Laying Eggs

Three minutes and forty-five seconds later, James collapsed exhausted and lay under the glaring spotlights as Brenda continued gyrating on top of him, muttering words which were either completely foreign to his ears or at best long lost strangers. James couldn’t recall Beth in even her most versatile moments behaving anything like this. In fact, upon reflection, he couldn’t recall Beth having ever had anything which came within a million miles of being a versatile moment of this type. For a few seconds, James’s mind flashed back to the sound of Beth humming while incinerating scones in the Old Vicarage. What little ardour that remained in him swiftly subsided, along with all physical manifestations thereof.

Brenda thumped into James again and then stopped, aware of a distinct lack of enthusiasm from below.

She stared down at James with a disparaging look on her face. ‘Is that it?’

‘He doesn’t seem to be overly active,’ observed the Rabophantt, ‘or, for that matter, overly alive. Do you think she has killed him off?’

The remainder of the Humans moved nearer the action to check on James’s continued viability.

James shook his head in the Rabophantt’s direction, wheezed some words of submission and fell back comatose.

Twenty-five pairs of hands stopped taking notes and stared in silence at the spotlit Humans.

‘I fink ’es given up,’ announced Brenda to the assembled company.

James opened his eyes and nodded with as much enthusiasm as he could muster in the circumstances, while mentally hoisting a white flag.

‘I don’t fink ’e wants to do it any more,’ Brenda continued.

‘Oh. Do you really think that’s the message he is trying to convey?’ said the Rabophantt, staring at James with an inquisitive look on its face. ‘The trouble with being the only one of me in existence is that you don’t get the chance to do it with another one – on account of you being the only one to do it with in the first place… if you see what I mean…’ continued the Rabophantt in a wistful way.

James looked imploringly at Brenda’s heaving navel and then across at Thrumm standing in the shadows.

‘I think I’m going to die,’ James gasped in Thrumm’s direction.

Thrumm approached the table, blinked his soft brown eyes and lowered his head until his mouth was close to James’s ear.

‘That would really be a terrific waste of time and effort. Besides, you are supposed to be Super-Human-Fit according to bloody SWOPP,’ hissed Thrumm, mindful of his performance commitment to Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob.

‘I don’t care. I am going to die right here and now,’ repeated James.

‘Perhaps we should have a commercial break,’ offered the Rabophantt helpfully. ‘Ice creams and that sort of thing. You know, like we see when we scan the history tapes of life on Earth when it still existed.’

The Electors stirred restlessly, looked around the room at each other and frowned.

‘Why doesn’t she eat him now, Chancellor Stroob?’ demanded Wyatt Earp.

‘Yes, from the toes up,’ seconded the Cisco Kid to a mumble of general approval from the remainder of Electors.

James gazed glassily at Thrumm, who seemed to be considering seriously whether feet first was appropriate in the circumstances and whether being eaten alive would qualify for force majeure as far as Stroob and the Electors were concerned.

‘No, no gentlemen,’ cut in Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob. ‘That’s what spiders do. These are Human pets.’

Pity, thought Thrumm.

‘You might observe that they are less hairy than spiders and only have four legs each,’ continued Stroob. ‘Spiders have eight.’

‘Well, why doesn’t he walk away and die somewhere, having left his wot not stuck in her?’ demanded the Lone Ranger.

James cringed and quickly glanced down to verify the location of his wot not.

‘Looks to me as though his wot not doesn’t have the strength to stick in a rice pudding, let alone into anything remotely resistant,’ said the Rabophantt, with the authority of something whose wot not was fully ready for active service. ‘Not that the fat one is remotely resistant,’ it added as an afterthought.

Brenda stirred, misinterpreting a movement from the previously defunct cleric as renewed interest and James fell back quickly, lest the whole exhausting process should start again.

‘I think, gentlemen,’ sighed Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, ‘that you are getting a little confused between Human copulation and a bee sting. Mind you, based on that pathetic show I can understand why,’ he continued under his breath, glaring at Thrumm.

‘Well, what does happen now?’ demanded Wyatt Earp, still smarting from the spider putdown. ‘Don’t tell us you’ve called the first plenary session of Electors in five hundred years to witness the Human equivalent of a bee sting.’

Clever little sod, thought Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob, as he struggled to maintain an aura of supreme confidence, firm in the knowledge that the Elector from Spyrodd currently masquerading as Wyatt Earp would relish any opportunity to score points off his old rival Stroob.

‘Have no fear,’ Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob boomed, ‘the best is yet to come.’

‘Well, at least that’s a relief,’ murmured the Rabophantt.

James looked horrified, wondering what could possibly surpass being consumed from the toes up.

‘According to SWOPP,’ continued Legs Eleven Stroob, ‘the blue female one on top will soon squirt out some eggs which will be fertilised by the bee… I mean male Human who will simultaneously cover them with pollen. These fertilised eggs will be specially packaged for you so that you can take them back with you to your own solar systems.’

‘What a disgusting thought,’ mumbled the Rabophantt. ‘Just think where they have come from and the topping that is on them. Ugh.’

‘Provided you keep them moist,’ continued Stroob, relishing the delivery of what he felt would be the clincher. ‘SWOPP assures me that the eggs will hatch after twenty-one days and you will have your own Baby Humans!’

The Electors didn’t seem to share Stroob’s enthusiasm for propagating Humans.

Undaunted, Stroob continued. ‘According to SWOPP, these little Humans will have tails at first, but in a matter of weeks these will be replaced by four legs like those belonging to the fully developed specimens in front of you.’

As James and Brenda glanced down at their legs, Stroob looked round the table at the faces of the twenty-five Electors who still seemed to have even less enthusiasm than the Rabophantt for hatching hopping Humans.

Stroob decided that there was nothing for it but to press on. ‘Being a basic life form,’ he continued, beaming confidently, ‘Humans don’t require much sophisticated upkeep and develop their limited cell structure in a relatively short time. If they haven’t been damaged in transit and provided the environment is right, according to SWOPP, you should also be able to breed Human pets on your home planets within a few weeks of leaving here.’

James and Brenda stared at each other in amazement.

‘As you have seen,’ continued Thrumm, ‘the Human reproductive process is extremely simple and doesn’t take long.’

The Rabophantt and Brenda nodded in unison and James opened his mouth to make a protest, but decided better of it.

‘Now we know why,’ concluded Stroob, ‘as our life form developed over the ages, this method of reproduction was replaced by chemical propagation. The original process was obviously discarded by our forebears as being inefficient, messy and generally not worth the time involved – however brief.’

The serious-looking Electors nodded their heads gravely and wondered why Stroob was making such a big deal out of a failed experiment.

Sod it, thought James. Man of the cloth or no, there was a limit to how much he would stand his manhood being insulted. Looking aggressively around the table at the Electors he rolled Brenda over and restarted proceedings with an agility that startled even himself.

‘Good grief, the pink one seems to have returned from the dead,’ the Rabophantt observed coolly. ‘I hope his wot not is up to it. It would be a shame if he wore it out,’ it continued, seemingly genuinely concerned about the durability of James’s equipment.

‘Oooh, goodie,’ squeaked Brenda. ‘’E ain’t really dead, ’e was jest restin’.’

Chancellor Legs Eleven Stroob looked on nervously as the couple unexpectedly resumed play. Could it be that the process took longer than he had originally assumed? On the one hand he felt relieved that he might have more to offer to the Electors than seemed the case in the first place. On the other, he prayed that the pink one in its renewed enthusiasm wouldn’t squash the take-away eggs when they finally arrived.