Unamused Electors

The door to the Electors’ chamber opened slowly as James and Brenda approached it, pushed on by Thrumm. The other three humans followed Thrumm, keeping closely together for security. James and Brenda found themselves staring at a plenary session of cowboys. Thrumm breathed heavily behind them and thrust a moist nose into their backs.

‘Hurry up and get in,’ he grumbled in a nervous fashion. In fact, Thrumm had become increasingly nervous and edgy ever since the EB ride, to the extent that any mention of explosions or cows would send him into fits of almost uncontrolled passion. The Humans had tried to reason with him but without conspicuous success.

‘Get in,’ repeated Thrumm in a loud hoarse whisper.

‘I’m not going to go in there and parade up and down in front of all those weirdoes,’ squawked Brenda.

‘I don’t think parading is on the agenda. Get in!’ snapped Thrumm, giving her a firm moist nudge in the small of her back.

‘I think she… er… he… is trying to tell you something important,’ said the Rabophantt.

The reluctant couple stumbled through the door and appeared in front of Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob and his massed Electors. James stared around the room in amazement at the collection of characters seated before him. Slowly it dawned on him that the assembled company of Electors in fact consisted of every cowboy character he could think of. All of them had one feature in common, however. They all looked deathly miserable and bored. They also had the demeanour of people who had been used to generations of power.

The room itself was a far cry from Stroob’s saloon bar control centre. This room was meant for business. Serious, hard-nosed unpleasant business carried out by serious, hard-nosed unpleasant cowboys, all of whom looked as though they would quite happily kill Stroob, each other or indeed anyone or thing that got in their way. James shivered and continued looking around the room.

It was functional in the extreme. The room itself was oval and gigantic. At least the size of a football pitch, James estimated. The edges were taken up by luxuriously furnished individual business suites, where James assumed the individual Electors retired to be briefed or relaxed or whatever unsmiling vicious-looking Electors did in their spare time. Each suite was packed full of all sorts of weird-looking electronic gadgetry.

An enormous black oval table stood in the centre of the room. Thirty large high-backed chairs were ranged around the table. Each chair looked like an individual business centre, since it was wired into a variety of monitors and keyboards. Twenty-five of the chairs were occupied by Electors who, between them, controlled the thirty major planets which made up the Mexatode Galaxy. At one end of the table, seated on a slightly raised and even larger chair, sat Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob; he who ran the Mexatode Galaxy as a whole and to whom the twenty-five vicious-looking cowboys reported.

Each of the Electors sat in semi-darkness. A bright light shone down on the centre of the table and an even brighter light illuminated Stroob from behind, giving him a sort of godlike ghostly presence.

As James ticked Roy Rogers, Buffalo Bill and several others off a little-used mental checklist of cowboys, Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob cleared his throat and began to speak.

‘Okay, Electors, this is the moment I have been telling you about. First you get to see my Human pets…’

The Electors stared at Stroob, silent and unmoved.

‘For some reason or another pets don’t seem to evoke the warm positive response one might have hoped for,’ whispered the Rabophantt.

‘Then you get to witness or even participate in an experiment involving some of them,’ Stroob continued confidently.

Still the Electors stared in stony silence.

Stroob cleared his throat again and for the first time began to look a little worried. ‘This experiment, gentlemen, will involve breeding the first Humans in captivity in our galaxy,’ he continued with a note of triumph in his voice.

Brenda shot a horrified look at James who had just ticked Wyatt Earp off his list.

‘Did you ’ear what ’e said?’

‘Er, yes,’ mumbled James, trying to decide how to react to the prospect of breeding with Brenda in public if indeed he had understood Stroob’s announcement correctly.

‘Gentlemen,’ continued Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, feeling that the revelation he had just made should be sufficient to dispel any doubts lingering in the minds of the Electors about the suitability of calling the first plenary session in five hundred years. ‘We have been aware for eons that the basic life form from which we developed reproduced itself through physical contact between the sexes. Of which there were two. Revolting and inefficient though this system sounds to us today, it is a fact that we still preserve some vestige of Human sexuality in our composition, and have nominal sexes called Male and Female.’

‘You can see why he is where he is,’ whispered the Rabophantt, which had taken up a position crouched under the table.

Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob paused and peered in a bad-tempered manner at Thrumm, who felt himself prickling.

‘Anyway, the point is,’ continued Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, dragging his cold eyes away from Thrumm, ‘the point is, that although we have vague records of the reproductive process of our distant forbears, in reality we have no real knowledge of what to do or how to do it. Hence the experiment with the Human pets that I have organised for you today.’

‘’E’s talkin’ abaht ’aving it off, ain’t ’e?’ demanded Brenda.

‘Er, yes, I do believe he is,’ said James, feeling more and more that something, at the same time wonderful yet awful, was about to happen.

‘I fink ’e finks you ’n me’re gonna ’ave it off,’ added Brenda, blurting out in mangled form the same thoughts that were circulating in Queen’s English in James’s head.

‘I do believe he does, my dear,’ said James, trying to respond in a way that showed a combination of horror and dignity, while at the same time excluded anticipation.

‘’N what’s more, I fink some of ’em are gonna watch. Dirty buggers.’

Julian giggled nervously and, along with Kevin and Helga, tried to shrink into the shadows.

‘To be precise, I think all of them are going to watch,’ observed James. ‘The description of them, however, is probably quite accurate. But if I were you I wouldn’t voice it too loudly. They don’t seem an overly friendly bunch.’

‘You see before you the Humans selected by our beloved SWOPP and transported from Earth to our Universe,’ continued Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob. ‘The two in front have been selected to perform in the Experiment.’

The Electors stared unblinkingly at the Humans and recoiled slightly.

‘I think you should try and make yourselves a bit more attractive,’ rumbled the Rabophantt from under the couch.

‘Please do not be concerned about the prospect of potential Earthly infection,’ continued Stroob. ‘They were thoroughly sanitised when they were processed through the Detoxification Chamber.’

Twenty-five Electors looked on unimpressed.

‘And to make your lives easy,’ announced Thrumm proudly, ‘the ever-efficient SWOPP has also had them colour coded to aid sexual differentiation – blue for the female and pink for the male. You can, in any event, observe the udders on the upper body of the female and the small reproductive organ dangling limply from the middle of the male, both of which features should help you differentiate between the sexes.’

James cast his eyes downwards and shuddered both at the all too accurate description and the awful colour of the article under discussion.

‘So far, the pets have been under the personal supervision of Potential Elector Thrumm seated over there,’ continued Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, waving a hand dismissively in Thrumm’s general direction.

‘There may be those among us who don’t immediately recognise Potential Elector Thrumm since, for reasons best known to only himself and SWOPP – and which frankly escape me – he has chosen for the purpose of this exercise to manifest himself as a milk-producing animal said to have been common on Earth. This animal was known as “A Cow” and falls into the female category of Earthly living creatures.’

‘You’re right, Thrumm,’ whispered the Rabophantt, ‘I don’t think he likes your disguise too much.’

Thrumm moaned softly, recalling the fate of the other recently departed milk-producing animal.

‘Anyway,’ continued Stroob, still staring aggressively at Thrumm. ‘Although Thrumm – alias “A Cow” – has not been colour coded blue, he does have the udders typically found on females. All this is, to my mind, creating unnecessary confusion. Perhaps, once this experiment is over, Thrumm may have the required background information to decide which side of the sexual fence to come down on.’

‘Bit of an explosive issue, I should say,’ mumbled the Rabophantt, loudly enough for Thrumm to hear.

Thrumm, bursting with a mixture of acute aggression and vindictiveness directed towards bloody SWOPP, Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob and the Rabophantt, fought to preserve what little dignity he had left and to avoid telling Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob to stuff his stupid project – thereby mortally wounding any pretensions Thrumm had to becoming an Elector. And probably significantly shortening the already dwindling life expectancy of the Cow in question.

For what seemed like an age, the room was silent as the inhabitants stared with mild interest at Thrumm’s pendulous udder.

‘Well, Thrumm,’ growled Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, ‘for Heaven’s sake start the experiment and show us that all this confusion has a happy ending. I might remind you that for you the outcome is particularly important.’

The sidelights dimmed further, leaving only the spotlights pinpointing the centre of the Electoral Table.

‘Okay, get on with it,’ groaned Thrumm, jabbing James in the buttocks with a wet nose.

‘You must be joking,’ gasped James, ‘if you think I can do it just like that.’

‘I don’t think anyone cares how you do it as long as you do do it,’ growled Thrumm, looking menacing. ‘Least of all me. And if I were you I would hurry up before things get nasty. These guys aren’t used to waiting. You could well find yourselves mere shadows of your former selves in no time at all.’

‘Not that your former selves are much to write home about anyway,’ added the Rabophantt.

Brenda stared at the collection of mean-looking, impatient cowboys surrounding the table and decided for once to take Thrumm’s threats at face value.

‘Come on, Reverend, if we are going to do it, let’s do it,’ she said, grabbing James where he hadn’t been grabbed for ages and rolling him backwards on to the Boardroom table.

For three minutes and forty-five seconds there followed what seemed for James like a mixture of all-in wrestling, Thai kick-boxing and long-distance running.

As the lights glared down on the pink and blue entwined bodies, twenty-five cowboys typed notes and observations on to keyboard consoles and wondered whether in some ways the customs and traditions of the good old days might not have been more fun than the current practice of ectomorphic dichotomy.