A Toaster on Mars

by Darrell Pitt

  The creature roared and then charged.

  17

  Barnaby Hazleton loved art.

  His mother had taken him to the Louvre when he was a child and he had literally jumped for joy as she led him from room to room. As far as he was concerned, science helped you to live, but art gave you a reason to live.

  Fortunately, his mother was a wealthy woman, allowing Barnaby to pursue his passion. As soon as he was old enough to pick up a paintbrush, he started producing his own paintings. He worked day and night, studying under the best art teachers Earth had to offer. But by the time of his twenty-first birthday, he had to face the terrible truth.

  He had no artistic talent.

  Oh, he could copy. He could reproduce Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Bargetti’s Seven Drapnas Eating the Mayor of Fellshaw as accurately as a photograph. More accurately, some would say. His own teachers marvelled at how he could reproduce not only every brushstroke of the original artist but a sense of the artist as well. His teachers all agreed he was a marvellous copier, but as far as being able to create original work…

  ‘Some of us have it,’ Señor Felipe, his favourite teacher, told him one day. ‘And some of us do not. Your composition is unbalanced. Your colours are wrong. Your tonal gradients…’ He shuddered in silent horror. ‘Well, you understand what I mean.’

  ‘But surely I can improve!’

  Señor Felipe had tried to be encouraging. ‘Stick to what you are best at,’ he said. ‘Copying.’

  This evaluation was so soul-destroying that Barnaby had given up art for a year. By this stage his mother had moved them to Neo City, purchasing an enormous underground apartment on the east side of town. Unfortunately, as her age increased, so did her eating, and by sixty she weighed over 400 pounds. Barnaby, meanwhile, remained in his room, gloomily watching soap operas and nature documentaries.

  Zeeb says:

  This is not to say that there’s anything wrong in watching nature documentaries. I encourage all of you to see more of them. Ring me for a list.

  Barnaby realised he had reached rock bottom when he found himself actually enjoying the entire series of The Giant Snail Families of Antareas. All nine episodes followed the path of a family of snails as they travelled a mile across a rocky ledge during the long Antareas winter. The more memorable episodes were ‘Herman Bruises an Antenna’, and the grand finale, ‘Felix Reaches a Rock’. When Barnaby finished watching the last episode he found himself limping to the kitchen, wondering if he might have been happier as a snail.

  That’s when two events changed his life forever. His mother was watching a program in the living room about a painting destroyed in a fire. Peering over her shoulder, he almost wept when he realised the work was Dobvey’s I Looked Up and Saw a Garble, one of his most revered pieces.

  ‘My God,’ Barnaby said. ‘What a terrible loss.’

  Which was when the second thing happened that changed Barnaby forever. He discovered the reason for his mother’s silence: she was stone-cold dead, taken suddenly by a heart attack.

  Slumping onto the couch beside her, he was surprised he didn’t feel particularly upset about his mother’s death. Instead, his eyes focused on the television. I Looked Up and Saw a Garble was lost forever, but that did not mean it could not live again.

  And so began Barnaby Hazleton’s second life.

  After his mother’s funeral, he dragged out his canvases and paints that had been languishing in the cupboard and started working on his version of the painting. Day and night he studied computerised images, applying paint to canvas with an obsessive zeal to reproduce the original. Nine months later, he staggered back from the canvas with an exhausted sigh.

  I Looked Up and Saw a Garble did not just look similar to the original; it was identical in every respect.

  Over the next twenty years he created dozens more copies of other famous paintings, gradually tearing out most of the underground apartment’s fixtures to expand his gallery of history’s greatest works.

  Or, at least, his versions of history’s greatest works.

  At the age of forty-five, Barnaby had just completed his pièce de résistance. Five years before, someone had stolen Leonardo’s Last Supper from its location in Old Milan. In the middle of the night, an industrious thief had removed the entire wall upon which it was painted.

  Now, Barnaby stood before his version of the original. The work had been taxing. This time he had pushed himself to the limit, working for days at a time without food or sleep. In the end, however, Barnaby felt he had outdone himself. The faces of the apostles were truly expressive, exhibiting various levels of shock and dismay as Jesus revealed that one would betray him.

  But it was the face of Jesus where Barnaby’s talent truly prevailed.

  The Messiah looked positively…otherworldly. While Barnaby had been working on the face he had found himself almost driven by a higher power to recreate the genius of Leonardo da Vinci.

  Barnaby Hazleton had never been a religious man, but now he found himself lifting his eyes towards heaven. It seemed that God himself had blessed him with a gift and shown him the way.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

  And that’s when the painting spoke to him.

  What the—

  Barnaby’s eyes darted left and right. The basement apartment was fifty feet below ground. He had never heard a sound from beyond the walls. Was it a voice?

  The sound came again, and Barnaby’s eyes darted upwards. It seemed to come from the painting.

  He approached the masterpiece on shaking legs and stared into the face of Jesus.

  ‘Are you trying to give me a sign?’ he asked.

  He waited. Jesus peered down at him with a beatific expression. Barnaby had always believed in a connection between art and the divine. Was it possible that link was about to be confirmed?

  Another noise came from the painting. There was no doubt about it. It was a voice, as if God were communicating from a great distance.

  Barnaby stepped closer.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something? Speak to me,’ Barnaby said. ‘Tell me what I must do.’

  The face of Jesus exploded into a thousand pieces as a large golden head smashed through the wall.

  ‘Run!’ the metal head screamed. ‘Get back! It’s alive!’

  Barnaby staggered back from the destruction in speechless horror as the metal creature broke through the wall and leapt into the room. Barnaby turned back to the painting. It was damaged, but at least the remainder—

  The entire wall toppled forward, crashing onto the floor.

  Wa-woomph!

  Two more people—a man and a woman—scrambled over the rubble and raced past him towards the gallery in the next room.

  ‘Sorry about this!’ the woman yelled over her shoulder. ‘But you’d better get out of here.’

  ‘We’re not kidding!’ the man added. ‘There’s something coming after us—and it’s not pretty!’

  I’m hallucinating, Barnaby thought. It’s a delusion brought about by the long hours of work. I’ll wake up and The Last Supper will be perfect—

  Then the creature appeared, convincing him that this was no delusion.

  ‘Gaarrk!’ the creature bellowed as it oozed into the room.

  Barnaby tried to speak, but could only open and close his mouth like a goldfish. The three people had pulled out blasters and were now firing into the opposite wall, completely destroying Paxley’s A Black Quixo in an Inky Black Cave and Tobor’s The Massacre of Mobius Four, to make a hole big enough to climb through.

  ‘Run!’ the woman screamed at him.

  ‘For the love of God,’ Barnaby said, finally rediscovering the power of speech. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a cheese sandwich,’ the robot yelled back. ‘Radiation has mutated it into a sentient life form!’

  As the three strangers disappeared through the gap they had just blasted in the wall, Barnaby stared in horror at the creature. Up close, he realised i
t was a cheese sandwich, although it was a million times larger than any cheese sandwich in history. It had no eyes—or face, for that matter—but a rudimentary mouth ran along the centre where the slice of Swiss cheese had once been.

  Zeeb says:

  By strange coincidence, Barnaby Hazleton was distantly related to Bert Jackson, the workman who was responsible for tossing the sandwich down the ventilation shaft two centuries earlier.

  You don’t need to file that information away anywhere. I just thought you’d find it interesting.

  Staggering away from the creature, Barnaby turned back only once to see it devouring the paintings he’d spent decades creating. The creature burped, emitting a stench that smelt vaguely of dead rat, Swiss cheese and oil paint.

  Giving a last, wild cry, Barnaby fled for his life.

  18

  ‘I’ve only got one question,’ Blake said to Nicki as they trudged down the darkened tunnel. ‘Can you guess what it is?’

  They had left the cheese sandwich far behind after the monster had headed in a different direction apparently in search of new prey.

  ‘Uh, no,’ Nicki said airily.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nothing springs to mind.’

  ‘Let me give you a clue,’ Blake said. ‘Do the words, Yippee! Come and get us, you sprot eater, mean anything?’

  ‘Oh,’ Nicki said. ‘That.’

  ‘Yes. That.’

  Nicki looked rather embarrassed—or as embarrassed as a gold-skinned woman could look. ‘I get nervous sometimes,’ she said. ‘Being a cyborg, sometimes my human biology doesn’t communicate properly with my psytotronic chips, and I say…inappropriate things.’

  ‘Inappropriate…’ Blake’s face twitched. ‘That’s not inappropriate. That’s come-and-hack-me-to-death-with-a-teaspoon-and-eat-my-brains-out insane!’

  Much to his surprise, it wasn’t Nicki who retaliated but Astrid. ‘You can’t talk,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve put your foot in it once or twice.’

  ‘Put my foot…’ Blake was incredulous. ‘I’ve never challenged a rampaging cheese sandwich to a duel to the death!’

  ‘You forgot about your own daughter’s birthday party!’

  ‘Will you ever forgive me for that?’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘But Lisa hasn’t.’

  Nicki spoke up. ‘I’m sorry about the Come and get us comment. I’m not perfect, despite my superior mental capability.’

  ‘Saying superior mental capability is another example of saying inappropriate things,’ Blake said.

  ‘That’s just the truth,’ Nicki said. ‘I am a genius a thousand times over—’

  ‘A toaster on legs can hardly count—’

  ‘Hey!’ Astrid snapped. ‘Enough is enough!’

  They walked on in silence. After a while, Blake pulled out his food pills and offered them around. Astrid’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Haggis and mushrooms?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘It’s an acquired taste.’

  Nicki and Astrid selected bacon and eggs.

  When they reached a junction, Nicki directed them along a narrow passage, which they followed until they arrived at a wall.

  ‘We go through here,’ Nicki said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Blake asked.

  ‘Absolutely. There’s a cave, and beyond that, GADO.’

  ‘Okay,’ Blake said, taking a deep breath. ‘Let’s do this.’

  He raised his blaster, set it to slow burn, and aimed it at the wall. After a few seconds the wall glowed red, giving off a smell like burnt plastic, and disappeared. Gloomy light poured from the hole.

  ‘What the—’ Blake began. ‘I thought there was supposed to be a cave on the other side.’

  ‘And what is that smell?’ Astrid asked, covering her nose.

  Nicki inhaled. ‘It appears to be a potent combination of food waste, metal fragments, shredded timber, fabric—’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Blake said.

  ‘No, it’s the truth.’

  ‘I mean it’s rubbish,’ Blake said, peering through the gap. ‘There are piles of it. This cave is some old underground waste dump.’

  ‘Is there another way around?’ Astrid asked.

  ‘There is, but it would take some time,’ Nicki said.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Six years, eight months, four days and—’

  ‘Looks like we’re going through,’ Blake said.

  Once they’d climbed through the gap, Blake, Nicki and Astrid found themselves in an enormous cavern. Mounds of rubbish stretched as far as the eye could see. Huge floodlights hung from the ceiling.

  Blake felt his nostrils twitching. It was the worst stench he had ever smelt.

  Zeeb says:

  Of course, there are worse smells, as you’d know if you’d seen my documentary Places Where You Should Not Stick Your Nose.

  The smelliest place in the known universe is Graphida Nine, and it reeks so badly it has only been visited once. A spaceship from Wortaser One landed a team of astronauts there in the hopes of colonising the planet, but after disembarking, three astronauts ate their own noses, two ate each other’s noses, and the remaining astronaut swallowed his own fist to escape the stench.

  It really is a very smelly place.

  But the smelliest thing in the universe is actually the uncovered feet of a man by the name of Alf Price who lives in Seldom-on-Tyme. He has been declared a public health hazard on no less than sixteen occasions. Anyone approaching his home must wear biohazard suits and carry their own oxygen.

  Once, a mailman, new to the area, unwittingly tried to deliver letters to the premises—and his brain imploded.

  In an attempt to discover the source of Alf’s rancid stench, a doctor examining his feet found no less than six infectious diseases including bubonic plague, cholera and typhoid. A new species of fungus was discovered growing between his toes. When removed for examination, the sample instantly burnt through the examination jar, melted through to the centre of the planet and created a massive volcanic eruption in China, killing half a million people.

  Alf takes the whole situation in his stride. ‘My feet don’t bother me,’ he explains. ‘I just suck the grunge off when they get real bad.’

  An enormous multi-coloured hill lay to their left.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Blake asked.

  ‘Only if you think it’s an enormous pile of socks,’ Nicki said.

  ‘An enormous pile of odd socks.’ Astrid pointed. ‘Could this be where all the odd socks go?’

  Zeeb says:

  The answer is: yes and no. Every sock is part of a pair, which really does make you wonder where the other sock ends up. This remained a mystery until a scientist on the planet Varoom conducted an experiment in which he kept a pair of socks under twenty-seven-hour-a-day surveillance until one of them mysteriously vanished.

  Further investigation revealed that odd socks were being sucked through an inter-dimensional porthole to the other side of the galaxy. It seems this had been going on for a long time. Thousands of years. So what do you get when you stick millions of socks together in space?

  A sock planet.

  And that’s actually what it’s called. Sock World. Which is hardly surprising, really. I mean, what else would you call it? It wouldn’t be called Bulbulous Seven or Quanda Four, would it?

  They slowly rounded the hill. It was only one of many similar piles spread around the cavern, all neatly catalogued into their respective types: furniture, cars, mobile phones, shoes.

  Nicki stopped and frowned at her datapad. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘We’re getting some weird magnetic interference.’

  ‘Which means?’ Astrid asked.

  ‘We’re lost.’

  ‘Sprot,’ Blake said. They were miles underground and time was running out.

  ‘Wait!’ Nicki said. ‘I just saw something move!’

  She pointed at a mountain of toilet bowls. Blake pulled out his blaster, but everythi
ng was still.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  A noise came from behind. Turning, Blake saw a skinny man in a pinstripe suit. His stun weapon was aimed at the three of them.

  Then everything went white.

  When Blake woke up, he found himself lying on a hospital gurney, his hands secured at his sides by handcuffs. It felt like he’d been asleep for hours, even the whole night. He spotted Astrid on the bed opposite, unconscious. Nicki lay on the floor, looking like a Barbie doll, her eyes open but unseeing.

  They were in a room carved out of a pile of television sets, robot parts, kitchen appliances and washing machines. Between two ancient robot torsos was a mechanical rat peering down at them. It gave Blake a startled look and scurried away.

  What the sprot is going on?

  The little man who had shot them entered the room. He was unusually gaunt, with thinning black hair and bushy eyebrows. Beneath those eyebrows were staring eyes that reminded Blake of a fish.

  ‘You’ve awoken,’ the man said. ‘I’m so pleased.’

  ‘I’m Blake Carter, an officer with the PBI, and I’m placing you under—’

  ‘Your upworld business does not concern me,’ the man interrupted in a high voice. ‘I am Doctor Robert Roberts and you are my guest.’

  ‘Is that a stutter?’

  Roberts shook his head. ‘Merely an unfortunate name.’

  ‘I demand that you release us immediately!’ Blake said, trying to keep calm. His eyes shifted to Astrid. ‘If you’ve harmed one hair on her head—’

  ‘Please don’t be concerned,’ Roberts said, looking pained. ‘I assure you I have no intention of causing you harm.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘But I am going to eat you.’

  ‘Well, that’s… What did you say?’

  ‘I’m going to eat you,’ Robert Roberts said, smiling as if they were discussing the weather. It’s been rather cold today…might be a change later…must bring the washing in off the line… ‘I don’t know why I do it,’ Roberts continued. ‘Plenty of food comes down the waste disposal chutes, but I’ve developed rather a liking for human flesh.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Your death will be painless.’