Prologue to an Epilogue

CHAPTER 5

Jim, for the fifth time, stared at each of his finds with a look at disbelief: a long shard of metal for the board of his surfer, a piece of rope that barely wrapped around it and an old energy cylinder he had found beside the debris unit (he didn't know what the academy had used it for, but it sparked dangerously from time to time and left him with very little hope). He heaved a long sigh and dropped them to the ground.
He had chosen to work on building a solar surfer after breakfast (whatever breakfast had been... Mr. Snuff certainly had a hopeful look in his eye when the students had asked if it was dead), rather than dare going back to the dorm where fifteen faces would be pestering him more about Treasure Planet. He had found on the boat ride over that it was remarkably difficult to make deck-swabbing and potato-peeling seem heroic and adventurous. Although the appeal of trying was shining far brighter than the prospects of getting a working solar surfer before the end of the day.
With another sigh, he kicked the pieces under the wooden stands of what he only assumed to be the school's Anti-Gravity Polo pitch (a sport Jim neither claimed to comprehend nor intended to attempt), and resolved to make a surfer even better than the one those Robopigs had impounded. Pulling a borrowed wrench from his pocket, reminding himself sternly that he most definitely would return it larer, he set to work on the energy cylinder.
It was also the fifth time he had given up on building the board and quickly decided to try again. Elizabeth's beautiful face kept spinning in his mind as he pictured himself, captain of the team, being congratulated on his speedy board, his magnificent form, his amazing techniques...
The time ticked away, and Jim's jaw almost locked as he realised he was five minutes late for Astrophysics. Brushing his hands of tell-tale grease, he tried to remember how he had found the pitch in the first place. Was it a right or a left at the debris unit? Hadn't there been a door somewhere...? The school, it seemed to Jim, was bigger and more complex than the entire planet of Montressor.
He sprinted as hard as he could, practically leaving indented footprints in the concrete floor as he searched for the classroom.
Another five minutes slipped away, and in a wave of desperation Jim burst into the kitchen.
"Mr. Snu - Sam! I need to find Astrophysics!"
The Flatulan alien seemed only too happy to shout directions at Jim, waving his tentacle-like arms to emphasize whatever the hell he was saying.
"Okay, okay wait! Take a left out of here?" Jim panted, trying to crush his frustration at the language barrier. "Up one floor? Two?"
The absurd game of charades lasted for far longer than Jim would have hoped. Finally, when he had a vague idea of where he was supposed to go, Jim took off with a cry of "Thanks, Sam!" His boots slapped against the floor, and he was a bright red, sweaty wreck when he finally hauled himself into the class - just off half an hour late.
"I'm... so sorry..." he wheezed, looking at the distraught professor imploringly. "I asked... for directions... from the chef."
The professor looked like she might shout at Jim anyway, but several cadets in the room seemed to find his comment too hilarious to keep quiet about it. They giggled, and shouted their empathy for his situation to him. Jim wished he had exploded on Treasure Planet. It would have been preferable to this torture.
"Take a seat, Mr...?" The professor gestured towards an empty seat, smack in the middle of the front row.
"Hawkins," he sighed, squeezing past the others already seated. Why they didn't all fill the seats properly was a mystery to everyone involved.
"Mr. Hawkins, as this is my first lecture of the term you haven't missed much work. If you miss any more, however, you'll find yourself on the receiving end of an official reprimand."
Jim stared at the desk, trying not to picture his mother's face the way it had been that day Billy Bones had come to the Inn. He was supposed to be turning things around, but the fates themselves had to be against him. No one screwed up this often. He barely listened to the rest of the introductory lecture, and decided it wasn't in his best interests to mention the doctor to the lecturer after his spectacular entrance. His next class, 'An Introduction to Tactics for Battle Situations', had to go better than this.

"How'm I doing, Sarah?" B.E.N.'s obnoxious tone drove into Sarah Hawkins' skull like a drill. He - never - shut - up. She knew it wasn't his fault, and she knew that however frayed her nerves were she would never shout at the friendly robot, but enough was enough. He had just embalmed the frying pan with eggs so burned there would be no separating them from it.
In Doppler's kitchen, which in contrast to the rest of the house was rather small, the smell was quite over-powering. She sighed, craving her son's eggs - probably one of his most useful talents, in fact, was Jim's ability to make a simple breakfast. He'd always been so helpful when he was younger, around the Inn.
"Uhm, why don't we take a break?" Sarah asked hopefully, feeling another pang of neediness rising. "Look!" she pointed out the window, to Doppler's overgrown and untended garden. "You could trim the weeds out there." B.E.N. peered through the steamed-up glass, animated electronic blue eyes blinking. "GREAT IDEA! I'll get the Doc's yard ship-shape in no-time!"
Sarah tried not to think about Doppler's reaction to hedges trimmed into the shapes of ships, and sent B.E.N. on his way outside. The next time she offered to teach someone how to cook, she thought, pigs would fly.
She sighed then, her thoughts turning to how long the week without Jim had been. It seemed she had only gotten him back a milisecond before he was off again, all by himself. Part of her - the most selfish part - wished they had never met the old tortoise, and that Jim had stayed at the Benbow and lived a quiet life on Montressor. The rest of her knew Jim would never have done that, whether he had gone to Treasure Planet or not.
"What is that - er - cooking?" Doppler had slipped into the kitchen, and didn't manage to hide his disgust well, his huge nose almost meeting his forehead as it wrinkled.
"B.E.N. was practicing," Sarah explained, holding the corpse of the frying pan up.
"Oh," Doppler inspected it closely. "Oh, I see. Well, I'll...pick up a new one on my way home."
Doppler had been invited specially to give a lecture at the Interstellar Academy. He had been talking about it all week, and Sarah was green with envy knowing he would see Jim.
"When you see Jim, tell him-" she started for the millionth time.
"I know, you send your love," Doppler parroted, smiling in spite of himself. "I'd better go."
Sarah studied him closely. There seemed to be something else he wanted to talk about, but he was distracted, looking out the window... Sarah turned, half expecting to see a pyre of flames where the garden had once been and that blasted robot in the middle crying "A little help!" Instead, the captain was trying to creep by the preoccupied robot - lending the whole situation a rather slapstick air. Eventually she did manage to get around him unnoticed, side-stepping into the patch of trees at the end of the garden. Like everything in Doppler's house (except the kitchen) the garden was huge. Sarah knew Amelia disappeared down there at least once a day for hours at a time.
Doppler cleared his throat, muttering "Tell... tell the others I'll see them in a few days."
"Okay, Delbert," Sarah nodded, wondering if he was being deliberately transparent. Probably not, it wasn't his way.

Doppler made his own way out the front door, nodding hastily as Sarah shrieked something about 'stopping B.E.N. before it was too late'. He found himself staring off into space as he drove Delilah towards the bus-port, and once again the slug-like beast proved herself to be more than worthy of navigating the journey. In the week since Jim had left, life in the house had been a roller-coaster of frayed emotions. Doppler couldn't get his head around Amelia. She didn't seem to want to have anything to do with him. Honestly, if she couldn't make up her mind things were going to be difficult. The bug-eyed reporter, Rhonda Frost, had been on the communicator once or twice, specifically asking for the doctor each time. Luckily, Amelia wasn't in the habit of answering the calls.
Intercourse, he thought to himself - blushing all over again. She didn't seem to have noticed, or was being extraordinarily kind by ignoring his constant slips of the tongue. Maybe he had offended her, he thought guiltily. And who wouldn't be offended! How was she supposed to take it if a man randomly suggested intercourse?
Doppler didn't have time to beat himself up any more, as they drew close to the bus-port. He payed the clerk hastily, and promised Delilah he would be back to collect her in three days' time. He tried to push Amelia out of his head, thinking forcefully about his astrophysics lecture and the properties of black holes as he boarded the bus.

Sarah felt oddly sly as she too slipped by B.E.N. without his knowledge - frankly, he was singing at the top of his lungs and hacking Doppler's hedge to pieces. A herd of Bonzabeasts could have thundered by unnoticed.
Tracing Amelia was the difficult part. She had a decent head-start, and the trees were so thick that walking through them was like trying to row upstream without an oar.
"Mrs. Hawkins, I think you'll find it far easier to traverse the forest this way." Amelia's voice sounded awfully close. It took Sarah a moment to realise she was up the tree, sitting comfortably in the crook of a branch.
"Ah... er, maybe for you." Sarah smiled weakly, dizzy at the thought of climbing so high. Amelia nodded slightly, climbing down only for the sake of well-learned politeness, Sarah imagined.
"Delbert left," Sarah started rather tactlessly. "He said to say goodbye for him."
"I'm sure that wasn't nearly important enough for you to chase me all the way down here," replied Amelia icily, waving her hand to emphasize the forest setting.
"No," Sarah agreed, leaning uncomfortably against the trunk of a wide tree. Yes, she could see why Delbert had trouble communicating with the captain. She was a formidable woman, but she had no authority over Sarah Hawkins. "What is it exactly that's going on with you two?"
"Excuse me?" Amelia arched an eyebrow, eyes flashing. Apparently, this was a touchy subject.
"I mean," Sarah paused. What did she mean? "He... Well, Delbert seems... How do I put this...?"
"Inarticulate?" guessed Amelia wryly, the cruel streak in her tone surfacing. "Clumsy? Buffoon-like?"
"If you don't like him, why are you still here?" Sarah interjected, glaring up at the feline as she jumped to the defense of her friend.
A long pause drew out between them as they stared at one another - Amelia apparently working out her response. "I didn't say that," she managed at last, in one breath.
"Didn't say what?" Sarah looked blank. She had been expecting a vicious comeback, an excuse or a smack from the way the situation had looked.
"That I don't like him," Amelia admitted uneasily, digging her claws into the bark of a branch over her head. Sarah was taken aback that the confrontation had gone so differently from how she had predicted. A thousand new questions surfaced, but from the look in Amelia's eyes she was lucky to get what she did. The captain definitely wasn't up for girl-talk, especially not if it concerned the doctor.
"Well - as long as we know where we stand," Sarah tried to make her tone gentle. This was much more complicated than she had thought. "I'll... be watching B.E.N. destroy the garden."
Amelia managed a quick smile, wincing when (as if on cue) there was a cry of 'Stay up there, ya naughty tree!' and then a suspicious set of violent creaking noises.
"Oh, good Lord!" Sarah hurried off, dreading to think what she would see when she got there.

The first week is always the hardest, at least, that's what Jim had been told by his guidance counselor. He seemed concerned with Jim's early signs of trouble - lateness for supper and for his classes. Not to mention the wicked whispers of his anti-social behaviour that had been heard all around the campus. He was surprised to find that in spite of all the mishaps, Thomas was still encouraging him to try out for the surfer group. They were only a day away, and Jim still hadn't found a solar sail to go with his crude base.
He slunk into the kitchen, a regular occurence after he had found a half-way decent listener in Mr. Snuff. On that very first day, when it had all gone wrong, he had ranted and raved to the Flatulan chef for an hour and he had listened without so much as a peep, parp or burp. Sure, he was no Long John Silver, but he was someone. And nothing he said would be entered into his permanent psych profile, either.
"Hey," Jim glanced around, to make sure Snuff was alone. Snuff grinned behind the odd tentacle-mouth of his, saluting Jim with a cascade of flatulan greetings.
Jim had been reading up on Flatula as part of his Interspacial Lifeform Studies class, and already he had learned to understand a few simple phrases. Mr. Snuff rarely used simple phrases, however, and Jim suspected he was either cursing constantly, or using enormous amounts of slang.
"Man. Astrophysics is tough, how am I supposed to know the different properties of certain nebulas? Get this, they say I'm failing. I've been here a week! I can't be failing! And, can you believe it, I still can't find a solar sail!" Jim sighed, rubbing his forehead. "The try-outs are tomorrow, what am I gonna do?"
Snuff seemed lost in thought for a moment, before suddenly slapping his suckers together, what Jim supposed was his equivalent of snapping his fingers. He hopped up and down excitedly, gesturing towards the side door that lead to the dining room.
"Uh... through here?" Jim followed the bouncy chef, who seemed to trying to shush him - although without much effect, as Snuff didn't seem to have much control over the volume of his own voice. They crept through the darkened dining area, and out into a deserted corridor. It felt like they were doing something extremely sneaky, to Jim at least. He was bent low, behind Mr. Snuff who often stuck his left eye around a corner first to check it was clear. At last, they reached a well-bolted door with a sign that read simply 'Equipment'.
"It's locked," whispered Jim, raising his eyebrows at his partner in crime. Snuff seemed unfazed by the obstacle, and lifted his chef-hat to reveal a set of keys underneath. They were clearly tagged as belonging to the janitor, but Jim didn't dare say anything.
Inside the closet there were plenty of marked boxes full of blanks for weapons practice and extra rigging for the simulation ships. It wasn't long before they found the box full of solar sails. They were perfect, not like the patchy one Jim had used on Montressor. White with golden nacels woven into them, and with a little modification (they were huge, and likely for battle simulation ships) just right for Jim's surfer. He would have hugged Snuff there and then, had he not known it would have made a noise.
With hissed thanks, Jim took off for the pitch in the waning light. He had an hour and a half before lights-out, and his damn astrophysics homework could wait! He had a sail to cut and fit.