Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  And now he sat there, under the pink glow of his student's table lamp ('Reduces eye-strain! Promotes concentration! Aids retention!' was the lamp manufacturer's proud boast), preparing to sit the astronavigation exam for the thirteenth time.

  He found the process of revising so gruellingly unpleasant, so galling, so noxious, that, like most people faced with tasks they find hateful, he devised more and more elaborate ways of not doing it in a 'doing it' kind of way In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and not learn anything at all.

  The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. At school Rimmer was always at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand, the ice-fields of Europa would be shaded a delicate blue, the subterranean silica deposits of Ganymede would be rendered, centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow, and the regions of frozen methane on Pluto slowly became a luscious, inviting green. Up until the age of thirteen, he was constantly head of the class in geography.

  After this point, it became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's marks plunged to the murky depths of W for fail He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision timetables. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision schedule which, when finished, were minor works of art.

  Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.

  The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of astronavigation revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.

  Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed - to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.

  Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-Plus caffeine tablets. By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to make the journey down to the ship's medical unit for a sedative to help him calm down. The sedative usually sent him off to sleep, and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left, and an anxiety that was so crippling he could scarcely move. A month of revision to be crammed into each day.

  At this point he would start smoking. A lifelong nonsmoker, he'd become a forty-a-day man. He'd spend the whole day pacing up and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time, stopping occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase, not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the recommended dosage of dogworming tablets, which he erroneously believed to contain amphetamine.

  Realising he was getting nowhere, he'd try to get rid of his soul-bending tension by treating himself to an evening in one of Red Dwarf's quieter bars.

  There he would sit, in the plastic oak-beamed 'Happy Astro' pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying to be light-hearted and totally relaxed. Two small beers and three hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back to his bunk and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.

  Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety, nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dogworming pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-afternoon.

  After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy. This would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back at his sleeping quarters exhausted, but knowing he was fully prepared for the final day's revision before his exam Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising, showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final, final revision timetable, which would condense three months of revision into twelve short hours. This done, he would give up and go back to bed. Maybe he didn't know a single thing about astronavigation, but at least he'd be fresh for the exam the next day.

  Which is why Rimmer failed exams.

  Which is why he'd received nine F's for fail and two 'X's for unclassified. The first 'X' he'd achieved when he'd actually managed to get hold of some real amphetamines, gone into spasm and collapsed two minutes into the exam; and the second when anxiety got so much the better of him his subconscious forced him to deny his own existence, and he had written 'I am a fish' five hundred times on every single answer sheet. He'd even gone out for extra paper. What was more shocking than anything was that he'd thought he'd done quite well.

  Well, this time it was going to be different, he thought, as he sat carefully colouring all the quantum mechanics revision periods in diagonal lines of Prussian blue on a yellow ochre background, while Lister stared out of the viewport window.

  Petersen clumped noisily into the room and did his traditional parody of the full Double-Rimmer salute, which ended with him slapping his face several times and throwing himself onto the floor. The first time Lister had seen it, it was funny. This was the two hundred and fifty-second time, and it was beginning to lose its appeal.

  Lister and Petersen then went down to the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar for the hundred and thirty-fourth time. Only, this time Lister did something incredibly stupid.

  He fell in love.

  Hopelessly and helplessly in love.

  THIRTEEN

  Third Console Officer Kristine Kochanski had a face. That was the first thing Lister noticed about her. It wasn't a beautiful face. But it was a nice face. It wasn't a face that could launch a thousand ships. Maybe two ships and a small yacht. That was, until she smiled. When she smiled, her eyes lit up like a pinball machine when you win a bonus game. And she smiled a lot Lister could perhaps have survived the smile. But it was when he found the smile was attached to a sense of humour that he became irretrievably lost

  They were both standing at the bar, queuing to get a drink, and Lister was looking at her in a not-looking-at-her kind of way: in the bar mirror, in the reflection in his beer glass, over his shoulder, pretending to look at Petersen, at the ceiling just above her head, and occasionally, because it was permitted, directly at her. His heart sank when a tanned, white-uniformed officer, who obviously knew her, came up and touched her on the shoulder. Touched her on the shoulder - just like she was some kind of ordinary person. It really made Lister mad.

  The tanned, white-uniformed officer noticed a book sticking out of her black jacket pocket. Lister had noticed it too. It was called Learn Japanese, by Dr P. Brewis.

  '"Learn Japanese"?' the officer snorted. 'Talk about pretentious.

  What she said next tipped Lister over the edge 'Pretentious?' she placed her palm on her chest, 'Watashi?' Lister didn't know any Japanese but he guessed, rightly, that it was an adaptation of the 'Pretentious? Moi?' joke.

  The officer just looked at her blankly.

  She got her drinks and went back to her seat, while Lister was still trying to think of something to say which would start a conversation.

  For the next hour Petersen droned on about the supply station at the Uranian moon, Miranda, where Red Dwarf was due to stop off for supplies in seven weeks.

  It was to be their only shore leave between Saturn and Triton, and Petersen was telling him what a great time they were going t
o have. But Lister wasn't listening. He was looking across the crowded cocktail bar, trying to calculate the amount of drink left in the glasses of the girl with the pinball smile and her female companion, so he could be at the bar just as she arrived, and casually offer to buy her a drink.

  Who was he kidding? How do you casually offer to buy someone a drink, without making it sound like 'I want you to have my babies'? If he hadn't been crazy about her, it wouldn't have been a problem. Lister never had any trouble asking women for a date, provided he wasn't too keen on them. When he was, which didn't happen too often, he had all the charm, wit, and self-possession of an Alsatian dog after a head-swap operation. She got up to go to the bar. Lister got up, too. They exchanged smiles, ordered drinks and went back to their separate tables.

  Damn. Smeg. Blew it.

  She got up again.

  My round,' said Petersen, rising Lister thrust him back in his chair and went to the bar They exchanged smiles and 'Hi's this time, ordered their drinks, and went back to their separate tables.

  Damn. Smeg. Blew it again.

  She'd hardly sat down before she was getting up again The two girls' glasses were full.

  She's going for peanuts, thought Lister.

  'You want some peanuts?' he asked Petersen 'No, thanks.'

  'I'll go and get some.'

  They stood at the bar again. They exchanged smiles again. Then she introduced herself and asked him out for a date.

  ***

  And so it began.

  Lister became a walking cliche. His senses were heightened, so even the foul, recycled air of the ship tasted crisp-and spring-like. He went off his food. He stopped drinking. Pop lyrics started to mean something to him. Magically, he became better-looking; he'd heard that this happened, but he'd never really believed it. He got out of bed before his alarm clock went off - unheard of. He started to marvel at the view out of the viewport window. And his face acquired three new expressions. Three expressions which he'd stolen from her. Three expressions which, on her, he found adorable. He wasn't aware of even copying them, and he certainly wasn't aware how stupid he looked when he pulled them.

  And even if he had been aware, he wouldn't have cared Because Third Console Officer, Kristine Kochanski, a.k.a 'Babes', a.k.a 'Ange' (short for Angel), a.k.a. 'Krissie', a.k.a 'K.K.', 'Sweetpea', and a host of others too nauseating to recount, was madly, electrically in love with him.

  Lister's all-time favourite movie was Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life, and, just to make things totally perfect, it happened to be Kochanski's too. They sat in bed - Kochanski's bunkmate, Barbara, had been chased away to the ship's cinema yet again - eating hot dogs doused in mustard, and watching, for the third consecutive night, It's A Wonderful Life on the sleeping quarters' vid-screen.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the scene where Jimmy Stewart's father dies, Lister found himself for the first time in his life talking about his own father's death.

  It wasn't, of course, his real father, but he was only six at the time and he didn't know then that he'd been adopted. It had been a gloriously hot day in mid-summer, and the six year-old Lister was given toys and presents by everyone. It was better than Christmas. He remembered wishing at the time that a few more people would die, so he could complete his Lego set.

  She held his hand and listened.

  'My grandmother tried to explain. She said he'd gone away, and he wasn't coming back. So I wanted to know where, and she told me he was very happy, and he'd gone to the same place as my goldfish ' Lister toyed absently with his plaited locks 'I thought they'd flushed him down the bog. I used to stand with my head down the loo, and talk to him. I thought he was just round the U-bend. In the end, they had to take me to a child psychologist, because they found me with my head down the pan, reading him the football scores.'

  This had never stuck Lister as being funny. But when Kochanski started roaring with laughter, he started laughing too. It was like a geyser going off.

  Something was exorcised. And as they lay in the crumb-laden sheets, wrapped in each other's arms, giggling like idiots - and even though they'd only been dating for three-and-a-half short weeks - Lister knew more certainly than he'd ever known anything in his life before that they'd be together, forever.

  FOURTEEN

  Seven months out into space, while Rimmer sat at his slanting architect's desk under the pink glow of his study lamp, Lister stared out of the sleeping quarters' viewport window, longing to be bored again.

  He'd been not going out with Kochanski now for three weeks.

  The whole affair, the glorious 'forever' he'd imagined, had lasted just over a month. Then one evening in her sleeping quarters, as Lister arrived to take her to a movie, she'd told him she wanted to break it off. He'd laughed. He thought it was a joke. But it wasn't.

  She'd been seeing 'Tom' (or was it 'Tim'?), a Flight Navigation Officer, for almost two years. Tom or Tim (it may have been Tony) had left her for a fling with some brunette in Catering. And Lister had been a rebound thing. She hadn't realised it at first, but when Tom, Tim, Tony or Terry, or whatever the smeg he was called, had turned up at her door, having dumped the brunette in Catering, she'd gone scurrying back.

  There were tears, there were apologies, and pathetic cliched platitudes: they could still be friends; if he met Trevor, he'd really like him; she wished she were two people, so she could love both of them; ad nauseum.

  She'd returned the blue jumper he'd left. She'd returned his DAT tapes, and offered to give back the necklace he'd bought her, which, of course, he'd declined.

  And that was that...

  Except it wasn't. Because now she was everywhere. Everything he did, he did without her Everywhere he went, he went without her. When he went shopping, he didn't go shopping, he went shopping without Kochanski. When he went to the bar, he didn't go to the bar, he went to the bar without Kochanski. She'd infected every part of his life. His mental map of the ship now judged all distances in relation to her sleeping quarters, or the Drive Room, where she worked. He wasn't walking on such-and-such a corridor, he was walking on such-and-such a corridor which was n floors above or n floors below where she was at that precise moment.

  So he lay on his bunk, staring out of the viewport window, longing for the anaesthetic of the stupifying monotony which he used to feel two short months earlier.

  His only relief from the Kochanski blues had been three days' planet leave on the alcohol-dry Uranian moon, Miranda, when Red Dwarf had docked for supplies Three days drinking cola and playing video machines with Petersen. Petersen, who'd got drunk every night of his life since he was twelve, was so thrilled with the benefits of being sober, he'd gone teetotal overnight. So their excursions down to the Copacabana were a thing of the past, denying Lister his one last refuge.

  He sighed like a senile dog and looked down at Rimmer, hard at work.

  'Do you fancy going for a drink?' he asked, knowing the answer would be 'No' even before he'd finished saying the word 'Do'

  'No,' said Rimmer, without looking up.

  'That's a surprise.'

  'As it happens, I am going out tonight. Just not with you.'

  'What about your revision?'

  Rimmer had decided to change.

  His latest three-month revision timetable had been constructed within two hours And four hours a day, come what may, he read his course books, made notes, and revised in a sensible way. And revising in a sensible way obviously meant an adequate provision for leisure time.

  'Well, where are you going, then?'

  'Out.'

  'Where?'

  Rimmer ignored him He was going to spend the evening not getting any older. He was going to spend it in a stasis booth.

  Red Dwarf, like most of the older ships, was equipped with stasis booths for interstellar travel. A hundred years earlier, travelling to other star systems had been considered economically and philosophically interesting. But not any more.

  To travel the vast distances involved, even
with craft which could achieve demi-lightspeed, took decades. Necessity being the mother of invention, the stasis booth was duly invented. Basically, it was a fool-proof form of suspended animation, but instead of freezing the body cryogenically, and having all the attendant revival problems, the stasis booth simply froze time.

  Once activated, the booth created a static field of Time; in the same way X-rays can't penetrate lead, Time couldn't penetrate a stasis field An object caught within the field became a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero.

  In other words, the object remained in exactly the same state, at exactly the same age, until it was released. Most of the important groundwork for Time-freezing and stasis theory had been done by Einstein in the 1950s.

  Unfortunately, just as he was on the verge of a breakthrough, he started dating Marilyn Monroe, and basically lost interest in the project. Even after their short affair was over, he found it difficult to concentrate on quantum theory, and spent much of the rest of his life taking cold showers.

  His notes on the theory were later discovered and developed - and the stasis booth was born.

  For a period, ships full of astros in stasis booths were hurled out of our solar system, and interstellar travel enjoyed its golden age. The big hope, of course, was that they'd contact intelligent life.

  They didn't.

  Not even a moderately intelligent plant. Not even a stupid plant.

  Nothing.

  And it was surmised correctly, although it wasn't confirmed for a further two thousand years, that Mankind was completely and totally and inexplicably alone.

  In all of the universe.

  In all of the universe, the planet Earth was the only planet with any life forms.