How I Saved the Cup Final
By Sarah McEvoy
Copyright 2012 Sarah McEvoy
To Mole, my favourite Spurs fan
* * * * *
I’ve got a bit of an embarrassing problem. I’ve gone and fallen madly in love with a football fan.
Well, you understand, I didn’t know she was a football fan. Not at first, anyway. It wasn’t as if she’d walked up to me wearing a bicoloured scarf and chanting slogans. After all, in the circumstances it would have looked a bit out of place if she had. It was my very first space job after I graduated, looking after the robots on the Moscow, the second biggest freighter in the Terran Merchant Navy. Big ship, lots of robots, and you can imagine I was kept pretty busy. We were on the Sirius run to start with, which gets pretty boring after a while because it’s a fairly short trip, but at least the fact that we weren’t in space for too long meant I had plenty of time to do what I had to do. But I’d only been on the Moscow a few weeks when the powers that be decided to send us out to Rigel with a consignment of building materials for the new colony. Rigel! At the sort of speed the Moscow could do, I knew that was going to be at least three months. I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for this.
So there I was, sitting in the rec room with a cup of synthetic cocoa out of the dispenser and wondering why it was that the human race could build robots capable of all kinds of complicated tasks like nursing and navigating, but they still couldn’t get synthetic cocoa to taste like the real thing… and all of a sudden, she walked in. Well, she didn’t exactly walk. More sort of undulated. I’d always thought I liked skinny girls before I saw this one, and I’d never believed in love at first sight either. But I realised I was staring at her so hard that if I didn’t pull my chin up pretty fast I was going to get it covered in imitation cocoa, even though she wasn’t skinny. Not that she was fat either, you understand. She was more… how shall I put this?… large but perfectly formed. Especially up front. Um. You get the picture.
She gave me this odd sort of look, and then such a knowing smile I could feel myself going red. I’ve never been very good with women, to be honest. Most of them don’t seem to want to talk about robots, but I’m not great at talking about anything else. They always say things like, “Oh, Taw, don’t you know any small talk?” That always stumps me. I mean, I’ve always thought small talk meant things like the weather, and you just don’t get any in space. But this one actually walked straight over to me and sat down opposite. I started to panic. I didn’t want to make an even worse fool of myself than I knew I was doing already.
“Hi,” she said. “My name’s Chalmyreth. I’m the new pilot. How about you?”
“Er. I’m Taw. Robotics expert. What happened to old Holson?”
She grinned. “Still here. We’re going to Rigel, remember? You need more than one pilot and a robot for a trip of that length. How long have you been in space?”
“Not long,” I admitted. “About three weeks, actually. We’ve just been doing the Sirius run so far.”
“Oh, well, that explains it. What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Synthetic cocoa. I’ll get you one if you like,” I offered gallantly. “Only you probably won’t, because it’s pretty awful. Shall I get you something else instead?”
She laughed musically. “I’ll try the synthetic coffee, then. Thank you. That’ll probably be awful too, but at least it should be fairly predictably awful. With the cocoa, you never quite know.”
I stood up, with a certain amount of difficulty caused by the fact that my knees seemed to have suddenly turned to jelly. She had long dark wavy hair that cascaded softly around her shoulders, and her eyes were such a striking green that either she was wearing tinted contact lenses or she had Varlan ancestry somewhere along the line. And her voice was… well, I’ve never really been the poetic type, but it was like waterfalls. Or honey. Or something. Anyway, I didn’t want to think too hard about what it was currently doing to me, just in case I fell over.
“I’m glad I’ve bumped into you,” she purred, as I went to fetch her coffee. “I’ve just run a check on the navigator and it’s playing up a bit. Keeps slightly mislocating the Galactic centre. I was going to call you out after the break, but since you’re here…”
“No problem,” I assured her earnestly, silently grateful for the navigator’s unexpected malfunction. It had never given any trouble on the Sirius run. “I’ll be along straight away, as soon as we’ve finished our drinks.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Taw.” She smiled brilliantly. “It’s nice to work with a robotics expert who’s so co-operative. On the last ship I was on, there was a dreadful surly old curmudgeon who seemed to think he owned the place.”
“I had a tutor like that at university,” I said, risking a little smile. “People like that are usually the ones who like to keep everyone else in the dark, because they’re the expert, but I don’t see it like that. I’d be more than happy to explain to you a bit about how the navigator works.”
“Would you, Taw?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested. “That would be lovely!”
I suppose I should really have known. Women just aren’t interested in how robots work, apart from the ones who go into robotics themselves, who generally aren’t women at all from my point of view because everything is a lot simpler if you treat them as honorary men. But, by the time I discovered what she actually was interested in, not to mention the fact that the navigator was really working perfectly all right, I wasn’t too worried about that.
It was a wonderful evening. And, you know, she didn’t mention football even once. How in space was I supposed to know?