CHAPTER 2
Fenchurch sat in the shadows of the Suicidal Insanity's storage hold. It was about the size of a couple of supermarkets surgically stuck together, after having been cleared of all the shelves and the food. The floor space was filled with crates and boxes ranging in size from large enough to hold a small automobile, to shoe box-sized. And overhead was a net draped down from the ceiling that held what looked like a hundred or so balls. They were cricket ball sized, and Fenchurch had no idea what they were for. She had been in the hold for several hours now with nothing to break the tedium. She did discover that she could become quite accustomed to time travel and what it did to her body temperature.
Eventually she heard footsteps walking by in the corridor outside. And then the footsteps went away again. Well, at least that broke the tedium. A couple more hours went by. She took off her jacket and bunched it up to use as a pillow... when more footsteps approached... and this time the storage hold's door opened.
A crew member came in. He rummaged around, reading labels on the boxes, sighing a lot as he failed to find whatever it was he was looking for. Then he spotted Fenchurch in the corner. "Hello? What are you doing there?" he asked, more confused than angry.
He looked a bit like a lemur, she thought. He was about five feet tall, with two large round eyes facing forwards, and large rectangular ears. The fingers, of which there were maybe ten on each of its two hands, were about seven to eight inches long and only about as big around as her own pinky. Clearly she wasn't a member of the same race, but that didn't seem to bother him.
"Oh, um..." Oddly, it was only at that point that she realized that she should have spent the last several hours coming up with a good excuse for what she was doing there. She made a quick mental note to use her time more wisely in future. Then she made an even quicker mental note to avoid making mental notes when she was in a situation like this where time was a very important factor.
"Are you doing the inventory?" the lemur-like man asked.
"Yes," she said, relieved that he had provided her with his own excuse.
"I guess nobody told you, then. Typical! Anyway Captain Forrestra changed his mind... again! He doesn't need an inventory after all. Here, why don't you give me a hand carrying the toilet paper up to the flight deck lavatory."
She put her jacket back on, slung her satchel over her shoulder, and picked up the other end of the large box over which the lemur-man was stooping.
They carried it through the corridors and into a lift and then into the enormous flight deck. It was nearly two hundred feet across, with a balcony level, and then three separate lower levels with walk-ways and railing and nearly a hundred different work stations where several different kinds of aliens were seated at their work stations. Most of the crew were the lemur-like aliens. But on the lower level there were human-looking aliens, which Fenchurch had learned could mean they were from any one of a very large number of totally alien worlds.
She helped carry the box into the lavatory where the lemur-man thanked her. One of the stalls burst open, and a large alien with a bushy mouth and two large tusks emerged. He was bipedal, but Fenchurch couldn't help thinking how much his face made him look like a walrus. Although she didn't know it, this was Alaric Badgerbull, the project coordinator.
Alaric suffered from a very enthusiastic and extraverted personality. Unfortunately he was the sort of person who expected the same enthusiasm from everyone else around him. And if he didn't get it, then he felt it was his job to somehow "jolt" it out of them. For example when he noticed the lemur-man and Fenchurch standing in the lavatory, he immediately bellowed at them, "Do either of you know why in the hell it is that when you push and you push and you push, it's only a little tiny poop. But those big ones the size of an Algolian sausage seem to slide out by themselves?"
The lemur-man just shook his head.
Fenchurch started to answer as politely as she could, "Maybe the smaller ones..."
But the walrus-man cut her off as he noticed the box they had brought in, "Ah, new toilet paper! Excellent. Although why it wasn't in place before now is a definite crime to every butthole on this ship!" And he left the lavatory without washing his hands.
When she emerged into the flight deck a moment later, there were lights flashing, and an alert sounding to let everyone know that some sort of minor crisis going on. Alaric Badgerbull leapt into action and ordered the nearest officer to rectify the situation. Unfortunately this was the science officer, Fark Bostleburger, another of the lemur-like aliens. "I'm afraid that's not my job."
"Well, do it anyway!"
"But I haven't been trained to work in the engine room. I'm the science officer. I have an idea though, why don't we get the engineering staff to fix the problem. Seeing as it is their job. And they are already in the engine room, where the problem is. And they have been trained for this sort of thing."
Badgerbull turned expectantly to the captain and directed a gaze at him which said, You're the captain here. Hadn't you better fix this! Captain Forrestra worried for a moment about how to give Badgerbull a, Yes, I know that it's my responsibility. I was about to start giving orders to fix it anyway, if only you would let me do my job! expression. But then he figured that his features weren't actually capable of that much lucidity. He was however unaware of the Delron race who communicated exclusively with facial expressions. But this information would only have made him feel inadequate for not being able to do the same thing himself. So he simply offered a sympathetic bugging out of his already large lemur-like eyes, then turned back to his controls and contacted the engine room. "Engine room?" There was a pause. No response. "Engine room, this is the captain." Still no response bothered to fill up the pause left by the captain.
Finally Captain Forrestra turned to First Officer Flop, another lemur-alien, "Go down there and see what's wrong with them and then see if they can fix the problem, please."
"Okay."
"Thank you, my dear."
Flop hesitated for just an instant. He hated it when the captain called him "my dear." He always worried that the captain had actually been addressing a nearby female, and that perhaps he had misunderstood when he thought that the captain had been giving him an order. But then he would always remind himself an instant later that the captain addressed everyone as "my dear," and for him, it was obviously gender-neutral. So he continued on his way down to engineering.
Fenchurch, meanwhile, wandered around the flight deck, trying desperately to look like she belonged there. Fortunately she found an unused work station down on the lowest level. The lower level had mainly the human-looking aliens working there, and so the console fit her quite nicely.
Several minutes later, Officer Flop returned to the flight deck. He reported to the captain, "I'm afraid that nobody in the engine room is fit for duty at the moment."
The captain actually began quaking with fear. He looked like a deer caught in headlights. "What do you mean! Why not?"
"Well, there's a slight leak in the new coolant system. And I'm afraid they've all inhaled rather too much. And now they're all stoned."
The captain thought for a moment. "All right. I see. Okay, here's what we'll have to do. We'll have to get environment suits on and go down there and fix the problem."
The First Officer Flop whispered quietly to the captain so as not to embarrass him in front of the rest of the flight deck personnel, "Sir, we don't need to do that to fix the problem. We can simply release the anti-gremlins into engineering."
Impatient, the captain said, "Then do it, please!" A moment later he sighed and said, "I'm sorry for shouting, my dear. Good job." Then in response to a tiny twinge of panic, he worried that there may have been somebody else involved in fixing the problem whom he had forgotten to thank. And so he raised his voice to address everyone on the flight deck, "Good job, everyone." Eighty percent of them had done nothing, and of those, seventy percent didn't even know that there was a problem. So they all nodded and smiled.
Officer Flop sent a maintenance officer down to the engine room to release a small batch of anti-gremlins.
#
Anti-gremlins were the opposite of the often thought mythical gremlins. Gremlins were in fact real. They were small, green creatures who were very good at hiding, and had a loathing of all forms of complex vehicles. They would sneak aboard boats, aeroplanes, or spaceships, find the inner workings, and have at it! Anti-gremlins on the other hand, were small red creatures who loved complex vehicles. They would sneak aboard boats, aeroplanes or spaceships in order to seek out any tiny problem they could find, and would then secretly make repairs. Interestingly, although they had each evolved on several planet around the galaxy, the two species never arose on the same planet. Planets either suffered from one, benefitted from the other, or never experienced either.
However, once space travel eventually became common-place throughout the galaxy, spaceships infested by gremlins inevitably came into contact with spaceships infested with anti-gremlins. And when the gremlins and anti-gremlins came into physical contact with each other, there was always a colossal explosion.
In fact the explosions were so powerful that militaries of several different worlds very quickly began using them as bombs. They would drop a metal container which housed one gremlin and one anti-gremlin. And seconds before impact, a door between the two compartments would slide open, and the two innocent creatures were shoved together by a small compactor. Eventually gremlin-bomb warfare was banned. Not for any humane reasons, but rather because anti-gremlins were much more useful as a cheap means of repairing spaceships.
#
Fenchurch noticed the captain coming towards her. She had been caught! She glanced around quickly in what she hoped was a successful mixture of panic and stealth as she looked for an escape route.
"Suwee," the captain said as he approached. Fenchurch wondered why he would be calling for a pig here onboard a spaceship. Was it some kind of mascot? She then had to quickly remind herself that that word didn't necessarily have the same meaning everywhere in the galaxy. She then reminded herself that she had a Babel Fish in her ear and should have therefore understood the meaning of the word within this context. She then reminded herself that even though the Fish translated meaning, there would still be the occasional similarity of words... or names.
"Suwee, my dear," the captain said, stopping at the woman sitting next to Fenchurch, "I'm afraid that Marlie just called in sick. You're going to have to pull a double shift again."
Suwee was a human-looking alien female, appearing about fifty years old. "She called in sick! Now! Her shift started ten minutes ago! I've been waiting for her to get here so I can get down to the mess hall and have some dinner!" The captain shrugged in what he hoped was a sympathetic manner, but which Suwee, and Fenchurch for that matter, interpreted as inept and entirely unhelpful. Suwee went on, "Can I at least have a break to get something to eat?"
"I'm afraid not, my dear. I need you to triangulate the energy modulator."
The woman's voice raised several octaves, "Captain Forrestra, I haven't eaten in at least nine hours! At least let me take a quick break for a small bite to eat!"
"Can't do it. Not yet. You need to stay at your post."
She rolled her eyes like she was dealing with the most ludicrous situation in the entire universe, and clearly deserved some sort of prize for putting up with it. "Then at least let me have something to eat here at my post."
She may as well have just asked the captain to sacrifice his life at that point. "Oh, no! The last time I let anyone eat here on the flight deck, they spilled their drink into the navigation computer and we spent the next nine years stuck in the black hole of Galginia."
"That was only three weeks!" she shouted back, clearly certain that the captain was exaggerating unnecessarily.
"I was talking about real time! Not subjective time!" The captain walked off, inspecting around the lower level of the flight deck, mainly to avoid having to deal with Suwee anymore.
The woman took several moments to compose herself. Then she turned to Fenchurch, threw her hands uselessly up into the air and said, "Typical! Typical! I don't know why I bother!"
Fenchurch was about to shrug, but then suddenly remembered how pathetic it had looked coming from the captain. So she simply said, "I'm sorry."
Unfortunately this was like dangling bait over a pool of piranhas. Suwee exploded again, "You're sorry! You're sorry! How do you think I feel! I'm the one who hasn't eaten in nine hours!"
At which point Fenchurch realized that she couldn't win, and just shrugged.
After several seconds of relative silence, it began to look like the tirade was over. So Fenchurch turned back to the controls in front of her. There were interfaces where she was meant to stick her upper appendages, in her case her hands. And it was while she was wondering exactly how safe it would be that the captain came up behind her. "What are you doing?"
"Um, I just finished the, um..."
"Well then you should monitor the zeesium flow. Come on."
She turned back to the interfaces, stuck her hands in, and a colourful holographic display appeared before her, making her jerk back slightly.
Satisfied that she was getting back to work, the captain walked away quickly before Suwee could pick up where they left off.
Several seconds went by before Fenchurch started to seriously worry that she might be doing some damage to the ship. At which point Suwee sighed loudly and then leaned over and whispered, "They never trained you how to do this, did they?"
"I... er... don't think..." Fenchurch dragged the words out as slowly as she could.
Suwee cut her off, "I didn't think so. They never train anybody anymore. I don't think anybody here knows exactly what they're doing. I know I don't!" she shouted.
And so Fenchurch got a brief, clandestine course on monitoring the zeesium flow. It was actually simpler than she would have thought. It was all computer controlled. The operator simply asked the computer to monitor the zeesium flow, and the computer then got on with it. When there was a problem, the computer reported it. At that point all the operator had to do was order the computer to correct the problem. And that was it.
At which point Fenchurch had to ask, "So why are my hands in here?"
"The old model computers were controlled that way. But they switched over to the voice-operated model ten years ago, and the regulations have never been updated. So now we have to keep our hands in the appendage interface even though it's entirely unnecessary."
Several minutes later Fenchurch finally got the hang of operating it, and then a warning light went off. "Computer, what's wrong?"
"Valve 1009/87/291 has opened too wide."
"Then fix it."
There was a pause. "Computer did you hear me?"
"Affirmative."
"Did you correct the problem?"
"Negative."
"Why not?"
"Grammatical error."
"What grammatical error?"
"You did not use the appropriate form of speech."
"What?"
Suwee leaned over again, "You have to say please."
"What?" Fenchurch asked again. "Really?"
Suwee's only response was to throw her hands up in the air at the general futility of all things.
Fenchurch paused for a moment to wonder if this woman had ever contemplated suicide. She even wondered if she ought to suggest it. Then she berated herself for becoming so cold from her travels through the galaxy. So she turned back to the computer, "Computer, please fix that valve thing."
The holographic display before her twirled a bit, the computer made a pleasant little chirp, and then said, "Corrected."
#
The managers of the Qurlspot Computer Corporation realized long ago that computers were in fact extremely sophisticated idiots. Computers didn't care if a spaceship broke down or if a nuclear reactor blew up. But they could still operate far more quickly and efficiently than any living being, and for far fewer pay cheques. So it became necessary in most cultures to have a combination of both computer and living entity operating together.
They also realized that the people of the planet Qurlspot had the opportunity to improve their race. So they programmed all their computers in such a way that they would only respond if the operator was polite. Otherwise they feared becoming arseholes. Unfortunately the politeness computers actually ended up having the opposite effect. What the Qurlspot Computer Corporation didn't realize was that when having manners forced upon them, most people reacted badly and ended up behaving even more rudely than they would have done in the first place.
#
Fenchurch was experimenting with the way the holographic display changed colours as she moved her hands... when suddenly the alarms went off throughout the flight deck. She yanked her arms out of the appendage interfaces. She must have done something wrong. The lemurs on the top level immediately began blaming each other. The main screen on the forward bulkhead displayed some alien characters she couldn't decipher. She was sure it was pointing her out to the flight deck officers. But in fact it had the equivalent words, "we are experiencing technical difficulties... please stand by." Fenchurch tried to will herself into invisibility. She hesitantly replaced her hands back in the appendage interface terminals and held perfectly still. She just stared at her holographic display and made her expression as rigid as she could. She was doing her job. That was the aura she was trying to project. She was doing her job, and she was doing it well.
A moment later she was relieved to hear the nearby crew members discover that the problem was in fact due to some kind of external influence. It quickly transpired that another time machine was coming up along side theirs, and was actually slowing theirs down so that it could catch up and dock with them.
"Security guards to the docking bay!" the captain ordered, slightly relieved that the problem required an easy solution from him. If anything bad happened at this point, he could always blame the incompetence of the security guards. Captain Forrestra believed that he never actually had to fix the problem. He just had to delegate correctly. So even if one day the ship went down in flames, he would at least die happily if he could blame someone else for not fixing it.
The atmosphere on the flight deck remained quietly tense as they waited to hear back from security... until a few moments later when a very old man with very long white hair and beard, and a gray robe walked onto the flight deck. "It's only me," he said to everyone, even though none of them actually knew who he was. The old man had discovered long ago that saying, "It's only me," in situations like this always put people at least a tiny bit at their ease. The reason for this was that whenever people hear those words, they automatically assume that nobody would say that unless they were no threat. And they also had a tiny paranoid voice in the back of their minds that said even if they didn't recognize the sort of person who said this, then they really ought to, and that there really was therefore no problem after all.
Unfortunately, after a moment's reflection, the captain decided that he really didn't know this person, and so said, "Who... what... er... Guards, stop him!"
Two nearby security guards stopped standing around menacingly, and began to lumber menacingly towards the intruder. They strode over slowly, ready for a fight. Their biceps bulged like a teenaged boy's crotch. Their lips snarled like they were about to sneeze. They were called Blargons. They were a race of warriors. And they were always ready for a fight. Only the strongest of their race got to work as off-world security. For their first birthdays, Blargon children were left alone in the woods, miles from any habitation. If they made it back home within a week, their parents would keep them. Blargon schools consisted of five parts being beaten, one part education, and nine parts truancy. The Blargon court of law was merely an arena where the two litigants would fight to the death. Blargon bodies were so course, they were frequently mistaken for rocks by off-worlders.
They marched up to the old man and came face-to-kneecap with him.
The only drawback about employing Blargons as security was that their race was only about two feet high. They had applied for the job of spaceship security via hyperspace visual communications. Over the image screen they certainly gave the impression of being very menacing indeed, and so a ten year contract was immediately signed with the largest spaceship corporation serving the spaceways; Happy Vacuum Space Lines. It was only when the first Blargons showed up for duty that their new employers began to regret it.
The old man pulled out a small devise which looked to Fenchurch like a television remote control. He pointed it down at the two guards, who looked to be about as intimidating as a couple of chiuauas, and she saw them suddenly stop and then march menacingly in reverse like someone was watching a video tape on rewind. The old man smiled.
The command crew looked puzzled and nervous. The old man then explained, "Oh, I'm sorry. This is a, uh, remote control. I just hit the rewind button."
First Officer Flop was genuinely interested by this nifty little gadget, "That is awesome. What else can it do?"
The intruder held the remote control up for him to see... but safely out of reach, "It can fast forward, rewind, play, and pause. But the record button doesn't work any more, I'm afraid. I had some chocolate on my thumb the last time I had to record anything, and it got stuck in the inner workings."
Feeling slightly reassured and safe now that he had the flight deck crew's attention, he began to stroll across the upper walk-ways. "The reason I'm here," he raised his voice slightly so that everyone could hear him, "is that the origin of the Big Bang Burger Bar is shrouded in mystery. Nobody has ever known who constructed it. Until, that is, you people have simply decided that you may as well cash in on it. The trouble is that that is a paradox." He walked just above Fenchurch's station, paused as he frowned down at her in thought. Then he smiled and said, "Hello, Earth woman." Then he returned his attention to the captain and crew, "I'm afraid that I am here to stop you. My name is Slartibartfast. And I'm with the Campaign for Real Time."
Alaric Badgerbull protested, "But somebody has to build the place!"
"Indeed they do. And somebody will." Slartibartfast waved a vague hand, "Or somebody already has done. Or already will have done. That's the biggest trouble with time travel, really. Grammar. But I'm afraid that you simply cannot go back in time to build it after you already have knowledge of its existence. It has to occur to you as an original idea. Otherwise it creates a temporal paradox."
Badgerbull shouted back the only retort he could think of, "So?"
"So it's my job to stop you."
"Are you responsible for the problem we had a little bit ago in engineering?"
"I'm afraid so. I do apologise, but I had to do that to catch you up. But now that I'm here, I won't be taking any more actions against you. Because I'm reasonably certain that you simply won't be able to do what you plan on doing. So I'm really here just to observe. But please... don't let me stop you from trying. Just go on about your business like I'm not even here."
Captain Forrestra looked helplessly at the Blargon guards who looked even more useless than usual.
Alaric Badgerbull didn't feel he had very any options left open to him at that point. So he went for one of his stand-by verbal attacks, "Let me just ask you one thing. How come when you push and strain on the toilet, it's always a little tiny poop. But the great big ones just slide out almost by themselves."
Slartibartfast said simply, "Oh, I don't know. At my age I'm lucky if anything comes out at all. At least when I want it to."
The old man then walked down the steps to the lowest level of the flight deck and stopped next to Fenchurch. He smiled at her and said, "Obviously we haven't met yet... for you. But for me, we have." He stuck out a hand, "My name is Slartibartfast."