Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  'Why?'

  Well, with respect, sir, I think you're mentally unstable.

  Sit down.' Rimmer shook his head. 'There's always one, isn't there? One wag. One clown. One imbecile.'

  'Yes, sir,' Lister agreed, 'but he's not usually in charge, sir.'

  Laughter.

  This was a tricky situation. Rebellion, a loss of respect. It had to be stamped on, it had to be crushed. His book on 'Poweramics' was quite clear on that. To crush a minor mutiny, you choose the leader: the toughest, the biggest, the strongest; and you humiliate him. And the rest follow like lambs.

  Don't look angry. Smile. Real power, true power, is unspoken - understated.

  Rimmer smiled. Slowly they stopped laughing.

  Excellent. Time to strike.

  Without warning he wheeled round and pointed. 'You! On your feet!'

  A man with a face like moon rock hauled his two hundred and fifty pound frame onto its feet. Rimmer climbed down from the podium and slowly, casually, strolled over to face him. He looked up at the small black shark eyes, the bald bullet head, the long, matted nostril hair. He was a good eighteen inches taller than Rimmer. And Rimmer was tall.

  'What are you chewing?' Rimmer said, after a suitable amount of silence.

  Tobacco.'

  'Tobacco?' A grin.

  'Yeah.' Defiance.

  Rimmer smiled and nodded, looking around the lecture theatre.

  'Well, I hope you brought enough along, for all of us.' The others laughed. On Rimmer's side. 'Well?'

  'Nope.' Slightly nonplussed.

  'Nope, sir.' Victory! 'Get rid of it.'

  The big man chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, a long plume of brown sputum plopped onto the polished toe-cap of Rimmer's left boot.

  Rimmer looked at his left boot, then slowly raised his head.

  'Some people's respect I've won already. I can see with you it's going to take a little longer. Now, get on the floor and give me fifty, mister.'

  'Ppt,' said the big man, and a second stream of half-chewed tobacco arrived on Rimmer's right boot.

  Rimmer rocked back and forth on his heels, nodding his head and still smiling.

  'Right. OK,' he said, pleasantly, 'I think that's about everything. Shift dismiss.'

  Slowly, Z Shift began to meander out of the lecture theatre.

  'Oh, by the way Rimmer called after the tobacco chewer. As the man half-turned, Rimmer leapt through the air and, with a Kamikaze scream, wrapped his arms and legs round the big man's frame, and they crashed into a row of chairs.

  As Lister left the theatre, Rimmer was having his head rhythmically beaten against one of the desk tops.

  BONK.

  'Fine,' Rimmer was saying.

  BONK.

  'There's nothing wrong...'

  BONK.

  '... with your reactions.'

  BONK.

  'Just checking.'

  BONK.

  'So you like chewing tobacco, eh?'

  BONK.

  'Well, that's absolutely fine and dandy.'

  BONK.

  'Perhaps you'd like me to run down to Supplies and buy you some more.

  BONK.

  'I think I'm going to lose consciousness now.'

  BONK.

  BONK.

  BONK.

  ELEVEN

  Everyone agreed it was a splendid funeral, but no one enjoyed it more than the deceased himself.

  'I can't tell you how great it is, being dead,' he told everyone who would listen. 'It's solved all my problems.'

  Every off-duty member of the eleven thousand, one hundred-and-sixty-nine-strong crew had packed into the vast ship canteen.

  McIntyre sat at the top table, a huge coffin-shaped cake containing his own effigy in marzipan before him, and listened, his ego aglow, while his fellow officers sang his praises.

  Saunders, much to his own personal delight, had finally been turned off, and although initially there had been some concern about hologramatically reviving a man who had killed himself, those doubts were allayed when the reasons for McIntyre's suicide were discovered.

  McIntyre rose to the sound of tumultuous applause, and fingered the 'H' emblazoned on his hologramatic forehead, as over eight thousand people stamped on the floor and banged wine glasses with forks and spoons.

  'Well, first I want to thank the Captain for the beautiful eulogy - uh, it was very flattering and deeply moving, and it was well worth all that time I spent writing it.'

  A huge laugh echoed round the canteen, and McIntyre smiled happily.

  'On a serious note, I know there's a rumour going round that I committed suicide. I'd like to try and explain why I did it ...'

  McIntyre started to talk about his gambling debts. Debts he'd incurred during his ship leave in bars on Phoebe, Dione and Rhea playing 'Toot'.

  'Toot' was a banned bloodsport, involving a fight to the death between two specially-bred Venusian fighting snails. The ferocious gastropods, with hand-sharpened horns, would meet in a six-foot square pit, and bets would be taken on the eventual victor. 'Eventual' was the word; a single butt from a Venusian fighting snail could take upwards of three hours to deliver, and the whole combat often took days. Meanwhile, the baying spectators got drunker and drunker, placing bets of wilder and wilder proportions. You could lose a lot of money playing 'Toot'. And McIntyre had. McIntyre admitted it was a cruel and pointless sport, which said much about man's inhumanity to just about everything to which he could be inhuman. But the buzz from watching two killer snails charging about slowly in the concrete pit; the roaring of the crowd as one snail drew blood, and the other retreated into its shell for hours on end ... well, you had to be there to believe it.

  Before he knew it, McIntyre had debts amounting to almost five times his annual salary. In desperation to pay off the Ganymedian Mafia who ran the snail pits, he'd taken a massive loan from the Golden Assurance Friendly and Caring Loan Society, which, as it turned out, was also run by the Ganymedian Mafia. He didn't know it when he signed, but they charged an annual percentage rate (APR) of nine thousand eight hundred per cent.

  The clause in the contract which specified this took the term 'small print' into a whole new dimension.

  The clause was concealed in a microdot, occupying the dot of the 'i' on page three of the loan agreement, in the phrase: 'Welcome, you are now a member of the Golden Assurance family.'

  Startled to discover his first monthly instalment was some seven times more than the original loan, he gambled what was left, and lost that, too.

  McIntyre wrote to the Society, explaining the situation, and a number of increasingly anxious letters were exchanged during Red Dwarf's tour of the Saturnian satellites. Eventually, McIntyre agreed to meet a representative from the company's head office when the ship docked over Mimas, to discuss a repayment plan.

  Duly, on the first evening in orbit round Mimas, McIntyre donned his dress uniform and went to the coffee lounge of the Mimas Hilton, where he met three gentlemen, representatives of the Golden Assurance Friendly and Caring Loan Society who arrived in Mimas's one and only five star hotel brandishing a pair of industrial cable clippers.

  There, before the eyes of hotel guests casually taking coffee and scones with clotted cream, McIntyre was force-fed his own nose.

  He needed little further persuasion before deciding to try a new repayment plan, and finally plumped for the Golden Assurance Friendly and Caring Loan Society's Pay-By-This-Evening-And-Don't-Get-Murdered Super Discount Scheme.

  Half-crazed with fear, he staggered back to his office aboard Red Dwarf, briefly explained his predicament to his rubber plant, and killed himself The beauty part of this scheme was of course that, as a hologram, he was now safe from reprisals. He could continue his life, dead and untroubled. Which is why he was telling everyone who would listen how great it was to be dead, and how it had solved all his problems.

  McIntyre finished his speech by thanking everyone for their understanding, and ki
nd words, and concluded by paraphrasing Mark Twain. 'Rumours of my death,' he said, 'have been greatly understated.' Out of the eight thousand assembled, only five people got this joke, and none of them laughed. McIntyre didn't even understand it himself; he'd been told to say it by the ship's metaphysical psychiatrist who assured him it would get a 'big laugh'.

  After the toast, the Captain, a short, dumpy American woman who'd had the misfortune to be born with the surname 'Kirk', made a short yet very boring speech welcoming the new intake aboard and outlining the schedule for the jag to and from Triton, before sitting down and thus signalling the beginning of McIntyre's death disco.

  ***

  The huge sound system vibrated and shook as it pumped out a Hip-hop-a-Billy reggae number from a band which had been red hot for two weeks, five years previously.

  Two thousand crew members stood on the dance floor, swaying and sweating, while the rest sat around tables, drinking and sweating.

  Though they'd been aboard less than two days, all the low-lifes, ne'er-do-wells and slobs in general had somehow found each other, kindred spirits, and were sitting around in noisy, moronic pockets having drinking competitions. Equally, all the ambitious career-types had somehow been sucked together, and were drinking low alcohol white wine, or slimline mineral water, and talking intensely about work.

  Except for Phil.

  For some reason, Phil Burroughs had accidentally got himself attached to Lister's group. Phil was a serious-minded academy undergrad on a two-year attachment. It would be a full twenty-four hours before he realised he had joined the wrong group, and had absolutely nothing in common with any of the people with whom he was presently sharing his evening. In the meantime, Petersen, was pouring a pint of beer into his jacket pocket.

  'That's my beer! What the hell are you doing?' screamed Phil.

  'It's just my way,' Petersen beamed charmingly, 'of saying it's your round, pal.'

  Phil got up and staggered to the bar. Although there were only five of them at the table, Lister, Petersen, Chen, Selby and himself, he'd been told to order twenty pints of beer. For some reason he couldn't understand, every round consisted of four pints each. 'Saves on shoe leather,' Petersen had pointed out.

  It didn't seem to matter whether or not you wanted them, either. Each round Phil had requested a low alcohol white wine, and each round he'd been delivered four pints of foaming Japanese lager. He knew for a fact Chen and Petersen were filching at least two of his four pints, but that was absolutely fine with him; his top limit was three pints a night, and he'd had seven already.

  Three identical barmen asked for his order. He asked for twenty pints, laid his head in a beery pool on the bar, and promptly fell asleep.

  Back at the table, Lister finished his story about how he'd been shanghaied aboard. He'd embellished it only slightly. In his version, for instance, both the Shore Patrolwomen had seduced him in a Photo-U-Kwik booth, and that's why he had that slightly shocked expression on his passport photograph.

  Petersen took his turn. He'd arrived on Mimas on a nuclear waste dump ship called Pax Vert, which had ejected its putrid load on the Saturnian moon of Tethys, and was now returning to Earth. He was trying to work his passage across the solar system to Triton, where he'd bought a house. As he explained, since Triton was on the very edge of the solar system, being over two-and-a-half billion miles away from Earth, house prices there were really reasonable. For just two thousand dollarpounds, Petersen had bought a twenty-five bedroom home dome, with twelve en-suite bathrooms and a zero-gee squash court.

  'At first I thought there was something wrong with it,' he said, showing Lister a sketch he'd been sent by the estate agent, 'but look, it's beautiful.'

  'They didn't send you a photograph?' said Lister, his eyes narrowing.

  'No, you can't photograph in a methane atmosphere.'

  'You're telling me they haven't installed an oxygen atmosphere yet?'

  'No. I'll have to wander around my house in a spacesuit. But that's why it's so cheap!' He quickly downed two pints. 'You ought to move there. There's a plot of about two thousand miles right next door to me. I'm telling you - it's a great investment. Ten, twelve years, they have plans to install oxygen. Can you imagine what will happen to house prices once the atmosphere's breathable?

  They'll rocket, baby!'

  Lister looked at him. Was he serious? Yes, he was.

  'No, listen,' Petersen continued. 'Do you know Triton is the only moon in the whole solar system which rotates in the opposite direction to the planet it's orbiting?' Petersen demonstrated the scientific principle by rotating his head and swooshing his beer glass around it the other way. Thin, fizzy lager cascaded onto the already sodden table.

  'Maybe,' said Lister, who was seriously beginning to wonder whether Petersen was brain-damaged, 'but that's no reason to buy a house there.'

  'True,' agreed Petersen, 'but if ever you have guests, it's a nice talking point.'

  The music changed; a Johnny Cologne number: Press Your Lumps Against Mine. It was smooch time.

  There was a loud scraping of chairs as people stood up and guided their partners onto the already packed dance floor. A huge, multi-limbed beast rippled, ebbing and flowing, contracting and expanding to the gentle sway of the music.

  Lister suddenly found himself alone at the table, the others lost in the undulating, pulsating mass of smooching bodies. He squinted drunkenly around the vast disco. So many people. People dancing, people touching, people laughing, people talking, people kissing. So many people.

  ***

  In just over seven months, every one of them would be dead.

  TWELVE

  Five months later, Lister stared out of the sleeping quarters' viewport window and saw nothing. Just a few, very distant stars, and an awful lot of black. It was pretty much the same view he'd had for the past twenty-one weeks At first he'd found it awe-inspiring Then, slowly, that had given way to just plain dull Then very dull. Then deeply dull. And now it was something below deeply dull, and even below deeply, hideously dull; a word for which had yet to be devised.

  It was, he thought, even more mind-numbingly, deeply, hideously dull than an all-nighter at the Scala, watching a twelve-hour season of back-to-back Peter Greenaway movies.

  If you went to the British Library and changed every word in every single book to the word 'dull', and then read out all the books in a boring monotone, you would come pretty close to describing Lister's life on board Red Dwarf.

  He looked at his watch. 19.50, ship time. He was waiting for Petersen to show up, and they were going to go down to the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar to spend the evening exactly in the same way they'd spent one hundred and thirty three of the last one hundred and forty-seven evenings: drinking hugely elaborate San Francisco Earthquakes from plastic coconuts, with Chen and Selby, and failing to meet any interesting women. Or, more to the point, any interesting women who were interested in them.

  Dull and gruesomely monotonous as his social life was, Lister knew for a fact it was at least four hundred and seventy-four times more interesting than his working life on Z Shift under Rimmer.

  Rimmer was sitting at his slanting architect's desk, under the pink glow of his study lamp, with a tray of watercolours, making out a revision timetable in preparation for his astronavigation exam.

  In all, he'd taken the exam eleven times. Nine times, he'd got an W for fail, and on two occasions he'd got an 'X' for unclassified But he persevered. Each night he persevered, under the Pink glow Each night he nibbled away at his skyscraper-high stack of files which stored his loose-leaf revision notes. He nibbled away, trying to digest little morsels of knowledge.

  Little morsels that stuck in his gullet, that wouldn't go down. It was like trying to eat wads of cotton wool. But he persevered. Rimmer wanted to become an officer. He ached for it. He yearned for it. It wasn't the most important thing in his life. It was his life.

  Given the opportunity, he would gladly have had his eyes scooped
out if it meant he could become an officer. He would happily have inserted two red hot needles simultaneously through both his ears so they met in the middle of his brain, and tap-danced the title song from 42nd Street barefoot on a bed of molten lava while giving oral sex to a male orangu-tan with dubious personal hygiene, if only it meant attaining that single, elusive golden bar of an Astronavigation Officer, Fourth Class.

  But he had to do something much more demanding, much more impossible, and much more unpleasant. He had to pass the astronavigation exam.

  Born on Io, one of Jupiter's moons, thirty-one years earlier, he was the youngest of four brothers. Frank was a gnat's wing away from becoming the youngest captain in the Space Corps. John was the youngest captain in the Space Corps. Howard had graduated third in his class at the academy and was now a test pilot for the new generation of demi-light speed Zippers at Houston, Earth.

  'My boys,' his mother would say, 'my clever, clever boys Johnny the Captain, Frankie the First Officer, Howie the Test Pilot, and Arnold... Arnold, the chicken soup machine cleaner. If you could sue sperm, I'd sue the sperm that made you.'

  'I'll do it, Mother One day, I will become an officer.'

  'And on that day,' his mother would say, 'Satan will be going to work in a snow plough.'

  If Rimmer hadn't been such a dedicated anal retentive, he would have realised the simple truth: he wasn't cut out for Space He wasn't cut out for it.

  He would have realised he wasn't the slightest bit interested in astronavigation. Or quantum mechanics. Or any of the things he needed to be interested in to pass the exams and become an officer.

  Three times he'd failed the entrance exam to the Academy. And so, one night after reading the life story of Horatio Nelson, he'd signed up with a merchant vessel as a lowly Third Technician, with the object of quickly working his way through the ranks and sitting the astronavigation exam independently, and thereby earning his commission: the glimmering gold bar of officerhood.

  That had been six years ago Six long years on Red Dwarf, during which he'd leapt from being a lowly Third Technician to being a lowly First Technician. In the meantime, his brothers went for ever onward, up the ziggurat of command. Their success filled him with such bitterness, such bile, that even a Christmas card from one of them - just the reminder that they were alive, and successful - would reduce him to tears of jealousy.