Better Than Life

  'Rimmer - I can handle it.'

  'I'm not sure I can.'

  'We're in the wrong position.' Lister sucked at his can. 'It's an easier shot if we're over here.' He tapped the screen at a point mid-way between Red Dwarf and the oncoming planet.

  'You mean right in the path of the ice planet?'

  Lister nodded.

  'So if you miss, we get a planet in our face?'

  'I'm not going to mish.' Lister tugged open his fifth lager, and ducked down into Starbug's cockpit section.

  'Mish?'

  'What?'

  'You said "mish”. "I'm not going to mish,” you said. You're pissed.'

  Lister fired up the thrusters and wrenched the 'bug towards its new coordinates. 'God, I could murder a curry. Pity we didn't bring any food. Have we got any crisps or anything?'

  ***

  The planet was close now. It occupied almost half of Rimmer's navicomp screen, and was growing steadily in size as it thundered towards them.

  Lister screwed up the empty sixth can of lager and threw it across the room at the wastebin. It hit the rim and clattered on to the floor.

  Rimmer closed his eyes. 'Let's just get out of here. It's a shame about the Cat and Kryten, but we still have a chance to save our necks.'

  Lister flicked the missile launch to manual. The firing pad lurched forward from the flatbed scanner, and he nestled his nose into the bifocal viewer. Heat prickled his arms and his forehead. He lined up the crosswires on the sun around which the cue planet spun. He shifted his legs until he felt his centre of balance.

  It was lined up.

  It looked right.

  But he waited.

  He waited until it felt right.

  Then it felt right. Space faded away, and he was back in the Aigburth Arms, and this was just another shot to stay on the table. He was on the eight ball, and all it needed was a push, with just enough bottom to avoid the in-off. It was easy. He could do it.

  It felt right.

  He played his shot.

  He touched the launch button, and increased the pressure steadily and evenly in one smooth movement.

  With a primal scream, the missile ripped from its housing under Starbug's belly and sizzled towards the distant sun.

  Lister turned to the scanner screen and watched.

  The whole sequence took eight hours to play out, but to Rimmer, it seemed like eight years. To Lister, it seemed like eight seconds.

  The missile plunged into the sun's inferno, and a giant solar flare licked up from its raging surface, struck Lister's cue planet and slammed it out of orbit.

  The cue planet yammered through space towards the intersection coordinates, the point where it would collide with the ice planet, and knock it into the 'pocket' of the left-hand sun.

  Almost immediately, Rimmer realized it was going to miss. And not by a little. By a lot.

  The cue planet wasn't going to hit the ice planet. It wasn't even going to connect. The cue planet had been wrenched from its orbit hopelessly early. It was going to streak harmlessly across the path of the oncoming ice world, to be captured in orbit around the left-hand sun.

  Lister had sunk the cue ball.

  Or rather, he was going to sink the cue ball; first they had to wait for the planetary pool shot to run its slow-motion course.

  They didn't exchange a word for three hours. They watched the scanner screen, and hoped, against the evidence of their eyes, that it wouldn't happen.

  But it did.

  The cue planet flew into orbit around the opposite sun. It looped round the far side in an erratic ellipse, then thumped into the sun's resident planet, and sent that curling out into space.

  The resident planet swept across the scanner screen, cannoned into the ice world and hammered it into the orbit of the right-hand sun, before elegantly back-spinning a return path to its original position.

  'She rides!' Lister wiggled his hips and arms in a touch-up shuffle. 'She riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiides!'

  'You jammy bastard.'

  'Played for, and got.' He pumped the air with his fists, chanting rhythmically: 'Yes, yes, yes, yes ...'

  'You jammy, jammy bastard.'

  'How can that be jammy? I pocketed all three planets with one stroke - how can that be a fluke?'

  'You're trying to tell me it was deliberate?'

  'Obviously, I wasn't going to tell you I was going for a trick shot - you'd have had one of your spasms.'

  'Oh, do smeg off,'

  Lister started dancing round the flatbed scanner, waving a seventh can of double-strength lager. 'Pool God.' He baptised himself with beer. 'King of the Cues.' He thumped his chest. 'Prince of the Planet-Potters.'

  Lister was doing some serious damage to his third six-pack, and watching the fast-motion replay on the scanner for the hundred and seventy-first time, while Rimmer slept off the journey back to Red Dwarf in the 'bug's one and only sleep couch, when a planet hit them.

  Which planet hit them, Lister never discovered. In fact, it was the cue planet, which had been knocked out of its new orbit by the back-spinning resident planet. But that didn't really concern Lister. When the craft you're in gets hit by a planet, you rarely have the presence of mind to stop and swap insurance details.

  Technically, the 'bug wasn't actually hit by the planet, it was the planet's slipstream. But that was enough to flick the craft upside-down and send it on a corkscrew death dive towards the ice world.

  SIX

  Only the Starbug's dome-shaped Drive section, scorched black from its encounter with the ice planet's stratosphere, poked up through the slow-shifting sea of snow dunes. Resting against the foot of the glacier, it fizzled and steamed for almost five days in the unrelenting blizzard before there was any sign of life.

  Finally, the small hatchway chinked open and light gushed out into the black arctic night. Lister's face, encircled by parka fur, appeared grimacing in the opening. His gloved fingers folded around the rim of the hatchway, before the blinding wind forced back the door and tried to close it on his head.

  The back of his skull slammed against the metal edging of the door frame, while the steel hatch jammed into his nose and began the slow business of cutting his head in two. He was helpless and close to blacking out. He was beginning to think that after all he'd been through, being 'doored' to death was a stupid way to die, when the wind changed direction for a second time, and the hatchway gave to his frantic pushes.

  He fell out of the 'bug and teetered on a ledge of packed snow. He quickly discovered the only way to remain upright was to lean into the wind. He had to incline his body at an angle of fifty degrees. He felt absurd, but there was no other way of staying on his feet. He managed three steps at this angle before the blizzard inflated his parka hood, and knocked him off the ledge.

  He slithered down the bank and dropped into the trough cut by Starbug's crash-path. Gradually he hauled himself to his feet, and unfastened the small ship-issue snow trowel which was tied to his waist. He looked at it. It measured scarcely four inches across. He looked at what little of the 'bug was visible above the drift. At a rough estimate, he would have to shift about eight hundred tons of snow if the 'bug was ever to move. He tried two trowelfuls before the erratic blizzard swirled into the trough and tossed him like a broken kite into a snow bank fifty feet away.

  Rimmer stooped over the communications console, and barked into the microphone: 'Mayday ... Mayday ... Can you read me? ... Come in, please ...' He looked up at the screen, which continued to rasp its static gibberish.

  The Starbug's inner door hammered open, and a blizzard stumbled in, followed by Lister. The snow swirled around inside the craft, like a swarm of trapped insects looking for an escape. Lister hurled himself against the inner door and fought it closed.

  Rimmer didn't look up from the communicator. 'Still snowing, is it?'

  'It's useless.' Lister flung his gloves against the 'bug's far bulkhead. 'You can hardly stand up, never mind dig it out.'

/>   He sneered at the static on the screen. Five days had gone by, broadcasting on all frequencies, and still Red Dwarf hadn't acknowledged the SOS.

  Rimmer persisted. 'Mayday ... Mayday ...'

  Lister took the rum bottle from his parka's emergency pocket, spun off the top and tilted it to his lips. The alcohol was frozen solid. Holding the neck he smashed the bottle on the corner of the table, and gratefully sucked his rum lollypop. This was the last alcohol on board. He was beginning to panic - if they didn't get rescued soon, he might have to spend a night with Rimmer, sober.

  'Mayday ... Mayday ...' Rimmer turned. 'I wonder why it's "Mayday”?'

  'Eh?'

  'The distress call. Why d'you say "Mayday”? It's just a bank holiday. Why not "Shrove Tuesday” or "Ascension Sunday”?' He turned back to the communicator. 'Ascension Sunday ... Ascension Sunday.' He thought for a while, and then tried: 'The fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost... The fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost...'

  'It's French, you doink. Help me - m'aidez. How much food is there?'

  Rimmer nodded at the navigation console. 'I made a full list on the dictopad.'

  Lister picked up Rimmer's voice-activated electronic diary, and pressed 'play'. The menu was meagre indeed: half a bag of smoky bacon crisps, a tin of mustard powder, a brown lemon, three stale water biscuits, two bottles of vinegar and a tube of Bonjella gum ointment.

  Lister looked up from the pad. 'Gum ointment?'

  'I found it in the first-aid box. It's that minty flavour. It's quite nice.'

  'It's quite nice if you smear it on your mouth ulcer, but you can't sit down and eat it.'

  Rimmer raised an eyebrow. 'You may have to.'

  'Is that it? Nothing else?'

  'Just a pot noodle. Oh - and I found a tin of dog food on the tool shelf.'

  Misery hissed through Lister's gritted teeth. 'Well,' he said finally. 'Pretty obvious what gets eaten last. I can't stand pot noodles.'

  He huddled over the last remnants of fuel glowing in the mining brazier and tried not to think of food. Three days had passed since he'd unzipped the last of the emergency seal-meals; three days without proper food. In fact, he hadn't eaten at all since breakfast the previous morning, and that had only been a raw sprout and a piece of chewing gum he'd found stuck under the Drive seat. It was all right for Rimmer. Rimmer was a hologram - he didn't have to eat, he couldn't feel the cold; he couldn't die.

  He replayed the food list again, desperately searching for something vaguely palatable. Rimmer argued that most of the food groups were represented: vitamins, proteins, nutrients. If Lister paced himself, Rimmer pointed out, if he sat down and worked out a dietary programme and stuck to it, the food could last him for two weeks.

  But, as Lister pointed out, Rimmer held that opinion because he was a dork.

  The argument ended in a long silence, broken only by the fizzling of the screen and the crackling of the brazier.

  It was Lister who spoke first. Predictably, he said: 'God, I'm so hungreee.'

  'Stop thinking about food.'

  'Take my mind off it, then. Talk about something.'

  'Like what?'

  'Anything.'

  'Anything?'

  'Anything apart from food.'

  Rimmer shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Not small talk. He hated it. 'Like what?'

  'I dunno.' Lister shrugged. 'Tell me how you lost your virginity.'

  Rimmer yawned to conceal his panic. 'We-ell. It was so long ago ... I was so young and sexually precocious, I'm not sure I can remember.'

  'Everyone can remember how they lost their virginity.'

  'Well. I don't. Good grief, you can hardly expect me to recall every single sexual liaison I've ever partaken of. What d'you think I am - the Memory Man?' Rimmer was babbling to buy himself thinking time. He'd always been a bit of a fish out of water when it came to women. Frankly, he'd always had a rather low sex drive, which he secretly ascribed to all the school cabbage he was forced to eat as a boy.

  What was a respectable age to claim he'd lost it? Certainly not thirty-one, to a half-concussed flight technician who'd checked herself out of the recovery bay prematurely after a winch had fallen on her head. Who was still wearing the bandages, and was so disoriented she kept on calling him 'Alan'. Certainly not that magical and lovely moment balanced precariously on the rim of the sleeping quarters' sink.

  No, he must lie. But what lie? He had to macho the facts up a bit. What was a good age for a tough, sexually-potent, rough-and-tumble type astro to have had his cherry popped? Mid-twenties? Early twenties?

  'Come on, Rimmer. The truth.'

  Then Rimmer remembered his first fumbled encounter at second base. He was nineteen. A slight tweaking of the facts, a slight blurring of the action, and that should be perfectly respectable.

  'The first time ... the very first time was this girl I met at Cadet College. Sandra. We were both nineteen. We did it in the back of my brother's car.'

  'What was it like?'

  'Oh, fantastic, brilliant.' Rimmer's eyes acquired a milky hue, and his mouth went dry. 'Bentley convertible. V8 turbo. Walnut-burr panelling. Beautiful machine, beautiful. So what about you? How did you lose yours?'

  'Michelle Fisher. The ninth hole of Bootle municipal golf course. Par four, dogleg to the right, in the bunker behind the green.'

  'On a golf course!?'

  Lister nodded.

  'A golf course? How old were you?'

  Lister wistfully prodded the dying coals in the brazier. 'She took all her clothes off and just stood there in front of me, completely naked. I was so excited, I nearly dropped my skateboard.

  'Your skateboard? How old were you?'

  'Twelve.'

  'Twelve!!! Twelve years old!!? When you lost your virginity, you were twelve???'

  'Yeah.'

  'Twelve??' Rimmer stared into the fire. 'Well, you can't have been a full member of the golf club, then.'

  "Course I wasn't.'

  'You did it on a golf course, and you weren't a member?'

  "Course I wasn't,' Lister repeated.

  'So, you didn't pay any green fees or anything?'

  'It was just a place to go.'

  'I used to play golf. I hate people who abuse the facilities. I hope you raked the sand back nicely before you left. That'd be a hell of a lie to get into, wouldn't it? Competition the next day, and your ball lands in Lister's buttock crevice. You'd need more than a niblick to get that one out.'

  'Are you trying to say I've got a big bum?'

  'Big? It's like two badly parked Volkswagens.'

  Twelve? Rimmer couldn't believe it. The only thing he ever lost when he was twelve were his Space Scout shoes with the compass in the heel and the animal tracks on the soles. His best friend, the boy who bullied him least, Porky Roebuck, threw them in the septic tank behind the sports ground. He'd cried for weeks - he'd been wearing them.

  Suddenly, the communications console crackled into life. The screen resolved itself into a clear picture, and Kryten was talking to them.

  But something was wrong with the sound: all they could hear was a dull, resonant bass throb, a slow-motion growl.

  Lister played with the frequency controls, but couldn't improve the sound reception. The transmission never varied. Kryten's expression never appeared to change, and the deep undulating grunt from the speakers never relented.

  They checked the video link, but could find nothing wrong. Same with the speakers: they were functioning perfectly.

  Then something happened to Rimmer.

  It was hardly noticeable at first, but after a couple of hours it was plain that he'd started slowing down. There was a definite time-lag in his responses to Lister. Talking to him was like conducting a transatlantic phone conversation with a bad connection. His light image started to corrupt. Occasionally he would flash and become two-dimensional, or lose all colour.

  Lister didn't mention it at first. It seemed rude, somehow. Rimmer had always been ex
tremely sensitive about his status as a hologram. He hated to be reminded that his image was projected from a minute light bee, which hovered in his centre and from time to time went wrong. Frequently in the past he'd suffered glitches - becoming slightly transparent, or turning a strange shade of blue. On one occasion his legs had become separated from the rest of his body, and spent a morning wandering aimlessly about the ship, leaving his torso shaking its fist in fury.

  As a rule, Lister never remarked on these signal failings, and within hours, they were generally put right.

  But this was different.

  Rimmer's voice had dropped two octaves, and trying to hold a conversation with him now was like talking person-to-person to Paul Robeson on Mars.

  'Rimmer - what's happening?'

  A two-minute pause, then:

  'Donnnnnnnnnnnnnnn't knooooooooooooooooooow.'

  'Something must be wrong with your signal from the ship. The remote hologrammatic relay's not getting through properly.'

  'Cannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn't unnnnnnnnnderstaaaaaaaaand wheeeeeeeeeeen yoooooooooooooooou speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak sooooooooooooo faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast. Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaknorrrrrrrrrrmaaaaaaaaaaally, liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.'

  The conversation that followed was brief in content, but took the best part of half a day to complete. The essence of the dialogue was that the signal from the ship that projected Rimmer's image was slowing down and weakening. When the signal became too faint to transmit, the hologrammatic projection unit would automatically flick from remote to local, and Rimmer would be regenerated, fully functional, back on board Red Dwarf.

  'Well, that's good. You can find out what's keeping them; tell them where I am.'

  Rimmer nodded curtly. It took five minutes.

  The transmission grew weaker. Interference lines split up Rimmer's image for minutes on end.

  'I'll beeeee baaaaack.' he said, over the course of the next half hour. 'Truuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.'