Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

by Grant Naylor

  Click.

  Eeeeeeeeee. Another octave higher.

  A green light.

  The tenth switch.

  Click.

  The console monitor above Lister's head exploded, and vomited shards of glass into the smoke.

  Another green light.

  The switch numbered nine,.

  Another green light.

  Eight.

  Then seven.

  And that was half way.

  Number six.

  Click.

  A red light.

  'Turn it off,' Holly said. 'Turn it off before...'

  Lister flicked it off, waited, and flicked it back on.

  Eeceeeeeeeeeeee.

  Green.

  Five to go.

  A maximum of five seconds before his purple knobbly thing was destined to fly across the room.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  Just two left. Two little switches.

  Lister wanted it to happen now. The penultimate switch.

  He didn't want to have to flick on the last one knowing.

  Knowing it would be the one to kill him. He wanted to have that slight element of surprise. But he was disappointed.

  Click.

  Green light.

  E E E E E EEEEEEEEEER

  The pitch of the screeching navicomp was now so high it was almost beyond his hearing threshold. Hardly a noise - more a feeling. A pointed squeal, a maniac sawing away at the top of his skull. Black smoke thrust its arm down his throat and started to yank out his lungs.

  Lister stared at the last switch.

  He rested his finger on it and felt its smoothness.

  Then he screamed.

  He screamed and pressed it.

  And nothing.

  Just silence.

  Then a red light, that flickered to green, then back to red.

  And then steady, steady green.

  GREEN.

  There was a huge BOOM!

  Followed by a second huge BOOM!

  And a third.

  And Lister realised it was his heartbeat.

  He sucked deeply at the foul, smoke-laden air. It tasted good.

  And for the second time in twenty-four hours he did the touch-up shuffle. His feet rooted to the spot, he swayed from his waist and moved his arms in counter-motion.

  He was alive.

  THIRTEEN

  The Red Dwarf Central Line tube hissed to a halt, and Lister danced out onto the platform. He had a sudden urge for chocolate - white milk chocolate, which he hadn't had since he was a kid - so he slipped a fifty pennycent bit into the machine and tugged on the drawer, but the drawer was stuck. For some reason this filled him with delight. The drawers were always stuck on station platform chocolate machines. Some things don't change. He laughed too much, then jumped on the escalator and leapt three steps at a time to catch up with Rimmer.

  They stood on the escalator. Every advert they passed, Lister sang the advertising jingle.

  'I don't know why you're so chirpy.'

  'I'm alive!'

  'But it's going to happen: I saw it happen. It just hasn't happened when we thought it would happen.'

  'Who cares? The point is: it hasn't happened.'

  'Correction: it has happened. It just hasn't happened yet.'

  'Don't let's get into that again.'

  'Lister - I saw it. I saw you die. It was you. I'm sure it was you.

  'What about the photograph? The two babies? That hasn't happened yet. Maybe none of it's going to happen.'

  'It's going to happen.'

  'It's really browning you off, isn't it, that I haven't died yet?'

  The escalator pushed them off at the top. Lister leapt over the turnstile barrier, and Rimmer walked through it.

  'No, it's not that. It's just your dunderheaded refusal to accept the pointless cruelty of existence. That's what gets my goat.'

  Lister shook his head sadly.

  When they walked into the sleeping quarters an old man was lying on Lister's bunk.

  When he smiled his age lines crinkled like wrapping paper. He raised his robotic left arm. The hand-was a metallic prosthesis, but the little finger had been customised so its top joint was a bottle opener. He used it to flick open a bottle of self-heating sake, and took a healthy swig. His white hair was plaited into three-foot long locks, and his right eye was missing. In its place was a telephoto lens, which zoomed and clicked, and focused in unison with his good eye.

  And it was quite clear the old man was Lister.

  He looked towards the door' but didn't appear to see them.

  The watch on the future echo's good right arm emitted a series of squeaks. He turned it off and smiled. Lister made out a curious tattoo on his future self's forearm. It appeared to be burned into the flesh; some kind of formula. It was fading, but it looked like 'U = BIL'. Lister was craning closer to read it when the old man spoke.

  'So, you're here,' he said. Lister's voice, but with a slight quaver. 'I can't see you, and I can't hear you, but I know you're here. Rimmer, you're going to say it's impossible.'

  'It is impossible,' said Rimmer, 'I saw you die.'

  The old man looked, more or less, in Lister's direction. 'Hello, Dave. This is me, I mean, you. I mean, I am you. I mean, I am you as an old man. I know you're here because when I was your age I saw me at my age telling you at your age what I'm about to tell you. And you've got to tell you, too, when you get to be me.'

  'Well,' said Rimmer, 'thank heavens you've still got all your marbles.'

  'The person you saw die, Rimmer, was Bexley's son.'

  Rimmer frowned. 'Who's Bexley?'

  'I was always going to call my second son Bexley,' said Lister, 'after Jim Bexley Speed.'

  'Dave - it wasn't you that Rimmer saw in the Navicomp Chamber, it was Bexley's boy. It was your grandson.'

  Lister sat heavily into a chair. It was too much to take in. He wasn't going to die in the navicomp accident. He was going to have a son, who was also going to have a son. And so his son's son would die.

  'You have two sons,' the old Lister was saying, 'and six grandchildren.'

  'But one of them dies.'

  'Everyone dies,' said the old Lister. 'You're born, you die. The bit in between is called "Life". And you have all those times together still to come. Enjoy.'

  He smiled.

  The old man's watch went off again. 'I haven't got much time. Get your camera and go to the medical unit.'

  'What's at the medical unit?' Lister fumbled in his locker for his camera.

  Lister's older self began to grow translucent.

  'What about me?' Rimmer walked up to the bunk. 'What happens to me?'

  'He can't hear us' Rimmer - he's from the future.'

  'Ah, but if I ask you what happens to me now you'll remember it, and when you get to be him you'll be able to tell me.'

  'Brutal.' Lister grabbed the camera from his vacuum storage trunk and raced out.

  'Don't waste time. Run,' the old Lister called after him.

  'What happens to me, Old Man? Do I become an officer? Do I ever get a body again? Do we get back to Earth?'

  The old man took another swig of sake and stared, unseeing' through Rimmer's imploring face.

  'Oh, Rimmer,' he said suddenly, 'you wanted to know what happened to you.'

  'Yes! What happened to me?'

  'Come close,' the old Lister beckoned; 'Come close. Closer.'

  Rimmer inclined his ear to the old man's mouth.

  'You wanted to know your future?'

  'Yes please,' Rimmer whispered reverently, and stood on tip-toe so his ear hovered barely millimetres from the future echo's mouth.

  The old Lister breathed in deeply' then belched loudly into Rimmer's ear.

  He was still laughing when he vanished.

  ***

  Rimmer caught up with Lister just outside the medical unit. Lister was hastily fitting an instafilm into the camera.

 
A jolt rocked the ship, and Lister went crashing against a wall' dropping the film. 'Smegging hell.' He picked it up and fumbled it into the camera. 'Smeg!'

  It was upside down.

  Holly flicked up on the wall monitor.

  'Deceleration achieved! We're slowing down, dudes. We'll be below light speed in thirty-five seconds precisely.'

  'What's going to happen now? Are we going to see my funeral or something?'

  'No - we're decelerating now,' said Holly. 'The faster we were going, the more into the future the future echoes were. But since we've just started slowing down' the future echoes should get nearer to the present.'

  A baby started crying.

  Then another baby started crying.

  Standing in the doorway of the medical unit was another Lister - more or less the same age Lister was now. He was wearing a white surgical gown. And in his arms were two babies wrapped in silver thermal blankets.

  'I can't see you, and all that guff,' Lister's future echo said, 'but I'd like you to meet your twin sons. This is Jim, and this is Bexley.'

  Lister brought them into focus in the viewfinder-, and rested his finger on the camera trigger.

  'Say "cheese", boys.' The future echo struck a pose and grinned.

  The two babies wailed louder than ever.

  Click.

  The future echoes faded away.

  The camera ejected the qik-pik, and an image of Lister holding two babies in silver blankets slowly coloured into focus.

  Lister turned, and started to walk back to the sleeping quarters. Rimmer followed him. 'How are you supposed to get two babies when we don't have a woman on board?'

  'I dunno,' Lister grinned, 'but it's going to be a lot of fun finding out.'

  FOURTEEN

  Captain Yvette Richards ran her fingers through the bristles of her crew cut, and craned forward to look at the spectrascope of the sun they were approaching.

  It was perfect. She let out a Texan yelp.

  'We got it!'

  Flight Coordinator Elaine Schuman leaned over her shoulder and peered at the console. 'It's a supergiant?'

  'You betcha!' said Richards, and yelped again.

  'Time to celebrate,' said Schuman.

  Kryten, the service mechanoid, handed round styrofoam cups of dehydrated champagne, and topped them up with water.

  The eight-woman, two-man crew yelped and cheered and partied, while Kryten handed round more champagne and irradiated caviare nibblets, which he'd been saving specially.

  It had taken the crew of Nova 5 six months to find a blue supergiant - a star teetering on the edge of its final phase in the right quadrant of the right galaxy. Another month, and they would have ruined the whole campaign. They certainly felt they had good reason to celebrate.

  Sipping her champagne Kirsty Fantozi, the star demolition engineer, started programming the nebulon missile. It had to explode at just the right moment to trigger off the reaction in the star's core which would push it into supernova stage. A star in supernova would light up the entire galaxy for over a month, giving off more energy than the Earth's sun could in ten billion years. It would be a hell of a bang.

  One undetected bug in Fantozi's programming could ruin everything. Not only did she have to push the star into supernova, she had to time it so the light from the explosion would reach Earth at exactly the right moment. The right moment was the same moment as the light from the other one hundred and twenty-seven supergiants, which were also being induced into supernovae, reached Earth.

  For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight.

  And the hundred and twenty-eight supernovae would spell out a message.

  And this would be the message:

  'COKE ADDS LIFE!'

  For five whole weeks, wherever you were on Earth, the huge tattoo would be branded across the day and night skies.

  Honeymooners in Hawaii would stand on the peak of Mauna Kea, gazing at sunsets stamped with the slogan. Commuters in London, stuck in traffic jams, would peer through the grey drizzle and gape at the Cola constellation. The few primitive tribes still untouched by civilisation in the jungles of South America would look up at the heavens, and certainly not think about drinking Pepsi.

  The cost of this single, three-word ad in star writing across the universe would amount to the entire military budget of the USA for the whole of history.

  So, ridiculous though it was, it was still a marginally more sensible way of blowing trillions of dollarpounds.

  And, the Coke executives were assured by the advertising executives at Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi and Saachi, it would put an end to the Cola war forever. Guaranteed. Pepsi would be buried

  OK, it wasn't wonderful, ecologically speaking. OK, it involved the destruction of a hundred and twenty-eight stars, which otherwise would have lasted another twenty-five million years or so. OK, when the stars exploded they would gobble up three or four planets in each of their solar systems And, OK, the resulting radiation would last long past the lifetime of our own planet.

  But it sure as hell would sell a lot of cans of a certain fizzy drink Fantozi finished the program and fired the nebulon missile off into the heart of the star. She finished her styrofoam cup of champagne and flicked on her intercom.

  'Let's turn this son-of-a-goit around and go home.'

  The nose cone of Nova 5 slowly swung around to begin the jag back to Earth.

  ***

  The seven crew members who were in stasis didn't survive the crash.

  As the ship bellied onto the cratered surface of the ice clad moon, it caught the edge of a jagged precipice which ripped open the port side like a key on a sardine can, and the stasisees spewed out into the deadly methane atmosphere.

  Captain Richards, who'd taken the first three-month watch along with Schuman and Fantozi, had been playing solo squash when Kryten had dropped in to the leisure suite to inform her politely that the ship's steering system had gone all cockamamie, and the computer had gone doo-lally.

  She'd raced up to the Drive Room to find chaos. The computer was reciting fifteenth-century French poetry, and the steering system was on fire.

  'What in hell is happening?'

  'Étoilette,je te vois ...' the computer said soothingly.

  Kryten sprayed the steering system with a portable extinguisher. 'I don't understand what's going on, Miss Yvette.'

  'Schuman! Fantozi!' Richards barked into the intercom. 'Get in here - we're in deep smeg!'

  'It's a complete mystery,'. said Kryten.

  'Que la lune trait à soi ...'

  'One minute he was fine,' Kryten shook his head, 'the next he was acting like this.'

  Richards tore at the panel housing to engage the back-up computer.

  'Nicolette est avec toi ...'

  'I mean, if I'd known he was going to go mad on us, I wouldn't have bothered cleaning him.'

  'Say what, Kryten?'

  'I mean, what is the point of treating him to a complete spring-clean. polishing all his bits and bobs with beeswax, and scrubbing his terminals with soapy water, if he's going to go all peculiar?'

  'You cleaned the computer?'

  'What? Can't you tell? He's absolutely sparkling. Just look inside.'

  Richards peered into the computer's circuit board casing. Foaming, soapy water bubbled and smoked beneath the gleaming' newly-polished innards.

  'M'amiette a le blond poil,' the computer gurgled' and blew soap bubbles out of its voice simulation unit.

  'Kryten - did you clean the back-up computer too?'

  Kryten look away modestly.

  'Did you, Kryten?'

  'Please' Miss Yvette - I don't want thanks.'

  'Did you?' She grabbed him roughly by his shoulders.

  'The only thanks I need is knowing that you appreciate a job well done.' His lipless mouth twi
sted into a plastic grin.

  Schuman burst into the Drive Room, wearing a towel, rat-tails of wet hair bouncing behind her.

  'What's happening?'

  Fantozi raced past her and up to the fizzling flight console. Her eyes darted over the digital read-outs. She typed quickly on the old-fashioned five-button keyboard.

  'There's no way in!' She tried again. 'We can't get manual - the flight console won't let us in!'

  'Well, it should be working one hundred and ten per cent,' Kryten said; 'it's even cleaner than the computers.'

  Nova dug a three and a half mile smoking furrow like a giant, twisted grin in the icy surface of the moon, and finally came to rest in two separate pieces at the bottom of a mountain range. The red-hot metal of the hull screamed and hissed, warped and twisted in the cruel suddenness of its icy bath. Gradually it stopped protesting, and with a sigh surrendered to its final resting place.

  Silence.

  ***

  Kryten looked down at his legs. They were thirty feet away, at the other end of the Drive Room. Nova 5 tilted like a dry-ski slope. He dragged his torso down the incline' over to the body of Yvette Richards. Blood pumped from a gash in her thigh, and her leg was twitching involuntarily. She was breathing.

  Just.

  Kryten looked down at the mess of wires that were hanging out of the end of his torso, located one he didn't need very much, yanked it out, and tied it in a tourniquet round the top of her thigh.

  Richards' eyes blinked open. 'Is everyone OK?'

  Fantozi was groaning under a pile of debris. Kryten hauled his half-body to the mound of twisted metal, and started pulling her out. Both her legs were broken.

  Kryten made rudimentary splints out of his hip rods, and bound them with wires torn from his midriff.

  'Thanks, Kryten.' Her mouth split into a dry smile, then she passed out Schuman crawled in from the corridor, her ankle twisted almost backwards' with cuts on her face and hands. 'Hey, Richards,' she grinned, 'nice landing. Remind me never to lend you my car.'

  Kryten lugged what was left of himself over to Schuman and, without warning, snapped her twisted ankle back into place. She screamed and punched him in the head.

  'We've lost the others' - Richards was looking at the security cameras -'and half the ship. We've still got the stores and the medical unit. And, since we're all still breathing, we can assume the atmosphere generator is still operational and the crash seal held. I guess Kryten hadn't gotten round to cleaning it yet.'