by Terry Jones
'Hurry away…run off… I've always done that, Nettie. I've wrapped my emotions up in a nice smart pin-striped suit and then walked away from them. Well, I'm not doing it any longer.'
'But Dan needs you, Lucy! You're a great team!'
'That's what we kept telling each other. We told each other that over and over again until we believed it. But all I know is that I'm a different woman from the woman I've been pretending to be.'
'Lucy!'
Lucy and Nettie span round. They hadn't heard anyone approaching.
'Lucy! The Starship's about to take off for Earth!' It was The Journalist shouting from the breakwater. 'We've only got a few minutes to make it!'
'We?' murmured Lucy.
'Of course!' exclaimed The Journalist. 'You don't think I'd let you go back on your own… Not now you've said you'll marry me!'
'But… The! I'll stay with you here if you want me to!' Lucy had run up to him and was kissing him.
'Uh-uh!' said The Journalist. 'I've got to see this thing through to the end!'
And suddenly the three of them were racing along the sands towards the spaceport.
25
The journey back to earth in the Starship Titanic was pretty uneventful for the first hundred and seventeen million million miles. The Doorbots were just as snooty as they always had been, but since Lucy, Nettie, Dan and The Journalist were travelling First Class (V.I.P. Status) all the other bots were unbelievably obsequious to them. The Liftbots gave Dan a surprising account of the Dunkirk evacuation which made it sound like a great victory for the Allied Forces, and the Deskbot asked for Nettie's autograph (nobody was quite sure why until they overheard the Deskbot whisper to one of the Doorbots: 'That's Gloria Stanley, the actress, you know!'). But otherwise routine life on board the Starship ticked over.
Captain Bolfass put a brave face on his hopeless passion for Nettie. And yet, as he told his wife, it had at least given some purpose to his old age — even if that purpose were just to get over it.
Nettie for her part was mainly concerned for Dan. He seemed to be raking his separation from Lucy and her wild affair with The Journalist rather badly. He mostly kept to his cabin, and when he ate with them he was generally silent and morose.
'Poor Dan!' Nettie thought to herself. 'He must be going through hell; after all, he and Lucy have been so close for all those years, and now to see her so besotted with another man — and an alien at that!'
Lucy and The Journalist also mostly kept to their cabin, but judging from the sounds emanating from behind their closed door, they were not brooding about anything. It sounded as if they might have been playing polo, or doing a bit of water-skiing all mixed in with some pretty serious weight-lifting. All-in-all it was lucky the state rooms on either side were empty. Even as it was, several pictures fell off the adjoining walls and a stand bearing a pot of Yassaccan lilies mysteriously toppled over.
On the third day the great Starship moved into the region of space beyond Proxima Centauri.
'We should locate your star any minute — what d'you call it?' asked Captain Bolfass.
'The Sun,' said Nettie.
'What a beautiful name,' said the gallant Captain, gazing at Nettie's exquisite profile.
Nettie nodded. 'It's a beautiful thing.'
'Hmmm,' agreed the Captain dreamily.
'Do you recognize any of the star patterns yet?' asked the Navigational Officer anxiously. It was all very well heading for an unknown destination with such scanty data… but in this case they were all on board a ship that was destined to explode within two days time! The whole venture was crazy, as far as he was concerned, and he had expressed his opinion quite forcibly to Captain Bolfass. Supposing they failed to find the Earth — would they ever find anywhere to land in this remote armpit of the Galaxy? And even if they did, once the Starship had exploded, they would be marooned for… well, goodness knows how long it would take a rescue fleet to arrive.
Nettie shook her head. 'I'm not much good at astronomy! I'll get the others up on deck.'
But neither Dan nor Lucy had any more idea than Nettie about the local constellations, and Rodden shook his head wearily at the Earth folks' ignorance.
'Perhaps you can't see the stars from the surface of your planet?' he offered. But they had to admit they could, and felt twice as stupid.
But worse was to come.
'Look!' Rodden suddenly exclaimed. 'D'you see that star! There! That must be your Sun!'
And so it proved to be. Within the hour the Starship was slowing down, and they could clearly see the Sun as a tiny disc.
'And so which of these planets is the Earth?' It was a simple question Rodden had asked, but it threw the three Earth folk into utter confusion.
'I think it's the fourth planet from the Sun,' ventured Dan.
'Or is it the third?' asked Nettie.
'It's the second!' said Lucy.
The Navigational Officer had to excuse himself at this point. He left the Bridge and locked himself in the washroom, where he proceeded to bang his head against the sink unit for several minutes. How could any living creatures be so utterly and abysmally ignorant of their own planet?!
'Look!' said Dan. 'On the outside: Pluto, right?'
'Yes.'
'Neptune… Saturn… or is it Jupiter next?'
'Saturn,' said Nettie.
'Saturn… Jupiter… Mars… Earth! So it's the sixth planet in!'
'Very good!' exclaimed Captain Bolfass. 'Then we are approaching it at this very moment! Stand by to fire retardation rockets and stabilize ship for slow-down! Orbit around Earth to be established in thirty-five edoes' time. Landing by small landing craft.'
By the time the Navigational Officer came out of the washroom, the Starship Titanic was in orbit around the Earth.
'Do the Starship's windows make everything look red?' asked Nettie.
'Maybe it's the weather,' said Lucy. The Earth did look extremely red.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' said Captain Bolfass. 'It is my privilege to accompany you down to your landing craft. If you would follow me…'
'Hang on!' said Nettie. 'We missed out Uranus! This is Mars!'
The Navigational Officer left the room again. He could feel one of those terrible Yassaccan rages overtaking him. In the washroom, he got out his SD gun and blew his own head off. After which he calmed down and returned to the Bridge.
By this time, they were approaching a blue planet, patched with brown and flecked with white whorls. It was definitely the Earth, and even old Rodden couldn't help feeling sympathetically towards the three Earth folk as he saw their spirits rise and their hearts beat with pride and wonder at this vision of the planet that had given them life.
As they assembled in the tiny landing spacecraft, Bolfass spoke briefly and unemotionally.
'We have exactly one day in which to find Leovinus and, hopefully, the Titanic's missing central intelligence core, and get it back to the ship and into Titania's brain. But we have less than that. I did not mention this before, but I have to now… We only have half a day, since, if you have not returned by midday, we will have no option but to fly the Starship off to a safe distance and man the life-boats before she explodes. May we all be saved from such a fate. Go! And good luck!'
Nettie took Dan's hand as he helped her into the landing craft. The Journalist jumped in beside Lucy. 'Oh, Dan?' he said. 'There's something I've been meaning to ask you.'
'Well, go ahead.'
'Will you be our best man?'
Dan thought about hitting The Journalist but instead he smiled. 'Yes,' he replied. 'I'll be glad to.'
'Great!' smiled The Journalist. 'We can have a real Blerontinian White Wedding. You'll love it.'
Dan raised his eyes heavenwards and Nettie smiled, as the cover of the landing craft was placed over them.
Captain Bolfass retreated to the viewing chamber; the side of the great Starship opened, and the tiny landing craft blasted itself away towards the blue planet.
&nbs
p; 26
Leovinus was not in a good mood. Despite all the things he was good at — astrophysics, architecture, molecular biology, geophysics, painting, sculpture, mechanical design, physics, anatomy, music, poetry, crystallography, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, philosophy and canapé arrangement — he'd always been hopeless at languages. Consequently, when he found himself on an alien world, without a translation blister, he was understandably frustrated. Here he was — the Greatest Genius The Galaxy Had Ever Known and he couldn't even ask these aliens, in their strange blue suits, for a cup of tea.
'I definitely think he is, Sarge,' said Constable Hackett.
'What, gay?' asked Sergeant Stroud, who'd noticed the old man's eyebrows were stuck on with toupee tape.
'No, Lebanese,' said the constable.
'Do we know anyone in the Oxford area who speaks Lebanese?'
'Well, it's kind of Arabic, innit?'
'Yes, must be plenty of them in the University.' And so a call was made, and Leovinus shortly found himself confronted by a large man with a nose the shape of Africa who told him in Arabic that his name was Professor Dansak. But to no avail.
Leovinus was beginning to lose his temper by now. Not only was no one treating him as you would expect a race of clearly inferior minds to treat the Greatest Genius The Galaxy Has Ever Known, but everyone was treating him as if they actually wanted to get rid of him.
'I hereby charge you with being an illegal immigrant.' Sergeant Stroud was reading from a formal charge-sheet. 'I have to warn you that anything you may say will be held against you and that you will be held in a place of custody until such dine as Her Majesty's Government is able to repatriate you to your own country.'
'Assuming we can find out where that is,' muttered Constable Hackett.
Professor Dansak had recommended a Professor Lindstrom, who held the chair in Linguistic Studies. Professor Lindstrom listened carefully to the little that Leovinus was prepared to say to him, and concluded that the elderly gentleman in the white beard and false eyebrows was probably making the language up.
'It bears no resemblance,' said Professor Lindstrom, 'to any of the Indo-European branch of languages. If, indeed, it is a language, I am prepared to state categorically that it has no relation to Uralic, Altaic, or to the Sino-Tibetan language groups. Malayo-Polynesian is not my field, but I would be surprised if it had any affinity there. As for the Eskimo-Aleut and the Paleo-Asiatic I am convinced it is not. I suspect, in short, gentlemen, that you have here a confused old gentleman, talking that widely-spoken language: gobbledygook. He probably ought to be with his family at home or else being cared for in an institution.'
Leovinus at this point had decided to treat these inferior beings to a recitation of edited highlights from his recent work, The Laws of Physics, a radical reappraisal of the subject which had turned the entire science on its head. It was, perhaps, the single most important volume ever written in the Galaxy, and merely to hear it again gave the great man a sense of belonging and reminded him that he was an individual of immense importance — no matter how they treated him on this remote and primitive planet.
He was still reciting from his Tenth Law of Thermodynamic Stress, when Sergeant Stroud banged the door of his cell behind him. Leovinus looked around his new environment. His suspicion was that he was not in a hotel. Entry appeared to be regulated by a simple locking device, and defecation appeared to be in a bucket. What a savage world he had got himself stuck on.
If only he'd regained consciousness before the Starship crash-landed! But he hadn't. After his fight with Scraliontis, he'd remained unconscious throughout the entire launch, the SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure) and the crash-landing on this godforsaken planet, wherever it was. He'd only come to when that wretched journalist had unrolled him from the curtain. Thinking it was still the morning before the launch and that Scraliontis must have returned home to gloat over his evil scheme, Leovinus had commandeered the service lift and charged off out of the Starship screaming for revenge. In the dark he had failed to notice that he was no longer on the launch pad at Blerontis. It was not until he was a good distance from the ship that he heard the sound of the great power-drive coming to life. He had spun round and, to his horror, he had watched his great masterpiece rise up into an alien night sky — leaving him stranded on an unknown, unidentifiable world.
In a state of shock, Leovinus opened the door of a small vehicle he happened to find parked nearby, and climbed in. The vehicle was, as it turned out, already occupied by a particularly dim-looking alien who nearly wet himself with terror when confronted by Leovinus. The Great Man himself was, for the first time in his life, unable to think of anything to say — aware that whatever he did say would not be understandable. He had therefore sat there, without speaking, and allowed the alien to drive him to the present building in which he found himself and which he was increasingly convinced was not a hotel.
What a complete and absolute mess.
'FOR GOD'S SAKE! I WANT TO SEE A LAWYER!' Leovinus screamed at the top of his voice, and he rattled the bars of his cell in the time-honoured manner.
Sergeant Stroud looked at Constable Hackett and they both shook their heads. He might be a harmless, confused old man, but, as far as they were concerned, it looked better in the station log if he were an illegal immigrant. They'd score a few points with the Home Office if they could get him sent back to somewhere or other… Maybe Chad or Zimbabwe…
27
Lucy thrilled to the expert way The Journalist brought the landing craft down in what had been the garden of the old rectory. In the darkness, the ruined house looked even more desolate than it had on that fateful night: souvenir hunters had stripped it of everything movable including loose bricks.
The plan was to try and pick up Leovinus's trail, starting from the crash site. There was also the possibility that he might still be hanging around hoping that the Starship would return.
It was not a bad plan, as such, but as Dan jumped out of the landing craft a loudspeaker crackled across the old rectory lawns and a blinding searchlight hit him full in the face: 'Put your hands above your head! Do not make any sudden movements! You are surrounded by armed police!' They had not reckoned on the Oxfordshire Constabulary, who, flushed with their recent success in capturing an illegal immigrant, had set up a permanent watch around the landing site.
Dan instinctively did all the things the megaphone had told him not to. He didn't put his hands above his head. He leapt — very suddenly — back into the landing craft and screamed: 'Hit it!'
The Journalist fired the engine and the small craft leapt into the air, as a hail of gunfire exploded across the lawn. In a few seconds, the spacecraft had disappeared into the night, and the Oxfordshire Police were left staring at the empty sward.
'Calm down, everyone!' Nettie had taken over, although Lucy was contributing the most volubly to the discussion:
'Aaaarrrgh! Agggh!' She was choosing her words carefully.
The Journalist was concentrating on controlling the craft. Dan was shaking.
'OK,' continued Nettie. 'We've got twelve hours to find Leovinus. Our two chances are: one, picking up his trail around here and two, Nigel.'
'Nigel?' Dan's hackles were up — could this wonderful woman be still thinking about that schmuck?
'He's the one person we know was here at the site when Leovinus walked off the ship. He may have seen him — may even know where he is now!'
'Nettie! You're a genius!' said Dan.
'Aaaah! Ooooh!' Lucy added.
'I suggest you and Lucy investigate around here, while The, here, drives me to London to find Nigel.' Nettie had it all worked out. Within a few minutes, the landing craft had deposited Dan and Lucy in a quiet back lane near the hotel where they had been staying, and in another minute, Nettie and The Journalist were heading for the M40.
It began to get light as they approached the motorway. 'We don't want the police picking us up,' Nettie was thinking aloud. 'We
'd better pretend we're an ordinary car — a Japanese copy of something Italian maybe. Can you drive this thing just a few inches above the ground?'
'Absolutely!' said The Journalist, and he swung the craft down onto the empty B road. It took him a few moments to pick up the knack of keeping it steady at such a low altitude, but he was getting it.
'And you'd better cut the speed down just a tad, The,' said Nettie, 'One hundred eighty miles an hour is a little fast for these bends.'
By the time they swung out into the fast lane of the M40, The Journalist had managed to get the craft down to a mere 80 mph. and was giving a pretty good impression of a perfectly ordinary (if flamboyantly designed) motorcar. Nettie just hoped nobody would notice their lack of wheels.
Being the rush hour, most drivers weren't looking where they were going, as they crawled their way towards Central London. The finest jam, however, was reserved for the picturesque stretch after the Uxbridge turnoff. There was road construction, and the rush hour simply ground to a deadening, inevitable halt.
'Purple Pangalin!' exclaimed The Journalist. 'What sort of a transportation system d'you call this? The more popular it is the slower it goes! What genius worked this out?!' He was really quite indignant.
'Well it's inevitable isn't it?' Nettie found herself being surprisingly defensive of her planet's right to have traffic jams.
'Of course it isn't!' exploded The Journalist. 'You have to devise a system that goes faster the more popular it is, so it can cope! It's perfectly obvious!'
Nettie was drumming her fingers on the dashboard of the landing craft, and smiling at anyone who happened to give them an odd look. Smiling was always the best way to make them look away. She was also glancing increasingly frequently at her watch. Time was running out.
The jam moved an inch nearer London.
'I mean a transportation system with an average speed of just above stationary is not really a transportation system at all!' The Journalist was raving by now. 'It's more like a storage system!'
