Better Than Life

  THREE

  Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat disembarked from the shuttlebus mid-afternoon the previous Tuesday and staggered surreally up the metal ramp to the Drive room.

  'Look, stay calm,' said Rimmer, manically pacing up and down in front of the vast screen. 'It'll take Holly ten seconds to work out what to do, and then we'll be out of here.'

  'Does anybody want toast?' came a small tinny voice.

  They turned, and saw the Toaster perched on top of a stack of terminals.

  'No!' they screamed in unison.

  'How about a crumpet?'

  Kryten tapped in Holly's activation sequence, and handed voice command over to Rimmer.

  'On,' said Rimmer. 'Holly - we're being sucked into a Black Hole - how do we get out?'

  The giant screen flitted and flickered, before Holly's image assembled in a mad, cubist parody of itself. His chin was where his forehead should be, his mouth was replaced by an ear and his nose pointed skywards on top of his balding pate.

  'Jlkjhfsyuhjdk,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Mcuj nklj flbnnbcbcy.'

  'There's something wrong,' Rimmer yelled. 'Turn him off! We're wasting his run-time.'

  Kryten slammed the flat of his palm on the keypad, and Holly fizzled away. 'What's wrong with him?'

  Rimmer and the Cat shared shrugs.

  'It's the dilation effect. His terminals are spread all over the ship, they're all operating in different time zones. While it's midnight Monday for his central processing unit, it's a week on Thursday for his Random Access Memory. Anybody fancy a muffin?'

  'Will you shut up?' said Rimmer. 'What the smeg are we going to do?'

  'What happens,' the Cat tilted his head to one side, 'if we get sucked into this Black Hole? Is that a bad thing?'

  'A Black Hole is an unstable star that's collapsed into itself. Its gravitational pull is so enormous that nothing can escape - light, time, nothing. How about a potato cake?'

  'Look, will you kindly shut your grill?' Rimmer spat. 'I'm trying to think.'

  'Can't we just fly through it,' the Cat ventured, 'and out the other side?'

  'Nice idea,' the Toaster scoffed. 'And perhaps we can stop off at the souvenir shop in the middle and buy various Black Hole memorabilia.'

  'Black Holes have souvenir shops in the middle?' The Cat grinned hopefully.

  'He's taking the smeg,' snapped Rimmer. 'Will you stop talking to that cheap piece of junk? We've got to work out how to get out of here.'

  'Cheap!?' the Toaster snorted, 'I'm $£19.99, plus tax!'

  There's no way out, is there?' said Kryten. 'We're going to duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh ...' he smacked his head into a monitor housing and cleared the seizure loop,'... die.'

  'Not necessarily,' said the Toaster, with all the smugness he could muster.

  'If you don't shut up,' Rimmer threatened, 'I'm going to unplug you.'

  'You don't want to know how to get out of this mess, then?'

  Rimmer spun on his heels. 'Oh, and you know, do you?'

  The Toaster's browning knob spun from side to side. 'Maybe,' he said enigmatically. 'Who's for a toasted muffin?'

  'How the smegging smeg would a Toaster know how to get out of a Black Hole?'

  'Technically, we're not in a Black Hole. Not yet. We haven't passed the event horizon.'

  'What's an event horizon?' asked the Cat.

  'Let's start at the beginning.' The Toaster adjusted his bread width to maximum, and back again. 'A Black Hole isn't an object, it's a region - a rip in the fabric of space/time. It starts off as a massive sun. When the sun dies, the enormous gravitational pull at its centre drags all the matter in the star back into itself. A medium-sized sun becomes a neutron star - a star whose molecules are packed as tightly as possible. However, if the weight of the sun is great enough, it overrides the 'exclusion principle' which states that, in normal circumstances, two electrons can't occupy the same energy space, and so the star continues collapsing. Eventually the gravitational drag at the centre becomes so colossal, the escape velocity - the speed you have to achieve to get out - reaches 186,282 miles per second. Which is lightspeed. And since lightspeed is the speed limit for the universe, nothing can escape - not even light. It becomes a sort of giant galactic vacuum cleaner, sucking in everything in its range - even Time. That's why Time at the front of the ship is running more slowly than Time at the back. The closer you get to it, the more you feel the effects of its pull, and the event horizon is the point of no return. So.' He paused. 'Who's for a hot cross bun?'

  Kryten shook his head. 'Did anyone follow that?'

  'I was with it,' said the Cat, 'to the point where he said: "Let's start at the beginning.” And I didn't pick it up again until he got to the hot cross bun part.'

  Rimmer strode across to the Toaster. 'Explain this, miladdo: how does a novelty kitchen appliance suddenly get to know so much about Black Holes?'

  'I have a voracious appetite for reading,' said the Toaster.

  'Holly told you this, didn't he? After he got his IQ back, but before he turned himself off.'

  The Toaster's grill glowed red. 'Maybe.'

  'Did he happen to mention how to get out of one?'

  'That depends,' said the Toaster.

  'Depends on what?'

  'Depends on whether or not anyone wants any toast.'

  ***

  Twenty minutes later they sat in a horseshoe, munching their way through the towering piles of assorted toasted delights. Kryten, who had to eat Rimmer's share, was beginning to feel he needed to change his stomach bag, and the Cat was becoming quietly hysterical about what effect consuming thirty-four pieces of toast was going to have on his waistline.

  'For godsakes, are you insane?' Rimmer snapped. 'How much toast are you expecting them to eat?'

  'Here's how to get out of a Black Hole. Providing you accelerate into it, and achieve sufficient speed before you pass the event horizon, the additional acceleration provided by the gravitational pull means you can break the light barrier, loop round the singularity at the Black Hole's centre and be travelling fast enough to swoop out again.'

  'I thought,' said Kryten through a mouthful of toast, 'that as soon as we pass the event horizon, we get crushed.'

  'Not if we're travelling faster-than-light. We inherit a whole new set of physical laws.'

  'So when we get out,' Rimmer frowned, 'we're travelling faster-than-light, yes?'

  The Toaster inclined its bread-tray in a nod.

  'How do we stop? Lister is stuck on that planet, starving to death. If we finally draw to a halt a hundred and thirty galaxies south-south-west, that's not going to be tremendously helpful. Assuming Holly was right about all this and we survive, we've got to rescue him - how do we stop?'

  'Well now,' the Toaster twirled his browning knob from side to side. 'Wouldn't you like to know?'

  'Yes we would,' said the Cat politely.

  'Well, for your part the answer's simple.'

  'What?'

  'Keep eating the toast.'

  The Cat groaned and reached for his thirty-fifth slice.

  FOUR

  Lister tried to move his arm again. This time it moved. Not much, but a little. He tried it again. This time it moved a little more. His suit was melting. And the more it melted, the lighter it got. This was good, and this was bad.

  It was good, because at least, at some point soon, he'd be mobile again, and able to make a break for the crest of the hill. It was bad because he had no idea whether or not he could get to the top of the hill before the suit melted completely.

  He angled up his elbows so he slid from between the forks and crunched on to the broken glass of the incline.

  He found he could lift his feet an inch or so off the ground, and he was able to make small, faltering steps forward. He began the slowest race of his life.

  His thighs throbbed. His shoulders ached. With each step the suit got lighter and his pace got quicker. Lister lost all sense of his body.
He was just a pair of lungs, scorched and straining. He struck for the top of the hill.

  The suit was light, now. Frighteningly light. He felt almost naked. Then he realized, even if he got to the top, even if he scrambled free of the rain, the suit would still be melting - he still had to get it off.

  And then it was over. He lunged over the brow and started clattering down the other side. Even as he fell he tugged at the inner straps of his suit, and hurled the smoking plates away. His fall was broken by a bank of bottles. There was no triumph. There was no joy, no celebration as he flung the final piece down the mountain, just a horrible aching weariness, and an irresistible desire to sleep. He stumbled along the glass mountain ridge and found a cave - hardly a cave, more a bolt-hole, no more than six feet deep and four feet high.

  He crawled inside, curled up baby tight, and slept.

  Less than twenty minutes later Lister woke up. The sound that roused him was the thick, wet sound of rainfall. He couldn't bear it. The acid storm must have moved across to this side of the valley.

  He uncurled himself from his foetal position and shimmied on his bare elbows to the lip of the bolthole.

  He was wrong - it wasn't acid rain.

  But it wasn't normal rain, either.

  It was black.

  Torrents of thick black syrup drooled over the mountainside. Lister reached out a quivering hand and caught a glob of the viscous goo in his palm. He sniffed it. He tasted it. He spat it out.

  Oil.

  It was raining oil.

  Still, Lister thought, oil rain was a damn sight better than acid rain. At least it wouldn't kill him. He felt quite cheered. Weatherwise, things were brightening up. Hell, if the trend continued, by evening it would probably be doing something as bland and normal as raining tomato soup, or snowing beach balls.

  He crawled back into the shelter of his bolthole and tried to get some sleep. But he couldn't. Not even Lister could sleep through an earthquake. Especially when it was happening directly underneath him.

  The ground sneered open, and a foot-wide chasm snaked towards him as he scrambled backwards out of the bolthole. He shielded his eyes from the lashing oil, and watched as zigzag splits powered across the splintering landscape. Millions of bottles crashed and tumbled into the ground's rumbling gullet.

  Lister ran. He had no idea where he was running or whether there was any point. He leapt over sudden chasms, dodged past small avalanches of bottles, and scrambled and scraped his way to the top of the next peak.

  The black sky hurled javelins of oil at his shivering, wretched body as he crumbled to his knees, and skidded and slithered into the next basin. The oil weighted his locks, and the wind whipped them across his face as oily fingers jabbed down his throat, forcing him to gag for air. Blind and choking, he staggered across the basin. He wiped the worst of the oil from his eyes with what remained of his T-shirt, and blinked up against the hammering rain. He wasn't alone. Looming on the horizon were the colossal silhouettes of five faces. Or, rather, five half-faces, which thrust out of the sea of garbage as if they were seeking one last breath before they were claimed by the refuse.

  Lister knew them. He recognized them all. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and perhaps the greatest American President of all time, Elaine Salinger.

  Lister hauled his aching body across the basin and took shelter under George Washington's nose. He knew where he was, now. Mount Rushmore. South Dakota.

  This hell-hole of a planet, this uninhabitable pit of filth, was Earth.

  Lister laughed. He'd made it. He was back home. He laughed too long and too hard, a dangerous laugh that danced with insanity. Everything that had kept him going, the goal that had given his life meaning, was suddenly, farcically, achieved.

  This was Earth. He was home.

  But what had happened? What had been done to the place?

  The answer was fairly obvious even to a half-insane, sick, oil-sodden astro on the brink of starvation.

  Earth had been turned into a garbage dump.

  He had no idea what had torn it from its orbit and sent it hurtling to the outer reaches of the universe, but the fact that this was Earth, and it had been converted into a planet-sized refuse tip was undeniable.

  But did that explain why the weather was haywire? Only partly. The more Lister thought about it, the more things seemed to click into place. Right from the moment he'd first arrived, from the moment he'd first emerged from Starbug and the arctic winds had whipped and toyed with him, whimsically changing direction every few seconds, tossing him up in the air and dashing his body into snow banks; right from that moment, the weather had been trying to kill him. There was the acid rain, the sizzling downpour which only fell in the basin where his ship had crashed. Then, after his miraculous escape to the bolthole, the quake had forced him out into the open, into the suffocating, cloying treacle of the oil storm.

  Had exhaustion made him paranoid? Were his thoughts being twisted by hunger and fatigue?

  Or was he right?

  Was the Earth waging a war against him? Against him, personally?

  But why?

  If the Earth did have some kind of inexplicable, innate intelligence, why would it want to kill him? What had he ever done to the Earth? Why should it despise him?

  Then he knew.

  He'd done everything to Earth. He'd crucified it. He was a member of the human race, part of the species that had spread like bacteria over the planet; killing its rich, teeming life; consuming its wealth; finally rendering it fit only for use as a dumping ground for all humanity's garbage.

  That's what he was: a single cell of bacteria. A plague germ. And the planet's auto-immune system was rejecting him.

  No. The idea was preposterous. It was insane. Hunger and weariness were fuelling his paranoia. The Earth didn't have an intelligence. It didn't 'live'. It was a ball of stone.

  He stood in the shelter of George Washington's left nostril and started to compose a list of humankind's many magnificent achievements. For some inexplicable reason, the first thing that popped into his addled head was the musical toilet-roll dispenser, before a sheet of lightning ignited the rain, sending a curtain of flame sweeping across the face of the mountain, scorching black all five presidents, and sending Lister hurtling back into the far recess of Washington's nasal passage.

  A second sheet ignited, blasting Lister out of the nose, sending him scurrying across the mounds of garbage, which were alive with rivers of fire.

  'Do it, then,' Lister screamed. 'Come on - kill me.' His fingers dug into the putrefying sludge and flung it skywards. 'Kill me! Come on, what are you waiting for?'

  Surrounded by lakes of fire and exploding geysers of oil, Lister screamed and ranted at the Earth.

  He ducked his head under his arm as two bursts of flaming rain strafed either side of the mound he was standing on.

  Lister collapsed to his knees on the smouldering garbage. 'I could do something,' he sobbed. 'I could help. I could ... If you let me live, I could start to make it right again. I could ...' He blacked out.

  As consciousness slowly percolated back into his body, he was aware of the rain. He groaned and raised his head. It was rain rain. Real rain. H20. The stuff of life.

  He rolled on his back and opened his mouth. All around him, tails of smoke wriggled skyward from the few puddles of fire that still remained.

  He drank in the rain. He let it cascade over him, cleansing his wounds, refreshing him, uplifting him. He'd rolled on to his belly to pick himself up, when he saw it.

  Inches from where his right hand had fallen, out of the rubble, out of the garbage, out of the stinking mire, poked a single branch - a small, stunted tree with a crop of green berries.

  Lister plucked off the fruit and started to eat. They were olives. He wept.

  He cupped his hands and collected some rainwater which he sprinkled, tenderly, over the tree. It seemed a simple enough equation: if he looked after the olive tree
, the olive tree would look after him.

  He heard a movement in the rubble behind him. He turned. He wasn't the only living creature on the planet. There was at least one other. The creature joined him by the olive tree. It was one of the oldest of Earth's inhabitants. It had been there long before man, and would probably be there long after. It was a cockroach.

  But a big cockroach.

  A very big cockroach.

  This cockroach could have played Nose Tackle for the London Jets in their all-time best season.

  It was a mother of a cockroach.

  This cockroach was eight feet long.

  Lister moved slowly. Very slowly. He rocked back on his rump, drew his knees up to his chest, and with a sudden, swift movement brought both his boots down on the roach's side. There was a sickening thud, and the cockroach lay on its back, rocking helplessly, its mandibles opening and closing in shock.

  Lister ferreted among the rubble for something lethal, and found a long thin shard of glass. He stood over the writhing beast, his hands raised over his head. The glass flashed down towards the soft underbelly.

  Then he stopped.

  He flung the glass blade away, then stooped and lifted the cockroach back on to its feet.

  The cockroach made a series of curious clicking noises, but made no attempt to move away.

  'Here,' Lister plucked an olive from the branch and held it out for the cockroach to take. 'I'm a reformed species. We're going straight. No more killing. Here. Take it.'

  The giant insect ignored the olive. Instead, it nuzzled among the rubble and started to eat the garbage.

  Lister sat there chewing his olives, watching the mammoth roach consume the refuse. It seemed like a hell of a good deal to him.

  The meal over, Lister decided to head back to Starbug, to rake through the ruins and see if there was anything left he might salvage. As he walked across the rubble he realized the cockroach was following. He turned and made some shooing movements with his arms. The cockroach clicked and whistled and carried on following him. Lister broke into a trot. So did the cockroach.