The Ultimate Inferior Beings (11 page)

The slimy green blob looked
about him again. He started humming a tune, but then stopped. Finally, he said,
“I expect you’d like me to take you to my leader.”

“Er, yes,” said jixX,
brightening up. “That would be... er... good.”

*

Silence.

“His name is Sir Roderick,”
offered Chris.

jixX nodded politely. “Well
I’m looking forward to meeting him. Shall we go?”

“Wait,” said sylX. “I need to
change.”

“Yes, of course,” said jixX,
slapping himself on the forehead. “We’ll need spacesuits. LEP?”

“No,” sylX was saying. “I
rather had my blue evening dress in mind.”

jixX gave her a funny look.

“And I need to fix my hair.
Put on a little make-up. This is a historic meeting, captain. We’ll need to
take photographs for posterity. And you might want to change out of your
pyjamas and dressing gown.”

“Ah, yes,” said jixX. “But
we’ll need spacesuits. We don’t even know if the air outside is safe to
breathe.” He pointed towards one of the remaining, undamaged, observation
windows.

“Fresh air never killed
anybody,” piped up Chris.

They all looked at him in
surprise. It was the sort of thing LEP might have said.

“LEP?” asked jixX, hoping for
a computer-processed verdict.

“He’s right, you know,” said
LEP with a chuckle.

jixX sighed. “Alright, we’ll
go and get ourselves ready. Is that okay with you, Chris?”

“Fine by me,” said Chris.

“Won’t be long,” said jixX as
the three of them left the room.

*

The slimy green blob remained
standing in the middle of the floor in the main control room, pulsating
rhythmically to itself.

There was a long silence.

“Do you play chess?” asked
LEP hopefully.

“I beg your pardon?” said
Chris.

“Never mind.”

*

In the corridor anaX put a
hand to jixX’s arm and halted him.

“I hope you don’t mind if I
stay behind,” she said when sylX had gone out of earshot.

“Anything the matter?” asked
jixX, concerned.

The gynaecologist put a hand
to her brow. “Just a bit of a headache.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I
expect LEP will tell you where the aspirins are.”

anaX gave a little smile at
this and wished him luck. Then, with a mysterious twitch of her mouth, she
turned and went off towards her cabin.

No sooner had she entered
than she was reaching under her bed and pulling out a small plasderm suitcase.
From the suitcase, she took a box, which she opened to reveal 25 low-reactance,
three-phase, high-Q batteries.

She tipped the batteries out
onto her bed and then, one by one, tested them against the tip of her tongue.
The four she considered to be the best she placed in her shoulder bag. The rest
she replaced in the box, which she put back into the plasderm suitcase. Then,
from the suitcase she carefully removed an object that looked almost exactly
like a small, hand-held hairdryer. Indeed, once it had been a small, hand-held
hairdryer. But now it was one of the deadliest weapons of mass destruction
known to man – a neutrino bomb.

Gingerly, she placed the neutrino
bomb in her shoulder bag. Then she closed the small plasderm suitcase and slid
it back under her bed. She stood up and, without so much as a glance at herself
in the mirror, slung the shoulder bag over her left shoulder and left the room.

Anyone watching her would
have been surprised by the strangeness of her actions. As everyone surely
knows, one should never test low-reactance, three-phase, high-Q batteries
against the tip of one’s tongue!

*

As he returned from his
cabin, having changed out of his pyjamas, jixX found himself outside fluX’s
cabin. He was about to knock on the door when... he didn’t. He indecisively
waved his fist about in the air a few times before putting it back in his
pocket. He turned and started tiptoeing away from the door, trying to look
casual.

“Ahem,” said LEP

“Er,” said jixX guiltily.
“He’s not in his room.”

“Oh yes he is.”

“Is he?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t want to
disturb him. I expect he’s busy proving the existence of God.”

“It’s your duty as captain to
take an interest in what your crewmembers are doing,” said LEP. “Chapter XII,
page 120, paragraph 3 of ‘Captaincy for Dummies’. Surely you’ve read it, sir.”

“And you, as ship’s computer,
should provide requisite computational assistance to the crew,” countered jixX.
“Such as performing any calculations they request? I bet that’s in some
rule-book somewhere.”

LEP didn’t answer, so jixX
presumed his guess had hit the mark.

“Anyway,” continued jixX,
setting off in the direction of the main control room. “I think I should be
getting back to our alien guest. It was very rude of us to leave him all alone
with you.”

“You’re dead right it was,”
said LEP. “He’s very boring. And he’s making an awful mess on the floor.”

jixX laughed.

“Oh, by the way,” said LEP.
“There’s a staff matter I need to inform you about. twaX the carpenter’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“He left the ship about ten
minutes ago.”

“But why?”

“No idea?”

“Which way did he go?”

“The last time I saw him he
was running off into the distance, waving his axe over his head and muttering
wildly to himself.”

jixX came to a stop. “What am
I supposed to do?”

“Dock his pay.”

“Very funny.”

“There’s also a court martial
to consider,” continued LEP. “Desertion, dereliction of duty, possession of a
deranged mind …”

jixX ignored him and
continued down the corridor. As he approached the main control room he had to
avoid stepping on the green slimy patches on the floor. The door swished open
in front of him and he went in. Suddenly he felt nervous. He realised that this
was supposed to be a momentous, historic meeting of alien cultures, yet he
couldn’t think of anything momentous or historic to say or do.

Chapter 6

“
Hello again,” said
Chris brightly as jixX entered the main
control room.

“Hello,” said jixX with a
forced smile, forgetting all the important and momentous things that he’d been
formulating in his mind. “Er, has LEP been keeping you entertained?”

Chris remained tactfully
silent while LEP gave a little cough. “I’ve been running some neurotrophic
alpha-wave decay tests,” said the ship’s computer in his own defence.

jixX nodded but said nothing.
Chris stared back at him, but said nothing.

jixX gave the slimy green
blob a weak smile and turned to address LEP. “And, er, what results did you
get?”

“Pardon?” asked LEP.

“From your tests.”

“Ah,” said LEP.
“Inconclusive.”

jixX nodded again and turned
back to Chris.

Silence.

jixX wracked his brains for
something to say to the alien, but nothing came. He groped about in his mind
for a suitable topic of conversation.

Silence.

“Looks like rain,” said Chris
at long last, finally breaking the tension in the room.

But neither LEP nor jixX
could think of an answer, so the tension renewed.

“I could be wrong, though,”
said Chris.

Silence again.

“Hard to tell, really.”

The tension mounted once
more.

Then, just as jixX was about
to ask a particularly banal question about the weather he was saved by the
swish of the door opening. He turned to see sylX enter, with fluX in her wake.

“We’re ready,” said sylX,
looking quite stunning in her blue, low-cut evening dress and high-heeled
shoes.

fluX the behavioural chemist,
looking far less stunning, was standing in the doorway, staring and pointing at
Chris. “Is zat ze alien?” he asked, still pointing.

No one answered as it seemed
a particularly dumb question for a trained scientist to ask.

“Ze green blob,” he
continued. “Is zat it?”

*

sylX stepped towards Chris
and leaned down to hand him a small metal plaque. “Before we start,” she said,
speaking in a serious and dignified tone. “I’d like you to accept this on
behalf of all Humankind. It is a token expressing our peaceful intentions and
extending a hand of friendship to you and your kind.”

“Why thank you,” said Chris,
taken aback. “This is most unexpected.” He extended a limb of slime out of his
body and took the plaque, eyeing it appreciatively. He read out the engraved
message. It was a moving statement, signed by the Governor of Earth and by TOT,
the Transcendental Overlord of Tenalp.

jixX looked astonished,
wondering where the stowaway had got hold of such a plaque. He was also rather
amazed at her presumptuousness in presenting it.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said
Chris, looking from sylX to fluX and finally to jixX. “What can I say?” Then he
cast his eyes down. “I’m afraid I didn’t bring anything for you.”

“Don’t worry about that,”
said sylX reassuringly. “All we ask for is your friendship.”

“You got it!” said Chris with
a huge grin. He took one last look at the plaque before retracting the limb of
slime back into his slimy body, hiding the plaque within it.

jixX stood open-mouthed,
eyeing sylX resentfully. He wondered how this stowaway, this unlawful
traveller, this uninvited passenger was getting all the best lines? His eyes
cast about the control room and settled on the spruce.

“Also,” he started as he made
his way to the potted plant. “We would like to offer you this fine dwarf Alberta spruce.” He indicated it with his hands.

Chris eyed the spruce
unenthusiastically. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “I won’t.”

*

 “Shall we go then?” asked
sylX, breaking the embarrassing silence.

“I’m ready,” said Chris,
suddenly all smiles.

“Alright,” said the stowaway.
“Take us to your leader!”

jixX looked daggers at her.

She smiled sweetly back.

“Aren’t you forgetting
something?” asked LEP as they started moving towards the door.

“Goodbye, LEP,” said jixX.
“We’ll send you a postcard.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“A souvenir? We’ll bring you
back a piece of rock.”

“The Tenalp flag.”

jixX stopped and turned.
“What?”

“Regulations,” said LEP. “The
Skyway Code says you need to plant the Tenalp flag to claim the planet as
ours.”

“But it isn’t ours,” said
jixX.

“That’s the whole point,
cap’n. That’s the whole point of claiming it.”

“He’s right,” said sylX.

jixX gave her an annoyed
look. Then he looked down at the slimy green blob on the floor. “Would
your...,” he hesitated, looking for the right word, “...people...,” he added,
having failed to find it, “mind if we were to plant our flag on your planet?”

“We would consider it an
honour,” said Chris.

“Thank you, Chris.” Then to
LEP, “Alright, where is it?”

“On your left,” replied LEP.
“Second drawer down.”

jixX turned to the cabinet on
his left and opened the second drawer down. It was empty.

Without flinching or saying a
word he calmly tried a few of the other drawers until he found it. It was no
more than six inches in height; bottom half white, top half black. He held it
up and waved it to and fro for the others to see.

“It won’t be the most
awe-inspiring of sights, will it,” he muttered.