Dumpiter

by David Fletcher

  58.

  The mottled purple vase was as old as the palace itself. And like the palace, it was drab and unloved. Nobody would shed a tear at its passing, nobody would remember it, its unremarkable form and its pitifully dreary colouring. So, when it smashed into a thousand pieces against the wall above Doggerbat's head, it was cast into total oblivion. It was gone forever. It was as though it had never existed.

  Lysaars had destroyed it as he would have destroyed any other conveniently placed object that offered similar ballistic qualities. He was in a furious rage, which entirely suppressed his stunted aestheticism. He was intent only on venting his feelings on his poor old lieutenant.

  His voice was one octave above its normal pitch.

  'Both of them! Both of the little buggers! You let both of them get away!

  'But no. That's not good enough, is it? Not for our fine friend Doggerbat. No, because they've got a mate with them now, haven't they? Some dumb bloody reptilian. And you let him get away as well! You let all three of them get away. All bloody three of them!!!

  'You blundering blockhead! Pity they didn't knock that useless appendage of yours off its shoulders. Maybe I should finish the job for them.'

  He began to walk around in a small circle, muttering a 'shit shit shit' mantra to himself and wringing his hands.

  Doggerbat stood in total silence, his head bowed.

  'And I'm supposed to be relaxing. Ha! Relaxing! It's the middle of the rotten night, and I get woken up with this bloody news. I mean, how can I possibly relax with numbskulls like you screwing things up?'

  His voice dropped to something like a normal level.

  'Dr Rattlepitt gave me explicit instructions to "take the calm road" as he said, to take the calm road to my rebirth. So I'd be as receptive as possible to all those life-forces. All that immortality flowing into my being. It was important, he said, important to maximise my capacity.'

  He stopped, glared at Doggerbat and then screamed at him. 'But he didn't tell me to wring your stupid fat neck, more's the pity!'

  Doggerbat wondered whether he had made a literally fatal error. Maybe he should have escaped with Renton and his friends. He'd have become a fugitive, but at least he'd be free - and with a chance of reaching retirement age. Judging by Lysaars' mood at the moment, he now doubted whether he'd ever see the outside of this palace again. Streuth, he might not even see the outside of this room again. Lysaars was that mad. And there was every chance that he might simply decide to eliminate his unfortunate lieutenant without further ado. And maybe quite soon.

  He knew it was futile, but Lysaars had interrupted his verbal onslaught for a short interlude of intense fuming, and so he chanced a few words. 'Uh, I'm sorry, sir,' he said quietly.

  Lysaars' tubby frame jerked abruptly and his piggy eyes flickered. For a few seconds he was speechless. Then he spoke. Again his voice was at an almost female pitch.

  'You're sorry? You're sorry? Doggerbat, you amaze me. So much so, Doggerbat, that I'm not going to have you killed. And I was. I was going to do just that. Tonight. Probably in this very room. But your remorse has caused me to change my mind. It's earned you a sort of reprieve.

  'Yes, you see, you shall stay alive. And when tomorrow… oh sorry, it's the middle of the bastard night, isn't it? What I mean to say is that when later today I achieve immortality, you shall share a little of that infinite existence with me. Not as my chief lieutenant though. Oh no, not as that. You shall have a new rôle. You shall be my chief plaything, my toy, something to use and abuse, something to suffer some wear and tear. You know. You'll be like a teddy-bear, Doggerbat, the sort that gets its legs twisted off and its eyes scissored out. Your skin'll get worn off in patches. In short, Doggerbat, I'll make you crave death as much as I crave immortal life! Understand?'

  Doggerbat did understand but he didn't respond. He thought it might not go down very well. And heck, his ill-timed apology had worked wonders - and he wasn't about to screw that up. No way. He had inadvertently dodged an imminent demise - and won himself a future, albeit not a very appealing one from the sounds of it. But who was to know what could happen? There were now, after all, some others involved, some others who'd lined up beside him. And they might do… well, they might do anything.

  As Lysaars stomped away muttering his 'shit shit shit' mantra again, Doggerbat closed his eyes and wished.

  'I wish,' he said to himself, 'that the Tenting bloke is doing something to bugger up Lysaars' little game. And I wish and I hope that he's doing it now. I mean, I hope he knows just how quickly he needs to move himself. I really do!'

  59.

  At about that time, Renton had no need to move himself quickly at all. The easipeas was thoughtfully doing that for him.

  Next to the small square of yellow plastic onto which he had fallen was a small square of green plastic. Anybody trained to drive an easipeas would have known that the yellow square allowed you to start the machine and that the green square afforded you access to its speed. And of course the green square was always, without exception, brought into play when the war-wagon had attained any sort of speed at all. For failing to do this would mean failing to interrupt the yellow square's other function, that of accelerating the vehicle after starting it. The easipeas would simply continue accelerating to its maximum speed.

  Renton didn't know this. In fact, he didn't know there was a small square of green plastic. And even if he had known, his present cabin-floor existence offered little opportunity of getting anywhere near that useful green square. That was why the easipeas was now thundering along at its nerve-rattling top speed.

  When Pipkim had brought it to a halt, he had left it pointing in the vague direction of Dopotompo's home - out in the debris-strewn desert of Dumpiter. Here, there weren't that many really large obstructions - although there were a few. But there were countless numbers of small ones. They were everywhere. And between them - the big 'uns and the little 'uns - they had no problem whatsoever in creating, in the easipeas, a sensation guaranteed to sicken to the heart anyone unfortunate enough - or stupid enough - to be riding inside it.

  It swayed and it swooped, it juddered and it swung - and time after time it generated that hitting-a-brick-wall sensation as it exploded each thing in its path. And each brick-wall slam was followed by another lurch and another sway and then another brick-wall and then another lurch… and so on and so on.

  Renton had once seen a weird device in a museum called a pinball machine. It wasn't an original of course, but it was a working model. It showed how, a long time ago, the real thing had been operated and how it had been used as a form of entertainment. And he had been amused - at the whole concept of a shiny metal ball bouncing backwards and forwards between an array of brightly coloured pins - and at the way that the pins had lit up, and at the funny, tinny fairground sounds which accompanied each game. After all, it all seemed so primitive, and so bizarre as well.

  And well… not surprisingly, he was thinking about it now. Because he now knew what it was like to be the metal ball - the one bouncing round hitting pins.

  He reckoned he'd now hit every recliner pedestal in the easipeas's cabin - as well as about every metre of its walls. Nothing lit up and there were no fairground sounds, but there was pain. There was an awful lot of pain. And he just couldn't do anything about it. He just couldn't stop himself sliding this way and that - and then that way and this for a change.

  To start with, despite his recollection of that pinball machine, Renton had tried to crouch into a ball. But not for long. He soon realised that balls had been chosen for the machine because they roll around a great deal more easily than do long strips of things with bits sticking out of them. So better to use your body sensibly - and keep everything outstretched - rather than go spherical. One stood the risk of snapping the odd limb off, but one's overall speed across the cabin floor was significantly reduced. And this was a not inconsiderable benefit - and possibly a lifesaver.

  The easipeas found a huge pile o
f plate metal. Quite a rare sight this far out. And a rarer sight still when the pile exploded into a mist of metal shards as the monster smashed through its centre.

  Inside the craft, the brick-wall sensation was an extreme one. As the aftermath lurch began its inevitable assault on his body, Renton was already skating at speed towards one of the front-row recliners. He was spread-eagled, but even in this configuration his closing velocity was frightening.

  It was just as well that when the recliner's pedestal arrested his flight, it was not his head that met its surface. It could have killed him. The force of the impact was so great it could easily have caved in his head - with the usual terminal consequences. No, he was more than a little fortunate to sustain instantaneous deceleration through the agency of his genitals. As his spread-eagled legs flew past either side of the pedestal, it was this malleable, squidgy part of his anatomy which cushioned the impact of his arrival.

  Renton didn't immediately appreciate his remarkable good fortune - as he was too busy screaming his head off. And at the same time he was attempting to render assistance to his testicles with his hands. But he failed in this task - principally because he passed out. The pain from his crotch was just too great to bear. And it was still there when he came round.

  He groaned and he prayed for death. This was surely the worst moment of his life. Why hadn't he stuck to accountancy? Nobody crucified your balls in accountancy. He swayed around first one way then the other. Then he swayed again. Then he realised he was swaying, and just swaying - and not moving around the cabin.

  'God!' he thought. 'I've penetrated the pedestal!'

  But no, he wasn't swaying around his injured crotch. It was somewhere near his neck that was acting as the fulcrum. He took three deep breaths and tried to concentrate on his situation. What the hell could have happened?

  He squinted to his right, his body still swaying backwards and forwards in a wide arc, and finally he managed to see and understand his predicament. One of the pencil pleats in his cloak's “ruff” had caught on a small hook on the floor. He didn't understand the hook's purpose - and he wasn't really interested in its purpose. But he was interested in the thought of some relief from his painful progress around the floor, and of some opportunity to nurse his damaged goolies. Then he actually managed a small sigh of relief. Suddenly, he had complete faith in the hook's ability to maintain its anchoring duties indefinitely, and he regarded the prospect of swaying around in a heaving behemoth, clasping crushed wedding furniture in his hands, as quite copeable-with. He could easily manage that for a few minutes more - until help arrived.

  Although he could still use all his faculties and although he was still able to feel pain and nausea, Renton was now in fact semi-delirious. The half smile on his face as he regarded the ceiling of the cabin was not the result of rational thought or of normal emotions. Not at all. For Renton had now entered his “with the birds” period - a time that would last through the night…

  60.

  Despite his senility, Dr Rattlepitt had chosen well. Although, there again, if you wanted to dispose of the lives of thousands of people both instantaneously and simultaneously, there was really only one choice: the infamous “bofar”.

  As any bofar salesman would be eager to point out, a bofar had a number of features that made it the ideal weapon for this ambitious objective.

  Not least was its reliability. A bofar had never ever failed its users in the past. Nor, for that matter, its victims.

  Then there was its effectiveness. It would terminate the life of every living creature known in the universe. In fact it was so devastatingly indiscriminate in its deadly impact that when using the damn thing its operators needed to take the most careful of precautions. The salesman would no doubt explain how the user's own safety could be ensured by wearing a very reasonably priced dodge-collar, a miniaturised micro-bofar that acted to neutralise its big brother's death blow. Nothing less than an essential option for the proud bofar owner.

  For the technically minded, the sales patter might then move on to the modulated microwave technology that made the bofar the perfect 360° death ray. But it might stop short of an explicit description of the unpleasant action of the wave motion on living flesh. Only if the potential punter demonstrated an interest in lurid detail would the salesman explain how appropriately modulated microwaves superheat fluids within the body. Death by explosive internal boiling was not a pretty prospect and had certainly never been described as a clean way to go.

  More likely, the salesman would emphasise instead the non-destructive nature of a bofar. Boiling the juices of anything organic in its range had little or no effect on the inorganic within the bofar's sphere of influence. Structures, no matter how delicate or fragile, were generally left intact in a bofar assault. The worst they could suffer would be a light splattering of body fluids - if they were unfortunate enough to be adjacent to a recently living organism. Bofars really were the ideal weapons of mass destruction.

  That was their problem. They were too ideal. Even the most belligerent forces in the universe were scared of them, and everybody else was positively pants-off scared of them. So much so that bofars were outlawed in every jurisdiction of populated space. They were just too awful to be allowed to fall into anybody's hands. The possession of, use of and dealing in bofars were all automatic capital offences. Bofar salesmen as well as bofars were effectively extinct.

  But as Dr Rattlepitt had discovered, when the need was great enough and the price was right, extinction could be reversed. Bofars and dodge-collars could still be found. Lysaars' soirée held out the prospect of being a real life nightmare for all the Dumpiterians who turned up to Scorran.

  And it was this menace of the bofar that was uppermost in Madeleine's mind at the moment.

  For most of the night, it had been Renton - and his hopeless situation, bucketing around in that easipeas. But Boz had finally convinced her that the best way to help Renton was to help herself. And that meant focussing on the forthcoming gathering and how they might use it to get at Lysaars. And that meant how they might deal with the bofar.

  When they'd first told Narry everything they'd learnt from Doggerbat - and how it was planned to murder so many people - he'd actually considered a boycott, a switch from his original plan to a mass non-attendance of the event. But it was soon decided that this was impossible. There were just too many people and the assembly process was too far advanced. There would be people there already and thousands more on their way. And whatever Narry and his colleagues did now, it would be too late, and the majority of the invited guests would turn up at Scorran anyway.

  So the original plan was back on - to use this giant gathering for a decisive confrontation with Lysaars. Although, of course, it now had to accommodate a new and potentially devastating feature: a burst from a bofar.

  This was not going to be easy. To stop that burst the bofar would have to be deactivated. But how could they do that? How could they pull its plug - given the protection that, according to Doggerbat, Rattlepitt had given it? For not only would the bofar be right at the centre of things, but it would also be heat-sensitised. Any warm-blooded sentient being touching the contraption would receive a localised pulse of modulated microwave energy and would be brought to the boil instantaneously, not to say very messily. There wasn't a human who'd get even near it.

  Madeleine pondered the predicament. And then she pondered the solution. Because there it was, sitting on the ground between Narry and Pipkim, and looking rather resentful. And now it was about to speak.

  'Helluz belluz. Why didn't that Rattlepitt bastard think about us reptilians? Typical bloody insectal! Typical, that's what it is. How'd he know Bostrom T Aukaukukaura wouldn't be passin' through these here parts about round now? How'd he know there wouldn't be no reptilian saboteur of his precious friggin' machine here abouts? If he'd a-done his job proper like, yous folks wouldn't all be lookin' at me now an' 'spectin' me to volunteer to mess round with that there god-damn doomsd
ay machine.

  'Hell, if I ever catch up with him, I'll squish him, the bastard! An' I'll make sure he don't never fool with no more bofars ever again.'

  'Does this mean you'll do it?' asked Narry.

  'Course, you knows that if I drop my body temperature, I don't like perform like no sprinter with a rocket up his arse. I tend to be like well… lethargy on legs an' all. I mean, not too much is gonna happen too damn quickly.'

  'I know,' said Narry quietly.

  'An' jus' one last thing. I ain't got my doctorate in bofar tamin' jus' yet. In fact, I ain't even opened the first text book on it yet. And if I listen to this here "expert" you've found, who's so darn expert he ain't actually ever seen a bofar in his life, I'm about as likely to come out of this lill' trip intact as a fart in a whirlwind o' wind…'

  Madeleine felt overwhelmingly emotional. Somebody she now realised she really cared for was, at this very moment, in the grip of an awful easipeas. And here was somebody else, for whom she had similar if not quite the same feelings, who was prepared to expose himself to an even more terrible machine. And for her. For Madeleine Maiden, until recently the strong-willed, somewhat selfish experience-seeker who was quite prepared to exploit the naïveté of others for her own ends. OK, it wasn't just her life on the line now. There were thousands of others who were in trouble as well. But heck, Boz wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for her. And just think; his honourable concern for her had now turned into his being prepared to risk his life for her - quite literally. It really was more than enough to make her feel emotional - and to make her feel terribly guilty that it was her own humanness that stopped her volunteering for the task in hand - and Boz's lack of the same that singled him out for it.

  '….so,' he concluded, 'Rattlepiss is a fink, and anybody thinkin' of tanglin' with this here friggin' microwave oven o' his needs his bumps jugglin'. An' that's a fact!'