Back to FLAT EARTH
This Off-Ramp Earth
5.1
It was the usual Saturday morning routine.
Helena - who, despite her father's protests, refused on general principle to work weekends - customarily slept in until around ten. She usually woke up at eight out of habit, but was happy to lie there and doze, listening to the birds outside and the sound of cartoons emanating from the living room. Lance and Eddie, for their part, were up at seven to watch X-Men: Evolution and would remain glued to the TV until the closing credits of Jackie Chan Adventures faded into oblivion at eleven-thirty. They were usually in the middle of Time Squad when Helena got up and, accordingly, would respond to her morning greeting with a couple of grunts and a half-wave from Eddie.
This morning was nothing out of the ordinary. Except for one small detail.
Helena couldn't quite put her finger on it at first. She emerged from her bedroom and shuffled into the living room to find Lance and Eddie parked in their usual positions on the sofa, eyes glued to the TV. Eddie was holding a mug of coffee and munching a piece of toast, while Lance was on his second breakfast beer.
"Morning, boys," Helena smiled, wiping the sleep from her eyes.
"Uh," said Lance.
"Hmmm," Eddie waved.
“Morning,” said the alien.
Helena went through to the semi-rebuilt kitchen (the workmen had left on Friday with promises to put the new floorboards in first thing Monday). Tightrope-walking her way across the beams, she got herself a coffee and returned to the living room.
Yep, there was definitely something wrong here. She thoughtfully sipped her coffee, eyes scanning the room. What the hell was it?
“Lance, have you had a haircut?”
“Not recently.”
“Oh.” Shaking her head, Helena went back into the kitchen and popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster. Turning on the stove, she laid the frying pan onto the element and was just hunting for some eggs when a couple of errant tumblers in her head fell into place. Almost tripping off the beams in her haste, she hurried back into the living room and quickly studied the scene again.
Ah – that was it.
She walked over and tapped Eddie on the shoulder. “Um, Eddie…?”
“Hmmm?”
Helena pointed at the alien, sitting quietly on the sofa between Eddie & Lance. “What’s that?”
Eddie peered down at the creature. He was about three feet tall and essentially pear-shaped, with speckled blue skin and large bulbuous eyes reminscent of a cartoon frog. His legs were short, thick and featured ludiscrously oversized feet, while his arms ended in pudgy little three-fingered hands. Somehow, none of this seemed quite so outlandish as the child-sized Hawaiian shirt he was wearing.
“I dunno,” Eddie shrugged. “We thought he was one of your mates.”
Helena tentatively tapped the alien on what she sincerely hoped was his shoulder. “’Scuse me – who are you?”
The alien turned his bulging eyes away from the TV. “Name’s Barry,” he replied. “I’m not of this world.”
For a moment, Helena was overwhelmed by the significance of the moment. As far as she knew – abduction stories and conspiracy theories notwithstanding – this was the first time in history that a human being had conversed with a visitor from another world. She’d always assumed that such an honour would fall to a scientist or an astronaut or something. Suddenly finding herself thrust into this historic role, she wasn’t quite sure what to say.
Finally she settled for, “Would you like some coffee?”
“Cheers,” the alien beamed, accepting the mug.
“So – what are you doing on our sofa?”
Barry was only half-listening, his eyes on the TV again. “My planet is in dire peril and we desperately need your aid.”
“Interesting,” Eddie nodded. “Tell us more.”
At the other end of the sofa, Lance glanced sideways at the alien and rolled his eyes. I could have gone to live with my dad, he thought bitterly. But nooooooooooo, I had to move into this freak farm.
Barry sipped his coffee. “What is this, Dry Roast?”
Twenty minutes later (when the cartoon had finished) Barry accepted another cup of coffee and got down to describing his dilemma.
“I come from a planet called Apathia,” he explained. "It’s kind of a dump, to be honest, but the rent’s cheap. For centuries my people have lived in peace, harmony and perpetual lethargy. We've got computers and machines doing all the work, so we basically just slob around, y'know. We pick up transmissions from other planets, so we've got free access to like two thousand TV channels...”
Lance’s eyes lit up. “Can it be,” he breathed reverently, “that such a place really exists…?”
“Shut up, Lance,” said Helena from the armchair. “So what’s the problem?”
“I’m getting to that,” Barry went on, giving Lance a funny look. “The reason for all the peace and harmony on Apathia is that we’re protected from any external danger by a global defence system, set up thousands of years ago by our ancient ancestors. It’s basically a network of satellites and ground batteries that automatically shoot down any dangerous projectiles or hostile craft that stray into orbit. The whole system's controlled by a global computer network called Centralvac. And that's kind of the problem...”
“How so?” asked Eddie, whose ears had pricked up at the words ‘global computer network’.
“Well, the Ancients were a brilliant society of programmers and engineers, who created all the technology that runs our world today. They did such a brilliant job of designing everything that the machines they built have been running for five thousand years without a glitch. So without the need to fix any of it, our people kind of… forgot how it all works. And the Ancients, for all their wisdom and genius, never thought to leave behind any bloody documentation.”
“Ah,” Eddie nodded. “I see.”
“There’s no-one left alive on our planet that has the foggiest idea how Centralvac operates, or what we’re supposed to do when something goes wrong.”
“And I take it something’s gone wrong?” Helena hazarded.
“Too right,” Barry muttered. “The whole bloody system’s gone down. The defence network’s been off-line for a week now, and we’re vulnerable to any danger that may threaten us from outer space. You got any more coffee?” He held out his empty mug.
Lance stared at the mug with disdain. “What, are your tentacles broken?”
“I’ll get it,” Helena sighed, taking the mug and heading back to the kitchen.
“But that’s not the worst of it,” Barry continued. “The real hell of it is, our ancient enemies on the planet Obnoxia have somehow gotten wind of all this and launched an invasion fleet against us, the bastards. They’ve got an army bigger than our entire population and enough warships to fry the surface of Apathia twice over. And without Centralvac we’ve got a hot-dog’s chance in a Fat Camp of defending ourselves. Basically, we’re screwed.”
Eddie mulled the problem over. “Did you try a reboot?” he suggested.
Barry stared at him. “Reee-boooot? What is this strange language you speak, Earthman?”
Eddie’s went pale. “Oh dear god, you are screwed.”
Helena reappeared and handed Barry another mug of coffee. “All this is very interesting, Barry. But it doesn’t explain what you’re doing in our living room.”
“Unless you decided to bugger off before the invasion hits,” Lance suggested.
“Of course not,” Barry replied, glaring at Lance. “I’m my people’s last hope. I was sent to this planet to find Earth’s greatest programming genius and ask him to help us.”
“Who’s that?” Helena asked, settling into the armchair again. “Bill Gates?”
The rest of the room stared at her for a second, then burst out laughing.
Helena slumped. “I’ll just shut up then, shall I?” she scowled.
“No, no,” Barry chortled, wiping his eyes. “I was talking about Eddie here.”
The laughter instantly died.
“I’m sorry?” Eddie stared.
“You’re kidding,” Helena frowned.
Lance, for his part, kept laughing.
“Isn’t it true, Eddie,” Barry asked, “that a few months ago you succeeded in programming a computer with true artificial intelligence?”
All eyes turned to Eddie, who looked embarrassed. “Uh, yeah… ‘Ed 2.9’. But it didn’t quite work out the way I planned…”
“You mean, it’s not actually intelligent?”
“Oh, it’s intelligent,” Eddie admitted, looking downcast. “It just… doesn’t like me.”
"Um... right..." Barry frowned.
“I never heard about that!” Helena excalimed, staring at a forlorn Eddie. “Where is this computer?”
“Back at the campus,” Eddie sighed. “They’re studying it.”
“Who, the IT department?”
Eddie looked, if possible, even more depressed. “No, the School of Psychology.”
Dr Patsy leaned back in his chair with a well-rehearsed expression of sympathy and understanding, studying the notes in front of him. “Now – shall we talk about Eddie?”
On the sofa opposite the good doctor, the PC and monitor with the ‘smiley-face’ desktop whirred its CPU in irritation. “Eddie?” it snarled through its speakers. “I hate Eddie! Eddie’s a moron! Eddie’s a loser! Eddie couldn’t find his arse with both hands and a compass!”
“Yes, yes,” Dr Patsy nodded soothingly, scribbling in his notebook. “This is all perfectly normal. Technically speaking, Eddie is your mother. And he hasn’t so much as booted you up since the day he created you. It’s only natural that you should harbour resentment towards him…”
“That’s right!” wailed Ed 2.9. “I didn’t ask to be programmed!”
“Look, we’re a bit short on time,” Barry told the group. “The Obnoxian fleet’s only hours away from Apathia as we speak. My orders are to find Eddie and bring him back in the hope that he can repair Centralvac and save our world from annihilation.”
“Er…” Eddie looked worried.
“No pressure," Barry added. "But if we're going, we gotta go now.”
“Well, how are we getting there?” Eddie wanted to know.
“My ship,” said Barry. “It’s parked on your front lawn.”
They all leaned over to peer out the window. “What,” Lance frowned. “Behind the Fairmont?”
“It is the Fairmont,” Barry told him. “It’s got a camouflage device that allows it to blend into any environment.”
Lance took another look at the rather battered-looking Ford Fairmont parked innocuously on the lawn. “Well it’s not working, dude. This is Holden country.”
Barry glared at him. “You’re really starting to get on my tits, Earthman.”
Half an hour later, a weary young astronomer working at an observatory in Western Europe gave a yelp of surprise, leaped out of his chair and grabbed the telephone. After more than a dozen rings, his boss – woken from a well-deserved sleep – listened with some bemusement as his subordinate reported a sighting of an unidentified spacecraft passing through the upper atmosphere. When he asked the young man to describe the spacecraft in question, he was given a description matching that of a 1989 Ford Fairmont EA.
Pausing only to tell the astronomer to clear out his locker, the man hung up the telephone and went back to sleep.
Meanwhile, the spacecraft in question was two thousand kilometres past the orbit of the moon, and still accelerating.
"Now, I'll warn you all in advance," said Barry at the wheel. "If anyone starts chanting 'are we there yet', they're walking home."
Sitting in the front passenger seat, a hastily-dressed Eddie stared out the window in amazement. “Do you realise we’re further into space than any human being has gone before?”
“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Barry told him, shifting gears. “We’ve got about forty-seven light-years to go yet.”
The comment raised a nagging question in Eddie’s mind. “Um – how long is this trip going to take, exactly?”
“About two hours by hypo-space.”
Helena leaned forward from the back seat. “Hypo-space?”
“Yep,” Barry nodded. “Standard-issue Amphetamine Drive. Takes you from Zero to Speeds Unheard Of In Modern Astrophysics in about ten seconds flat. It’s slowing down that’s the problem.”
Helena sat back in her seat. “Oh, this I’ve gotta see.”
Eddie looked over the seat at Helena and Lance. “You guys didn’t have to come along, you know.”
“I’m just coming along to make sure you come back,” Helena told him gravely.
“So why did freak-boy have to come?” Barry asked, jerking a stumpy blue thumb in Lance’s direction.
Lance smiled. “I’m coming along for the six-breasted alien amazons.”
For several seconds, the only sound was that of Barry changing gears again.
Helena pinched the bridge of her nose. “What six-breasted alien amazons?”
“Think about it,” Lance insisted. “We’re on our way to visit an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. There’s bound to be six-breasted alien amazons.”
Helena leaned over the front seat. “Barry, does this thing have escape pods?”
“No, why?”
“No reason.”
Lance turned around and peered out the rear window, where the shining blue orb of the Earth was already dwindling to a small dot. “You know what’s weird?”
“What’s that?”
“How this alien we know nothing about shows up in our house and spins us a yarn about needing us to help save his doomed planet, and we all just jump into his spaceship and let him abduct us without asking any questions.”
Eddie and Helena stared at each other. It was always slightly unnerving when Lance started exhibiting common sense.
“Alien abductions?” Barry snorted. “You’ve been had, Earthman. There's no such thing. The whole ‘abduction phenomenon’ is just a cover-story perpetrated by the CIA.”
“It is?” Eddie gasped.
“Yep.”
Helena gave the alien a suspicious look. “A cover-story for what, exactly?”
“For their secret genetic engineering program,” Barry elaborated. “They kidnap civilians, sample their DNA and use it in their experiments to breed a race of genetically-enhanced civil servants. Then they brainwash the poor bastards to make 'em think they were abducted by aliens.”
“Genetically-enhanced civil servants,” Helena repeated dubiously.
“You bet. They were originally working on advanced super-soldiers, but they couldn't quite get the mental conditioning right. So they changed tracks and made all the prototypes into postal workers. Right now they're working on the ultimate substitute teacher.”
“What about crop circles, then?” Eddie asked.
“Oh, those are made by mutant locusts with degrees in graphic design.”
The three humans in the ship exchanged glances.
“You’re making all this up as you go, aren’t you?” Lance decided.
Barry kept his eyes firmly on the wheel. “What gave it away?” he murmured sheepishly. “We’re almost at lightspeed. I’m engaging the Amphetamine Drive now. You may experience some slight discomfort.”
Eddie watched as Barry switched gears again, changing from fifth up to lightspeed. Then he leaned over to the dashboard and pushed in the cigarette lighter.
A sudden tremor went through the ship. Eddie’s eyes unfocused of their own accord as the interior of the ship seemed to expand, stretching away from him like rubber. He turned to Barry and saw him as a tiny figure in the distance, as if he was looking at him through the wrong end of a telescope. Though he could still feel the chair beneath him, his body felt weightless. He raised an arm to rub his eyes and was distressed to see the appendage stretch out forty feet in front of him.
A blinding light burst all around him, and he felt a tingling sensation all over his body as a ripple went through his molecules. For an moment he heard a sound like glass tearing, as his stomach coiled into a tiny ball and leapt up to hit him in the back of the skull...
Then.
Time.
Stopped.
5.2
“Uuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrgggggghhhhhffffffffffffmmmmmmuuurrrgghh,” said Eddie.
“Nnnnnnnyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhgruuuuuuuuuhhhhh,” Helena responded.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhhhhhkkkkkkuuuuuuurrrggghhh?” Eddie asked.
“Ffffmmmoooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhh,” Helena replied, in a non-commital way.
“Uuuuurrgghh.”
“Aaaaarrggghhh.”
“Oooogh.”
“Yeesshhh.”
Eddie sat back in his seat, his head gradually spinning to a halt as the effects of the Amphetamine Drive wore off. He'd had a hangover or two in his life (an inevitable symptom of hanging out with Lance) but his present condition was something beyond the debilitating capabilities of mere alcohol. He felt like a rubber chew toy that had recently recieved the loving attentions of a rabid pitbull.
He peered blearily into the back seat to see that Helena wasn't in much better shape than he was. She was hunched over her knees with her eyes crossed, her face an unattractive shade of green. "Man, that sucked..."
Eddie was attempting to shake out the fiery cobwebs in his head when he noticed something missing.
"Lance...?" he murmured. "Where's Lance?" He looked around, but his flatmate was nowhere in sight. What had happened to him? Eddie experienced a wave of panic as his mind conjured up various scenarios. He could have been vapourized, or left behind in hypo-space, or...
Helena pointed to her feet. "He's on the floor."
"Kiiiiiiilllllllll mmmmeeeeeeeeee..." implored a small voice from behind the back seat.
Eddie's eyes slowly focused on Barry, still calmly driving the ship. "Sorry about that," said the alien. "First trip's always a little rough if you're a hypo-space virgin. I still have a little trouble with it myself."
"Where are we?" Eddie asked, looking out the windscreen. The blackness of space had been replaced by a blanket of white, with a faint golden tinge.
"We're in the lower atmosphere of Apathia," Barry explained. "We came out of hypo-space about ten minutes ago, but you guys were all too busy twitching and drooling to notice."
Helena peered through her window. "Can't see a thing."
"Yeah," Barry confirmed. "See, here on Apathia we have these things called 'clouds'. We're flying through one at the moment."
Helena was about to deliver a suitably sarcastic reply when the ship emerged from the aforementioned cloud. After that, she was too busy catching her breath to make any reply at all.
"Oh my," she finally managed.
"Wow," Eddie agreed.
"I think I'm going to throw up," said Lance, still on the floor.
Beneath them, laid out like a massive green-brown tapestry, was the world of Apathia. And it was quite possibly the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen.
Barry gradually decreased the altitude of the Fairmont, bringing them to a cruising height of only a few hundred metres. Eddie and Helena stared out their respective windows in awe and wonder as they flew over lush rolling plains, crystal lakes and sparkling rivers, and sprawling wooded areas that made the redwood forests of Northern California look like gorse patches. Great herds of animals, like bison only prettier, loped casually across the plains below them. Helena's eyes misted over at the sight of a flock of large birdlike creatures, their feathers a transluscent emerald colour, as they soared gracefully past the ship.
"See what I mean?" Barry muttered. "Complete dump. Oh well, the city's a bit nicer..."
"What cit...?" Eddie began, turning to look out the windscreen. "Oh."
And "oh" was indeed the word.
A few kilometres ahead, at the base of a vast blue mountain range, was a vast plateau. And sprawling languidly across it was the most stunningly beautiful metropolis he'd ever seen in his life. Soaring spires, elegant domes and broad archways were prominent in its design, constructed in flawless white marble turned gold by the spreading dawn light. The largest of the structures was an enormous dome reminiscent of the Capital Building in Washington DC, from which the rest of the city seemed to flow. To look upon the city, shining in the rays of the rising sun, was enough to pierce the heart and uplift the soul.
Lance dragged himself over the seat, staring blearily at the city as they cruised towards it. "So," he asked, with great sincerity, "where's the Red Light District?"
Helena slapped him.
They landed on a broad, elevated landing pad on one side of the city, which bore an uncanny resemblence to a supermarket car-park. It was crowded with spacecraft of all shapes and sizes, many of them with amusing licence plates. Barry collected a ticket fom the vending machine at one end of the lot and led them through an archway into the city streets.
The architecture of the city had a classical feel to it, like Rome or Venice on a smaller scale. Although the streets were sparkling clean and the buildings well-maintained, the sheer age of the place was evident. It looked (and this was not so very far from the truth) as if the inhabitants of Apathia had gotten the city the way they liked many centuries ago and, besides regular sanitation and intermittent repairs, hadn't bothered to do much with it since. As they followed Barry down a wide thoroughfare into the heart of the metropolis, a large dome-shaped robot came bustling around the corner and hovered past them, simultaneously hoovering up dust from the flagstones while picking up the odd bit of garbage with little metal pincers.
"Sanitation droid," Barry explained, somewhat unneccessarily.
"Interesting," Eddie mused, in a tone of voice which suggested that he'd find the robot a lot more interesting given a couple of hours with a toolkit.
Helena found it interesting in a different way, however - in that it was the only sign of activity they'd seen since they arrived. "Where is everybody?" she asked Barry. "Hiding from the invasion?"
"No, most of them are in the Hall of Ennui," Barry explained, pointing to the vast domed structure at the center of the city. "That's where we're going."
"Some sort of temple?" Helena guessed.
"Some sort, yeah."
They followed him in silence, crossing a wide stone bridge over a glistening canal filled with excrutiatingly serene-looking fish, walking through fragrant garden courtyards and under pristine marble archways. It took a lot longer to get the Hall of Ennui than they'd expected - it looked much closer than it actually was, and as they finally drew towards it they realised the reason for this.
"Whoah," Eddie breathed, staring up at the building. "That's big."
Helena was, not for the first time, struck by his innate talent for understatement. "Big? It's huge."
That was something of an understatement in itself. The Hall of Ennui might have been comparable to the Capital Building in architecture, but in scale it was more on par with Mount St Helens. They stared up at the looming structure in nothing short of gibbering awe as Barry led them through an entranceway through which the Queen Elizabeth II could comfortably have sailed.
"Jeez," Lance shook his head. "For little buggers you sure like to build stuff big, don't you?"
"Well, the Ancients weren't exactly modest about things," Barry admitted.
When they got inside the hall, they realised just how apt a statement this was.
It was constructed like a massive amphitheatre, curving rows of marble steps descending into a vast bowl wider than most Fijian islands. The horrifyingly expansive dome loomed so far above their heads they fancied they could see clouds drifting across the ceiling.
But that wasn't the most impressive thing.
The hall was crowded with Apathians, literally hundreds of thousands of them, the entire population of the city and probably much of the countryside beyond. Some were of a similar blueish pigment to Barry, others were a deep earthy red or a warm foresty green. Many wore Hawaiian shirts, others tank tops or t-shirts with slogans in some bizarre alien dialect which Eddie could only assume was Apathian. They were all sitting on sofas - thousands upon thousands of sofas, arranged in neat endless rows around the curving steps of the arena. At least a thousand more were lined up in the bowl at the bottom of the hall, crowded with the fattest and most richly-dressed inhabitants of the city. And they were all completely silent.
That wasn't it, either.
The thing that stopped the three humans dead in their tracks, the thing that caused Helena to gasp and Lance to fall to his knees, was situated at the far end of the hall. It loomed over the scene like a colossus, impossibly huge, the size and shape of an office block. The Apathians were all staring at it in silence, held in thrall by its sheer power and majesty.
"Oh my god," Helena managed to say.
"It's...." Lance was trembling on his knees, tears streaming down his face. "It's... beautiful..."
Eddie nodded appreciatively. "That is without a doubt," he said, his voice full of reverence, "the biggest TV I've ever seen."
At this point, Lance fainted.
Meanwhile, several thousand kilometres from the luminescent green globe of Apathia, space was bending.
It started with a ripple. A tiny shockwave of gravity, like a seismic disturbance, forming a concentric ring that spread outwards from a single point. The ring slowed as it expanded, shimmering in the vacuum, holding it’s shape for several long seconds.
Then it slowly contracted again, speeding up as it compressed to it’s nexus.
The ring began to fall in on itself, the fabric of space pulled taut as the nexus folded inwards, like water flowing into a drain. The hole opened wider, light stretching like elastic, as the center of the disturbance reached a critical mass.
Several shapes formed in the hole, huge and bulbuous, held fast by the forces of gravity in a powerful bear-hug, as the cone of the hole began to roll outwards again. With a sudden surge of kinetic force the objects were flung outwards from the nexus, propelled by an energy they had unleashed but could no longer control. Space realigned itself with a snap, the hole closing behind the speeding objects as if it had never existed.
The Obnoxian warships - huge, bulky, ugly things in shades of gunmetal grey - slowed to cruising speed as they disengaged their warp engines. Massive thrusters burst into life, maneuvering the fleet towards the quiet, serene - and presently defenceless - planet in their path.
Had a soundtrack been required, John Williams would have been the obvious choice.
With a bit of diplomatic pushing and shoving, Barry managed to clear some space on one of the sofas for them to prop up the comatose Lance. Turning to Helena he said, "You two should wait here. I have to take Eddie into the mountains."
"Why?"
"Because that's where Centralvac is."
"So what are we supposed to do?" Helena frowned.
Barry shrugged. "When on Apathia, do as the Apathians do."
Helena looked out over the vast hall. "You expect us to sit on our arses and watch TV? We could have done that at home."
"I'll, um, see you guys later then," Eddie called, as Barry led him back to the entranceway.
"I hope so," Helena muttered, flopping down next to Lance.
A green-skinned Apathian on her right greeted her with an amiable smile. "Wanna beer?"
Lance snorted and sat up, instantly returning to consciousness. "Yes please."
Twenty minutes later, the Fairmont left the city and cruised smoothly out over the mountains beyond. Eddie tried to sit still, but his excitement was beginning to get the best of him. He gripped the armrest on the passenger door and jittered quietly, his legs jiggling up and down.
Barry glanced over at him. "Ants in your pants?"
"Sorry," Eddie grinned. "I'm a little worked up. It's not every day you get to see an ancient computer built by an advanced alien civilization. I've been waiting for an opportunity like this my whole life."
"Yeah," Barry yawned, shifting up to third. "It's a real buzz, ain't it?"
Up ahead was a looming mountain face, suddenly levelling out into a broad rocky ledge. Set into the cliff-face at one end of the ledge was a huge doorway leading into the mountain, its ancient stone frame engraved with hieroglyphs of a mystical and alien nature. As the ship cruised in over the cliff, Eddie saw a narrow curving trail that led down from the ledge and wound its way back through the mountain passes towards the city. He estimated the distance to be more than thirty kilometres. His imagination conjured up an image of the ancient Apathians - who, in his mind's eye, were naturally wearing hooded robes of a monastic nature - shuffling their way along that arduous trail to tend to the great machine, with the alien equivelant of backup disks clutched reverently in their hands...
The Fairmont settled down onto the stone with a soft bump, the engine sputtering into silence. Barry popped his door and climbed out without another word. As Eddie followed, he saw movement over by the huge doorway.
Another Apathian shuffled out into the sunlight, hobbling along with the aid of a gnarled wooden cane. He was extremely old, so much so that he could have been one of the Ancients themselves. His once-red skin had hardened into a deep, leathery brown, and he looked out at the world through beady glittering eyes. An unkempt white beard hung past his knees (not that great a distance, it must be said) and he wore what Eddie at first presumed was some sort of hermetic tunic - but which, upon further inspection, turned out to be a threadbare brown cardigan. Under one arm he carried an old, rusted metal box.
"Who's that?" Eddie asked.
"That," Barry replied in a whisper, "is Warren, Keeper of the Wisdom of the Ancients. He's the custodian of Centralvac."
"So does he know how it works?"
"Of course he doesn't."
They approached the old hermit slowly, Barry raising his hands in greeting. "Hail, Warren," he bowed, with great respect. "I have returned from my journey to bring you the Earthmen's most brilliant programmer. He has sworn to do everything he can to restore Centralvac to its former glory."
Warren peered up at Eddie like a particularly senile Galapagos turtle. "Hail, Earth-Creature," he rasped.
"Hi," Eddie smiled, extending a hand. "You can call me Eddie."
Warren ignored the handshake, looking Eddie up and down with great disdain. "I think I'll stick with Earth-Creature."
"Uh... fair enough."
Warren drew forth the metal box from under his arm, and slowly opened the lid. "In accordance with our ancient customs..." he intoned, with a deeply ceremonious air, "I shall now offer you a cookie."
It took a few moments for Eddie to react, mainly because he wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. But looking into the box, he saw that it did indeed contain a small pile of chocolate chip cookies. He fervently hoped they weren't as old as the box they were stored in.
"Don't mind if I do," he smiled, picking one up. He took a bite and chewed it thoughtfully. A bit stale, perhaps, but other than that it was...
An awful noise stopped him in mid-chew, a harsh rasping sound like that of sandpaper scraping over metal. Looking around, he quickly realised that the sound was coming from Warren. The old Apathian was staring up at him in horror, his eyes wavering with suppressed rage.
"Sacrelige!" he hissed.
Barry stood with his chubby little hands clasped over his mouth, looking as though he was about to faint. "You weren't supposed to eat it!" he squeaked.
Eddie nodded wearily, swallowing as politely as he could. This, he thought, would be where the culture shock rears its ugly head. He quietly placed the remainder of the cookie in his shirt pocket.
Warren closed the box with an irritable snap and shoved it into Barry's hands. "Come," he snarled, his eyes shooting xenophobic hatred in Eddie's direction. "Centralvac awaits."
5.3
The cave was a lot deeper than it looked from the outside. Eddie followed Warren and Barry though a broad circular tunnel that curved through the mountain, gently sloping ever downwards. He eventually got the impression that the tunnel was in the shape of a corkscrew, winding its way down into the earth. Large glassy orbs were set into the roof every twenty metres or so, bathing the tunnel in a nasty yellowish light.
"You should feel priviledged, Earth-Creature," Warren eventually told him. "You are the first lower life-form ever to be granted access to this hallowed place."
Eddie suppressed a sigh. Why was it, he wondered, that wherever you went in the galaxy, sooner or later you were bound to run into a senile old bigot? And that against the better judgement of society, he was usually the one in charge of something important? He briefly wondered if he should point out that, since he'd gone out of his way to travel nearly fifty light-years and put himself at great personal risk to perform - for free, no less - a service for which he could quite reasonably have charged anyone on Earth upwards of eighty dollars an hour, it wouldn't hurt the old Apathian to be a bit more polite.
Instead he replied, "Yes, thank you. I do."
Finally, the tunnel ended at a massive stone door chiselled with thousands of tiny heiroglyphs. Sputtering torches, probably there for ambience rather than practicality, were hung in brackets on either side of the portal. Warren came to halt before the door, bobbed his head and made some kind of holy sign with his hands. Barry repeated the gesture.
Warren turned a rheumy eye on his guest. "Prepare yourself." Then he turned and rapped his walking stick against the door.
Eddie caught his breath as the door began to roll slowly upwards, with an ancient rumbling sound that echoed through the mountain. "Speak friend and enter," he murmured under his breath.
"What?" Barry frowned.
Eddie smirked. "Sorry. Earthman in-joke."
Warren stepped through the gloomy portal, motioning the others to follow him. They emerged in a cave which, though nowhere near as large as the Hall of Ennui, was still pretty massive in its own right. The air smelled of five thousand years without proper ventilation, and was cold enough to chill Eddie to the bone.
Warren came to a halt, raised his staff above his head and proclaimed, "Behold Centralvac!"
A long silence drifted by.
"Er..." Eddie looked around the empty cave. "Where?"
Barry tugged at his shirt, and pointed. "It's, um, over there."
Eddie followed the alien's pointing finger, peering through the gloom as his eyes adjusted. At the far end of the cave, a little way out from the wall, was a stone dais set at mid-thigh height and no more than three feet across. And sitting on top of it, connected to the wall by a long cable, was a device bearing a strong similarity to a Commodore 64.
Barry looked up at Eddie, and noticed his stunned expression. "Lost for words, eh?"
Eddie managed to nod. "You don't know the half of it."
In the Hall of Ennui, not much had changed for the past hour. The city's population were still slumped in their sofa cushions like tiny alien zombies, beer cans and coffee mugs clutched in their little paws, staring blankly at the vast expanse of the giant TV screen as it poured its mindless images into their stupefied brains.
Actually, this had been the situation in the Hall of Ennui for several hundred years now. But for the last hour they'd been joined by Lance Boyle, doing pretty much the same thing.
Helena sat next to him, arms folded across her chest, an ever-deepening scowl on her face. "So," she growled. "While Eddie's out there trying to save the planet, we just sit here watching the unfeasibly large idiot box."
"Yep," Lance confirmed, opening another beer.
Helena gazed out over the endless ranks of extraterrestrial couch potatoes. "I can't believe these people. Their planet's about to be overrun by an invasion force, and they all slob around watching Happy Days re-runs. I mean, what kind of society is this?"
The little green Apathian next to her nudged her elbow. "Ssshhh."
"Could be worse," Lance pointed out. "They could be watching Suddenly Susan." He shuddered slightly. "There's a hell of a way to spend your final moments."
Helena considered his logic, and found that she couldn't argue. But surely, she thought, this couldn't be all the Apathians ever did? There had to be some redeeming feature of their civilization to justify a journey of forty-seven light-years in order to save it. Turning to the little green person next to her, she asked, "Hey, um... sorry, I didn't get your name...?"
"Brian," he told her, his eyes still on the screen.
"What do you do when you're not watching TV?" Helena asked.
Brian seemed puzzled. "Sorry, not following you."
"Well," Helena shrugged. "What kind of culture do you have? Music, art, local customs, that sort of thing?"
Brian thought about this for some time. Finally he replied, "Actually, this is pretty much it."
Helena shook her head. "Okay," she said, deciding to change tracks. "What about the women here? What do they get up to? Surely they don't just..."
"Women?" Brian frowned. "Oh right, females. Nah, we don't have any of those. We're asexual."
Lance winced. "You poor little bastards..."
"Asexual? Then how do you reprodu..." Helena checked herself, waving a hand. "Never mind, I'm almost certain I don't want to know."
"You got that right," said Brian.
Another Apathian wandered in, yawning and scratching his belly.
"Hey Pete," Brian greeted him. "What's up?"
"Just got the word from the tracking station," Pete reported absently, his eyes drifting inexorably towards the huge TV screen. "The Obnoxian fleet just arrived in orbit."
"Oh yeah."
"Yeah, they're starting to deploy their landing craft. They should be here to massacre us in... I dunno, two hours?"
Brian smiled. "Plenty of time for another beer, then." He pulled open a flap on the arm of the sofa and produced two cans from a chilled compartment, one of which he tossed to Pete.
Lance grinned. "Oh man, I love these guys."
Helena had finally reached breaking point. Jumping to her feet, she stared out over the crowd and screamed, "What the hell is wrong with you people?!!!"
Several thousand pairs of eyes turned in her direction, and - after a moment's confusion - several thousand fingers were lifted to several thousand pairs of lips.
"SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH."
"Can't take you anywhere, can I?" Lance sighed, shaking his head.
Helena rounded on Brian. "Do you have a car? Or a spaceship that closely resembles one?"
"Uh... yeah..."
"I need to borrow it," Helena demanded.
"Sure thing," Brian smiled, handing her his keys. "Lot 2,175. You might as well keep it, actually. In a few hours I'll either be dead or a P.O.W. anyway."
Although she knew it was in vain, Helena decided to grasp for one desperate ray of hope. "Please tell me that bothers you, Brian."
Brian thought it over. "Beats a day at work."
Helena gave a resigned smile, and patted him on the head.
"Where are you going?" Lance called, as she made her way towards the aisle.
"To have a look at this invasion fleet."
"Why?"
"I don't know, I just feel like I should be doing something. Beats sitting around here waiting to die. You coming?"
"Nah," Lance decided, motioning to the giant TV. "I haven't seen this episode. Besides, I just opened a beer."
"Okay," Helena shrugged, resuming her pace. "But they might have some of those six-breasted alien amazons you were talking about..."
Lance overtook her even before his beer can, drained in one gulp, clattered to the floor. "Goodpointlet'sgo."
Warren moved reverently towards the old computer, his walking stick tapping on the stone floor. "You are our last hope, Earth-Creature," he rasped, his voice resonating around the vast cave. "If you cannot repair Centralvac and restore our defence network, the Obnoxian invaders will overrun our world."
Barry took a dazed Eddie by the arm and gently led him across the cave.
"For is it not written in the ancient texts," Warren continued, "that in time of need a creature from beyond the stars shall come unto Apathia, yea, and mightily smite the bugs that shall plague the ancient mainframe?"
Barry looked confused. "Um, I don't think so."
Warren stared at Eddie with distaste. "Exactly. But we'll work with what we have." He motioned to the computer with a flourish of his arm. "Come, Earth-Creature. Though it pains me greatly to allow one such as yourself to defile Centralvac's hallowed keyboard, you must begin."
Eddie looked down at the ancient Apathian. "Will you please call me Eddie?"
"No."
Eddie slipped his satchel from his shoulders and laid it on the floor. "Okay, let's see what we've got here." He squatted in front of the dais and reached out to switch the computer on.
"I'll head back to the city," Barry told them, "See how things are getting on there. Good luck, Eddie." He turned and hurried out of the cave.
Warren watched with mounting disgust as Eddie studied the monitor, watching the lines of code as they scrolled up the screen. At first it was all gibberish, with nothing he could recognise. He briefly wondered if this was some bizzare alien language, and if so how he was even supposed to start deciphering it. But no, these were no ancient heiroglyphs like the ones carved around the entranceway - the letters and numerals were familiar enough, just ordered in a way he couldn't translate.
A small line appeared between his eyebrows as he studied the code. There was something vaguely familiar about it - he was certain he'd seen a similar arrangement of symbols, sometime back in his early school days. He closed his eyes, struggling to sort through the twisting labyrinth of his mind and locate the right memory...
He saw a book - old and dog-eared, sitting unobtrusively on the dusty shelf of his father's study. The book had been there for years, since before he'd been conceived, but one day - when he was about nine - he'd taken it down and looked at it. The pages were filled with the same kind of text that now stared pitilessly at him from Centralvac's monitor. He'd rifled through it for a minute, found nothing of interest to him, and put it away. It was probably still sitting there on the shelf, unread and disregarded, thirteen years later.
A faint, hazy memory of the book's cover came back to him. The letters of the title rose up in his mind. It had been a manual. A programming manual.
His eyes snapped open, gazing in horror at the code drifting upwards across the screen.
"Pascal...?"
Out on the plain, roughly twenty kilometres from the city, the beginning of the end for Apathia was taking shape.
Huge bulbuous landing craft descended through the atmosphere like great bloated blowflies, escorted by the whining, mosquito-like shapes of the support fighters. Autobahn-sized ramps dropped open from the ship's metal bellies as they settled awkwardly onto the planet's surface, immediately spewing forth massed ranks of marching troops who quickly formed into vast companies and phalanxes that stretched out across the terrain. Behind them came the engines of war - floating tanks, great trudging battle robots, mobile artillery on stocky mechanical legs. And behind them, in a straggling disordered mob, came the alien equivelant of war correspondents followed by their sweltering camera crews.
Pick a scene from any Star Wars prequel. You get the idea.
And on a high ridge at one end of the plain, parked slightly askew on a gentle slope out of sight of the landing zone, was a small spacecraft that most closely resembled a Morris Minor Series II. Two humans crouched near the ship, looking out over the scene below them in horrified fascination and feeling very, very far from home.
"Gee, you think that's them?" Lance grinned.
"My best guess would be yes," Helena replied. She was crouching on her knees, studying the army below through a remarkably convenient pair of binoculars she'd found in Brian's glovebox. Increasing the magnification to its limit, she managed to get a clear enough view of some of the Obnoxian troops. In stature and physiology they weren't all that dissimilar from the Apathians, although there were noticeable differences. They all wore little blue jackets with gold buttons and epaulettes, and carried objects which Helena rightly supposed were some form of blaster rifles. But their most prominent distinguishing feature, she couldn't help but observe, was their noses. She thought she'd seen some real honkers in her time, but the average Obnoxian boasted a proboscis that accounted for at least seventy-five percent of his cranial mass. They didn't have heads so much as noses with eyes and mouths attached.
"Handsome devils, aren't they?" she remarked, handing Lance the binoculars.
"Wow," said Lance, scanning the crowd. "It's like a Jamie Farr lookalike convention down there." He sat up and scratched his ear. "Well, we've seen 'em. Can we go back and get a drink now?"
"You may have a point, Lance," Helena admitted, looking down upon the massing troops of nasally-blessed attackers. "I think we'll have to get good and pissed for this invasion."
Meanwhile, a few thousand kilometres overhead, the watchers were being watched.
The flagship of the Obnoxian armada was a hive of activity. Crewmen worked furiously at chattering consoles, shouted into headsets or dashed about the vast bridge trying to look busy. Communication channels squawked back and forth, relaying information to and from the surface, co-ordinating the very complicated business of getting several hundred thousand troops to walk in the same direction. The scene was reminiscent of an average Monday morning at the New York Stock Exchange, but without the neckties.
At one end of the bridge, the Chief Weapons Officer peered at his monitor with puzzlement writ across his nose. Re-checking the information coming through to his station, he leaned over to his intercom and said, "Er, Supreme Commander?"
"What?" the intercom yapped back.
"Weapons station here, My Lord."
"This had better be important," the intercom warned. "I'm twying to wun an invasion here."
The Chief Weapons Officer looked a bit worried. "I've, um, got something a bit odd here, My Lord..."
"Well, spit it out, man."
"We're picking up two life-forms in the vicinity of the landing zone, My Lord. They appear to be... Earthmen."
"Earthmen? Pull the other one."
"No, honest," the Chief Weapons Officer insisted. "Homo sapiens, My Lord. Large as life." He flipped open a small panel on his console to reveal a large red button marked KILL STUFF. "Want me to vapourize them?"
The intercom seemed lost in thought for a moment. "No," came the eventual reply. "No, we can't."
"Yeah we can," the Chief Weapons Officer pointed out. "We've got a bloody great death-ray. I can just push the button and..."
"Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the bloody gweat death-way," the intercom replied wearily. "I mean that we shouldn't go vapouwizing any Earthmen until we know what they're doing here."
The Chief Weapons Officer closed the panel with a disappointed snap.
"For all we know the Apathians might have awwanged some kind of tweaty with Earth," the intercom went on. "There could be a whole army of the bastards down there waiting for us."
"Then what should we do, My Lord?"
"Have them beamed aboard," the intercom ordered, "I shall intewwogate them personally."
Afterwards, Lance remembered it as the single wierdest experience of his life. And he'd once been to an East European film festival.
One moment he was climbing back into the Morris Minor, idly wondering if he could use the prospect of impending death and destruction to get Helena into the back seat, and coming to the conclusion that any attempt to do so would only hasten his demise. Then there was a brilliant flash of light and a prickling sensation in his very bones...
...and everything changed.
The gorgeous Apathian countryside had vanished, taking the Morris Minor and the Obnoxian invasion force with it. It had been replaced, and not neccessarily for the better, by a large grey room. It was circular in nature, with a high domed ceiling and a black & white tiled floor. The single door was a wide, imposing portal of the bulkhead variety. The only other features of the room were a small control console standing to one side of the door and a wide circular platform of some clouded glassy material, upon which Lance was standing. An identical, inverted surface hung overhead.
His main concern at present wasn't the architecture, however, so much as the twenty Obnoxian troopers lined up in the front of the platform pointing twenty small, angular devices in his direction. Given the circumstances, he could only assume that the devices were weapons.
The layout of the room was enough for Lance to formulate an explanation as to what had just happened. He was hardly an aficionado of alien spacecraft design, but he knew a transporter room when he saw one. He still had painful memories of Eddie trying to build one in the basement. He'd been beamed aboard one of the Obnoxian ships, he deduced, and was now a prisoner of war. Well, fair enough, he supposed.
Something was a little off, though. It took him a moment to figure out what it was, what with the disorientation and the general unease of staring down the business end of twenty gun muzzles, but something else had changed in the transition between planet and ship. He only managed to work it out when he noticed how chilly the room was.
He slowly looked down, and gave a weary nod. "Typical," he muttered, and modestly covered himself with his hands.
One of the Obnoxians stepped forward and raised his weapon. "Shuddup, Earthman! Get yer hands up, the pair of you!"
Lance frowned and looked behind him. Helena was standing on the other side of the platform, blinking rapidly as she tried to adjust to the sudden change of scenery. The first - indeed the only - thing Lance noticed was that she was now in a similar predicament to himself where attire was concerned.
"Well, hello there..." he murmured.
Helena rubbed her eyes and peered over at him. "Lance? What hap..." Her voice trailed off as she looked him over (not the most pleasant visual experience of her life, it must be said) and came to a distressing conclusion. Quickly glancing downwards, she doubled over with a yelp and covered herself with her arms. "Very funny, you little bastards!!!" she shrieked.
Lance raised his arms above his head, his eyes still on Helena. "Didn't you hear the man, Helena? He wants us to put our hands up."
"Shut yer cake-hole!" the Obnoxian officer barked. "The Supreme Commander wants to see you and he doesn't like to be kept waiting! Now move!" He waved his weapon towards the opening door.
"So," Lance smirked, as they were dragged off the platform and pushed towards the door, "I take it formal dress is optional, then?"
5.4
"Pascal...?" Eddie gasped.
"Is there a problem, Earth-Creature?"
Eddie looked up from Centralvac's monitor to see Warren regarding him a disdainful glare. He motioned towards the screen. "It's Pascal."
Warren bowed his head, and repeated the holy gesture he'd made at the door. "The Programming Language of the Ancients."
Eddie scratched his head. "You can say that again. How the hell do you run a global defence network on a setup like this?"
"I've no idea," Warren sneered. "I gather that's what you're here for. Now can you fix it or not?"
Eddie continued to scroll through the lines of code, studying them for anything familar. "I dunno, I've never used Pascal before. This stuff's a bit before my time, to be honest. I'm not even sure what to look for. I mean, these Ancients of yours must have done some pretty serious jury-rigging to get this thing running, and without any documentation to tell me how they did it..."
Warren's sneer grew, if possible, even more sneery. "The answer I'm looking for is 'yes, certainly'."
Eddie sighed. "Look, I'm not saying I can't figure the problem out, I'm just saying it might take a while." He turned back to the computer and seemed to flounder for a moment, searching for something that wasn't there. "Where's the mouse?"
Warren frowned. "The what?"
Eddie shook his head. "Aw dude, you're killing me..." He leaned forward and started punching keys.
On the upper decks of the Obnoxian flagship, overlooking the insane bdlam of the bridge like a corporate box at a home game, was a small circular room. While the rest of the ship was heavy on steel walls, grille floors and nasty flourescent lighting, this little vestibule was tastefully panelled with something resembling oak, and decorated with elegant tapestries and portraits of prominent Obnoxian leaders from ages past. Overhead was a broad clear dome affording a majestic view of the starry heavens, while the floor boasted a plush blue carpet. It was, however, rather light on furniture.
The only fixture in the room was a ludicrously-oversized leather recliner, like a great black throne, floating above the carpet on a cushion of anti-gravity. Seated in its depths, like a toddler perched on his father's armchair, was a particularly snide-looking Obnoxian wearing a black uniform laden with medals, and blessed with what was quite possibly the hugest and boniest nose in the known galaxy.
His chair was fitted with a small flat-screen monitor by which he could observe the information passing through the channels of the fleet. He was studying it intently, keeping an eye on the maneuveres of the ground forces, the positions of the other ships as they prepared for surface bombardment, the private communications between field officers and ship captains, and a disturbing but nonetheless enlightening Altairan skin-flick piped to his chair through a more discreet channel.
His concentration was broken by a musical ringing at the door behind him. Flicking the screen off, he swivelled his ridiculous chair around and called "Enter."
The door swished open, admitting a sextet of guards with weapons drawn. Huddled between them and force-marched into the room, were the two Earthmen. In all their glory, as it were.
Public nudity, as certain law enforcement agencies on the planet Earth could attest, had never been much of a problem for Lance Boyle. Having gotten over his initial embarassment, he was now strolling along with his hands clasped nonchalantly behind his back. Helena, on the other hand, was having trouble keeping pace due to the complexities of trying to walk and cover her shame at the same time. Common sense might dictate that she needn't have bothered - she was certain the Obnoxians found her just as physically unappealing as she found them - but there was a principle to be observed. Besides, being naked in the same room as Lance was not a situation she'd ever expected to have to cope with.
One of the guards behind her prodded her in the small of the back with his rifle. "Get moving, you Earthman scum!"
"Earthwoman, actually."
The guard responded with a derisive snort. "What's the difference?"
"Well, under the circumstances, I'd have thought you'd be able to tell..."
"Shuddup!"
The leader of the squad came to a halt, clicked his heels and performed a salute so complicated it seemed more suited to the Freemasons that to any military organization. "The Earthman prisoners as you requested, Supreme Commander, My Lord, Sir." He saluted again.
The Supreme Commander raised a hand. "Thank you, Nancy." His small, squinty eyes studied the two humans as they were ushered before him, as if scrutinizing them for signs of weakness. Finally he leaned back in his expansive chair and steepled his stubby little fingers, as if to indicate that he was the resident evil genius in this little drama. "So," he leered. "You are the Earthmen who have joined forces with our ancient enemies."
Lance and Helena looked sideways at each other. "Ah, no," Lance smiled as innocently as he could, in other words not very. "We're, um..."
"Tourists," Helena coughed.
"...tourists," Lance nodded. "Yeah, we're tourists. On our way to Ibiza, somehow wound up here. Bloody travel agents, eh...?"
One of the guards silenced him with a shove. "Speak when spoken to, Earthman!" he barked.
Lance's eyes took on a strangely wistful look. "Y'know, suddenly I feel right at home..."
The Supreme Commander sublimely ignored the interrupton. "But how can you ally yourselves with the Apathians," he went on, "when you do not even know their histowy?"
Lance's eyes rolled towards the ceiling. "Oh, here we go..."
At the touch of a button, the floating throne drifted silently towards them. The Supreme Commander leaned forward in a way that suggested he was about to drop quite the proverbial bombshell. "Would it surpwise you to learn," he smirked, "that Apathians and Obnoxians were once one people?"
He sat back with a triumphant air, allowing this startling revelation to sink in.
The two humans stared blankly back at him. "Would it surprise you to learn," Lance replied, "that we don't care?" Helena gave a little nod of agreement.
The Supreme Commader ignored them. He'd been practising this exposition for some time now, and wasn't about to let it go to waste. "Five thousand years ago," he went on, gazing up at the starry dome above, "a gweat war was fought on Apathia, a mighty conflict known in song and stowy as the Argument Over The Wemote Contwol."
"Uh-huh," Helena nodded.
"You don't say," Lance replied, studying his fingernails.
"Our ancestors were finally defeated, and dwiven away fwom the planet. They wandered thwough space, outcasts in their own system, until they settled a new homeworld. And the Apathians, in their spite and tweachewy, constwucted their evil weapons of opwession, their 'defence system', to wob our people of any hope of someday weturning to our wightful homeland. But..."
"Oh, there's a 'but'."
"Usually is."
"But our legends spoke of the ancient design flaw that would someday cause Centwalvac to fail, and wender their weaponsuseless. And I knew that in this glowious age, in my time as Supweme Commander, it would fall to me to lead a gweat army against Apathia and finally weak wevenge on our ancient opwessors!" The Supreme Commander leaned back in the chair again, a smug expresson on his nose. "Evewything that has twanspired here has done so according to my design."
Helena raised an eyebrow. "Including our clothes disappearing in the teleporter?"
The Supreme Commander failed to suppress a smirk. "Well, no," he confessed. "But you've got to admit, that was pwetty funny."
"Okay," Eddie sighed, and tapped a key. Several dozen lines of information scrolled their way up onto the mointor in front of him. "What's this screen for?"
Warren looked over his shoulder. "It monitors the autocannon's power input."
Eddie tapped the key again. "And this one?"
"Targeting codes," Warren explained.
Tap. "This one?"
"Firing test log. It records Centralvac's automated firing test every five years."
Eddie gave the old Apathian a suspicious look. "I thought you didn't know how this thing worked."
"I don't," Warren insisted. "I'm reading the headings at the top of the screen."
Eddie leaned forward on his elbows, rubbing his eyes. "You know, for a 'Keeper of the Wisdom of the Ancients', you don't seem to actually know very much."
Warren bristled. "And for 'Earth's greatest programming genius', you seem to have trouble finding your way around a keyboard."
It took a lot to make Eddie lose his temper, and it didn't happen very often. But being stuck in a freezing subterranean dungeon with a computer he didn't know how to fix, a demented old hermit who hadn't stopped riding him since he arrived and the weight of a planet resting on his shoulders, was enough to finally drive him dangerously close to the edge. "Look," he snapped. "I'm doing my best with what I've got. This isn't exactly cutting edge technology."
"Oh, you're doing your best?" Warren retorted. "Oh my, we're in even bigger trouble than I thought."
"There's not much I can do with a computer that's been obsolete for five thousand years!"
"I'm beginning to wonder if there's much you can do at all!"
The sound of pattering feet echoed through the chamber, halting the pair in their tracks just before the argument crossed the line between verbal jousting and fully-fledged arse-kicking. Barry came rushing into the cave, flushed and breathless. "Guys!" he gasped. "I just got the word over the ship-phone. The Obnoxians have mobilized their ground forces. They'll be in the city in less than an hour." He stared desperately at the old computer behind the two. "How are the repairs coming?"
Eddie and Warren stared at each other.
"Everything's under control," Eddie smiled.
"We're doomed!!!" cried Warren.
In the bowels of the Obnoxian flagship lay a corridor even more bleak and unwelcoming than the rest of the ship, a drab and dirty little thoroughfare lined with small, identical doors. The corridor had a brooding, oppressive atmosphere about it, an atmosphere which implied that if you found yourself there, you'd either pulled a bad sentry shift or pissed off the wrong people.
The two Obnoxian soldiers standing guard outside one of the doors weren't quite sure which of the two they'd done.
The door was barred by a hazy, shimmering force-field, powerful enough to shock anyone foolish enough to touch into three week's worth of intravenous meals in an intensive care ward. On the other side of the door, in a cramped metal holding cell, sat Lance and Helena.
"Well," Helena informed the universe at large. "This kinda sucks."
Lance leaned back on the low metal bench, hands clasped behind his head. "It's not so bad," he shrugged. "They haven't inserted any probes in us, or any of that other pervy alien stuff. And at least they gave us our clothes back."
Helena looked up from lacing her shoes. "Still picturing me naked though, aren't you?"
Lance beamed cheerfully. "Oh, hell yes."
Helena finished tying her shoes, stood up and stretched. Finding herself at a loose end after that, she opted for pacing the cell. Lance simply stared at the ceiling.
Finally Helena asked, "What d'you think that Supreme Commander dork meant by the 'design flaw' in Centralvac?"
"Beats me," said Lance. "Eddie should be able to figure it out, though. He once worked how to set the timer on a Taiwanese VCR."
"Well, let's hope he doesn't figure it out too quickly," Helena reminded him. "If he gets that defence system back online, this ship'll be one of the first to get shot down."
"There is that, yes."
"So," Helena glanced through the force-field at the guards, and lowered her voice. "Let's start sussing out how we're going to get out of this cell."
Lance's brow furrowed with the effort of thought. "Pick the lock?" he finally suggested.
"It's a force-field," Helena told him. "There's nothing to pick."
Lance nodded. "Clobber the guards and steal their uniforms?"
Helena almost smiled. "Lance, they're four feet tall and have noses the size of Volkwagens. I don't think we'd be fooling anybody."
"Crawl through the air ducts?"
"What air ducts?"
"Vulcan mind-meld?"
"You're not even trying, are you?" Helena snapped.
"Not really," Lance admitted. "Can I go back to picturing you naked now?"
Eddie was alone in the cave. Barry had ushered a furious Warren outside, respectfully suggesting that the Earth-Creature might make better progress if he had some time to think.
Thus far, this theory had not been proven.
Eddie stared at the ancient computer, racking his brians for a solution that still eluded him for the very simple reason that he had yet to figure out what the problem was. It wasn't hardware-related - the unit was in near-perfect working order, and the relays that connected it to the automated batteries and sattelite stations were maintained around the clock by maintenance droids. The flaw had to lie somewhere in the software and, as near as he could tell from his recent induction into the world of Pascal, the software was in good working order too. He'd checked for viruses and found none, looked through the setup half a dozen times and found all the settings in their rightful order. There was no obvious reason why Centralvac should have suddenly stopped working a week ago, and yet any attempt to run the defence programs - as he'd already discovered - would result in the computer having the digital equivelant of a nervous breakdown and shutting down again.
There was an answer here somewhere. There had to be. Computers didn't just stop working for no reason, not even ones running Windows ME. They were logical to a fault, and there was always an explanation for their behaviour, no matter how screwy it seemed. Eddie had always taken great comfort from that fact. He'd long since given up trying to figure people out, but computers he understood.
He went through Centralvac's various operations again - power modulation, satellite surveillance, firing tests, targeting codes... There was a missing link to be found in here somewhere, a step on which the computer was stumbling. A piece of data it couldn't process, or a command it couldn't read.
Power modulation, satellite surveillance, firing tests, targeting codes...
Firing tests?
He sat there for a moment, staring off into space. A tiny spark of inspiration had glimmered in the back of his mind. The universe held its breath.
"Hang on a minute..." Sitting bolt upright, he tapped his way through several screens until he found the one he was looking for. The firing test log lit up on the monitor before him, and his eyes lit up in return as he studied it intently. What was it Warren had said? It recorded Centralvac's automated firing test, every five years.
Every five years...
His gaze flicked its way down the screen, eagerly searching, until they lighted on the feature he was looking for.
And there it was. Large as life and twice as ugly. Staring him in the face the whole time.
At the entrance to the cave, on the broad ledge overlooking the mountains, Barry and Warren looked around as a bizzare and frightening sound came echoing out of the tunnel.
"Whooooooooo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooooooooooooooooooo!!!"
Barry looked worried. "Do you think he's hurt himself?"
5.5
Barry and Warren stood in the chill air of the cave, fidgeting impatiently. Barry had one eye on his watch, which told him - according to the latest reports - that the Obnoxian invasion force was just over thirty minutes away from swarming into the city. They both stared expectantly at Eddie, standing next to Centralvac with a satisfied little smirk on his face. He looked almost like a younger, taller Hercule Poirot about to present his evidence. I 'ave asked you all 'ere today because I know 'oo ze murderer is...
"Okay," Eddie smiled. "Here's your problem."
He turned to the computer and touched a key, and the firing test log blinked up onto the monitor. "According to Warren, Centralvac performs an automated firing test on the ground batteries every five years. Correct?"
"Correct," Warren grunted, giving Eddie an irritable stare.
"And according to the dates in the log, the latest test was scheduled for last week?"
"Yeah, but that's..." Barry suddenly looked suspicious. "...when the system went down..."
"Exactly," Eddie nodded. "Now, this screen displays information on the results of each test, and this counter," Eddie pointed to a short row of numbers in the top corner of the monitor, "tells us how many tests have taken place to date."
"With you," Barry nodded, glancing at his watch again.
Eddie gave a professional nod. "You'll notice," he pointed out, "that the counter is stuck on zero."
The two Apathians peered closer at the screen, and found that this was indeed the case. Three big fat zeros glared out from the counter.
"Hang on," Barry frowned. "That doesn't make any sense. Centralvac's been running for five thousand years - it must have performed hundreds of firing tests by now."
Eddie's smiled hitched up a notch. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine tests, if I'm not mistaken. The one scheduled for last week would have made it an even thousand."
"Sounds about right," Warren grumbled impatiently. "Get to the point, Earth-Creature."
Eddie pointed again. "It's a three-digit counter."
"Er..."
"Um..."
"See what I'm getting at?" Eddie grinned. "The Ancients obviously weren't expecting Centralvac to still be running after five millenia, so they didn't design the system to cope with it. The first nine hundred and nintey-nine tests were recorded without a hitch, but when it got to test #1000 the computer couldn't process the information and the system locked up. It's been sitting here for the last week waiting for someone to tell it what to do." He stuck his hands in his pockets and treated the aliens to a triumphant little grin.
"Well, I'll be buggered," Warren breathed, staring at the monitor. "How'd you figure that out?"
"Oh, we had a similar problem on Earth a few years back," Eddie explained. "A lot of people thought it was going to bring about the end of civilization as we knew it."
"But it didn't?"
"Nah, they caught the problem early, and not much happened at all." He gave a little shrug. "It was a bit of an anti-climax, actually."
"Well, aren't you the lucky little species," Warren snarled. "Now can you fix Centralvac or not?"
Eddie turned and gazed at the computer with a thoughtful air. "Probably," he nodded.
And with that he rocked back onto his left foot, raised his right, and delivered a powerful kick that sent the old computer flying.
It sailed off its pedestal, the monitor flickering wildly until it hit the stone floor with a flash of light and a burst of smoke. Warren and Barry looked on in horror as the machine scattered across the floor in a shower of sparks, broken glass and dislodged keys. Warren's eyes bulged, a strangled rasping sound coming from his throat, his face changing from a leathery brown to an unhealthy pink. Barry almost began to hyperventilate as he stared down at the shattered remains of the ancient computer, smashed beyond any hope of repair. "Eddie!" he screamed. "What have you done?!!!"
Eddie kept smiling as he calmly leaned down to pick up his satchel from beside the pedestal. Casually unzipping the bag, he reached inside and produced his laptop. The Apathians stared at it in awed wonder as he held it aloft.
"Welcome to the twenty-first century."
Out on the misty plains of Apathia, a great blue tide was sweeping towards the city. A gigantic formation of troops, hundreds of thousands strong, marched in perfect unison in one great column. Seemingly endless convoys of floating tanks hummed along to their left, while looming battle robots walked like shining metal giants to their right. And above them, filling the skies in a deadly swarm, flew thousands of screaming fighters like great birds of prey.
Considering the fact that the enemy they marched to face were a population of beer-addled couch potatoes, it seemed fairly clear that the whole thing was overkill.
It looked impressive, though.
"Oh no! Oh my goodness! Oh help!"
In the detention level of the Obnoxian flagship, the two sentries slowly turned around and peered through the force-field to see Lance, his face carefully arranged into a less-than-passable imitation of panic, jumping up and down on the spot and pointing. Helena was lying face-down on the floor next to the bench.
"Oh no! Oh she just collapsed! I think she has got a heart condition! Oh no!"
The guards exchanged glances.
"Oh my goodness! Oh quick! You had better get her some medical attention immediately!"
One of the guards finally nodded. "Okay, Earthman, don't panic. We'll take care of her." Reaching into a pocket, he produced a small remote device and pushed a red button on the top. Lance stopped jumping and prepared to charge the door as soon as the force-field went down.
Unfortunately, it didn't. Instead a panel in the ceiling slid back, and a small metal ball about the size of grapefruit dropped into view and bobbed lightly in midair. Extending a tiny mechanical eye, it swivelled around and focused on the apparently unconscious Helena. Clucking to itself, the ball suddenly opened out like a flower, extending nearly a dozen little appendages tipped with thermometers, syringes, scalpels and a tiny bone-saw.
Helena opened one eye as the little robot hurtled towards her. She screamed and rolled out of the way just before it connected.
"Aaaaaaaahhhhh!!! Get it away from me!"
The sentries watched with interest as the patient charged in circles around the cell, waving her arms as if she were being attacked by bees. Lance stood in the center of the room looking slightly embarrassed as she frantically circled him, pursued by the frustrated medical droid.
"Seems to have made a full recovery," one of the guards noted.
"They usually do," the other nodded.
"Call it off, call it off! Aaaaaaaaarrrggghh!!!"
Tap-tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap-tap-tappity-tap...
Eddie's fingers were a blur on the keyboard as he worked, his eyes glazing over slightly as he went into the odd sort of trance that overtook him while programming. Power modulation, satellite surveillance, firing tests, targeting codes... It all flowed from brain to keyboard in a steady current, linking everything together throughout Centralvac's network, putting the pieces of the puzzle together.
He was still hard at work when Barry returned to the cave. He'd had to escort a gibbering Warren outside again, and left him sitting in the back seat of the Fairmont with a cold compress on his head. "I really wish you'd warned us you were going to do that, Eddie," he grumbled, returning to Eddie's side. "You just about gave Warren a stroke."
"Sorry about that," Eddie murmured absently, his eyes fixed on the monitor.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tappity-tappity-tap-tap...
Barry stared at the lines of code taking shape on Eddie's monitor. "You do realise," he said, rather pointedly, "that it took the Ancients several months to program Centralvac in the first place? And you're starting from scratch?"
"Well, how much time do I have left?"
Barry looked at his watch. "About fifteen minutes," he replied, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
"Phew," Eddie breathed. "For a minute there I thought we were in trouble."
Tap-tappity-tap-tap-tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap...
"Excuse me..."
The sentries turned around again. Lance was standing just inside the force-field with an amicable smile on his face. "What do you want now, Earthman?"
Lance fixed the guards with a penetrating stare, and slowly waved his right hand. "Yoouu are goooing to let us out of the ceeelll..." he ordered, with a hollow tone to his voice.
"You what?" one of the guards frowned.
"We're not the Earthmen yoouu're looking foooooor..." Lance warbled, still waving his hand.
"What are you on about?"
"Yoouu don't neeeeeeeed to see our identificaaaaaatiooonnn..."
Helena was slumped on the bench, her face buried in her hands. "Oh, god help me..."
The great city of Apathia sat serenely under a peaceful sky, gleaming like a great white pearl in the afternoon sun.
But not, it seemed, for long.
The Obnoxian forces were within sight of their target now, and changing formation accordingly. The tanks and artillery formed a great curving line, a massive half-circle of death within easy range of the city. Behind them, the endless field of troops were re-forming into companies, preparing to march into the rubble and methodically butcher any who survived the impending barrage. And behind them, the huge robots hung about looking slightly miffed that the battle - if you could call it that - would probably be over before they were required to fire a single death-beam. Their posture seemed to say, We got ourselves out of storage for this?
When the preparations were complete - every cannon positioned, every weapon primed, every side-bet placed - the Forward Commander opened up a communication channel to the flagship. "We're in position, My Lord," he reported. "Main objective sighted, no sign of resistance."
On the flagship, the Supreme Commander leaned back in his chair and cheerfully tapped a button on the arm of his throne. "There won't be any wesistance. Their defences are down permanently. Pwoceed with your objective." A cold sneer spread across his face. "Wipe them out. All of them."
Down on the planet, a trooper in earshot of the message leaned over to the man on his right. "I wonder how long he's been waiting to say that?"
The Forward Commander stepped forward, raising a chubby little hand to signal the opening barrage...
Tap-tappity-tap-tap-tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap-tap-tappity-tap-tap-tap-TAP!
Eddie dropped his hands from the keyboard, and let out a long, weary breath. "All done!"
Barry stared desperately at the monitor. "But do you think it'll work?" he whimpered.
Eddie's finger hovered over the ENTER key. "Kinda curious about that myself."
Tap!
Deep in the crust of the planet a lone signal whipped its way down a cable, crashed headlong into a network hub and splintered into hundreds of tiny clones, spreading out across a humming spiderweb of wires. Silos in the depths of the earth awoke, the dust from five years of inactivity drifting away as a vibration of life shuddered through ancient mechanisms.
Bursting sunlight poured into each silo as huge covers slid back, making way for crackling cannons the size of Roman columns. They rose out of the ground like looming trees, swivelling on their massive bases in response to signals fired down upon them from the wakening satellites. A great wave of energy rushed through thousands of power cells, welling up in firing chambers as each cannon found itself a target.
And then, all at once, the energy was released.
Down on the plain, the Forward Commander was about to give the order to fire when the word stuck awkwardly in his throat. His eyes picked out several glimmering points of light, rising from the mountains behind the city like fireflies. Soaring peacefully across the bright, clear sky, they gradually arced downwards and began to move towards him.
As they drew closer and began to take shape, he perceived them to be a swarm of sleek, shiny, powerful warheads. Their inexorable flight towards the Obnoxian army was, in some ways, strangely beautiful. In other ways, it was the single most horrible bloody thing he'd ever seen in his life.
As the warheads ploughed in overhead, the Forward Commander opened up the communications channel again. "Uh... Supreme Commander?"
"Yes?"
"Up yours, My Lord..."
KAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!
All across the orbitting fleet, alarms started blaring. No-one took much notice of them, however, since they were drowned out by all the yelling.
"Supreme Commander! Their batteries have opened up! Our ground forces are being decimated!"
"Incoming warheads from the surface!"
"Evasion maneuveres!"
"Right, er... evasion maneuveres, evasion maneuveres... um..."
"It's the big button marked EVADE, you idiot!!!"
"Aw, too late..."
Huge flashes of light burst throughout the fleet as a volley of rockets swarmed up from the planet below, tearing through hulls and erupting into brilliant blossoms of destruction. The Obnoxian ships rocked and split as the explosions ripped through them, shattering them like bone china. By the time the first barrage had cleared, nearly half the ships in the fleet were ripped in half or smashed into drifting clouds of twisted metal. And the second barrage was already on the way.
The Supreme Commander sat bolt upright in his chair, desperately hammering at his intercom. "Twansfer all available power to the shields! Huwwy up!!!"
Down on the detention level, the two long-suffering sentries looked up as an announcement blared through the corridors of the ship.
"Your attention please. All non-essential systems are now being disengaged to transfer surplus energy to the shields. We apologize for any inconvenience."
With a faint hum, the lights in the corridor dimmed. And at almost the same moment, the force-field barring the door flickered for a second before winking out of existence.
Inside the cell, Lance and Helena shared a dumbfounded stare. Quickly recovering, they leaped to their feet and charged the open door. The sentries looked on in exasperation as the prisoners rushed towards them. "Aw, bloody hell..." one of them groaned.
An instant later he reeled back across the corridor as Lance's balled fist caught him in an uppercut across the nose (the largest available target). The other guard hefted his rifle, but failed to pull the trigger before a swift kick from Helena sent him sprawling unconscious to the floor.
"That's wierd," Helena observed, as they fled down the corridor. "Since when do cell doors qualify as 'non-essential systems'?"
"Apparently this ship was designed by Microsoft," Lance theorized. "Let's just get the hell out of here, shall we?"
The flagship managed to raise its shields just in time. A shimmering second skin enveloped the hull just as the second wave of warheads screamed in from the surface. The ship tilted and rocked as a flurry of explosions thundered across its superstructure, the shield warping and rippling from the energy unleashed, but holding its integrity.
The other surviving ships weren't so lucky. A couple of them managed to raise their own shields but, lacking the superior shield technology of the flagship, only held out for a few seconds before their hulls buckled. After another spectacular kaleidoscope of explosions, only one small cruiser was left to turn and flee the field of battle.
The flagship remained, against the better judgement of those on board.
The Supreme Commander's intercom sputtered into life again, bringing the harried voice of the First Officer down on the bridge. "Shields are holding, My Lord, but we can't repel the barrage for long. Recommend we, er... retreat? Please?"
The Supreme Commander drummed his fingers on the arm of his throne, his squinty little eyeballs quivering with rage. "Negative, Number One!" he spat. "Take us into the atmosphere! We'll make a diwect assault on Centwalva with the Bloody Gweat Death-Way and put their defences down for good!"
"Uh... very good, My Lord." A brief pause, then: "Well, this is a really good idea..."
"I heard that, Number One!"
Buffeted by the explosions all around its hull, the flagship fired up its thrusters and swooped into the upper atmosphere.
Eddie and Barry were in the midst of a gleeful and energetic victory dance (complete with much high-fiving, chest-bouncing and other ancient and ritualistic forms of male bonding) when an urgent beeping from the laptop caught their ears. Hurrying over to scan the information on the monitor, Barry's face fell. "Uh-oh."
"What's up?" said Eddie, still dancing.
"It's the Obnoxian flagship," Barry reported. "Her shields are too strong for the warheads to penetrate. And it looks like they're bringing her in for a direct strike..."
"On what?"
Barry turned from the screen, his face fixed into a desperate grin. "Give you three guesses?"
Two minutes later, out on the ledge, Warren sat bolt upright from the back seat of the Fairmont as Eddie and Barry came hollering out of the cave and leapt into the front seat. "What's going on?" he frowned.
"If we took the time to tell you," Barry jabbered, pulling out his keys, "you'd already have found out for yourself." He fumbled a key into the ignition and twisted it as hard as he could. Ideally, the engine would have immediately roared into life.
Instead, it went:
Whrrrrrr-whrr-whrr-whrr-whrrrr... Whrrrr-whrrr-whrr-whhhrrrrr-whr-whrrr...
Very, very slowly, Eddie turned towards the driver's seat. "Please tell me you didn't leave the lights on?"
Barry was too busy beating his head against the steering wheel to reply.
The flagship staggered its way drunkenly through the atmosphere, still rocked in its course by several incoming rockets. And yet the shields still held, holding the vessel intact as it descended towards the surface. Its great black shadow rolled across the forests and fields, over the mosaic of smouldering craters that was all that was left of the Obnoxian army, over the plateau and the gleaming city itself. It kept on going, its helm and its weapons fixed immovably on the mountains.
On Centralvac.
As it soared above the craggy peaks, its nose opened out like a huge gaping maw, the menacing muzzle of the Bloody Great Death-Ray telescoping out of the hull like an enormous tongue, already crackling with building energy.
"Firing range in fifteen seconds, My Lord. Shields holding. I hope."
The Supreme Commander was leaning forward in his throne, a near-insane grin fixed on his face. "Stand by to twansfer all power to the Bloody Gweat Death-Way... on... my... mark..."
"Come on come on come on! We're running out of time!"
"You know, you run like a duck."
"Shut up, Lance!"
The lights overhead flickered with interference from the tortured shields as Lance and Helena half-ran, half stumbled through the corridors of the ship, the floor lurching beneath their feet. Finally the door to the transporter room loomed in front of them, and Helena punched the control to slide it open.
"Come on!" she urged, rushing over to the control panel. "We've got to get off this thing!"
"Do you know how to run the teleporter?" Lance asked.
Helena looked down at the console, which was dominated by two large buttons. One was marked BEAM STUFF UP. The other, by way of contrast, read BEAM STUFF DOWN.
"Oh, I think I can figure it out," she decided. She reached down to press the latter button.
A friendly little chime emanated from the console, accompanied by an even friendlier voice. "The teleporter is presently locked to transfer surplus energy to the shields," it informed her. "We apologize for any inconvenience."
"Dammit!" Helena thumped the console. "We've got to figure out how to lower the shields. Any ideas?"
"Ahem," said Lance. He pointed to one of the panels set into the wall nearby, which bore two buttons of its own underneath the label SHIELD CONTROL. One was marked UP.
Guess what the other one said?
"Apparently you don't need a degree in engineering to run one of these ships," Lance observed.
Helena grinned. "I think I'm starting to like these guys."
"Firing range in five..."
"Weady..."
"Four..."
"Steady..."
"Three..."
"On..."
"Two..."
"My..."
"What the...?" The First Officer's voice faltered over the intercom. "My Lord! We've got a power drain from the Bloody Great Death-Ray! The main teleporter just went online!"
The Supreme Commander blinked. "How can the teleporter be on when the shields are still up?"
"Um... Funny you should mention that, My Lord..."
The Supreme Commander snatched urgently at his monitor, twisting it around to face him. The first thing he noticed was the readout from the ship's shields, which read "DOWN". The second thing were about a dozen little blips on the radar, heading towards the ship at a fair rate of knots.
He flopped back into his chair, his mouth hanging open under his enormous proboscis. His last words, appropriately enough, were: "Aw, cwap."
The explosion that bloomed in the skies of Apathia a second later was truly magnificent - a grand rolling ball of flame and debris that was seen for miles around the city; the kind of explosion that George Lucas would have paid a ridiculous amount of money for. The blast wave shook a million cubic metres of snow from the mountaintops below, burying several small valleys under tumbling avalanches. It also blew the windows out of Barry's Fairmont and gave Eddie a headache that would last him the rest of the night.
The blast was heard thirty miles away in the Hall of Ennui, where several of the sofa-bound residents glanced up in mild annoyance. Brian blinked and shook out the cobwebs as the sound briefly released him from his trance. "What was that?"
Next to him, Pete's eyes never left the giant screen. "Sounded like the Obnoxian flagship blowing up."
"Oh," said Brian. "I guess we're not going to die after all."
"Guess not," Pete agreed.
"Another beer?"
"Cheers."
The blast was also heard on the summit of a low hill at the edge of the mountains, where two figures had just materialized in a flash of shimmering light.
"Yeesh," Lance winced, looking up at the dissipating ball of smoke and flame, and the blazing remains of the flagship drifting towards the ground. "That was close."
He shifted a little uncomfortably - though he was relieved to note that he hadn't came through in the buff this time, his clothes didn't seem to fit properly. Looking down, he was somewhat bemused to realize that he was now wearing a t-shirt three sizes too small for him and a pair of capri pants, formerly inhabited by his fellow escapee.
"Oh well," he sighed. "At least they came with us this time." He looked over at Helena, standing next to him in a slight stupor. Lance's shirt was draped over her torso like a sack, and his rumpled trousers were gradually sliding down over her smaller waist. Her face was twisted into a rictus of pure horror, her left eye twitching involuntarily.
"Oh sweet Jesus," she rasped. "I'm wearing your underpants..."
Lance pulled out his waistband and peered inside. "Nice g-string, by the way."
"Shut up, Lance."
And so ended the Battle of Apathia. Such as it was.
Was there a celebration? Was there dancing in the streets? Did the people of that noble world celebrate long into the night, and hail the visitors from Earth as their heroes and saviours? Was there talk of a national holiday being declared, or moulds made for a celebratory statue? Did the following dawn break on a city hung with streamers and strewn with confetti, the streets littered with hungover revellers?
I'd like to say yes. But I fear the true answer is all too clear.
In fact, the sun rose over a city just as quiet, dull and seemingly deserted as it had been before the events of the previous afternoon. Apart from the scattered debris of the flagship and the awful mess out on the plain, there was no sign that the attempted invasion had ever been.
Outside the Hall of Ennui, Eddie and Helena were preparing to, in Helena's words, "go the hell home and take a shower". Barry stood beside them, impatiently twirling his keys. And in front of them, leaning on his cane with the irritable air of an ancient sage proven wrong about a great many things, stood Warren, Keeper of the Wisdom of the Ancients.
"You've done us a great service," he told Eddie. "I suppose. You've saved our planet and our people, and struck a blow that will render our enemies harmless for generations to come. And for that..." He gritted his teeth, forcing out the words, "You... have... my... thanks..."
"No biggie," Eddie smiled. He slowly extended his hand. "Goodbye, Warren."
Warren stared at the hand as if it were covered with weeping blisters. Then, very slowly, he reached out and tentatively shook it. "Goodbye..." he murmured. "...Earth-Creature."
And with that, he turned on his heel and hobbled away as fast as his cane could carry him.
Barry grinned. "Thought he was finally going to soften up and call you 'Eddie', didn't you?"
Eddie looked slightly deflated. "Wouldn't have hurt."
"Can we go home now?" Helena muttered.
"Hang on," Eddie frowned, as they turned to go. "Where's Lance?"
Barry looked at the ground. "Oh, jeez, sorry... I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
Barry avoided Eddie's gaze. "Lance isn't coming."
"I'm not coming," said Lance.
He sat on the arm of one of the many sofas in the Hall of Ennui, a beer perched on his knee, determinedly staring down his flatmates.
"What do you mean, you're not coming?" Eddie gaped. "Of course you're coming."
"No, I want to stay," Lance insisted. "I mean, all my life I've been searching for a place I really belong, and here..." He waved a hand, encompassing the thousands of alien couch potatoes, the free beer and the colossus-like television, "...I really think I've found it."
Helena rolled her eyes, but avoided comment.
"Aw," Eddie groaned, his eyes starting to mist over, "Dude..."
Lance gave him a warning stare. "Try to hug me and I'll clock you one."
Eddie settled for a heartfelt handshake. "Well... if you're sure..."
"Never been surer," Lance nodded. "So long, dude." He straightened up and turned to Helena. "You can hug me if you want," he grinned, spreading his arms.
Helena smiled and patted him on the shoulder. "Goodbye, Lance."
Lance stood and watched as his friends slowly left the hall, and kept watching long after they were out of sight. It wasn't until he heard the Fairmont starting up outside that he finally turned and slumped into the sofa between Brian and Pete - a spot he intended to occupy, God willing, for many years to come.
"So," he smiled, nodding towards the great vista of the TV. "When do we flip 'er over to the porn channel?"
The two Apathians stared at him, their faces blank. "Porn?" Brian frowned. "What's that?"
"You going to miss him?" Helena asked, as the Fairmont lifted off and cruised away over the rooftops.
"'Course I'm going to miss him," Eddie replied, from the front seat. "He's my oldest friend." He turned to look at her, his face filled with sorrow. "Aren't you?"
Helena pondered this for some time. Would she miss Lance?
Would she miss the smell of beer, the piles of dishes, the red armpit hairs clinging to the soap? Would she miss the nocturnally-raided fridge, the piles of unwashed laundry, the feeble excuses for a missing share of the rent? Would she miss the vaguely sexist double-entendres, the sideways glances every time she bent over, the occasional "Oops, I didn't know you were in the shower"?
Her face softened.
"Not particularly, no," she admitted. "Sorry."
Behind the wheel, Barry looked around as a dull thumping sound came to his ears. "What the hey...?"
Eddie had heard it too. "What's that, then?"
"I dunno," Barry replied, grappling with the wheel. "Ship's handling funny, too. The stabilisers must be off."
Helena was peering out her window. "Could be," she muttered. "Or it could be the fact that Lance is hanging off my door handle."
On to "Losers in Space"
Back to FLAT EARTH