by Mark Roman
“Isambard Kingdom Brunel at your service, the greatest civil engineer ever.” He lifted his top hat in greeting.
“They’re just ordinary crates. A magnificent, precision-engineered robot such as your good self need not trouble himself with mere crates! Come, let me show you some glorious engineering! The base is our pride.” The cart carrying the great Victorian engineer started off in the direction of the base, ready to lead the way. Meanwhile, Dura inched up behind the giant inspector robot and, valiantly, but unsuccessfully, tried to push him in the same direction. His caterpillar drive spun furiously in the soft sand, but the huge robot did not budge an inch.
Brunel sighed. “As an experienced site inspector you will know that every building project, large or small, has surplus items. Usually the workers flog them off at knock-down prices to earn themselves a little beer money. But our workers are honest and true. Hence the crates remain here, unopened, unused, unsold.”
InspectaBot stood firm.
“Well, it’s possible that some items have yet to be fitted,” conceded Brunel. “You’ll have to ask site foreman bot, Tude, about that.”
Dura’s caterpillar track spun ever faster as the little robot continued its efforts to push the huge robot away from the crates.
“Of course, of course. I’ll make a note of that on my clipboard.” Brunel patted his suit, as though trying to locate the misplaced clipboard.
InspectaBot turned, switched his flashing light from yellow to blue, and took off towards Botany Base, removing Dura’s sole means of support and leaving him in a heap in the sand.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel sighed as he watched Dura struggling to get up.
Then he shot off after the receding figure of InspectaBot 360.
13. Tarquin the Spotter
To his delight, Tarquin Brush found himself alone in the family cabin. His parents, Brian and Delphinia, were out packing their precious laboratory glassware for transfer to the surface, while his siblings, Gavin and Tracey, were probably up to mischief somewhere on board.
“Quality ‘me’ time”, he said to Mr Snuggles who was gently rotating about his centre of gravity in the middle of the room. The robot was holding an empty can of Stallion, picked from many drifting around the spaceship, and mimicking the Commander’s drinking action. Every now and then he would broadcast recordings of the Commander’s deep, croaking belches.
After locking the cabin door Tarquin opened his flaptop, pulled on his headphones and patched himself into the spaceship’s main server. Although only ten years old, he had managed to hack into the server within the first week of the voyage. Since then, he had plundered the ship’s archived CCTV images from all the on-board cameras. Most of it was deadly dull, such as two hours of Miss Leach explaining the merits of the Garter knitting stitch to her SmartFridge. Even the fridge’s rote responses of ‘really’ and ‘you don’t say’ had started to sound jaded before Tarquin fast-forwarded through to the juicier stuff.
And some of the recordings had been juicy indeed. There had been Penny Smith’s murder. He had seen it all. Every gruesome detail, replayed almost nightly in a recurring nightmare. The eyes of the murderer were still etched into his memory. Out of fear, he hadn’t told anyone what he had heard and what he had seen. And then there were the screams of former Mission Commander Chad Lionheart during his fatal ‘accident’. The young boy still heard those screams in his nightmares and saw the shadowy figure that briefly hovered over the body before drifting away.
Now, as he watched the earlier CCTV footage from the cockpit, he shrugged off his fears and listened to Willie Warner talking to himself about his epic discovery. Tarquin became more and more gripped. He turned the sound up so as not to miss a word. When the scene came to an end with Willie’s exit from the cockpit, Tarquin sat back, his mouth in an ‘O’ shape.
“Life on Mars!” he muttered in awe. He turned to his lazily spinning robot. “There are huge aliens down on Mars, Mr Snuggles. What do you say to that?”
Mr Snuggles waited for his rotation to bring himself into the same orientation as his maker before releasing a monster Dugdale-burp and saying, “The chuffin’ dog’s bollocks!”
14. Don’t Mention the Door
By the time HarVard’s holographic cart had reached the base, InspectaBot 360 was already inspecting. He had climbed a tall stack of drainage pipes and was examining the walls and roof of the BioDome. Then, as his eye stalk continued to scan the outside of the building, something stole his attention. The eye came to a sudden stop and zoomed in on the base’s front entrance, or rather, where the base’s front entrance was supposed to be. For, instead of a class III airlock, with pressurized seals and heavy opening wheel, there was ... nothing. Just a large, gaping hole. Gotcha, the inspector said to himself.
Like a panther pouncing on its prey, or a traffic warden espying an illegally parked vehicle, he leapt off the pipes, sending them cascading down a slope, and headed straight for the entrance. His intuition told him he was going to have a field day with this item alone but there was more amiss here than the absence of a couple of doors. Had he been capable of smiling, he would have beamed from ear to ear.
Laser range-finders on, InspectaBot set to measuring the frame, lintel, edging, neoprene seals, and threshold strip. Each measurement was checked against the base’s door-detail blueprints. As he worked, his yellow light flashed and his loudspeaker emitted a “Tut, tut” sound.
HarVard’s cart finally arrived, skidding to a halt right behind the inspector. “I can explain everything,” said his new avatar which, under certain lighting conditions, might have looked a bit like Basil Fawlty.
InspectaBot turned his bullet head.
“Name’s Fazil Balti, hotel proprietor,” said HarVard’s holograph with a sycophantic bow and smile.
InspectaBot turned and pointed at the gaping hole where the airlock was supposed to be.
“I know what you’re thinking,” continued Balti. “There should be a door there. Those robots, eh? Tch-tch. What are they like? Useless, completely useless. I’ll get onto it right away.”
“Uninhabitable?” Balti looked aghast. “Uninhabitable? Nonsense. There could be huge pockets of air in there where a human might survive for hours. Maybe days.”
InspectaBot turned back and continued inspecting.
At that moment, Dura arrived, his motors murmuring their clear need of a recharge, but otherwise seemingly unaffected by his recent fall.
Fazil turned to him and said in a stage whisper, “Ah, Dura. Whatever you do, don’t mention the door. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.”
Dura looked puzzled, but said nothing. Instead he watched InspectaBot working. It was an impressive sight – such doggedness, such precision, such attention to detail. It reminded him that, one day, he hoped to be upgraded to an inspector.
“What?” asked Fazil, looking totally mystified and indicating the doorway with his hand as though there could not possibly be anything wrong with it.
“Too small? Surely there’s some mistake.”
Fazil’s goggle-eyes looked from the inspector, to Dura, and then back again. “Are you sure you have the right plans?”
A cunning smirk flitted across the hotel
proprietor’s face. “Ah, that would explain it. Wrong plans.” He grinned. “I’m afraid you can’t continue if you have the wrong plans. So, if you’d just issue us a certificate and be on your way. Thank you. Good day.” His arm indicated the direction away from the base.
InspectaBot’s processors considered this for a long time as his decision-circuits prevaricated.
Fazil shook his head, a smug smile planted on his face. He pointed at a sign above the door lintel. The name “Botany Base” was there, engraved into the lintel in fine Roman lettering. However, two additional letters had been inexpertly painted in front of the first word: an ‘R’ and an ‘o’.
“See? This is Robotany Base. You must have the wrong plans. An easy mistake to make. Are you sure you’re on the right planet?”
InspectaBot 360 stared at Fazil for a long time as he calculated and computed and passed the data through his logic circuits. Lights on his chest panel played out various patterns, like a penny arcade machine. Finally, he transmitted,
Fazil looked dumbstruck.
“Yes, yes, very well, very well,” said Fazil sighing and shaking his head.
*
Tude shot out of the base’s front entrance, his eyes bobbing on their stalks.
“Don’t mention the door,” Fazil hissed.
Tude came to a halt by the side of InspectaBot and looked up at him.
“I said, don’t mention ...”
InspectaBot shushed Balti and turned to Tude.
InspectaBot stared at them in disbelief.
Tude and Dura exchanged glances.
Dura butted in. <’Yards’, Tude. They were called ‘yards’.>
InspectaBot continued to stare, as did Balti, the latter’s eyes almost popping out of his head. “You what?” he shrieked.
InspectaBot performed a quick calculation.
Tude and Dura exchanged glances again.
*
“You idiots!!” Fazil was bawling at them, tearing at his holographic hair. “You complete and utter idiots.”
Tude and Dura stood with heads bowed, scuffing their caterpillar tracks on the dirt.
InspectaBot, yellow light flashing, was preoccupied with one of the windows. He was tapping on it with some sort of ultrasonic wand which he then scanned round the aluminium frames.
“Mr InspectaBot, your lordship,” said Balti, advancing towards him with a fawning bow. “Perhaps you would like to inspect the inside of the base now? I am sure you will find much to admire in there. And you can meet some of the fine constructorbots who have been working flat out to get this base ready for the humans.”
“Please walk this way.” HarVard’s cart, with Fazil Balti bowing and scraping and beckoning the inspector to follow, wheeled its way to the entrance. InspectaBot’s decision-making processors kicked in again. Then, with what – for a robot – counted as reluctance, he followed.
“That’s right, follow me.” The hologram entered the base’s entrance hallway and then, before he could call “Mind your head” he heard a sharp crack. Balti stopped and, with a wince, turned to look back.
InspectaBot 360 stood in the doorway, his now dented forehead up against the door lintel, his broad metal shoulders pressing against the left and right frames either side. A sound like “Grrr” was coming out of his loudspeaker.
“Can you bend down a little?” asked Fazil, with a helpful show of bending down a little.
“Yes, yes, yes,” urged Fazil. “Good idea.”
*
They had turned the oversized robot sideways and then tipped him to an angle of about 60º, pushing him along on the edge of one of his pantaloon leg-bottoms. One of his range-finders wedged itself on the inner doorframe.
InspectaBot remained quiet throughout the entire operation, possibly in a state of electronic shock. The only time he made a sound was when a protruding screw scraped a nasty gash across his shiny pate. After several minutes of struggle, including a hairy moment when Dura nearly dropped the giant robot, they had him standing upright in the entrance hall, the light atop his bullet head just an inch from the low ceiling.
Tude and Dura scuttled off down a passage to find a recharging point while InspectaBot tried to get his bearings. There was no sign of HarVard’s cart or his avatar. The last sight of him had been as Joe Hur, a distant relative of Ben, riding a Roman chariot at full gallop down another passage.
15. Hat Stands to Reason
Alone in the entrance hallway, InspectaBot turned through 360º and wondered what to inspect next. The place resembled a construction site more than a finished building. Various abandoned tools lay scattered around him, covered in Martian sand which had blown in from outside through the gaping entrance. The walls and ceiling were unplastered and unpainted. He could hear the sounds of nailing, sawing and drilling coming from distant parts of the building. Then, to his right, he spotted a pair of doors. These were the lift doors through which the first humans would step, when their space elevator arrived from Mayflower III. A ceiling-mounted camera was aimed at the doors, ready to record the historic moment. The giant robot decided this was the most important area to concentrate his attention. But as he aimed his laser rangefinders, something odd caught his oculars.
He swivelled towards it. Standing by the doorway, away from the wall, was an antique-looking, wooden hat stand, seemingly totally out of place. InspectaBot checked the Botany Base plans and inventory of items brought to Mars, but was unable to find any record of it. To minimize the banging of his h
ead on the low ceiling he shuffled towards the mysterious object. The sand crunched loudly under his rubber-soled metal feet. Switching on his yellow flashing light, he subjected the hat stand to a thorough inspection.
*
A hologram projector in the entrance hall buzzed to life not far from InspectaBot. It flashed and flickered as HarVard skimmed through his holographic wardrobe, eventually settling on Florence Nightingale.
The nurse from the Crimean War had only just materialized when her face took on a look of sheer horror and her eyes boggled as she saw what InspectaBot was up to. “Dura!” she hissed out of the side of her mouth. “Dura!”
But Dura was still plugged into a charging point in the passage and out of earshot, so HarVard switched to encrypted wireless communication instead.
InspectaBot had switched off his yellow flashing light and turned to face HarVard’s avatar.
“Florence Nightingale, at your service,” said the nurse, fanning her flushed face with a hand. “Is everything OK?”
“Oh? Is someone injured? Can I be of assistance?” Florence gave a nervous flick of her head.
“Why, it’s just a hat stand, ha, ha.” said Florence in wide-eyed bafflement.
“Ha, ha, ha,” trilled Florence gaily, fluttering her eyelashes and morphing into Jane Austen. “Cup of tea?”
The change of avatar wrong-footed InspectaBot for a moment, but only for a moment.
“Oh, Mr Inspector, you silly sausage. It’s just a hat stand. And a rather pretty one, don’t you think? It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single entrance in possession of a good fulcrum, must be in want of a hat stand.”
