Backwards Read online

  He was saved from expounding them by Lister's breathless arrival in the cave.

  Rimmer stiffened visibly. His relationship with the increasingly immature Lister had soured to the point where they no longer conversed, merely exchanged insults. 'Ah, Listy.' He beamed and clasped his hands. 'So glad you could tear yourself away from your imaginary friends and join us.'

  Leering insolently, Lister raised the middle finger of his right hand and jabbed it in the air.

  Rimmer's beam broadened. 'Marvellous. What a riposte. Such a shame we can't hang around until Oscar Wilde comes to life and the two of you could match wits.'

  'Sir,' Kryten interposed himself between them. 'Have you seen the Cat around? We really should be thinking of preparing for take-off.'

  Lister shrugged and unslung the home-made bow from his shoulder. 'He'll turn up. I mean, what's the big deal? Why is it always me who's supposed to know where he is? You're always getting at me. I'm not responsible for the Cat. Just leave me alone, OK?'

  Kryten clucked nervously and waddled to the cave's entrance. The boys' accelerated aptitude for derring-do bothered him greatly. Just recently the two mountain men had started prowling the woods with shotguns, as if they suspected some strangers' presence, and none of the mechanoid's entreaties could prevent the boys from pursuing their nocturnal adventures. Of course, it was logically impossible for any serious harm to befall the Cat or Lister, but that didn't prevent Kryten from worrying.

  The treetops were smouldering profusely now. As Kryten scanned the vista, a face popped upside-down into the top of his vision.

  The Cat grinned. 'Hey bud, what's happening?' He flipped down from the lip of the entrance, landing straight in front of Kryten. 'Do I look different to you in any way?' His grin widened exposing all of his unfeasibly white teeth, and he strutted towards the Bug. 'Do I look, like, even cooler than I did before, if that's possible? Do I look like a total sex god of the mountains, or what?'

  Rimmer's features crinkled. 'What is he drivelling about?'

  The Cat swaggered up to Lister. 'Do you see a certain sparkle in my eyes that was not there before? A sparkle that says: "This is a mature individual who knows what it's like to lie with a woman. "'

  Lister's eyes widened. 'You're kidding. You did it?'

  'Buddy, did I do it. I did it so good, they're gonna have to redefine the rules of sexual engagement!'

  Lister and the Cat whooped and whistled and staged a mock fist-fight of triumphant celebration.

  'Wait a minute.' Rimmer stepped up. 'Are you telling me the Cat has had sex?'

  The two boys stopped their celebration and looked at him. 'Buddy, I didn't just have sex. I had seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeex. Lament ye Earth men, your women will no longer be satisfied with mere humans.' Then the boys whooped again and began an elaborate high-fives ritual.

  Rimmer closed his eyes. 'If I can just intrude on the undoubtedly warranted and extremely right-on and reconstructed jubilation, gentlemen. You had sexual intercourse with a human, woman person? A human, woman person who wasn't made of rubber? Who breathed and was alive?'

  The Cat nodded eagerly.

  'Even though we've all agreed to keep our presence here an inviolable secret? A secret we have kept assiduously for the best part of a decade?'

  The Cat nodded again.

  'Don't you think that was perhaps a teeny, tiny taddette irresponsible?'

  The Cat nodded a third time. Then he looked at Lister, who burst out laughing, and the celebrations began all over again.

  Rimmer sighed, shook his head, and headed towards the embarkation ramp. The Cat had made love to a human woman. Backwards. No doubt, unprotected. Who knew what demon spawn the union might produce? What terrors might lurk in this poor Earth's spent future? He stopped at Starbug's entrance and looked down at the air-punching duo chanting 'Yes, yes, yes' ad nauseam. They were becoming increasingly uncontrollable. The human race had better pray this lift-off was successful. The planet wasn't safe with those two reckless lunatics on it.

  Kryten watched Rimmer disappear up the ramp, then twisted his head to inspect the vessel's underside. The metal panels were smoking promisingly, but the large rent towards the rear was glowing almost neon red. As he watched, a thin drool of molten metal leapt up from the cave floor and glooped itself on to the rim of the hole.

  He turned to the boys, trying to keep the alarm out of his voice. 'Now, sirs, it really is time we should be...'

  'All right!' Lister whirled on him, suddenly aggressive. 'All right! We're coming! Ker-eyst! Is it illegal to have fun around here? Is it against the law or something?' He fixed Kryten with a look of petulant challenge, and then he whirled again and stomped up the ramp, pursued at a confident ambling pace by the swaggering Cat.

  Kryten stepped up to follow them, and then ducked to catch a last glimpse of the red-hot wound in Starbug's belly. There was no doubt in his mind now, none at all, that such a hole could only have been made by one thing.

  A muh...

  A muh... muh...

  A muh... muh... muh...

  A seriously high-powered heat-seeking missile.

  FIVE

  Rimmer watched impotently from his station at the back of the cockpit as Lister and the Cat giggled and joked their way through the pre-take-off safety checks. He'd begged and pleaded with Kryten to take control, at least until they were in orbit, but the mechanoid had refused. His argument was that he'd be most useful at the computer stations, analysing data and making minor course adjustments, but that was only half of the truth. The reality was, he wasn't prepared to take responsibility for the lives of his crewmates.

  'Landing gear down.'

  'Check!'

  'NaviComp on line.'

  'Check!'

  'Retros at maximum elevation.'

  'Sex!'

  Lister and the Cat burst once more into uncontrollable laughter.

  Rimmer stood, almost purple with rage. 'Will you two reckless nincompoops for God's sake stop smegging about!? Our lives are on the line here!'

  Once again, Lister's demeanour shifted instantly from jubilation to petulance. 'All right then.' He stood and walked down the narrow aisle to Rimmer's station. 'You do it.'

  'What?'

  'You're so clever, you get the ship off the ground.'

  Rimmer looked up as if he hoped some divine arbiter of sanity might suddenly descend through the roof, but none appeared.

  'You can't, can you? Because you're dead!' Lister made his way back to the co-pilot's seat. 'Well just because you're dead, doesn't mean you can stop the living having fun.' He thumped down into the seat.

  'He's jealous,' the Cat said.

  'Yeah.' Lister grinned. 'He's jealous because you're only fifteen, and you've had more sex than him.'

  They fixed Rimmer with accusatory stares. He stared right back at them. There was an iota of truth in Lister's insult. Rimmer, in his lifetime, had enjoyed woefully little sexual experience, and tales of others' success in that arena did cause a certain amount of resentment. When he felt he'd stared enough to restore his superior adult status, he said, quietly, 'The truth is, gentlemen, Monsieur Chat did not enjoy a normal, regular sexual experience, but rather a reverse, sort of backwards one. What actually happened to Monsieur Chat, is that Monsieur Chat actually became a virgin.'

  The boys' teasing expressions changed to perplexion. Rimmer sat back, satisfied, and pretended to scan his screens for data.

  Kryten tapped his console impatiently. 'Sirs, if we could continue the lift-off procedure.'

  The Cat and Lister brattishly mumbled their way through the rest of the checks. Kryten scanned the bewildering data on the ship's status, but the physics of their take-off defied logical prediction. Without knowledge of their final velocity, it was impossible to ascertain the correct level of thrust required to get them airborne. Finally, he gave up trying, and simply nodded to Rimmer, who gave the command 'Engage.'

  The front retros built up rapidly to a high-pitched whine, sucking in
great clouds of smoke from the cave outside. The craft shuddered, and with an ear-bursting scream of metal on rock, scraped across the cave floor and shot out of the entrance with digestion-defying acceleration.

  Everyone began shouting, but their yells were inaudible above the retros' thunder. The Cat wrestled hopelessly with the collective stick as they streaked backwards across the forest top, buffeting wildly, sucking tree tips and dousing nascent fires in their wake. There was a loud thunk below and Kryten checked his status readouts. 'Landing jet three attached!' he yelled, his voice unit on maximum decibelage. Starbug lurched dramatically to port as another mighty thunk signalled the addition of a second landing jet.

  The Cat strained at the collective and gained some control as the vessel howled towards the crest of the mountain, Kryten's radar registered some large objects speeding up the mountainside towards them. At first he thought they might be missiles, and by the time he'd stopped panicking and worked out they were in fact huge boulders from the rocky peak they were about to clip, he barely had time to yell 'Brace!' before the impact sent the craft lurching skywards.

  Most of the shielding had been re-attached to the Bug's belly by now, and the noise in the cockpit had diminished considerably. Lister punched the air. 'We made it!'

  'Not quite, sir.' Kryten nodded at his status screen. 'We are still shy one landing jet. Our manoeuvrability is still below sixty per cent.'

  The Cat's adolescent shoulders were knotted with the sinews of his burgeoning muscles as he struggled for control. 'Tell me about it, bud,' he hissed through gritted teeth.

  Suddenly, the alert siren began to sound, and despite the Cat's straining, the ship began to twist into a spiral of rapid ascent. Sprinkler systems all over the ship burst into life, spawning countless fires.

  Rimmer's NaviComp console fizzed and died. 'What the smeg is happening?'

  Kryten coughed, unnecessarily. 'Sirs, I'm afraid... Well, in fact, I was meaning to mention this earlier, but I didn't quite... the right occasion never seemed to present itself and I was really hoping it wasn't going to be what I was afraid it was going to be, but now it looks as if it probably will be what I feared it was...'

  'What?!' Rimmer screamed. 'What are you saying? Spit it out!'

  Kryten drummed his fingers on the console. 'Well, the fact of the matter is, in all probability, I think we're forced to conclude...'

  'Say it!' Rimmer sprayed hologrammatic spittle. 'What the smeg is happening, you dough-brained streak of venereal pus!'

  'We're about to get hit by a heat-seeking missile.'

  Lister glanced down at his display. 'Not possible. We're fully radar cloaked.'

  'Yes, sir, that has been puzzling me. I believe what's about to happen is that we trigger an anti-missile array which has only recently been erected by the North Americans, which they have rather quaintly named "Star Wars".'

  Rimmer stared at his dead screens in horror. 'How? How do we trip it?'

  'It's probably an accident. The system is fairly experimental at this time. I guess we encounter one of its teething problems.'

  'One of its teething problems!? One of its teething problems is that it blasts us out of the sky and sends us into a screaming, spinning death dive?'

  'That's my guess, sir, yes.'

  'And you didn't get around to mentioning this before we took off?' The veins in Rimmer's neck were bulging dangerously. 'It slipped your bloody mind?!.'

  Kryten looked down guiltily. 'I didn't want to cause any unnecessary alarm.'

  And before Rimmer could launch into his number-one list of foul expletives and vile epithets, a deafening explosion rocked the ship, sealing the hull, attaching the final landing jet and extinguishing all the fires.

  Rimmer's screens blinked back into life, and he tracked the missile as it screeched away towards its source.

  The alert lights winked out as the sirens ceased wailing. Starbug sped smoothly out of Earth orbit and began accelerating towards the outer planets.

  'There,' Kryten smiled. 'No harm done.' He tapped away at his keyboard. 'Course entered. With good luck and a following wormhole, we should be back in our own universe in a little under three weeks.' He stood, looked around the cockpit, oblivious to the glares directed at him, and added, 'Anyone for tea?' and then waddled off to the galley to rustle up a couple of dirty cups for them to spit into.

  Rimmer wrapped his fingers around his forehead and squeezed. 'Is it me, or is that plastic peckerhead suffering from droid rot?'

  Lister swivelled round in the co-pilot seat and let out a sigh that had been almost fifty years in the making.

  Home. At last, he was headed home.

  Well, not actually 'home' home. He'd be heaven knows how many millions of light years from his own solar system and the nearest member of his own species, if the human race still existed. But at least he'd be in the right universe, which would make a nice change. At least time would be moving in a familiar and friendly direction. For the first time in half a century, he'd be able to make choices. He could choose what to eat: he wouldn't have to wait for the food to leap up his gullet to find out what he'd had for breakfast. He could choose first and then eat it.

  Lister had never been one to waste time bemoaning his fate, or raging about what destiny flung at him, but all the time he'd spent on the reverse Earth, he'd felt he'd been nothing more than an actor in someone else's script, with all his decisions made for him beforehand. Well, now he was going to be in charge of his own life again.

  And that thought should have made him feel better than it did.

  He should have been elated. Ecstatic. Instead, he merely felt numb and hollow.

  Still, he put that down to his" inverse trip through puberty, which was playing merry havoc with his emotions. He'd feel better, he thought, as soon as he set foot again on Red Dwarf. The ugly old monster of a ship was the nearest thing he'd had to a home since he left Earth almost two lifetimes ago. He smiled as he pictured the rusty red ogre in his mind's eye, waiting to meet them, like a giant guardian of normalcy as they emerged into their own universe. Things would be different once he was back on board. He'd start to feel normal again, he thought.

  Lister couldn't know it, but he was wrong. He was so wrong, he could have represented his species at inter-galactic level if wrongosity ever became an Olympic sport. He was wrong because he'd made 3 basic error in his assumptions.

  He'd assumed Red Dwarf would still be there when they emerged into their own universe.

  MIDLOGUE

  The Difference — 1

  Arnold J. Rimmer, age seven and almost five-sevenths, is crouched at the starting line for Junior B two-hundred-yards dash.

  His sports kit, handed down from his brother, Howard, is two sizes too large. A cruel breeze is flapping at his shorts, whipping his thin thighs blue. His feet are loose inside the spiked running shoes.

  His eyes are clenched against the wind, but he forces them open to look at the spectators lining the track. At first, he can't see her. His heart jumps with excitement. Perhaps she's gone. Perhaps she's nipped into the refreshment tent, to grab a cup of tea before the senior school events start up, and she can watch the other boys, Frank and John and Howard, actually winning something.

  But his joy is short-lived.

  He spots her, two hundred yards along the track. Arms folded. Wearing an expression that would have blown away Mrs Danvers and Nurse Ratched in a stern-looks competition.

  His mother is waiting at the finish line.

  She wants to see him lose close up.

  There are seven other boys at the starting line, and there's no doubt in anyone's mind that Rimmer will come in at number eight.

  Suddenly, something inside his head snaps. Perhaps it's loathing at his mother's grim patience, perhaps it's the thought that he could be beaten by Thrasher Beswick, who's crouched next to him, leering crudely with one hand in his pocket, playing underpants snooker. Or perhaps it's revulsion at himself, for being beaten before the starting whist
le's even been blown.

  Whatever the cause, Rimmer suddenly decides he's not going to lose.

  Not this time.

  There really is no reason why he shouldn't win. His legs are long and lanky — not much muscle on them, maybe, but at almost seven and five-sevenths, that's not a major factor. He's outpaced his brothers many times. True, on those occasions he'd been spurred on by the fact that they were pursuing him with poisonous snakes or crossbows, but that just meant it was a question of attitude. All he has to do is imagine they're behind him now, shouting gleeful taunts. They're threatening to peg him out on the ground, smear his body with bilberry jam and leave him to be eaten alive by armies of soldier ants. And he can't let them catch him.

  He won't let them catch him.

  His eyes are bunched like fists. He's willing all the power in his little body down to his feet. He hears the whistle and before he knows what's happening, he's running.

  He opens his eyes.

  There is no one in front of him.

  The too-big running shoes are wrenching at his feet as he thumps them into the clay of the running track. His T-shirt is billowing, the short sleeves slapping his arms as he pumps his hands up and down, trying to gain extra speed by pushing the wind behind him. The baggy shorts are dragging at his legs.

  And in the corner of his eye, he sees the hundred-yard mark. The race is halfway over, and there is still no one in front of him.

  He knows it's wrong, but he can't resist glancing over his shoulder. Bad technique and all, but he has to know.

  The nearest boy is a good two strides behind hint.

  Beyond that, young Rimmer catches a glimpse of Bullet head Heinman, his gym teacher, at the starting-line. The whistle flops out of his mouth and he gawks at Rimmer with bewilderment. Rimmer is one of the 'wets, weirdoes and fatties' that Bull enjoys humiliating on Wednesday afternoons. He's one of those skinny, useless kids that team captains pray they won't get lumbered with in ball games.