by Grant Naylor
Buli-BUB.
Buli-BUB.
Buli-BUB!
His heartbeat was deafening; when someone turned round, he was convinced they were going to say: 'Can you keep your heartbeat down a bit? I'm trying to concentrate.'
'ASTRO NAVIGATION EXAMINATION -PART ONE,' he read. Then underneath: ' ANSWER FIVE QUESTIONS ONLY.'
Just five, thought Rimmer. I'm not going to make that mistake again.
'QUESTION ONE.'
As he looked at the question, the letters seemed to come off the page and sway, out of focus, like distant figures disappearing in a heat haze on a desert road.
He blinked. Two tears of sweat ran past his eyes and tumbled onto the page. He ran his hands through his hair and wiped the perspiration off his face with his palms, then blinked twice more, and brought the question into focus.
'0 Ifst-Y'#§f(OM' ngE(E)§ Ifst-Y#§f(ng(E)§ Ifst OM' oo – As'
Oh God, thought Rimmer, I've forgotten how to read.
He blinked several more times.
'DESCRIBE, USING FORMULAE WHERE APPROPRIATE, THE APPLICATION OF DE BURGH'S THEORY OF THERMAL INDUCTION IN POROUS CIRCUITRY.'
That was his left forearm! The answer was there! The formulae were there! All he had to do was slide back his sleeve, copy it all down and he was one-fifth of his way into that officers' club.
He looked at the other questions. There were three others he could do. And he could do them perfectly. Eighty per cent. He only needed forty! There was a whole hour to go.
HE WAS AN OFFICER!!
Arnold J. Rimmer, Astronavigation Officer, Fourth Class. Already, in his mind's eye, ticker-tape was cascading from rooftops as he sat in the open-top limousine waving to the adoring Ionian crowds.
He snapped out of it. No time for complacency. Fifteen minutes per question. It was enough.
Let's go-o-o-o-o! he screamed, silently. He glanced nonchalantly around. No one was watching.
Casually he rested his hand on his wrist, and slowly slid back the sleeve. The adjudicating officer turned a page in his novel.
Rimmer looked down at his arm.
An inky black blob stared up at him.
His body had betrayed him. It had conspired to drench him in sweat; it had dissolved his best chance ever of getting that glimmering gold bar.
He looked at his right hand. The answer to the question 'Describe, Using Formulae Where Appropriate, the Application of De Burgh's Theory of Thermal Induction in Porous Circuitry' was there, somewhere, hiding in the black blobby mess.
Rimmer decided to take a chance in a million. It was the longest of long shots.
With careful precision he placed his inky hand on the answer sheet and pressed as hard as he could. Maybe, just maybe, when he removed his hand, his tiny copperplate writing would reassemble itself legibly on the page.
He removed his hand.
There in the middle of the page was a perfect palm print, with a single middle finger raised in mocking salute.
An idiotic grin spread across Rimmer's face as he picked up his pen and signed the bottom of the page.
Slowly he clambered to his feet, saluted the adjudicating officer, and woke up on a stretcher on his way to the medical bay.
EIGHTEEN
Petrovitch led the way and Lister followed, flanked by two unnecessary security guards. They stopped at the door to the stasis booth.
'Last chance, Lister. Where's the cat?'
Lister just shook his head.
'Three years in stasis for some stupid flea-bitten moggy? Are you crazy?'
Lister wasn't crazy. Far from it.
He'd first heard about the stasis punishment from Petersen. Now that the booths were no longer used for interstellar travel, their only official function was penal. Lister had spent six long, boring evenings, shortly after Kochanski had finished with him, poring over the three-thousand-page ship regulation tome, and had finally tracked down the obscure clause.
The least serious crime for which stasis was a statutory punishment was breaking quarantine regulations. When Red Dwarf had stopped for supplies at Miranda, he'd spent the last afternoon of his three-day ship leave and all his wages buying the smallest, healthiest animal with the best pedigree he could find. For three thousand dollarpounds he'd purchased a black long haired cat with the show name Frankenstein'. He'd had her inoculated for every known disease, to ensure that she didn't actually endanger the crew, and smuggled her aboard under his hat.
A week later he started to panic. The ship's security system still hadn't detected Frankenstein's presence.
It was tricky.
On the one hand he wanted to get caught with the cat, but he didn't want the cat to get caught and dissected. Eventually he hit on the idea of having his photograph taken with the cat, and sending off the film to be developed in the ship's lab.
Finally, and much to his relief, they'd caught him Three years in stasis was everything he'd hoped for. OK, his wages would be suspended, but it was a small price to pay for walking into a stasis booth, and walking out a subjective instant later in orbit around the Earth.
He'd hidden Frankenstein in the ventilation system. The system was so vast she would be impossible to catch, and also provided her with access for foraging raids to the ship's food stores.
So, all in all, as Lister stepped into the stasis booth, he was feeling pretty pleased with himself, or, at least, as pleased as anyone could expect to feel who was actually as miserable as hell.
Petrovitch gave him one last, last chance to surrender the cat, which Lister naturally refused.
As the cold metal door slammed behind him, he sat on the cold smoothness of the booth's bench and exhaled. Suddenly a warm, green light flooded the chamber, and Lister became a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero.
He ceased, temporarily, to exist.
NINETEEN
20.17
A red warning light failed to go on in the Drive Room, beginning a chain of events which would lead, in a further twenty-three minutes, to the total annihilation of the entire crew of Red Dwarf.
20.18
Rimmer was released from the medical bay, and told to take twenty-four hours' sick leave. He was halfway along Corridor 5: delta 333, on his way back to his sleeping quarters, when he changed his mind and decided to spend the evening in a stasis booth.
The medical orderly had informed him of the Lister situation, and that just about capped a perfect day in the life of Arnold J. Rimmer. On top of everything, Lister was about to gain three years on him. By the time they got back to Earth, Lister would be exactly the same age, while he would he three years older. Even with his illicit stasis-boothing, Rimmer could only hope to snatch three months; four at best. So Lister would gain two-and-three-quarter whole years, and he was already younger than Rimmer to start with. It seemed totally unfair.
To cheer himself up, he decided to spend the evening in a state of non-being, and vowed to begin work in the morning on an appeal against Lister's sentence, so he could get him out of the stasis booth and make him start ageing again.
20.23
Navigation officer Henri DuBois knocked his black cona coffee with four sugars over his computer console keyboard. As he mopped up the coffee, he noticed three red. warning blips on his monitor screen, which he wrongly assumed were the result of his spillage.
20.24
Rimmer got out of the lift on the main stasis floor and made a decision which, in retrospect, he would regret forever.
He decided to comb his hair.
20.31
The cadmium II coolant system, located deep in the bowels of the engine corridors, stopped functioning.
20.36
Rimmer stood in the main wash-room on the stasis deck and combed his hair. He combed his hair in the usual way, then decided to see what it would look like if he parted it on the opposite side. It didn't look very good, so he combed it back again. He washed his hands and dried them on a paper towel. If he had left at this point and gone dire
ctly to a stasis booth, he wouldn't have died. But, instead, he was seized by one of his frequent superstition attacks.
He rolled the paper towel into a ball and decided if he could throw it directly into the disposal unit, he would eventually become an officer. He took careful aim, decided on an overarm shot, and tossed his paper ball.
It missed by eight feet.
He retrieved the paper and decided if he got it in the disposal unit three times on the run it would make up for the miss. The miss would then be struck from the superstition record, and not only would he become an officer, but within three weeks he would get to have sex with a beautiful woman.
Standing directly above the disposal unit, he dropped and retrieved the paper ball three times. Combing his hair one last time, he left the wash-room, idly wondering just who the beautiful girl might be, and headed for a stasis booth 20.40
The cadmium II core reached critical mass and unleashed the deadly power of a neutron bomb. The ship remained structurally undamaged, but in 0.08 seconds everyone on the Engineering Level was dead.
20.40 and 2.7 seconds.
Rimmer placed his hand on the wheel lock of stasis booth 1344. He heard what sounded like a nuclear wind roaring down the corridor towards him. It was, in fact, a nuclear wind roaring down the corridor towards him.
What now? he thought, rather irritably, and was suddenly hit full in the face by a nuclear explosion.
0.57 seconds before he expired, Rimmer released he was going to die. His life didn't flash before him. He didn't think of his parents, or his brothers or his home He didn't think of the failed exams or the wasted time in the stasis booths. He didn't even think about his one, brief love affair with Yvonne McGruder, the ship's female boxing champion.
What he did, in fact, think of was a bowl of soup. A bowl of gazpacho soup.
Then he died.
Then everyone died.
TWENTY
Deep in the belly of Red Dwarf, safely scaled in the cargo hold, Frankenstein nibbled happily from a box of fish paste, while four tiny sightless kittens suckled noisily beneath her.
Part Two
Alone in a Godless universe, and out of Shake'n'Vac
ONE
The hatch to the stasis booth zuzz-zungged open, and a green 'Exit now' sign flashed on and off above Lister's head.
Holly's digitalized faced appeared on the eight-foot-square wall monitor.
'It is now safe for you to emerge from stasis.'
'I only just got in.'
'Please proceed to the Drive Room for debriefing.' Holly's face melted into the smooth greyness of the blank screen.
'But I only just got in,' insisted Lister.
He walked down the empty corridor towards the Xpress lift. What was that smell?
A musty smell. Like an old attic. He knew that smell. It was just like the smell of his grandmother's cellar. He'd never noticed it before.
And what was that noise? A kind of hissing buzz The airconditioning? Why could he hear the airconditioning? He'd never heard it before. He suddenly realized it wasn't what he was hearing that was odd, it was what he wasn't hearing. Apart from the white noise of the airconditioning, there was no other sound. Just the lonely squeals of his rubber soles on the corridor floor. And there was dust everywhere. Curious mounds of white dust lying in random patterns.
'Where is everybody?'
Holly projected his face onto the floor in front of Lister.
'They're dead, Dave,' he said, solemnly.
'Who is?' asked Lister, absently.
Softly: 'Everybody, Dave.'
'What?' Lister smiled.
'Everybody's dead, Dave.'
'What? Everybody?'
'Yes. Everybody's dead, Dave.
'What? Petersen?'
'Yes. They're all dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.'
'Burroughs?'
Holly sighed. 'Everybody is dead, Dave'
'Selby?'
'Yes.'
'Not Chen?'
'Gordon Bennet!' Holly snapped. 'Yes, Chen! Everybody. Everybody's dead, Dave.'
'Even the Captain?'
'YES! EVERYBODY.'
Lister squeaked along the corridor. A tic in his left cheek pulled his face into staccato smiles. He wanted to laugh. Everybody was dead. Why did he want to laugh? No, they couldn't all be dead. Not everybody. Not literally everybody.
'What about Rimmer?'
'HE'S DEAD, DAVE. EVERYBODY IS DEAD. EVERYBODY IS DEAD, DAVE. DAVE, EVERY BODY IS DEAD.' Holly tried all four words in every possible permutation, with every possible inflection, finishing with: 'DEAD, DAVE, EVERYBODY IS, EVERYBODY IS, DAVE, DEAD.'
Lister looked blankly in no particular direction, while his face struggled to find an appropriate expression.
'Wait,' he said, after a while. 'Are you telling me everybody's dead?'
Holly rolled his eyes, and nodded.
The enormous Drive Room echoed with silence. The banks of computers on autopilot whirred about their business.
'Holly,' Lister's small voice resonated in the giant chamber, 'what are these piles of dust?'
The dust lay on the floors, on chairs, everywhere, all arranged in small, neat dunes. Lister dipped his finger in one and tasted it.
'That,' said Holly from his huge screen, 'is Console Executive Imran Sanchez.'
Lister's tongue hung guiltily from his mouth, and he wiped the white particles which had once formed part of Console Executive Imran Sanchez onto his jacket cuff.
'So, what happened?'
Holly told him about the cadmium II radiation leak; how the crew had been wiped out within seconds; how he'd headed the ship pell-mell out of the solar system, to avoid spreading nuclear contamination; and how he'd had to keep Lister in stasis until the radiation had reached a safe background level.
'So ... How long did you keep me in stasis?'
'Three million years,' said Holly, as casually as he could.
Lister acted as if he hadn't heard. Three million years? It had no meaning. If it had been thirty years, he would have thought 'What a long time.' But three million years. Three million years was iust ... stupid.
He wandered over to the chair opposite the console he'd seen Kochanski operate.
'So, Krissie's dead,' he said, staring at the hummock of dust. 'I always...'
His voice tailed away.
He tried to remember her face. He tried to remember the pinball smile.
'Well, if it's any consolation,' said Holly, 'If she had survived, the age difference would be insurmountable. I mean, you're twenty-four, she's three million: it takes a lot for a relationship with that kind of age gap to work.'
Lister wasn't listening. 'I always thought we'd get back together. I, ah, had this sort of plan that one day I'd have enough money to buy a farm on Fiji. It's cheap land there, and, in a half-assed kind of way, I always pictured she'd be there with me.'
This was getting morbid. Holly tried to lighten the atmosphere.
'Well,' he said, 'she wouldn't be much use to you on Fiji now.
'No,' said Lister.
'Not unless it snowed,' said Holly, 'and you needed something to grit the path with.'
Lister screwed up his face in distaste. 'Holly!'
'Sorry. I've been on my own for three million years. I'm just used to saying what I think.'
For some time now, well, the last two hundred thousand years to be exact, Holly had grown increasingly concerned about himself.
For a computer with an IQ of six thousand, it seems to him he was behaving in a more and more erratic way.
In fact, he'd long suspected he'd gone a bit peculiar. Just as a bachelor who spends too much time on his own gradually develops quirks and eccentricities, so a computer who spends three million years alone in Deep Space can get, well, set in his ways. Become quirky. Go a little bit ... odd.
Holly decided not to burden Lister with this anxiety, and hoped his oddness would eventually sort itself out now he had a bit of company.
&nbs
p; Another slight concern which he tried to put to the back of his RAM was that, for a computer with an IQ of six thousand, there was a rather alarming amount of knowledge he seemed to have forgotten. It wasn't, on the whole, important things, but was nonetheless fairly disturbing.
He knew, for instance, that Isaac Newton was a famous physicist, but he couldn't remember why.
He couldn't remember the capital of Luxembourg.
He could recall pi to thirty thousand digits, but he couldn't say for absolute certain whether port was on the left side, and starboard on the right, or whether it was the other way round.
Who knocked Swansea City out of the FA Cup in 1967? He used to know. It was a mystery now.
Obviously none of this missing information was absolutely vital for the smooth running of a mining ship three million years out into Deep Space. But technically he was supposed to know more-or-less everything and, frankly, there were some worrying gaps. He could remember, for instance, that in the second impression, 1959 publication of Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov, printed in Great Britain by the Shenval Press (London, Hertford and Harrow), page 60 was far and away the dirtiest page. But was Nabakov German or Russian? It totally eluded him.
Maybe it wasn't important. Of course it wasn't important.
Still, it was for Holly a source of perturbation.
It's a source of perturbation, he thought. Then he wondered whether there was such a word as 'perturbation', or whether he'd just made it up. He didn't know that either. Oh, it was hopeless.
***
Lister sat in the empty Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar and poured a triple whisky into his double whisky, then topped it up with a whisky. Absently, he lit the filter end of a cigarette and tried to assimilate all the information Holly had thrown at him.
Everybody was dead.
Everybody.
He'd been in stasis three million years.
Three million years.
Since one drunken night outside the 'Marie Lloyd' off Regent Street, London, every step he'd taken had led him further and further from home. First it was Mimas, then Miranda, and now he was three million years away. Three million years out into Deep Space. Further than any human being had ever been before.
