Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  That's all there was.

  Interstellar travel was abandoned as a total waste of time And the returning stellarnauts tried to reintegrate into society and cope with the fact that many of them were now fifty years younger than their own children. This led to curious generation gap problems, of which the greetings cards industry took full advantage.

  ***

  Rimmer had a keycard to one of Red Dwarf's stasis booths, which he used whenever he could.

  While morons like Lister and Petersen were urinating their lives down the gutter in the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar, he was in a stasis booth, not existing, not getting any older.

  It made great good sense to Rimmer. Take tonight. There was nothing he particularly wanted to do. He'd achieved all the aims on his daily goal list, and under normal circumstances he'd just lounge around, doing not very much, and eventually go to bed. As it was, when they took to their bunks that night, Rimmer would be three hours less older than Lister because he wouldn't have lived those three hours: he'd have saved them. Saved them for when he really needed them.

  True, technically, he wouldn't be living.

  But he didn't particularly want to live tonight. He wasn't in the mood It was just like a bank, only, instead of saving up money, he was saving up time. He'd been doing it, on and off, for about five years, and in this way he used up most of his free leisure time. Most Sundays were spent boothing. And then, usually, three evenings a week, for three hours or so. And obviously, if there were any bank holidays, he'd take full advantage of the facility not to exist, and pinch back a few hours from Father Time.

  In just five years he'd saved three hundred and sixty-nine full days. Over a full Earth year. In five years, he'd only lived for four. Although his birth certificate said he was thirty-one, technically he was still only thirty.

  Occasionally Rimmer reflected that his boothing could possibly be the reason why he didn't have any friends, but, as he pointed out to himself, if having friends meant having to hang around and get older with them, then he wasn't sure he wanted any. Especially since the perks were so astonishing. He often looked in the full-length mirror, when Lister wasn't there, and reflected that, although he was thirty-one, he still had the body of a thirty-year-old If he could maintain this routine, by the time his birth certificate said he was ninety he'd actually only be a very sprightly seventy-eight-year-old. Pretty a-smegging-mazing, eh?

  ***

  Lister slumped off to try and persuade Peterson to go for a drink. Rimmer watched him go, then showered and changed, treated himself to a little aftershave, and went off to spend the very last evening of his life not existing.

  FIFTEEN

  On the very last morning of his life, Rimmer strode into the lecture theatre to give Z Shift their work schedule for the day.

  'OK, men,' he said as always, 'Listen up.'

  As always the whole of Z Shift inclined their heads to one side and pointed their ears at the ceiling. But, as always, Rimmer missed this as he turned his back to pull down the blackboard he'd prepared the day before. As always his schedule wasn't there. What was there was a crudely-drawn cartoon of a man making love to a kangaroo, wearing hugely exaggerated footwear covered in brown spit, and underneath, in the same crude hand, 'Old Tobacco Boots goes down under!'

  Nobody laughed. Rimmer looked round at a sea of blank faces. He'd long since given up referring to the blackboard insults.

  'OK,' he said, consulting his notes, 'Today's schedule. Turner, Wilkinson: we've had a number of reports that machine 15455 is dispensing blackcurrant juice instead of chicken soup. While you're down there, Corridor 14: alpha 12 needs new Crunchie bars. Thereafter, I want you to go down to the reference library and hygienise all the headsets in the language lab. Saxon and Burroughs: continue painting the engineers' mess. And I want that finished today.

  McHullock, Schmidt, Palmer: as yesterday. Burd, Dooley, Pixon: laundrettes on East alpha 555 report no less than twenty-four driers out of commission I want them up and drying by nightfall. Also, there's an unconfirmed rumour that the cigar machine in the officers' club is nearly empty. Now, it may be nothing, but just in case: for pity's sake, stay by a phone'

  A paper dart whistled past his head.

  'OK, roll out. Lister, you're with me today.'

  The men began to shuffle out.

  'Why me?' Lister moaned.

  'Because it's your turn.'

  As always, just before the first man reached the door, Rimmer called out his team chant, which he hoped would catch on.

  'Hey, and remember: "We are tough, and we are mean. Rimmer's Z Shift gets things clean".'

  Z Shift shuffled out silently.

  ***

  Two of the three worst things that ever happened to Rimmer happened to Rimmer on this day.

  The worst thing that ever happened was, of course, his death. But that was a clear twelve hours away.

  The second worst thing that ever happened had happened thirteen months earlier and it was so horrible his subconscious had created a new sub-department to hide it from his waking thoughts. It involved a bowl of soup The third worst thing that ever happened to Rimmer happened to Rimmer shortly after ten o'clock, as he and Lister made their way towards Corridor I: gamma 755, to check, just to put Rimmer's mind at ease, that there was enough shower gel in the women's wash-room.

  At first it was Lister who had a horrible thing happen to him, as he pushed his squeaky four-wheel hygiene truck along the steel mesh floor. First Technician Petrovitch rounded the corner.

  Rimmer didn't like Petrovitch. Petrovitch, three years his junior, was his equal in rank, and leader of A Shift - the best shift. A Shift got all the plum jobs, the serious, technical work, repairing porous circuits, and, if that weren't bad enough, Petrovitch had taken and passed the astronavigation exam the exact same time Rimmer had made his claims to fishhood, and was now merely waiting for his orders to be processed before he got his gold bar and took up the rank of Astronavigation Officer, Fourth Class. Also, he was good looking, popular, charming and amiable. All in all, as far as Rimmer could see, there wasn't a single thing to like about Petrovitch.

  There'd been a wild rumour some months back that Petrovitch was a drug dealer.

  And Rimmer did whatever he could to spread it. He didn't know whether it was true, but, God, he hoped it was. Whenever he was feeling low, he entertained himself with visions of Petrovitch having his badges of rank ripped from his uniform, and being led away in manacles. Still, there was no evidence that it was true, so all Rimmer could do was keep spreading those malicious rumours, and hoping.

  'What the smeg is wrong with your bleepers? I've been trying to get hold of you for an hour,' said Petrovitch. 'Lister, the Captain wants to see you.'

  Rimmer looked dumbfounded. Why should the Captain want to see Lister? In the ordinary course of things, Lister, being a lowly Third Technician, should go the whole trip without ever meeting the Captain.

  Unless, thought Rimmer, brightening, he's in very, very deep smegola indeed. And by the slightly sick look of Lister's smile, Rimmer confidently surmised the very same thought had occurred to him.

  'Why does she want to see me?'

  'I think you know why,' said Petrovitch, his usual geniality completely absent.

  Lister dragged himself off towards the Xpress lift.

  'Oh. dear,' said Rimmer, breezily. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.' He tutted and shook his head. 'Dearie me. Dearie, dearie, dearie me.'

  Petrovitch didn't smile; he made to follow Lister, but then stopped and turned.

  'What are you doing with Lister, anyway? It's five past ten.'

  'So?' said Rimmer.

  'I thought you were taking the astronavigation exam.'

  'That's November the twenty-seventh, you square-jawed chump,' said Rimmer, with naked contempt.

  'No, it's October the twenty-seventh.'

  'I think, Petrovitch, I know when my own exam is, thank you so very, very much.'

  'My bunkmate is
taking it today.'

  'Hollerbach?'

  'Yeah. He went up at ten.'

  Rimmer's smile remained exactly where it was, while the rest of his face sagged like a bloodhound's. He looked at his watch. 10.07. He tapped it a couple of times, and walked off without saying anything.

  ***

  Rimmer arrived, breathless, back at the sleeping quarters. He skidded to a halt in front of his timetable. His eyes scanned the chart for an error. He couldn't find one. He couldn't find one for a whole two minutes. Then he froze. In his haste not to dwell on the construction of the chart, somehow he'd included two Septembers.

  'August, September, September, October, November', ran the new Rimmerian calendar.

  How could I have included September twice, and not noticed? thought Rimmer, sucking on his fist. This is what happens when you spend most of your social lifie not existing.

  He looked at his watch. 10.35. He'd missed thirty-five minutes of a three-hour exam.

  A strange calmness overtook him.

  Well, he could still get to the exam by, say, 10.45.

  If he kept his answers short and pertinent, it was still more than possible to pass. So far, so good. What would be slightly trickier was cramming a whole month's revision into minus thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five minutes was hard enough, but minus thirty-five minutes-well, you'd have to be Dr Who.

  As always at crisis times in his life, Rimmer asked himself the question: 'What would Napoleon do?'

  Something French, he thought. Probably munch on a croissant, and decide to invade Russia. Not really relevant, he decided, in this particular scenario. What, then ... what, then?

  The seconds ticked away. Then it came to him. He knew exactly what he must do.

  Cheat.

  Rimmer took out a black felt tip pen, stripped off his shirt and trousers, and began work. He had, he estimated, twenty minutes to copy as much of his textbooks onto his body as humanly possible.

  SIXTEEN

  Lister had never been up to the Drive Room before.

  It was enormous.

  Hundreds of people scurried along the network of gantries stretching above him.

  Banks of programmers in white officers' uniforms clacked away at computer keyboards, in front of multi-coloured flashing screens arranged in a series of horseshoe shapes around the massive chamber. Skutters, the small service droids with three-fingered clawed heads, joined to their motorised bases by triple-jointed necks, whizzed between the various computer terminals, transporting sheets of data.

  Occasionally a voice could be heard above the unrelenting jabber of hundreds of people talking at once.

  'Stop-start oA3! Stop-start oA3! Thank you! At last! Stop-start oA4! Is anybody listening to me?!'

  Lister followed Petrovitch as he zigzagged through a maze of towering columns of identical hard disc drives and people pushed past them, desperate to get back to wherever they had to get back to.

  Up above them, Holly's bald-headed digitalized face dominated the whole of the ceiling, patiently answering questions and solving quandaries, while dispensing relevant data updates from other areas of the ship.

  Through the computer hardware Lister caught sight of Kochanski, expertly clicking away at a computer keyboard, happily going about her business, just as if nothing had happened. Lister didn't exactly expect her to be sobbing guiltily onto her keyboard. But smiling? Actively smiling? It was obscene. Lister remembered reading in one of Rimmer's Strange Science mags that an Earth biochemist claimed he'd isolated the virus which caused Love. According to him, it was an infectious germ which was particularly virulent for the first few weeks, but then, gradually, the body recovered.

  Looking at Kochanski merrily tippy-tapping away, Lister was inclined to believe the biochemist had a point. She'd shrugged him off like a bout of dysentery.

  She'd recovered from him like he was a dose of 'flu. She was fine and dandy.

  Back to normal.

  They climbed the gantry steps to the Admin level, where glass-fronted offices wound round the entire chamber, like the private boxes which skirted the London Jets Zero-Gee football stadium.

  Five minutes later they arrived outside the Captain's office. Petrovitch knocked, and they went in.

  'Lister, sir,' said Petrovitch, and left.

  The office looked like it had been newly-burgled and freshly-bombed. The Captain was mumbling into a phone buried beneath gigantic reams of computer print-out, surrounded by open ledgers and piles of memoranda.

  Lister shifted uncomfortably and waited for her to finish her call.

  'Well, you see he does exactly that,' finished the Captain, and before the phone had even hit its holder, and without looking up, she said: 'Where's the cat?'

  'What?' said Lister.

  'Where's the cat?' repeated the Captain.

  'What cat?'

  'I'm going to ask you one last time,' she said, finally looking up: 'Where is the cat?'

  'Let me get this straight,' said Lister. 'You think I know something about a cat, right?'

  'Don't be smart.' The Captain was actually smiling with anger. 'Where is it?'

  'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'Lister, not only are you so stupid you bring an unquarantined animal aboard.

  Not only that,' she paused, 'you have your photograph taken with the cat, and send it to be processed in the developing lab. So, let's make this the last chorus. Where's the cat?'

  'What cat?'

  'This one,' she shouted, pushing a photograph into Lister's face. 'This goddam cat!'

  Lister looked at the photograph of himself sitting in what were unmistakably his sleeping quarters, holding what was unmistakably a small black cat 'Oh, that cat.'

  'Where'd you get it? Mimas?'

  'Miranda. When we stopped for supplies.'

  'Don't you realise it could be carrying anything? Anything. What were you thinking of?'

  'I just felt sorry for her. She was wandering the streets. Her fur was all hanging off...'

  'Her fur was hanging off? Oh, this gets better and better.' Two of the Captain's phones were ringing, but she didn't answer them.

  'And she had this limp, and she'd walk a few steps, then let out this scream, then walk a few more steps and scream again.'

  'Well, now I'm screaming, Lister. I want that cat, and I want it now! D'you think we have quarantine regulations just for the hell of it? Just to make life a bit more unbearable? Well, we don't. We have them to safeguard the crew. A spaceship is a closed system. A contagious disease has nowhere else to go.

  Everybody gets it.'

  'She's better now. Fur's grown back, I've fixed her leg. She's fine.'

  'It's impossible to tell. You got the cat from a space colony. There are diseases out there, new diseases. The locals develop an immunity. Now, get that cat down to the lab. Double-time.'

  'Sir...'

  'You're still here, Lister.

  'What are you going to do with the cat?'

  'I'm going to have it cut up, and run tests on it.'

  'Are you going to put it back together when you've finished?'

  'The Captain closed her eyes.

  'You're not, are you?' persisted Lister. 'You're going to kill it.'

  'Yes, Lister, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill it.

  'Well, with respect, sir.' said Lister, taking a cigarette from his hat band, 'what's in it for the cat?'

  Lister smiled. The Captain didn't.

  'Lister, give me the cat.'

  Lister shook his head.

  'We'll find it, anyway.'

  'No, you won't.'

  'Let me put it like this' - the Captain reclined back in her chair -'give me the frigging cat.'

  'Look, she's fine, there's nothing wrong with her.'

  'Give me the cat.'

  'Apart from anything else, she's pregnant.'

  'She's what? I want that cat.'

  Lister shook his head again.

  'Do you want t
o go into stasis for the rest of the jag and lose three years' wages?'

  'No.'

  'Do you want to hand over the cat?'

  'No.'

  'Choose.'

  SEVENTEEN

  11.05

  Rimmer hurried out of the lift and down Corridor 4: delta 799 towards the exam hall.

  Under his high-neck zipped flightsuit he had everything he needed to pass the exam. On his right thigh, in tiny script, were all the basic principles of quantum mechanics. Time dilation formulae covered his right calf. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle took up most of his left leg, while porous circuit theory and continuum hypotheses filled his forearms.

  Rimmer had never done anything illegal before. He hadn't so much as got a parking ticket on his home moon, Io. He'd never even fiddled his expenses, which, quite frankly, even the Captain did.

  He'd never cheated; never. Not because he was of high moral character, but simply because he was scared. He was terrified of being caught.

  He walked into the clinically white exam room. The adjucating officer glanced at his watch and nodded towards the one empty desk, where an exam paper lay face-down, and returned to reading his novel.

  He knows, thought Rimmer, his face glowing like Jupiter's Red Spot. He knows from the way I walked into the room. He knows.

  Rimmer ducked his body low into his chair, so just his head remained above the table top, and peered past the backs of the examinees in front of him, waiting for the adjudicator to make his move. Waiting for him to leap forward and rip off his flimsy flightsuit. exposing his shame: his illustrated body, Rimmer's cheating frame.

  For a full ten minutes Rimmer watched the officer quietly reading his novel. All right, thought Rimmer, play it like that. The old cat and mouse game.

  Another ten minutes went by. Still the officer taunted him by doing nothing.

  Nothing.

  At 11.45 Rimmer decided the adjudicator didn't know, and it was safe to begin.

  Safe to ... cheat!

  He turned over the exam paper and started to read the questions. Something appeared to be sucking oxygen out of the room, and he seemed to have to take two breaths to his usual one, just to keep conscious.