Space Team: Planet of the Japes

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “What? I wasn’t,” Loren replied.

  “What the fonk are you two talking about now?” Mech demanded.

  “I don’t know, she’s the one who started saying the Munsters are real!” Cal protested. “They aren’t, by the way. I checked.”

  “What? No, I didn’t!” Loren snapped. “I don’t even know who the Munsters are!”

  “They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and—”

  “That’s the Addams Family,” Dave said.

  “Damn it! So it is.”

  Loren was about to continue arguing, but then she gritted her teeth, held them together for a few moments, and exhaled slowly. When she spoke again, her voice was more controlled. “You mentioned other people. Bad people. Scary stories that people on Earth made up to frighten kids. The Boggleman, or something?”

  “Ah! You mean the Boogeyman,” said Cal.

  “Right! And who was the other one?”

  Miz glanced up from examining her fingernails. “Hitler.”

  “That’s it!” Loren said. “The Boogeyman and Hitler. You know how you said those were made up to scare kids?”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t include Hitler in that, but go on,” said Cal.

  “Well, that’s Geronimus Krone,” Loren concluded.

  Cal nodded a little vaguely. “Oh. So, you’re saying… You’re saying… Actually, what are you saying?” He gasped and pointed to the box, suddenly wide-eyed. “Space Hitler’s in there?”

  “No! Well, I mean, yes,” said Loren. “I mean Geronimus Krone doesn’t exist. He’s a fairy tale. If kids misbehave, or won’t do what they’re told, their parents tell them he’s going to come and eat their eyes out.”

  “Jesus! That is some terrible parenting,” said Cal. “I mean, that’s going to screw up a child for the rest of their life.”

  Loren folded her arms defensively. “My parents used to say it to me all the time.”

  “The prosecution rests its case,” said Miz.

  “So, you used to misbehave, huh?” said Cal, smirking as he looked Loren up and down. “You know, bad girls are pretty hot.”

  “I was nine,” Loren pointed out.

  “Ooo-kay, then,” said Cal, his face falling. He cleared his throat and nodded to Bobo, who had been watching them in a sort of bewildered fascination. “Anyway, let’s all go back to listening to the clown guy and pretend that last conversation didn’t happen. You were saying?”

  “Geronimus Krone is no fairy tale,” Bobo said. His voice dropped into a barely audible whisper. Cal wasn’t sure if it was for effect or if he was genuinely worried that whoever was inside the box might hear him. “For months, he tore across the galaxy, carrying out atrocity after atrocity. Mass-murder. Genocide. Extinction level events that left entire planets devoid of even plant-based life.”

  “Busy guy,” said Cal.

  “Whole systems stood against him. Differences were put aside and galaxy-wide alliances were formed in an attempt to halt his progress. All of them were unsuccessful. All of them failed.”

  “That’s pretty much the story I heard,” Loren confirmed. “Except it’s not real.”

  “It is. He is. I assure you,” said Bobo. “Geronimus Krone is as real as you are. He murdered billions of innocent people. He boiled atmospheres and snuffed out suns, and it seemed that no-one could stop him. And then he was stopped. Here. By him.”

  All eyes went to Mech. The cyborg looked slightly uncomfortable at all the attention, then he shrugged. “What can I say? I’m fonking awesome.”

  “And he has been here ever since,” Bobo concluded. “Held prisoner, away from the eyes of the universe.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to, you know, just kill him?” said Cal. “I refuse to believe ‘build a theme park on him’ was the most efficient solution to the problem.”

  “We tried,” said Bobo. “Many tried. But Krone would not die. He lives even now, frozen in time, crushed forever by the weight of an imploding star.”

  Miz picked at her claws and exhaled, like she’d just been subjected to the single most tedious experience of her entire life, and possibly of anyone else’s entire life, too.

  “I, like, totally hate to agree with Miss Childhood Trauma here,” she said, flicking a contemptuous look in Loren’s direction. “But she’s right. Geronimus Krone isn’t real. He can’t be.”

  Bobo appeared thoughtful for a moment, then he shrugged his big bare shoulders. The sudden upwards movement of his nipples caught Cal’s eye, and he watched them, mesmerized, like a cat catching sight of some dangling string. He was able to resist the urge to paw inquisitively at them, although only just.

  “It is understandable that you would have doubts,” Bobo said. “That Geronimus Krone has become the thing of legend does not come as any great surprise.” He raised a hand and gestured in the direction of the box. “So, perhaps you would like to see for yourself?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said Cal, waving his hands over his head. “Abort. Abort. Back up. Stop right there. We are not going to go in and take a look at the most dangerous guy in the universe.”

  “Why not?” asked Mech.

  “Because we’ll mess it up! It’s what we do,” Cal said. “Miz will slouch on the wrong control panel, or I’ll trip over Splurt and land on the ‘release prisoner’ switch, or Loren will, I don’t know, somehow crash a vehicle into something important, and it’ll all be terrible.”

  He looked across the faces of the others and crossed his arms defiantly. “I am not being responsible for accidentally freeing Make-Believe Space Hitler. No way. Not happening.”

  “The security protocols would prevent any such calamities,” said Bobo. “I assure you, it’s perfectly safe.”

  “Oh,” said Cal. He shrugged. “Fonk it, then. I guess there’s no harm in looking.”

  * * *

  Splurt clung to Cal’s leg as everyone followed Bobo into the metal box through a door that hadn’t even been there until the clown-dude had scanned his eyeballs on the wall. The inside of the box was illuminated in a purple-pink, and an electrical humming made the hairs stand up along Cal’s arms.

  It also made the hairs stand up along Miz’s everything. She tried smoothing the worst of it down, but static crackled between her fur and her fingers, and she let out a little yelp of shock.

  “Apologies,” said Bobo. “The shielding generator can have a number of side effects on those inside the vault. Static shocks, nausea, headaches, dizziness, cancer...”

  “Gotcha,” said Cal. “Wait, what?”

  “Cardiac arrest, impotence and sterility among males, baldness, aneurisms, blindness, crippling mental disorders, complete organ failure,” Bobo continued. “It varies.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “One gentleman – a security consultant – inflated. Just inflated, right before my eyes.”

  “Did he deflate again?” Loren asked.

  Bobo chose his next few words carefully. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Shouldn’t all this information be, like, written in big letters on the door outside?” asked Cal. He looked down, then grabbed Splurt and held him up like a blobby shield. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, but Splurt looked quite pleased about this turn of events.

  From behind his protective barricade of sentient goo, Cal examined the room. There was very little in it besides four intersecting walls of energy – two running parallel from floor to ceiling, two bisecting these horizontally.

  The energy walls effectively split the room into nine sections. If one of the metal walls could have been removed and the room viewed from side-on, it would resemble a Tic Tac Toe grid, with a big fat circle already drawn in the center space.

  “Is that it?” asked Miz, not bothering to hide her disappointment as she peered through the forcefield at the dull gray ball floating in the center of the middle boxed-off area. “I thought we were going to see Geronimus Krone?”

  “This is his prison,” Bobo explained, his voice becoming
a whisper of awe. “That Indestructium sphere contains the heart of an imploding star, and inside that lies Krone himself. Frozen. Trapped. Forever.”

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait!” said Cal. “Indestructium? That’s not it’s real name, surely?”

  Bobo raised an eyebrow in confusion. “It is. What of it?”

  “Indestructium,” Cal said. He looked around at the others, expecting to find them looking equally amused. None of them did. “So, let me guess, it’s indestructible? That’s why it’s called that?”

  “Why else would it be called that?” Mech asked.

  Cal shook his head, grinning. “No. I mean, you’re right. If you’re going to make indestructible metal, you may as well call it Indestructium. Fonk it, why not?” He nodded to Bobo. “Continue.”

  “Yes. Right. As I was saying, Krone is trapped forever within this sphere.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll be here forever,” said a voice from behind them.

  Cal and the others turned to see Dave finish inserting something into both ears. Earphones, Cal thought, although he couldn’t see any wires.

  “You don’t?” said Cal. “How come?”

  He watched as Dave reached into his pocket and withdrew something that looked not unlike a large pen with a series of lights running down the side. Before the words ‘space pen’ could even begin to form in Cal’s mind, Dave raised the device above his head and closed his eyes. There was a high-pitched whine that made Miz hiss, then a blinding flash filled the inside of the metal box.

  This time, Cal didn’t feel his brain turn to mush, but his body immediately gave up on him. His legs slipped in opposite directions and Splurt tumbled from his arms as Cal lost control of his muscles.

  Loren, Miz and Bobo all dropped, too. Only Mech remained standing, but his arms fell to his sides and his head listed at an awkward angle like a boat letting in water.

  Dave opened one eye, swiveled it around to make sure everyone was down, then grinned and flipped the device into the air, before catching it again. “So, turns out that worked,” he announced, slipping the gadget back into his pocket. He pulled a couple of small white balls from his ears, rolled them between his fingers, then flicked them both at the energy shield. They sizzled, then fell to the floor, smoking and charred.

  “I mean, I knew it’d work, of course,” said Dave, slipping off his shoes. He picked them up, gave them an experimental sniff, then pulled a mildly disgusted face. “Took months and a lot – a lot – of money to develop, but we tested it extensively before taking it into the field. Didn’t want to screw this one up – am I right?”

  “Wh-aat arrre you t-t-talllking ab-b-out?” Cal asked. His mouth felt fat, swollen and – weirdly – far away.

  “Oh, Cal. Cal Carver. Adorable imbecile, Cal Carver,” said Dave, jiggling Cal with his foot. “So far out of his depth he doesn’t even know he’s drowning.”

  Reaching inside his shoes, Dave pulled out two small circles of metal, each a little larger than a poker chip. He dropped his shoes and began wriggling his feet back inside, then flipped both the disks like coins.

  “You really believed all that, didn’t you?” Dave said. “That we knew each other. That somehow, in this whole big, bad nothingness, we just happened to bump into one another at a theme park, of all places. You genuinely believed that’s what happened.”

  Dave leered down at Cal and jabbed a finger in the direction of the motionless Mech. “He knew! He tried to tell you that the odds were astronomical, but you didn’t listen, did you? And why? Because you wanted it to be true. You needed it to be true so badly that you ignored all evidence to the contrary.”

  With his shoes back on, he squatted down next to Cal and ruffled his hair. “The truth is, Cal, we’d never met until the landing bay. I mean, I’d been tailing you for a while – well, your cyborg, at least – that’s how I knew about the reward money I stole from you. Say goodbye to that, by the way, you’re never getting it back.” He mimed tapping a keyboard very quickly. “I’m also the one who unlocked the cyborg’s secret brain compartment, knowing you’d have to come and investigate. I needed him to get through security. But met? Us? Me and you? No, I’m afraid not.”

  A dribble of saliva fell from Cal’s lips like spider silk. “H-how diiiid…?”

  “How did I know the stuff I knew? Like I said, I’d been following you. I picked up a few things, used some fairly standard con tricks to get the rest out of you. Oh, and the AI on my ship was patched into the park’s psychic scanners. That helped a lot. A lot.”

  He slapped Cal on the cheek a couple of times in a way that was partly playful, and partly painful.

  “I kneeeeew h-h-h-he werennnnn’t from Ear-t-t-th,” said Mech through unmoving lips. His voice sounded like it was on an old tape recording that had become badly entangled in the cassette player.

  “Oh, I’m from Earth,” said Dave. He thumped himself on the chest. “One hundred per cent U.S. bred beef right here. In fact, most of the story I told you is true. You know, about being abducted? The Oovil and their probing little fingers.”

  He stiffened, just slightly, at the memory, then continued. “Except I didn’t complain to their supervisor, and they didn’t give me their ship. I killed them and took the ship. Well, I killed most of them. I left one alive and forced him to show me how to fly the thing, and then I killed him.” He laughed. “Technically, I began killing him. It took a while. He was quite the stubborn little butthole. Had one, too. Wasn’t so keen on probing when the shoe was on the other foot. Or the spike was up the other… you know.”

  “B-b-buuuutthooole,” Cal said. “W-weee caaan…?”

  “Yes, yes, we can say ‘butthole,’” Dave said. “I have a whole list of words the filters don’t screen for. Would you like me to tell you them?”

  Cal tried to nod, but his body completely ignored him. Dave leaned in closer, his voice becoming a manic little whisper. “Well, I’m not going to.”

  He sniffed the air, a faraway look rearranging the features of his face. He glanced at Splurt, sniffed again, then turned back to Cal. “By the way, do you know your weird fat kid smells like Silly Putty?”

  Giving Cal’s face a stroke, Dave sprang to his feet, words tumbling out of him now as if he was up against the clock. “Anyway, long story short, I explored space for a while, fell in with what some might consider ‘the wrong crowd’, killed a sizeable number of other people, aliens, things, whatever you want to call them, and then found myself rising swiftly through the ranks of a very exclusive, and extremely well-connected organization. Yadda-yadda-yadda, blah, blah, blah, fast forward a couple of years and here I am about to set free the most dangerous man in the universe!”

  He threw up his hands and laughed drily, like he couldn’t quite believe it all.

  “What a day,” he said. “Oh! And by the way…”

  He spun, raised a foot, and slammed it as high up Mech’s torso as he could reach. To everyone’s surprise – not least his own - Mech toppled backwards, then clanged against the metal floor. Anger flared in Dave’s eyes. “That’s for my fonking finger.”

  From behind him there came the sound of claws scratching on the floor. Dave spun and saw Miz’s arm shift a couple of inches towards him, her chest heaving from the concentration and effort. He drove his foot against the side of her head, snapping it around and taking all the remaining fight out of her.

  “Down, doggy,” he said.

  “Ffffoooonking k-k-iiilll y-yooo,” Cal wheezed.

  “Haha! Yes. Good luck with that,” Dave said. He clapped his hands, then rubbed them together. “Now, if it’s all the same with you guys, I think it’s time we got started!” He stood over Bobo and smiled down at the inert bio-bot. “First up, handsome, I’m afraid I’m going to need your eyes.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dave grunted and struggled as he dragged Bobo across the floor, one arm wrapped around the bio-bot’s neck, the other gripping the waistband of his underwear. For Bobo, it wasn’t exa
ctly a dignified means of travel, but the fact that his body was limp and lifeless meant that at least he wouldn’t feel the record-breaking wedgie he was currently being subjected to.

  Breathing heavily, Dave rolled the enormous clown-thing over on his front and began hoisting him up onto his knees, just as two eye-scanners rose out of the floor on stalks a few feet apart.

  “OK, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dave urged, trying to angle Bobo’s eyes towards one of the little scanning screens, but the bio-bot’s head lolled forwards and both stalks continued growing for another three feet or so.

  “Ballsacks,” Dave spat. He began inserting himself underneath Bobo, trying to support the weight of the clown-thing across his back and shoulders. “I know what you’re thinking,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “That I should just cut its head off, or pop his eyes out. That’d be easier.”

  Cal wasn’t thinking either of those things, but he didn’t have the energy to argue.

  “But it’d turn to mush, you see? It’d be useless, and so I’m stuck having to…” He grimaced as he straightened his legs, bringing Bobo’s head closer to the scanner height. The clown’s face was angled down, and it took a few attempts for Dave to hook a shoulder under his chin and raise Bobo’s eyes to the scanner.

  There was a faint bleep and the scanner retracted back into the floor, leaving the other one standing by itself over on Dave’s right. He sighed with relief as he shrugged the bio-bot off, then put a hand on his back and physically straightened himself.

  “Phew. I am glad that’s done,” said Dave. He pointed down at the slumped green-skinned figure. “And look, I didn’t even have to kill him.”

  Lunging, Dave caught Bobo by the head and twisted until something went snap. The others watched on in mute, helpless horror as the space clown became yellow sludge.

  “I didn’t have to, but I did it anyway,” Dave sniggered. “See, that’s just the way I roll.”