Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

  There was a silence.

  'Is that it?' Lister said eventually. 'Is that what you've been torturing yourself with for the last seven years? One dumb mistake that anybody could have made?'

  'If only they'd mentioned it in basic training. Instead of climbing up ropes and crawling through tunnels on your elbows. If just once they'd said "Gazpacho soup is served cold", I could have been an admiral by now. I could. I really could.'

  'Come on - everybody has memories that make them wince. And ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person who remembers the incident is you.'

  'Oh, what does it matter now? Come on. Let's get it over with. Erase me.'

  'And those things nearly always happen with people you don't know very well, and don't see very often, so who gives a smeg anyway?'

  'Just turn me off. Get on with it.'

  Lister swigged at his now cold coffee. 'I've already done it. I wiped the other one.'

  Emotions wrestled for space on Rimmer's brow. 'You wiped ... the duplicate?

  When?'

  'Before you walked in.'

  'And you let me stand here ... and ... spill my guts?'

  'Yeah.' A big, broad grin.

  'Why?'

  'I wanted to find out about gazpacho soup, and I knew you'd never tell me.'

  'Of course I wouldn't tell you - because you'd make my life hell with gazpacho soup jokes for the rest of eternity.'

  Rimmer - I swear I will never mention this conversation again.'

  Rimmer regarded him dubiously.

  'I don't break my word. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a liar.'

  Rimmer looked at him through one eye. 'All right, then. I believe you. You're a disgusting rancid slob, but you keep your word.'

  'Thank you.'

  Rimmer got up from the chair. 'So I'm going back to Earth, then?'

  Lister nodded. 'We're all going back to Earth, then.'

  Rimmer motioned drunkenly towards, the hatchway. 'Come on. Let's go down the Copacabana, have a real drink.'

  Lister got up to follow him.

  'Souper,' he said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Strange, but years later, whenever Lister remembered it, he always remembered it in black and white. And something else; the memories came in a rush: there were no insignificant details, only significant ones. He remembered his scalp tingling as the cargo bay doors boomed open.

  He remembered his giddiness as Nova 5 taxied across the cargo deck and blasted into the blackness of space.

  He remembered the silvery light that preceded each jump, and the incomparable feeling of existing simultaneously at two points in the universe - and then the jolt as all his cells 'decided' to be in the new position.

  Perhaps a thousand jolts.

  And there it was - on the navicomp screen.

  The planet Earth.

  They were home.

  Part Three

  Earth!

  ONE

  The big clock on the wall tocked round to five o'clock, and Lister lifted up the flap on the counter and turned the sign on the door to 'Closed'. Bailey's Perfect Shami Kebab Emporium was shutting for the day. Lister rang up 'no sale' on the old fashioned wrought-iron till, and counted the week's takings. Fourteen dollars and twenty-five cents. Another great week.

  He dipped his hand into the penny candy jar, picked out a liquorice shoelace, then grabbed his overcoat and scarf, pulled on his fur-lined deerstalker and mittens, and walked out into the crisp white snow. The bell on the door jangled behind him; there was never any need to lock the shop, not here in Bedford Falls. There was only one cop for the entire population of three thousand, and he spent most of his day asleep in his patrol car.

  Lister crunched across the eiderdown street, chewing happily on his liquorice, and headed for the bank. A group of carol singers were standing round the war memorial, belting out God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, accompanied by a fourpiece brass band. They all waved a cheery greeting, and Lister stood with them and helped them finish his favourite carol.

  'Merry Christmas,' he said, and dropped two dollars into their can as Ernie, the cab driver, produced a hip flask from the bell of his tuba and gave Lister a nip of brandy.

  It being after five o'clock, and Christmas Eve, the bank was closed, of course.

  Lister tried the door. It jangled open.

  'Hello? Anybody home?'

  Money was stacked in neat piles on the wooden counter - obviously Horace hadn't got round to putting it in the safe yet.

  'Horace? Are you there?'

  Horace stepped through the back door, holding a sheet of wrapping paper and some string.

  'Sorry, Mr Bailey, I was just wrapping presents for the kids up at the orphan home. You ever tried to wrap a HulaHoop? I'll be a monkey's uncle if I can figure it.'

  Lister handed over ten dollars and asked Horace to put it in his account.

  'Ten dollars! Business is good, Mr Bailey.'

  Lister smiled, and pulled out a handful of candy walking sticks from his huge overcoat pocket. 'I didn't have time to wrap them. Hope the orphanage doesn't mind.'

  'They won't mind, George. Merry Christmas.'

  'Merry Christmas, Horace,' said Lister, and turned to go. 'You know - you should get a lock for this bank door or something.'

  'That's what everybody says, but I figure what the heck -I'd only lose the key.'

  Lister laughed, and walked back out into the street.

  Last minute shoppers exchanged Merry Christmasses with him as he crossed back to the Emporium, where his rickety old model 'A' Ford was covered in snow. He took the hand crank from the bench seat and jerked the engine into spluttering life.

  As he turned left at Martini's Bar his arms started to hurt again, so he pulled over outside Old Man Gower's drugstore.

  His arms had been giving him problems for a few weeks now. It was like a burning sensation down both his forearms - excruciatingly painful at times, but Doc MacKenzie couldn't find anything wrong with them. There were no marks, nothing showed up on the X-ray: it was a complete mystery.

  He grabbed a tub of cooling ointment from Old Man Gower's shelves and dropped twenty-five cents into the open till, then hopped back in his old Ford and headed for home: 220 Sycamore.

  A couple of birds - robins, Lister guessed - were singing in the snow-laden lilac trees that lined the avenue. Life was good. Everything seemed ... well, perfect. But, God, did his arms hurt.

  It had been two years since they returned to Earth. Two years since Nova 5 had completed the duality jumps which brought them back to their own solar system.

  Two years since they'd skidded to a landing in the middle of the Sahara desert.

  As they'd opened the airlock and stepped out into the baking heat, there, like a mirage over the brow of a vast dune, an army of jeeps and helicopters had descended on them.

  The world's press went crazy! The three-million-year-old men! Space adventurers!

  Things hadn't changed that much. The human race were still there, a foot or so taller, but still there. And so was everything that went with the human race: advertising, commercialism, marketing, huge dirty cities and people on the make.

  And it had turned into a freak show: interviews, book offers, chat shows, endorsements, sponsorship deals ... Lister had hated it. He was a piece of meat that people wanted to package and sell.

  'I'm three million years old - what's my secret? I eat Breadman's Fish Fingers.'

  'I've been all around the universe, and I've never come across anything quite as good as Luton's Carpet Shampoo.'

  Rimmer lapped it up, the Cat adored it, but Lister just wanted to get away. He'd turned down all the offers, changed his name and opted for the peaceful anonymity of this backwater town in the American mid-west. He couldn't believe it when he'd discovered there actually was a town called Bedford Falls. He'd gone there on a whim, to take a look, and was stunned how similar the place was to the Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life. It seemed like fans of the film had all
collected there to live out their lives in a self-created 1940s American Shangri-la.

  Of course he couldn't keep his secret from the townfolk for long; his face had been plastered all over magazine covers and newspapers for six months, so he guessed more or less everyone knew who he was and where he'd come from. But they pretended they didn't. They all called him 'Mr Bailey', or 'George', which was the pseudonym he'd chosen. They respected his privacy, and guarded his secret, and he was left in peace to live out the rest of his life in this quiet idyll.

  But something was wrong with his arms, and it was beginning to worry him.

  He turned the Ford into the tree-lined drive of his old house and honked his horn three times. The snow lay thick and deep on the lawn, and a huge, eight-foot snowman was grinning a welcome in coal. Lister grabbed the Christmas presents off the back seat and staggered under their weight up the drive to the porch. As he pushed open the door with his back, he could hear a carol being mutilated on a clapped-out old piano. He loved that sound. To Lister it was better than the London Phil.

  He walked into the parlour. A log fire was burning merrily in the grate. Jim and Bexley were smashing Silent Night out of the complaining piano, while Krissie was standing on a stepladder, putting tinsel on the Christmas tree. She turned and smiled, and blew him a kiss.

  When the kids were in bed they sat snoozily in the big leather armchair with the springs poking through the back, watching the fire splutter and splurt, and listening to Hoagy Carmichael on the wind-up phonograph. After Krissie climbed the stairs to their draughty bedroom with the leaky roof, he took out the ointment - he didn't want her to know about his arms - and began to apply it to the sore areas.

  It came as something of a shock that, when he'd put the cream specifically on the areas that throbbed and hurt, it spelt out a word. A word written in pain down his forearm. The word was 'DYING'.

  TWO

  The black stretch Mercedes with the tinted, bullet-proof glass glided along the Champs Elysées, and pulled up outside the canopy of the hundred-and-forty-floor skyscraper. Rimmer finished his phone call to his publicist, then stepped out of the limo. A string of bodyguards kept at bay the group of teenage girls who'd camped out on the steps overnight, in the hope of catching a glimpse of AJ.R. He allowed them a thin smile as he walked under the canopy and up the marble steps into the Rimmer Building (Paris). The Rimmer Building (Paris) was an identical copy of the Rimmer Building (London) and the Rimmer Building (New York). He was happy with the towering glass and steel architecture, so he saw no need to vary the design. The electric doors purred open and he strode across the thick white mink carpet, trailed by the gaggle of accountants and financial advisers who seemed to follow him everywhere.

  As he walked across the massive lobby, he dismissed his financial advisers for the evening, and nodded almost imperceptibly at Pierre, the Sorbonne graduate he'd hired exclusively to press the button that summoned the lift. While he waited, he swung round to look at the colossal white marble statue of himself, captured in the middle of a Full Double-Rimmer, which the Space Corps had long accepted as its standard official salute. The lift took a full ninety seconds to arrive, so he fired Pierre and pressed the button himself for floor 140 - his luxury penthouse suite. The fact that he could actually press the button at all was, in a way, the key to the immense fortune he'd amassed since his return to Earth two years previously.

  After the hero's welcome, his cunning business brain had taken full advantage of the offers which flooded in daily. With the money he culled from advertising and the publication of his memoirs, he'd set up various multi-national corporations which had sponsored the Rimmer Research Centres, which had finally invented the Solidgram - a solid body that housed his personality and intellect. He was now exactly like any normal living person, with the added bonus that he was more or less immortal. The Solidgram had sold in such quantities, his income from that alone allowed him to buy the Bahamas for 'somewhere to go at the weekends'.

  It amused him no end that he was now one of the three or four richest men in the world, while Lister was stuck in a dead-end burger bar in a dead-end town somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

  He'd hired-a private investigator who had taken fourteen months to track him down. Rimmer was now well into the complicated negotiations to buy up the entire town, which he intended to turn into a huge maggot farm. Just for the hell of it.

  He got out of the lift and walked past the salute-shaped pool on the roof garden. Hugo, one of the gardening staff, was aquavac-ing cherry blossoms from the surface of the water.

  'Monsieur Rimmer!' he called, 'Madame Juanita - she is unwell again.'

  Rimmer sighed'. 'Unwell' was the code for throwing a major Brazilian wobbly. His wife was having one of her regular tantrums. Juanita Chicata was unquestionably the most beautiful woman in the world. Everything about her was classic, from the tip of her perfect nose to the toes of her beautiful feet. Eyes the colour of fire, panther-black hair, dangerous lips. Dangerous woman. She'd made two fortunes, the first as the world's number one model, the second as the world's number one actress. And she was a great actress - she wasn't a model who got by on her looks, she really was the finest actress in the world. And she was nineteen years old. She had beauty, brains, talent, everything. God had finally got it right.

  Every man, every man desired her.

  And she'd married Rimmer two summers earlier. This was another source of amusement for Rimmer. While Lister had ended up with a very ordinary girl-next-door type, he'd acquired the 'Brazilian Bombshell'.

  Right now the Brazilian Bombshell was exploding in the master bedroom of their penthouse apartment. Rimmer wandered through the exotic Chinese roof garden, while four hundred catering staff prepared for the customary Saturday night party. The marquee had been erected overlooking the glistening Seine, the forty thousand fireworks were all in place and primed, the three-hundred-yard-loing buffet table was crammed to overflowing with food which had been flown in from around the world earlier that day, the centrepiece of which was a replica of Juanita's naked body in caviar. He paused to admire it. Even like this, even sculpted from little black fish eggs, it was a body that drove him crazy. He couldn't help himself - he leaned over and nibbled at the splendid right breast - the real ones were insured for ten million each, and she hadn't let him near them for over a year and a half. Which was why right now Rimmer had his face buried deep in the ice-cold caviar.

  Suddenly, from above, there was a shattering of glass as a Louis XIV grand piano crashed out of the french windows of their master bedroom and landed on the roof garden, crushing one of the catering staff.

  It had amused Rimmer when the private detective reported that Lister had a piano - a clapped-out tuneless wreck with dry rot which Lister had bought at a second-hand shop in Bedford Falls for four dollars and thirty cents. Rimmer's piano, which now lay in pieces on top of a screaming servant, had cost him a million. It was a lot to pay for a piano that nobody played, but his wife thought it would look 'kinda neat' in the bedroom, so he'd got it. Now, of course, it wasn't worth the price of a cup of tea, because she'd hurled it out of the window because she was ... 'unwell'.

  Juanita was regularly 'unwell' - perhaps two or three times a week - and on each occasion it cost Rimmer upwards of three hundred thousand. Still, he could afford it. And she was the most beautiful woman alive. And she was married to him.

  As he walked into the master bedroom he found Juanita hurling dollops of cold cream at an original Picasso, while two maids swept up the remains of the fifth-century Ming vase that she'd used to smash the nose of the Michelangelo statue he'd bought her as a kiss-and-make-up gift.

  Rimmer sighed and shook his head. Why had she gone crazy this time? What was the reason for today's little sulk? Was it because for the second month in a row she wasn't on the cover of Vogue? Was it because she was on the cover of Vogue, and she didn't like the photograph? Was it because she'd put on a pound in weight?

  Or had she lost a po
und in weight? Both, of course, were disastrous. Had the maid accidently brought up Lapsang tea instead of Keema? Last time she did that it had cost Rimmer three Matisses and his entire collection of Iranian pottery.

  Was the telephone dirty again? Was there nothing on TV she wanted to watch?

  Whatever it was she was obviously upset, because now she had taken down Rimmer's twelfth-century samurai sword and was hacking away at the water bed. The liquid gurgled happily over the irreplaceable Persian rug.

  'Nita, Nita,' he cooed soothingly as he sploshed over towards her, 'what is it?

  What has disturbed my little turtle dove?'

  She turned to face him, ferocious, the samurai sword clasped above her head. 'I can't tell you. You wouldn't understand ect!' She skewered a Cézanne hanging above the bed, and sliced it into thin shreds.

  'You can tell me anything,' Rimmer said softly.

  'Not thees! I can't tell you thees!'

  'Please. Tell me what's made you so angry.'

  'Hugo!' she screeched and, at the mention of his name, she hurled the Koh-i-Nor out of the window and down onto the Champs Elysées below.

  'What about Hugo?' said Rimmer, picking up the phone to make arrangements for the pool man's dismissal.

  'He won't make love to me any more,' she bawled. Then she collapsed into a sobbing heap in the soggy mess of the demolished water bed. 'Not ever. He's afraid you'll find out and sack heem.'

  'Well, he's got a point,' Rimmer found himself saying.

  Then it hit him.

  What she'd said. He was stunned. He felt sick.