Em knelt beside the basket stroking Smudge’s fur. She almost never cried, but she did now. It felt like the last straw. The children, now this.
Frank knelt beside her, looking down at the large black and white form. He didn’t speak. Couldn’t. The pair of them had raised Smudge from a kitten.
He put an arm round his wife’s shoulders and stroked the cat with his free hand.
There were sounds outside. An army truck trundled past the kitchen. Someone shouted. Someone laughed.
Frank cleared his throat. ‘Remember that old box the microwave came in? She used to love that. It’s still be under the house somewhere. Reckon I should dig it out?’
‘That’s a lovely idea, Frank.’
He gave the old cat one last pat and made to rise, but as he did so Smudge drew a long, deep breath and opened her eyes. Then she stretched and looked up at them, her face bright and alert.
Frank started back in surprise. Smudge saw the movement, gave his hand a kittenish swat and sprang to her feet ready to play.
* * *
‘Millicent!’ Roderick Millais exclaimed. ‘Unhand me. I was just about to call the doctor.’
‘Why Roddy? I haven’t felt this good in years. I feel like a girl again.’
‘But it looked like you passed out there for a minute. You gave me quite a turn.’
‘Come here you silly man. I’ll give you quite a turn alright!’
‘Really Millicent. We’ve got school tomorrow!’
‘Who cares about tomorrow? Come here, you silly manz ...’
* * *
Coral looked at Norman Smith hanging upside down in front of her and began to feel a little sick. She closed her eyes. Zero gravity – floating freely in space, bouncing off walls, sitting on ceilings – was fun, but it was also disturbing. There might really be no up, down or sideways in space, but her brain was wired to think there was.
The crew quarters of Knock Knock Who’s There? were laid out with gravity in mind. Once the engines started, thrust would press them to the floor, but until preparations for departure were complete, she’d have to put up with this.
‘Woo hoo!’
She opened her eyes to see Norman air-swimming in front of her doing an awkward sideways crawl, rotating in a steady corkscrew motion as he went. She closed her eyes again and heard him bump into a bulkhead.
‘Ow!’
She looked up, sorry she’d missed that.
You might be weightless, but your body still had mass. Coral had learned that exiting the evacuation pod, pushing off too quickly and banging her head on the ceiling. Stopping suddenly with the mass of her body behind her had left her with quite a bruise.
Norman must have scraped against something. There was a shallow cut on his arm and he was watching tiny droplets of blood drift into space.
‘You even bleed weird here,’ he said as a small metal sphere the size of a tennis ball whizzed past and sucked it up.
There were at least two dozen cleany-crawlies on this deck alone. They spent most of their time anchored to furniture or equipment where they would move about slowly, cleaning continuously. Now and then one would launch itself into space to suck up a speck of dust or a fleck of spit. Drifting droplets were particularly dangerous in a spaceship. They could end up anywhere, causing short circuits or equipment failures, so the cleany-crawlies were on constant alert.
Watching them made her feel nauseous too and she closed her eyes again.
What if she really was sick in space? The thought of it, the mental image, was horrific. But no doubt it would fascinate Norman.
‘You OK?’ Ludokrus touched her arm.
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t worry. Everyone feel like this at first.’
Coral looked past him to where Norman, floating on his back, had pushed off from the wall and was letting fly with little gobs of spit so that a pair of cleany-crawlies trailed him like well-trained dogs.
‘Almost everyone.’ Ludokrus reached into his back pocket. ‘Here, I bring you something that will help.’
Coral looked down, expecting to find pills. Instead, he held out a pair of fluffy pink slippers.
‘Great colour, no? Alkemy’s favourite. We can make some more if you do not like. But try for now. See how you feel.’
‘Slippers? How are they going to help?’
‘Try. Put them on the feet.’
Coral hooked an arm around a support strap and took one. It was actually a sort of fluffy overshoe that enclosed her foot and tightened round her ankle. She put on the second one.
‘Well, I don’t feel any better. And now I look ridiculous too.’
‘More ridiculous,’ Norman called.
Ludokrus gestured. ‘Come to floor.’
Coral pushed herself downwards. Gently. She’d learned that much.
As her feet touched down, she felt them stick. A wave of relief ran through her. The world seemed to right itself and a sense of her place in it returned.
She still had no weight, but the slippers anchored themselves to the matting that ran throughout the ship. They even allowed her to walk in an almost normal fashion. An exaggerated, high-stepping walk at first, but she soon got used to the actual movements needed – a kind of shift-your-weight-forward-then-shuffle step.
‘Wow! Yeah. That is much better.’ She tried to block out the sight of Norman doing back-flips overhead.
They were standing on the lower deck of the crew quarters, an open, circular space twenty-five metres in diameter and four metres high. Deck C. The docking deck. Three silvery saucer-shaped evacuation pods were evenly spaced around it, their ramps down, their support struts extended, each one set on the broad conveyor belt that would carry them to the long, cylindrical airlocks beyond each craft. There were also five tiny escape pods, like miniature replicas of the larger craft, and an empty space for the sixth; the one the Eltherians had first used to get to Earth. The one the Sentinels’ killer robot destroyed.
The rest of the interior space was given over to a workshop that surrounded the open lattice of the ship’s central spine. Everything gleamed. Fresh white surfaces and polished metal. There wasn’t so much as a greasy smear anywhere. Most of the workshop was still and silent, except for the segment marked C-9 where a variety of machines bustled back and forth, servicing the recently docked evacuation pod.
‘Come.’ Ludokrus gestured and she followed him across the deck, feeling the faint grab-and-tear of her slippers as they made their way towards the spine.
‘How’s Tim?’ she asked.
‘All good. We move his capsule to the medic bay. Have proper machine there. Will heal him faster now.’
‘How long?’
‘Maybe three or four day.’
‘And will he be ... you know ... OK?’
‘Oh yeah, fine. Just like new.’
‘Those burns were pretty bad.’ She shuddered at the recollection. She’d barely recognised the shape as human once Alkemy had smothered the flames. Helping carry him to the ship had been like carrying a large piece of barbecued meat. The smell too ...
‘The mind is OK. The rest need only time to regrow. But deep tissue take more time.’
‘And Albert?’
‘I move his memory bulb to bridge of ship, but he and KK do not get on.’
‘I noticed.’ Coral lowered her voice. ‘What is it with your ship?’
‘No need to speak quiet. It does not listen.’
‘But ... isn’t it all around? Controlling everything?’ She gestured at one of the service-bots tending the evacuation pod.
‘May be a little crazy, but polite also. Does not listen till you speak direct. Try.’
Coral hesitated. It felt weird to be talking to empty space.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Um ... Knock Knock Who’s There?’ she said.
‘Europe.’ The voice came from a speaker directly overhead.
‘Europe who?’
‘No, you’re a poo!’ the ship exclaimed and cackled. ‘How can I help you?’
‘I ... was wondering how my brother is.’
‘Doing fine! I had to recalibrate my medical parameters to match his alien biology – that was tricky – but I discovered my memory banks contained a ton of stuff about human beings.’
‘From Albert, no doubt,’ Ludokrus said.
‘Albert? That dim bulb?’ The ship laughed. ‘Nah, I’m sure it was there all the time.’
‘But he is going to be OK, right?’
‘Albert? He was never OK,’ the ship said.
‘I heard that,’ Albert’s voice came through a speaker to their left.
‘What are you going to do about it, Bulb Boy? Blow a fuse?’
‘Reprogram you, perhaps.’
‘You can’t. It’s not allowed. Anyway, my subroutines are bigger than your subroutines.’
‘I was talking about my brother!’ Coral said.
‘He’s fine. He’s going to be fine. Ms Alkemy’s with him now and they’re playing a virt. But regrowth will take a while and he’ll start getting bored if Bulb Boy keeps us hanging around here much longer.’
‘Bulb Boy is currently running the Temporal Accumulator and charging the time batteries,’ Albert said coolly. ‘Unless you have a subroutine to speed that up, it’ll take as long as it takes.’
‘Oo, touchy.’
‘Thank you ship,’ Ludokrus said and the speaker went quiet.