Backwards Read online

'It's completely safe, Rimmer,' Lister panted. 'We can't possibly get hurt. We're not actually climbing down, we're unclimbing up, and we've already arrived safely, see? Come on,' and he turned to lower himself over the side.

  Rimmer folded his arms. 'Not in a month of Plutonian Sundays.'

  'Sir,' Kryten implored, 'we have to go after him.'

  'Believe me, I'd love to join this little expedition, only I suffer from a terrible mental affliction known as "sanity".'

  Lister glanced over his shoulder. Directly beneath them, a dirt road cut a thin grey trail across the rocky valley floor. There was a battered, old pick-up truck parked there, its doors akimbo. Behind that, a police car was skewed across the trail. He stepped back on to the mountain track. 'Maybe you're right. Maybe this is where we should split up. Kryten, you and Rimmer carry on up the track. See over there?' He nodded across the valley. 'Where the valley road heads down from the mountain?'

  Kryten nodded.

  'I'll pick you up there. How quickly can you make it?'

  Kryten tilted his head and made some swift calculations. 'Personally, in double-time jog mode, I could make it in twenty-two minutes and nine seconds. But Mr Rimmer...'

  'Carry him,' Lister said.

  'Beg pardon, sir?'

  'Switch off his light bee and pop him in your pocket.'

  'Now, just a minute,' Rimmer stepped forward.

  Lister's breathing was getting more laboured, and now the Cat was panting heavily, too. 'No time...' Lister gasped, '... to argue. Just do it.'

  Kryten flipped a switch marked 'standby' on the remote pack, freezing Rimmer in mid-protest. His image wavered and then flicked off, and his light bee plopped neatly into Kryten's outstretched palm.

  Kryten dropped the tiny gizmo into the pocket of his cagoule. 'It's probably for the best. His batteries need conserving.'

  Lister nodded, his voice now little more than a rasping whisper. 'Find some sort of cover... some bushes, whatever... and hide till we get there.' He swallowed and looked down the mountain. The policeman was about halfway up. 'I'll go first... tell...' Lister turned around, formed his lips into a circle and sucked, noisily. A great wad of sputum suddenly leapt off one of the rocks by his feet and shot neatly into his mouth. '... tell the Cat to wait until the police car's gone before he sets off.'

  'Understood.'

  Lister backed to the edge of the mountain again. His heart was thumping so madly in his chest, he felt like it was going to burst through his shirt and race off down the track, jibbering insanely. He wiped the thin skein of sweat from his forehead and held out his hand. Kryten hesitated for a second, then stepped up and grabbed it. He gently lowered Lister over the side.

  It was slower going than Lister had imagined, but his fingertips hurt less with every foot of progress, and his heart rate began to subside. After the first fifty yards or so, he spared a look down. The cop was alarmingly close. For some reason, he seemed to be gaining on Lister.

  How could that be happening?

  He looked back up again and tried to concentrate on the descent, but his heart started thumping again, and the blood began to roar in his ears. He clambered down another few feet, but he was hit by an inexplicable dizziness. He was hyperventilating again. He was afraid he was going to lose consciousness.

  There was a sturdy branch jutting out at about shoulder height, and he grabbed it. He dangled his right leg down but couldn't find a foothold. He scrabbled around with the leg, trying to find some purchase. Then slowly, exasperatingly, his left leg started skidding down the rock face. He tried to lift it back up, but it wouldn't go.

  Suddenly, he was dangling from the branch. There was nothing between him and the ground but clean Canadian air. He fought the throbbing in his head, and forced himself to look down. The cop seemed even closer now. He looked up at Lister, grinning.

  A cloud of dust and small rocks rose up in between them and started tumbling up the mountainside towards Lister. The branch he was hanging from bent ominously. Then Lister was holding on to nothing at all.

  FOUR

  He was travelling in a cloud of choking dust. Rocks and pebbles were bouncing off him like he was being pelted by an angry crowd.

  He was falling up the mountain.

  Panic yabbering at his brain, he clawed desperately at the rock face, instinctively grabbing for some kind of handhold. His fingernails scrawped at dust and dirt. His legs kicked wildly at the unyielding rock like a child in the throes of a tantrum. The choking dirt cloud whirled around him and he was nothing more than the blind eye of a dust devil spinning up the mountain.

  And time was certainly passing. It just didn't feel like it to Lister.

  And then, miraculously, a medium-sized rock tumbled into his hand and he managed, somehow, to jam it into the mountainside, arresting his sudden ascent. He jabbed his foot into a cleft in the rock, and suddenly it was all over.

  His heart was thumping normally, his breathing was close to normal and the thudding pulse had gone from his ears. He looked down. The cop was much further away, now.

  Without feeling the need to catch his breath, Lister set off again down the mountain.

  The Cat was leaning over the side, peering down at the bizarre spectacle. He was having second thoughts about following Lister down the mountain, that was for sure. He glanced off up the mountain track, but Kryten was almost out of sight by now, jogging backwards at what looked like an impossible pace. The Cat prided himself on being fairly fleet-footed, but he couldn't have caught up with the yellow-cagouled robot even at maximum pace.

  He stood up and stretched, and then stiffened. He had a strange feeling in his stomach. It wasn't a pain, exactly, more like a queasy sort of void. He looked over the track and decided he'd better head behind the bushes. Maybe a quick toilet stop would help him feel more like mountaineering.

  He'd just got comfortable, when something unspeakable happened. There was a strange rustling in the ground he was crouching over. His eyes widened to maximum as some slimy warm thing began to force his buttocks slowly apart...

  Lister heard his scream halfway down the mountain. He looked up, and then down at the cop, who seemed oblivious.

  The cop was almost at the bottom now, just scrabbling down the last few yards of loose rock at the foot of the mountain. When he hit the ground, he stopped, looked up at Lister, and then ran backwards to the police car. He picked up the radio that was dangling from the door and shouted into it. Then he climbed into the car, started up the siren and screeched off along the narrow dirt track.

  Lister kept on down the mountain until the police car had reversed up the valley track and swept out of sight. He looked up. The Cat was peeking over the ridge at the top. Lister signalled for him to come down, and the Cat turned around and started lowering his lithe body down the mountainside with astonishing nimbleness.

  Lister sighed. So far, he'd got it right. Fairly soon, he'd find out the answer to a lot of the questions that had been plaguing him for so long.

  The most important of those questions was whether or not he'd actually committed the crime that had put him in prison for the last eight years.

  FIVE

  Kryten felt more than a little stupid jogging backwards up the mountain trail. He could probably have made better time jogging forwards, but he would have felt self-conscious flouting the conventions of the world, and was unwilling to risk drawing attention to himself unnecessarily. Not that a mechanical man thundering along a dirt track at forty-two miles an hour in a bright yellow plastic anorak could be squeezed into the category of commonplace sights, but Kryten was determined not to miss his rendezvous with Lister, so setting a more discreet speed, or adopting a route which afforded more cover, was out of the question.

  'When in Emor,' Kryten thought, 'do as the Snamor.'

  Despite his forced haste, Kryten found he was sufficiently relaxed to enjoy something of the spectacular scenery. This was the first time he had ever actually visited Earth. Even the most sophisticated multimed
ia travel guide was hopelessly inadequate at conveying the impression of truly being there. The colours, the smells were so much more sumptuous and intense. The early morning sun was beginning to glow a reddy orange as it sank low in the east, and Kryten was astonished to see the moon was still clearly visible in the cloudless sky.

  He'd always considered that possessing a mere single moon somehow made the Earth the poor relation of the solar system. But seeing it firsthand convinced him otherwise. A solitary moon was pleasing, aesthetically. Nicely understated, not too showy.

  He jogged round a bend and stopped to take his bearings. This was roughly the place designated for the rendezvous. He looked around and spotted the dirt road that led down into the valley. Fresh, deep tyre marks were cut into the road beside a shallow ditch which was thickly strewn with loose foliage.

  With a start, Kryten registered a police siren poohw-poohwing towards him. He dived into the ditch and tugged the ferns and branches around him, just as the police car leapt over the brow and reversed past him, sucking with it thick plumes of dust.

  Kryten lay there until the siren faded and the engine sounds had died away. Then he lay there a little longer. Then he began to wonder what in heavens name he was lying there for. The police car was out of sight, and since he hadn't seen anyone on his jog up the footpath, it followed that no one was going to spot him and give chase. He rolled out of the ditch and crept to the brow of the mountain. The old pick-up truck was whining up the valley trail towards him.

  He collected up the foliage he'd used for cover and began to re-attach it to nearby bushes and trees. It seemed the decent thing to do. In the reverse ecology of this planet, the function of plant life was to suck in the oxygen that humans exhaled, and process it into carbon dioxide which humans required to breathe.

  Just as he was re-affixing the last leaf, the pick-up truck tumbled over the crest of the track and screeched to a stop neatly in the pre-cut tyre tracks. The door flung itself open, and Kryten caught the handle.

  'Everything OK, sir?'

  'Get in, Kryten! Let's go!'

  Kryten climbed into the passenger seat and tugged the door closed. Lister raised his foot from the brake and they lurched off backwards. When they hit top speed, Lister pumped down on the accelerator and they raced steadily off along the track up towards the peak.

  Kryten looked up at the drivers mirror and caught a glimpse of the Cat, who was sitting rigidly in the rear seat, his eyes wide and unblinking, as if someone had slapped two fried eggs either side of his nose.

  'What's wrong with the Cat?'

  Lister shrugged. 'He's been like that since the climb. Hasn't said a word.'

  Kryten twisted round in his seat. 'Are you feeling all right, sir?'

  The Cat simply kept staring straight on. Kryten noticed his lips were moving minutely. He leaned over as close as possible, and made out the Cat's mumbled murmur: 'Ghnits-suhsidt,' he was saying, over and over. 'Ghnitssuhsidt oot oot...'

  When Kryten turned back, Lister was studying the driver's mirror. 'There he goes,' he said.

  Kryten twisted round again. The trail had widened and straightened, and in the distance, a flashing blue light above a small ball of dust was travelling away from them. 'Won't be long now,' Lister smiled.

  After a few seconds, the dustball vanished, the black-and-white killed its lights and siren, and reversed swiftly off the track, through a gate which led to a small farmstead, where it seemed to park.

  It took the pick-up a couple of minutes to reach the gate. As they zoomed up, Kryten saw the policeman standing by his vehicle with a barefoot man in dungarees. They were both staring at the pick-up, agape. Kryten felt Lister's hand on his head, thrusting him below the windscreen.

  'Stay out of sight!' Lister hissed.

  After a few seconds, Lister raised his hand, and Kryten straightened up in the seat. The road was clear. 'That's it then, sir,' he beamed, 'the policeman is no longer in pursuit.'

  'That's right,' Lister agreed, but his expression was harsh. 'And round about now is when someone goes and gets themselves killed.'

  SIX

  Rimmer glowered out of the window into the blurred motion of the valley below. He'd given up glancing at the speedometer when he'd noticed that the needle had bent and stuck on its upper extremity, which was, for the record, one hundred and twenty somethings per hour. Rimmer didn't know or care whether it was miles or kilometres. In his book, anything over thirty somethings per hour travelling backwards on a winding mountain road was sheer insanity.

  Lister must have caught his expression in the mirror because he grinned and said, 'Feeling better now, Arn?'

  Rimmer leaned over the catatonic Cat and yelled above the engine's whine into the driver's ear. 'Lister — as you are well aware, I am no stranger to travelling at lightspeed. However, I am more than a little uncomfortable attempting it in a clapped-out old shooting brake on a narrow dirt track up a mountain, in reverse.'

  'Look...' Lister turned and smiled at him.

  'Don't look at me!' Rimmer screamed. 'Keep your eyes on the road! Or the mirror! Or whatever the smeg your eyes are supposed to be kept on!'

  Lister's grin broadened. 'You still can't wrap your head round it, can you? It's physically impossible for us to crash in this car, on this trip.'

  'So you say. All the same, I'd feel slightly more comfortable if we weren't actually overtaking radio waves.'

  Rimmer leaned back and closed his eyes. He might as well have been urging a crippled, blind, deaf mute to be dancing to 'La Bamba'. He was beginning to wish they hadn't turned him back on. Kryten had rigged his portable power pack to the old pick-up's dynamo, and they'd revived him in order to help his batteries wind down, which seemed to Rimmer as insane as everything else in this lunatic world.

  Still, they were heading towards Starbug. This nightmare was almost over. Soon enough, they'd be in a universe where time flowed smoothly in the proper direction and things made sense. A universe where Santa Claus was a good person, not some evil old bastard who sneaked down chimneys once a year to steal all the children's favourite toys.

  Rimmer was as close as it was possible to get to a state of relaxation under the circumstances, when Lister inexplicably jammed his foot on the brake and wrenched the steering-wheel left. The cab tilted, so only half the truck was actually on the road as they sped round a bend. Suddenly they were reversing past an almost stationary tractor, which blared its horn angrily as they zipped by at a cartoon angle of forty-five degrees.

  Lister slewed the car back to a horizontal position, and the wheels kissed the dust of the mountain track.

  'Hang on!' Lister shouted. He looked over at Kryten and Rimmer, both of their faces frozen in grins of terror. 'Sorry, I should've warned you beforewards.' He shrugged. 'Habit.'

  Rimmer prised his nails out of his knees, and uttered a vowel-less word which, under normal circumstances, the human larynx could not possibly reproduce. He looked out of the window. Hedgerows and bushes spat past dizzyingly. Despite their near-death experience, and the fact that the road was getting cruder and rougher, Lister hadn't dropped his speed one iota.

  'Just how much further...' Rimmer began, and then spotted something that took his mind off their velocity. On the seat beside him was a cluster of tiny shards of glass he hadn't noticed before. There was another spattering of them by the handbrake. Where had all this glass come from? And what was that funny little hole in the dashboard?

  'You were saying?'

  Rimmer's eyes flicked up to the driver's mirror. There seemed to be a similar sort of funny little hole in the rear window...

  'Rimmer?'

  Rimmer turned to examine the hole, which was surrounded by a network of thin cracks. He turned back to Lister. 'Where did you get this car?'

  Lister shrugged. 'Dunno.'

  'What d'you mean, you don't know? This is your car, isn't it?'

  Lister shrugged. 'Maybe. I've never seen it before.'

  'Are you telling me you're about
to steal this vehicle?'

  'Not necessarily. Maybe I'm going to buy it.'

  Rimmer's eyebrows pushed his hairline back a good two inches. 'At the highest, most obscure peak of an obscure mountain range? Presumably from one of the many discount second-hand car showrooms that flourish there?'

  Lister shifted uncomfortably in his seat. 'Who knows? Maybe we buy it from a farmer or something.'

  'Lister, there's only one kind of people live in the most obscure peaks of obscure mountains. Strange people. People who don't like other people. Not polite, besuited, secondhand car salespeople. Hermit-type inbred people, with criss-crossed front teeth and a penchant for stews well-stocked with human flesh. People who, when other people take something away from them, are not averse to shooting at those other people with bullets.'

  Kryten twisted towards Lister. 'Bullets?'

  Lister sighed. 'OK. We're going to get shot at.' He nodded at the bullet hole in the dash. 'But he's going to miss! Can everybody please relax!'

  But Rimmer couldn't relax. He became less relaxed with every stone that spat itself under the wheels of the stolen car as they relentlessly wound their way up the narrowing road towards an inevitable gun battle.

  SEVEN

  Rimmer thought he was at his most unrelaxed when Lister suddenly thrust his hand out of the driver's window and caught a handful of shattered glass, which he distributed around his lap, but he was wrong.

  His unrelaxation didn't even peak when Lister screamed 'Heads down!' and ducked towards the steering-wheel.

  Kryten and Rimmer dipped their heads as low as they could. The Cat didn't move. Rimmer hissed at him to get down, but he just remained upright and staring forward, oblivious.

  Rimmer glanced up at the driver's mirror just in time to see the bearded, genetically challenged, diagonally dentured hillbilly hermit of his nightmares level a smoking rifle at them.