Grant Naylor Better Than Life

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'Is it me, or is Wilma Flintstone incredibly sexy?'
The Cat swivelled and looked at him, then turned his head back to the screen.
'Wilma Flintstone,' he said with quiet authority, 'is without question the
most desirable woman who ever lived.'
Lister looked at him, to see if he was serious. He was. 'That's good,' he
said. 'I thought I was going a bit whacko. What d'you think of Betty?'
'Betty Rubble?' The Cat mulled it over. 'We-ell, I would go with Betty,' he
said, then added wistfully: 'but I'd be
thinking of Wilma.'
They both lapsed into silent reverie.
'What are we doing?' Lister said, finally. 'I think we've been in the medical
unit for too long. Why are we talking about making love to Wilma Flintstone?'
'You're right,' the Cat agreed. 'We're nuts. This is an insane conversation.'
Lister shook his head, sadly. 'She'd never leave Fred, and we know it.'
Kryten's face, when it appeared through the recovery bay's hatchway, was
simultaneously wearing two expressions. The bottom half was calm, benign and
kindly; the top half, his eyes and forehead, was shot through with panic.
'And how are you two feeling?' he said soothingly, his voice obviously siding
with all the features south of his nose.
Lister and the Cat grunted non-committally.
'Now, there's absolutely no reason for concern, but we're going to have to
move you,' he said, and began loosening the medi-suit support straps.
'Why?'
'No reason. Just keep resting and getting better. That's all you have to worry
about.'
'I don't want to be moved,' the Cat protested. 'I want to watch the
Flintstones. This is the one where Fred and
Barney go away, and Wilma and Betty are left alone.'
Kryten pushed the hover stretcher parallel with his bed. 'Just lie back and
relax. We're going to go on a little walk.'
'Where to?'
'Nowhere in particular. I just thought it would be nice.'
'Kryten - what's going on?'
'The medicomp said no stress. Now just try and get some sleep.'
'Kryten, I'm not getting on that stretcher until you tell me what's going on.'
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Kryten smiled. 'If you absolutely must know, there's a tiny little planet that
might be possibly heading on a collision course with us. But there's
absolutely nothing to worry about,' he said, soothingly.
'A planet!?'
'It's only a small planet.'
'Why doesn't the ship just get out of the way?'
'The engines are sort of deadish, but that's not a matter that should concern
you. Now please, get on the stretcher.'
Lister tried to wrestle himself upright in his medi-suit. 'Why don't we make
the engines sort of un-deadish?'
'We can't,' Kryten smiled benignly.
'What does Holly say?'
'Well, Holly's sort of deadish, too. Now please, get on the stretcher, and try
and relax.'
Lister and the Cat sat bolt upright, rigid with panic. 'What are we going to
do, then?'
'We are going to go on a nice little walk down to the cargo bay and then,
depending on how we're all feeling, who knows, we might even do a spot of
abandoning shipping.' Kryten patted the stretcher, and watched helplessly as
Lister and the Cat un-velcroed their medi-suits, ripped off the biofeedback
sensors and belted out of the room and down the corridor.
It fell to Rimmer to give Holly the news that they couldn't take him with
them. His hardware was far too vast to be evacuated on to the small
transporter, and so Rimmer felt it was only decent to switch him on and let
him enjoy the fifty-five seconds of run-time that remained to him, before the
planet oblivionized Red
Dwarf, and everything on it.
He sat at his sloping architect's desk in the sleeping quarters, bathed in the
emergency lighting, and re-read the speech he'd written. It didn't seem nearly
as succinct as he remembered when he'd dictated it to his secretary skutter.
In all, it covered nine pages of A4, and when he timed it, he discovered it
lasted over sixteen minutes. He had to make some cuts, and get it down to five
seconds at the most. But it all seemed essential. His two-page tirade against
the Space Corps and their loathing for blast-off buttons; it seemed a pity to
lose that. His three-page report on the squashed skutter incident, which laid
the blame firmly in the lap of person or persons unknown - how could that go?
But in the end, he managed to get it down to twelve words: 'Planet collision
course ... engines dead ... impact twelve hours ... Abandoning ship ... sorry
... 'bye.'
With practice, Rimmer found he could say the whole mes-sage in just under two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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