Lazy Daisy

  Chapter 7.

  I was shaking too hard to talk and my legs were freezing again. I aimed for the right hand opening and before I froze completely I dragged Eddie through it. We stopped abruptly. We were standing in some sort of weird room. There were doors all around us in some sort of shiny colour that wasn’t quite silver and wasn’t quite gold. There were flat, glistening black slabs stretching out on blocks of silvery stuff and other slabs so white that it hurt your eyes to look at them. The air had a faint smell of cleaning stuff – not the flower scented stuff but the disinfectant one. It was very sterile, like a hospital, and completely empty.

  ‘We made it,’ I said to Eddie. My voice didn’t even echo, as you would have expected it to in that place. Instead it sounded dull and flat.

  ‘We’d better find Mum,’ murmured Eddie.

  I held his hand for moral support and he didn’t even object, which showed that he was at least as scared as I was. ‘Which do you suppose is the door?’ I asked him. We looked around blankly. All the walls looked the same, with doors in every direction. Eddie patted the one nearest to him.

  ‘There are no handles,’ he said in surprise. ‘How do they open?’

  I felt completely helpless. He was right. All the doors were smooth shiny blanks.

  ‘Maybe they push,’ I suggested.

  We tried tentatively pushing at the nearest doors then, when that didn’t work, we resorted to kicking them. After about half an hour we were hot and bothered and extremely cross but still stuck in the room. I even kicked the floor, which was a shiny grey plastic stuff, but that didn’t help either.

  ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, or even a moa,’ groaned Eddie. Turning to the nearest door he thumped on it with his fist. ‘Open up, you stupid thing,’ he shouted.

  There was a hissing sound and the door slid across to reveal a long white corridor stretching out in front of us. Our mouths hung open in amazement and we felt rather foolish.

  ‘Okay, so now we know all we have to do is ask,’ I grinned nervously.

  Eddie gave me a shaky smile and we ventured out into the corridor. I think that was a mistake. The floor started moving as soon as we stepped onto it and we clung to each other in surprise.

  ‘I guess it’s one way to travel,’ Eddie said after a while.

  I nodded. It was an eerie feeling travelling silently and smoothly down the long white corridor. Eddie tried calling out ‘open’ at intervals to see if there were any other doors in the corridor but nothing happened. The floor seemed to pick up speed after a while so we sat down and decided to see where we would end up.

  The end came unexpectedly. One moment we were yawning with boredom looking at the white walls, and the next moment the floor seemed to drop down, taking us with it. My stomach did flip-flops and Eddie grabbed my hand again. The floor lurched and tilted and we yelled as we were thrown into a curved pipe. The sides were too high to see over, even if I could have stood up and we were travelling much too fast to do that. I shrieked as a large lumpy thing bounced into the tube beside us. It was as big as my head and seemed to be some sort of dirty mossy stuff but Eddie hissed at me not to touch it.

  ‘It might be poisonous,’ he warned me.

  I shuddered. No way would I want to touch something like that anyway. There was a clang and hiss and occasional popping sound as other strange shaped objects tumbled into the tube, then we were swept over and dumped onto another flat plastic conveyer belt in an enormous room.

  Eddie screamed and so did I. It was terrifying. There were great machines everywhere, rattling and creaking. The noise was appalling. Some metal tube things were pumping up and down like pistons while large sharp looking pincers came down from above us and picked up some of the mossy lumps. Eddie and I clung to each other as we were tossed and buffeted past these machines. At one stage there was a flash of orange light across us then we were tumbled onto another conveyer belt.

  This one led to a quieter area, thank goodness, as my head was beginning to pound with the noise. It was also a lot slower but that was worse as it gave us time to see what was ahead of us. The belt stretched into a black hole where machines made a terrible grinding sound. It was a bit like the noise the cat makes when it eats a mouse under the bed and crunches on the bones. I felt sick.

  ‘We have to get off here,’ I whimpered. ‘I’m not going in there. It’s going to chew us up.’

  Eddie looked green. ‘We can’t,’ he moaned. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’

  I crawled to the side of the belt and peered over, with Eddie holding onto my ankles. The belt was suspended in the air and below was a drop for what looked like kilometres with a foggy sort of darkness below it. I put my hand out over the edge of the belt and jerked it back with a gasp.

  ‘It feels like an electric fence,’ I said indignantly. ‘My bones have gone all wobbly.’

  ‘Must be a forcefield,’ nodded Eddie, who has played every sci-fi computer game ever invented. ‘We must be in the future.’

  ‘It’s not going to be a very bright future for us,’ I wailed, wondering where our dead bodies would end up. ‘Do you suppose this happened to Mum?’

  Eddie didn’t answer this, as with a whoosh he was suddenly sucked away from me into the hole. I lost it completely then. I screamed and screamed and kept screaming as I was sucked away into the dark hole with a blast of air. Then I was frozen silent in terror. A flash of green light lit me up and a metallic voice said,

  ‘Garbage. Garbage. Life ... potential? Assessment Area Four.’

  I heard all this in bewilderment before I was blown down into a green tube. It was like one of those water slides at the pools only with warmish air instead of water. I dropped down and around curves, to end with a bump beside Eddie. We were on a perfectly ordinary looking bench seat. You know, the sort you get in bus shelters that are all hard plastic and not quite comfortable. I was thankful that at least it wasn’t moving after all the churning around we’d had already, but my sigh of relief came too soon.

  ‘We’re moving again,’ Eddie called, rather unnecessarily, as I could see the walls gliding by beside us.

  ‘Maybe it will scoot us right back to the swinging seat,’ I suggested hopefully.

  ‘But then we wouldn’t find Mum.’

  Eddie’s voice was sounding a bit wobbly, so I bit my lip and tried to think positive thoughts.

  The journey was a bit like sitting in a train and from time to time we passed open doorways. We peeped inside but they were incredibly weird. One was all strange lights flickering while the one next to it was all misty with a booming sound coming out of it. Another looked like a glasshouse with rows and rows of green stuff growing on trays. Shortly after that, the seat stopped by an open door and a machine came gliding towards us. It was shaped like a big rectangular box about as high as my waist, and had things like camera lenses all over it that went in and out with a whirring sound. The machine came up to us and said, ‘descend now,’ in a thin squeaky voice.

  ‘It’s a robot,’ Eddie yelled excitedly.

  Now in all the Sci Fi movies you see, the robots are really cute. They strike up friendships with people and perform all sorts of amazing antics. This robot obviously hadn’t seen any of those movies. It was about as cute as your average refrigerator and, what’s more, had several menacing metal pincers that it waved at us.

  ‘Descend, descend,’ the robot repeated.

  We obediently climbed off the seat, although I have to say I was a bit nervous.

  ‘Occupation?’ demanded the robot.

  ‘What?’ we goggled.

  ‘Occupation?’ it demanded again.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Eddie whispered to me.

  ‘It wants to know what sort of work we do,’ I whispered back.

  ‘We are children. We don’t work,’ said Eddie loudly. I don’t know why we felt we had to talk loudly to it. It was probably just as good at picking up our whispers but it made us feel a bit braver.

  ‘Occupation?’ re
peated the robot.

  ‘We don’t have one,’ I protested. I might as well have saved my breath. The robot stood solidly in front of us and waved its pincers again.

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Oh this isn’t getting us anywhere. Housework. We wash dishes and cook meals,’ I shouted.

  ‘What did you say that for?’ Eddie asked me indignantly.

  ‘It was only going to keep saying ‘occupation’ at us and it’s true. We’ve been doing most of the housework ever since Aunt Daisy came to stay.’

  As Eddie muttered that he hoped that didn’t mean we’d be put to work washing dishes, the robot turned away from us. ‘Follow,’ it instructed and we trooped behind it as it rolled through an open door. It was such a relief to see an almost normal room. There were two beds in the middle and along one wall were two chairs in front of a green screen that looked like a TV. The robot said ‘rest’ and glided out the door, which shut behind it.

  ‘Let’s explore,’ said Eddie. ‘Maybe we can find some food in here somewhere.’ He put his hand on all the walls in turn saying, ‘open.’

  Quite a few of them did and we discovered racks of clothes, a bit like shapeless pyjamas, and some sort of warm soft covers which we guessed were for the beds. One door opened to a small bathroom that we were both pleased to discover worked normally, as long as you told things what to do. If you asked for water the tap would turn on, and Eddie spent at least ten minutes making it turn on and off and go hotter and colder just for the fun of it.

  A burst of static came from a speaker on the wall and made us jump.

  ‘Assignment of duties. Food tasting,’ a voice droned.

  ‘Food tasting! Thank goodness for that. I’m starving,’ grinned Eddie.

  Now that he had mentioned it, I realised I was ravenous. I’d been too churned up with all the travelling round to notice it before, but as soon as I heard the word ‘food’ I felt totally empty inside. There was a ‘ping’ and two white containers dropped out of a hatch beside the TV screen, a bit like one of those candy bar dispensers you get at shopping malls. We grabbed the containers and ripped them open. In each one there was a small plastic spoon and a blob of purple jelly stuff. I had a sudden thought about the duties of a food taster. They were used in the old days by kings and emperors to taste the food before it was served up. If the food taster didn’t die, then it was a fairly safe bet the food wasn’t poisoned then the king could eat it. I hadn’t seen any sign of a king, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one, and I guess we could be considered expendable.

  ‘Yuck,’ I said. ‘We shouldn’t eat this. It might be poisonous. Don’t touch it.’

  Eddie poked at his jelly doubtfully. It wobbled lethargically and looked even less appetizing.

  ‘We want more food, I mean, different food,’ I said to the screen.

  Nothing happened.

  Eddie prodded his jelly again. Then he said, ‘I’m sure it’s not poisonous. I mean, why would they bother? If they’d wanted to kill us they could have squashed us up in that garbage compressor machine.’

  What he said made sense and I watched in trepidation as he defiantly took a mouthful of jelly. ‘It’s not too bad,’ he said cautiously. ‘Go on, try it.’

  I took the smallest spoonful I could and touched my tongue to it. It tasted bland and bit like soap. ‘I’m not eating it,’ I told him, and firmly put both containers down on the bench beside the hatch. The screen lit up with 2 round glowing buttons. One was red and one was yellow.

  ‘Do you suppose we are supposed to push one?’ Eddie asked me.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ I answered cautiously.

  Eddie reached out and pushed the red button. The screen gave a beep and the word ‘rejected’ flashed up.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, as it dawned on me. ‘We have to judge if the food is any good or not. Let’s try pushing the yellow button next time.’

  I don’t know if the machine heard me, but the next minute the containers of jelly dropped down a chute and about thirty seconds later there was a ‘ping’ and two more containers appeared. These ones had a green stuff that looked like broccoli in them, although it tasted a bit like candy floss. Eddie and I both ate those then I pushed the yellow button. It flashed up with the word ‘accepted,’

  ‘I was right. It does want us to judge the food samples. I wonder why?’

  ‘Maybe there are machines like the robot making it and they can’t taste it so they need real people,’ Eddie suggested.

  It sounded reasonable to me so I grinned at him as we watched the samples go down the chute the same way as the first two. Over what felt like the next hour or so – Eddie’s watch had stopped and I wasn’t wearing mine – about a dozen different containers appeared. A couple of them were really nice and we ate them thankfully while one grey gritty one was so bad that the machine promptly gave us big cups of clear water to drink as we gasped and gagged. We pushed the reject button really quickly that time.

  Finally we were too full to be interested in even opening the containers and the screen went dead as the last lot vanished. In fact the whole room went dark and Eddie and I decided that would be a good time to go to bed.

  ‘We haven’t done anything about finding Mum,’ I whispered as we snuggled under the soft covers.

  ‘In the morning,’ Eddie replied sleepily. ‘We’ll find her tomorrow.’