The Ultimate Inferior Beings by Mark Roman Page B

are fourteen pogo-sticks.”
    jixX sighed.
    “There’s one snowshoe and one
flipper,” continued LEP. “These would be good if they weren’t both for the
right foot. And, of course, two skateboards.”
    “That’s useful, LEP,” said
jixX wondering why he bothered. “Anything else? Over.”
    LEP’s answer was lost in a
burst of static.
    “Pardon?” asked jixX. “Over.”
    “I said: ‘three space
hoppers. Over.’ Over.”
    jixX sat up, suddenly
interested. “Space hoppers?” he asked. At last he was getting somewhere. “What
are space hoppers? Some sort of jet backpacks, or something? Over.”
    “Not exactly,” came LEP’s
answer. “You must remember space hoppers. They’re those big, orange, rubber
inflatable things with two handles and a kangaroo face painted on them. You sit
on the body, hold on to the handles and bounce up and down. Over.”
    jixX’s shoulders sagged again
as he regretted having started the conversation. “Tell me, LEP,” he said as
patiently as he could. “What use are these space hoppers in our present
predicament? Over.”
    “They’re amazingly good fun,”
said LEP. “Something to while away the hours. You should try one. Over.”

 

    Chapter 8
     
    Right
in the heart of
the forward engine room, tightly hugging the coaxial dimagnetic lead, was the
neutrino bomb – the deadliest weapon of mass destruction known to Humankind. It
purred softly to itself. The purring sound came from the bomb’s first-stage
timing device. This is how it worked. The bomb’s shaded-pole motor turned a
fan. As the fan turned, its rotating blades reflected low frequency virtual
photons from the 100 - watt light bulb in the hairdryer’s handle. Each reflected
photon passed into the rapid-response liquid-crystal photodivider where, after
successive subdivision, it triggered a unit of the binary-digital counter. The
net result was a precision time measurement accurate to the nearest milliday
(or 86.4 seconds).
    Exactly two millidays after
anaX had activated the bomb, the scalar flipped a switch that triggered the
seismophobic Rayleigh-wave detector (one of the bomb’s sophisticated
anti-tampering devices) and engaged the bomb’s second-stage timer.
    But something was wrong.
    The second-stage timer should
have been activated after exactly 20 millidays, not after exactly 2. It had
thus been triggered nearly 26 minutes too early! The time of the bomb’s
detonation had been brought forward by nearly half an hour!
    *
    jixX sat and thought about
space hoppers. He wondered whether there really were space hoppers on
The Night Ripple, or LEP was being LEP.
    “How’s anaX feeling?” he
asked by way of changing the subject, speaking loudly and clearly into the army
surplus microphone. “How’s her headache? Over.”
    “No idea,” said LEP’s faint
and crackling voice, deep within the white noise. “However, I do know that
she’s just been in the forward engine room. Over.”
    “What was she doing in there?
Over.”
    “Beats me,” said LEP. “My
little buddy, BUF, isn’t on speaking terms with me at the moment. Over.”
    “Can’t think why,” said jixX.
“Where is she now? Over.”
    “In the ship’s boat-hangar.
Over.”
    jixX frowned deeply. What was
the gynaecologist up to? First the forward engine room, and now the
boat-hangar. Probably following LEP’s directions to the aspirins, thought jixX
with a shrug.
    “She’s acting more and more
strangely. Over,” said LEP.
    “In what way? Over.”
    “She hasn’t spoken to me
once. Not a word. Over.”
    “In what way is that
strange?” asked jixX. “But don’t tell me, let me guess. She’s playing hard to
get, right? Over.”
    “Great minds think alike,”
said LEP. “Over.”
    jixX didn’t know how much
more of this he could take. He looked at his watch, then at his two companions
sitting on the ground a short distance away and then at the featureless planet
around him. “Over and out,” he said.
    But the static burst