of the evening trying to take advantage of the fact that he now had a proper bed, of sorts, for the first time in six months. Though, curiously, he'd discovered he couldn't drop off to sleep until he sat up in bed and wrapped both arms around his knees, luggage locker-style. Meanwhile, Rimmer sat at his slanting architect's desk and whiled away the time until Lights Out reading a book called: How to Overcome Your Fear of Speaking in Public.
***
Rimmer gripped the podium tightly, the inside of his wrists pointing out towards the new intake, a trick which, his book told him, would make his audience trust him, and began his speech to Z Shift.
'My name,' he said, 'is Arnold J. Rimmer. You will call me "sir" or "First Technician". I am your shift leader. This is my very first command, and I don't intend it to be my last. What I do intend is for Z Shift to become the best, the fastest, the tightest, the most efficient Routine Maintenance, Cleaning and Sanitation Unit this ship, or any other ship in the Space Corps, has ever seen.'
He paused.
Silence. The book said silence could be as effective as speech, if used judiciously. Use silence, it urged. Rimmer stood there, being silent. Enough silence, he decided. More speech.
'When we do something, we do it fast and we do it right.'
More silence.
Still more silence.
No, this was a dumb place to have silence. It just made him look like he'd forgotten what he was saying.
'This ship is three miles wide, four miles deep, and nearly six miles long. But ...' he paused again - a most excellent and petite silence, he congratulated himself Very telling. '. * . if anywhere on it a vendin
g machine so much as runs out of chicken soup, I want a member of Z Shift to be there within four minutes.'
More silence. The best silence yet.
'You used to think your mother was your best friend. Not any more. From now on, your best friend is this ...' he held aloft a three-foot-long metallic tube, with a vari-twist grip and seven detachable heads. 'It's called a sonic super mop. It washes, it steam-cleans, it mops and it vacuums. And from now on, it never leaves your side. Wherever you go, the SSM goes with you. You work with it, you eat with it, you sleep with it.'
The new members of Z Shift exchanged glances.
Rimmer gave them another shot of silence. It had gone well, he thought. Nice, pointy speech. Some good silences. No! Some great silences. And he was especially proud of the macho bit at the end about the sonic super mop, which he'd lifted shamelessly from his favourite movie, God, I Love This War.
Lister stood up and snapped a salute. 'Sir, permission to speak, sir!'
Sloppy salute, Rimmer thought. He'd have to teach them all his own salute - the one he'd invented. The one he'd drawn diagrams of and sent off to the Space Ministry, in the hope that it would replace the passe, old-fashioned standard one. It was a great salute, and one day it would make him famous. It went thus: from the standard attention pose, the saluter brought his right arm sharply out in front of him, at a perfect angle with his body. He then twirled his wrist in five circles, to symbolise the five arms of the Space Corps, then snapped his arm back, fingers rigid, to form an equilateral triangle with his forehead; he then straightened the elbow, so the arm was pointing sideways from the body, from which position it was snapped smartly back down to his side. There were also variants: the 'Double-Rimmer', for dress occasions, where the salute was performed with both arms simultaneously, and the 'Half-Rimmer', with only one arm, and only three circles for emergency situations, when there wasn't time to carry out the Full-Rimmer'.
'Permission granted,' said Rimmer, returning Lister's salute with a five-loop Full-Rimmer.
'Sir...'
Yes, Lister?'
Is it possible to get a transfer to another shift, sir?'
