Pew! Pew! - Sex, Guns, Spaceships... Oh My! Page 10

  That said, no one has noticed or commented on his efforts, any more than they ever did on mine. They are thinking of nothing except the Wot.

  We read through Pushever’s guidelines. They boil down to “No one is to go near the Wot except qualified xenobiologists,” i.e. Pushever.

  Hiroto, who as a meteorologist has no imaginable claim on the Wot, accused Pushever to his face of trying to monopolize the fame and fortune destined to accrue to us all. Hiroto has always seemed so mild-mannered. Rooming with Pushever has clearly taken its toll.

  Of course he is right; Pushever will ride the Wot to worldwide stardom if it is the last thing he does.

  The discussion devolved into bickering. Kirsty got up to look out the window. You can just barely see the cold lab through the haze. There is no sign whether the Wot is still there, let alone whether its wittle paws are chilly.

  “The question is whether credit should be assigned in alphabetical order, or in order of seniority,” brayed Pushever. They were already talking about the press release we would splash across the solar system, announcing the discovery of life on Titan.

  Kepler leaned towards me and said quietly, “This isn’t fair. We discovered the Wot.”

  Whaddaya mean we, honey-britches? I thought in a bad American accent. If I had not been trying to prove my theory of subsurface convection, we would not have been dropping lines into Lake Eerie in the first place. But I just sighed and smiled and nodded.

  I had already decided on a course of action of my own.

  The meeting ended with no decision made on the press release, and no call to Earth having been placed.

  Ramaswamy says he later went to check the radio for incoming transmissions (a likely story) and found it inoperable. Pushever has changed the password, so that no one can call Earth except for him, in his own sweet time.

  Now Ramaswamy is now snoring. Here I go.

  Later

  Well, that went well.

  I was going to let the Wot out of the cold lab and coax it back to the lake. I had brought a handful of protein bar wrappers for the purpose.

  I pushed open the swing door of the cold lab and clumped in. The Wot was not there. However, all (!) the inorganic waste was gone out of the feed bin. The thing has a prodigious appetite. I saw the neat little pile of organic scrapings it had left behind, and another little pile of metal parts.

  Concluding, much to my relief, that it had got out and fled by itself, I returned to the hab. I began to climb the stairs to the airlock—and slipped.

  Sliding helplessly down the stairs, I collided with a soft, yet resistant living object.

  The Wot.

  It blinked at me, and continued to snarf up the inorganic waste littering the stairs.

  So that is how Pushever got the kitchen so clean so fast!

  He simply shovelled everything out of the airlock without bothering to separate it.

  The Wot is doing the job for him.

  It had made its usual neat little pile of tomato skins, uneaten french fries, macaroni, etc. That is what I slipped on. The stuff had frozen, of course, into a colorful ice slick.

  I sat up at the bottom of the stairs as the airlock opened. Kirsty (pink helmet) came out. She jumped a mile at the sight of me. “I thought everyone was in bed!”

  “Obviously not. What’s that you’ve got?”

  Her exosuit gloves held balls of crumpled plastipaper. “Just a wee snack for the Wot.”

  “Go ahead. Feed it, like Pushever has done, so it will stick around,” I said.

  My sarcasm was lost on her. “Come here, you cute wee thing.” The Wot eagerly sat up and begged. Cooing, Kirsty tossed it balls of plastipaper. One missed its maw; I picked it up to see what it was. Diary, she was feeding it Pushever’s guidelines.

  After some minutes of this Ramaswamy (orange helmet) tumbled out of the airlock brandishing a geological sampling tool like a sword. “Is it attacking you?!?” Kirsty defended the Wot like a Highland maiden of yore defending her favorite shaggy cow. They are both hot-blooded Scots. Throughout history, the Scottish have excelled as adventurers and inventors. It is a shame we couldn’t have had two of those type of Scots instead of two neurotic maniacs.

  Myself being Anglo-Irish, I went back to the cold lab to check had the instruments been eaten yet.

  I was gloomily examining the tooth marks on my mass spectrometer when I heard Pushever come out. I got back to the scene of the argument to see Kirsty pointing dramatically at him. “Now there’ll be no more complaints about me not doing my job, will there Sam? The Wot is a better housekeeper than any of us!”

  “It’s certainly a better housekeeper than me, especially since I am not a fockin’ housekeeper! I have a master’s degree in xenobiology, and I’d have my thesis for my doctorate written by now if it wasn’t for you asking me to spellcheck your shit!”

  It all came out after that, while the Wot peacefully cleaned up the steps.

  Kirsty is NOT a professional station manager, as we were all led to believe.

  She is a graduate student of Pushever’s. During some vernal mentoring session back in California the birds sang and the bees buzzed, and we shall draw a veil over the unsavory scene that followed and was reprised every day for half a year, twice a day sometimes if Kirsty is not exaggerating.

  They lied about her qualifications to get her onto the Titan mission. There was something in it for each of them: a leg up on the competition for her, and an unpaid secretary for him, not to mention the frequent (but increasingly less frequent) romps that shook the walls of Kirsty’s tiny single room.

  But who got screwed?

  I could point to myself but the truth is unfortunately worse. We are all screwed. I do not really know how to maintain the CO2 scrubbers and things of that sort. I was assuming Kirsty would step in and take over if I was doing it wrong.

  In fact she knows less about it than I do.

  And the Wot has eaten one of the IR cameras.

  I offered the following scientific observation: “The radio antenna is made of plastic.”

  “Polygel to be precise,” said Pushever, trying desperately to reassert his amour propre after being publically dumped by his amour most improper under the conduct guidelines of any self-respecting university. “I hypothesize that the Wot thrives on a diet of complex hydrocarbons.”

  “Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon there is,” sez I. “CH4.”

  Pushever (pityingly): “It may have come out of a methane lake but that does not mean it feeds on methane, Ben.”

  Me: “Oh no, I fully agree. It is more likely that it feeds on long-chain aliphatics, formed when lightning in the atmosphere polymerizes methane into photochemical smog. At these temperatures, aliphatics would be solids. The methane rain would wash them down into the lakes, where they sink to the bottom.”

  Tangle with a psychroplanetic climatologist at your peril, O faker of life-support technician CVs and exponent of pseudo-science!

  Well.

  Not so pseudo anymore, I suppose.

  Everyone was watching us now as if it was a boxing match.

  I landed one more jab: “The Wot presumably dives for its food like Anas platyrhynchos.”11

  Pushever then cheated. Instead of engaging with my arguments, he looked around and said, “Where is Kepler?”

  11 The common duck.

  DAY 60

  I was too exhausted to finish yesterday’s diary entry last night. The long and the short of it is that Kepler has vanished. We talked about it for a long time and then drew straws to decide who should go to look for her. Ramaswamy lost. He cheered up considerably when Kirsty said she would go with him. They left, and the rest of us went to bed.

  I woke up with the black-out blinds still drawn and an agonizing ache in my lower back. I had been sleeping on my voice recorder. Now I am eating breakfast at lunch-time, alone in the oppressively tidy kitchen. On the wall monitor, I can see Pushever, Hiroto, and Zoya in the cold lab. They have put the Wot in an i
mprovised playpen. When Ramaswamy and Kirsty come back, I will go out in my turn to look for Kepler.

  What if they don’t come back?

  I have to get the new password off Pushever and call Earth. They need to know what is going on.

  Where did Kepler go? Why?

  Did she go, or was she taken?

  My thoughts are going around in circles. The red murk seems to be pressing in at the window. The walls creak. The walls, the bloody walls … what are they made of?

  Plastic?

  Stop that right now, Godwin. Everything is perfectly all right. You’re scaring yourself to death in broad daylight.

  Broad daylight … ha! Ochre gloom, and so it will continue for the next 6 years. On Titan, the monsters roam beneath the noonday sun.

  Stop it.

  This is a very decent sandwich.

  I found all the makings of lunch—well, it is breakfast for me—laid out on the counter in the manner of a buffet at a low-end B&B. Bread, tomatoes, cheese, pickle, ham12, and a small mountain of crisps that had been dumped out of the bag onto a plate.

  I wonder who laid the stuff out? It was kind of them, anyway. So it can’t have been Pushever.

  **Voice of Zoya** “Lo, the beast has arisen from the depths.”

  Zo, that’s just not as funny as it was last week.

  **Voice of Zoya** “I’m glad you’ve finished off the tomatoes. Sam must have overestimated our appetites. Based on his own, I guess.”

  PUSHEVER put out the lunch stuff?

  **Voice of Zoya** “Yeah, wasn’t it sweet of him?” (Sound of Zoya crunching crisps.) “Actually, I think he just wanted the wrappers to give the Wot.”

  What is he doing with it out there?

  **Voice of Zoya** “We are giving it intelligence tests.”

  Ah, so you’re reading it some of Pushever’s published articles to see if it laughs out loud?

  **Voice of Zoya** “We’re doing short-term memory tests. You know, flash numbers on a screen and see if it can put them in order. Also, game theory. It’s beaten Hiroto three times out of three so far. Ciao!”

  She has bounced away, back to the lab.

  It is as if she hasn’t even noticed that Kepler is missing.

  In fact, I suspect she has not noticed, in the ordinary sense of noticing that implies thinking about cryogenic temperatures and exosuit tolerances and suffocating in your own CO2 and falling into lakes of liquid methane. Hiroto has not noticed, either. They are highly specialized beings optimized for survival in the competitive environment of academia, where concern for your fellow man is a flaw. Their brief resistance to the Pushever regime has wilted; they are once again attaching their lips to his gluteus maximus as securely as they can.

  This sandwich doesn’t taste so good anymore.

  I think I’ll leave the rest.

  Should I tidy up?

  No. Leave it.

  (Sound of thumping on outside of wall)

  Oh God! What’s that?

  Later

  Things are going from bad to worse.

  Kepler is back.

  The thumping on the wall was some of the new Wots, leaping up to try to see in the windows, and hitting them with their clawed flippers.

  Yes, some of them.

  “I wanted to see if I could find out where our Wot came from,” she said, as cool as a cucumber.13 “So I took the boat and went around the lake.”

  “You’ve no idea how to sail it,” I said.

  “I watched you do it. Ben, Ben, being an adventurer is all about picking up new skills quickly.” Smirk, chomp, glug. “Anyway, I never went out of sight of the shore. I just sailed along until I came to this kind of river delta feeding into the lake, where I guess the liquid methane flows down from the highlands, and it was jammed with Wots. Thousands of them!”

  There are thousands—well, at least dozens—of them around Camp Squalor now.

  They are sitting there staring woefully up at the windows, waiting for a Pushever or a Kirsty to throw them something to eat.

  Speaking of Kirsty, she and Ramaswamy came back an hour after Kepler’s return. Both were understandably peeved that their heroic search mission turned out to have been a waste of time. Ramaswamy flew into a rage about the new Wots. “What the fock were you thinking to bring them back with you?”

  “I did not ‘bring them back with me,’” Kepler yelled. “They just came! How was I supposed to make them go away?”

  That is a very good question. But I may have the answer. While everyone was yelling at Kepler I developed a hypothesis. Now I am going out to test it.

  Later Still

  Hypothesis: Wots dislike bright light.

  Reason: They have never seen it before.

  Experiment: Go out and shine a bright light on them.

  Result: Wots thronged around self, boinging up and down like wallabies in attempt to reach torch, which is made of polyethy-something or other like every [bleeping] thing in this camp. They got it off me in 10 seconds flat and began fighting over it, hitting each other with their flippers and drawing rivers of methane blood.

  Conclusion: Wots are not as peaceable as they look.

  “Let’s hear it for the scientific method!” said Ramaswamy, sarcastically, from the airlock steps where he was sitting in between frozen lumps of organic waste from supper. “What will you try next? Play Ravel’s Bolero at them, on the hypothesis that they’ve never heard crappy music? Let me remind you that they’ve never encountered potato crisp bags or seismometers either, and they get along very fockin’ well with those.”

  “Seismometers? Oh, no.”

  “Aye, they’ve eaten Zoya’s. They spat out the metal bits.”

  “We have to call Earth,” I said, “before they eat the radio antenna.”

  We both looked up at the roof of the hab, where the 5-meter dish points towards Earth.

  “That’s made of metal,” Ramaswamy said eventually.

  “The connectors and cable coatings and stuff aren’t. Have we got replacements for those if they eat them?”

  “I don’t think they can jump that high.”

  There was a silence. Ramaswamy brooded. I moodily made the exosuit tap-dance around the boulders. I wasn’t trying to kick the Wots, but I wouldn’t have minded if I had. However they dodged.

  Presently Ramaswamy, who shrinks utterly from violence as much as I do myself, said, “Maybe Pushever will change his mind when he sees thousands of them outside.”

  After another pause—a tacit acknowledgement that this is not likely—I said, “I like Ravel’s Bolero.”

  “That is because you’ve got no more aesthetic sensibility than a frog has got balls.”

  Ramaswamy doesn’t know I write poetry. No one does. I would die if it came out. I pretend, therefore, to be a mere horny-handed psychroplanetic climatologist, although as I have said before, I suffer pangs of doubt about my career path. Being a poet would certainly have been safer.

  We went inside arguing about whether frogs have balls. In our own way, we were attempting not to notice the throng of Wots ringing the camp.

  How Late It Is, How Late

  Unable to sleep, I got up and took my computer to the kitchen. I started clicking around in the station manager’s database. It is a labyrinth of numbers and unexplained acronyms.

  Kepler padded into the kitchen. “My body clock is all screwed up,” she said by way of explanation, while retrieving a carton of chocolate milk from the fridge. “What are you doing?”

  I looked up at her with haunted eyes. That was the idea anyway. I probably just looked dyspeptic. “I’m trying to find out if the walls are made of plastic.”

  “I was thinking about that, too,” she admitted. She sat down at the table. “But we’re on stilts. Right? The Wots can’t bite through the stilts. They are made of titanium. So is the airlock, which is the only bit you can reach by going up the stairs.”

  “You have a point,” I said, not feeling much better. Feelng worse, in fact. It
may have had something to do with the chocolate milk moustache on her upper lip. It made her look … less adventurous.

  “Listen,” she said. “They haven’t done anything to harm us, yet. Right?”

  “Right.” She was wearing a low-cut sleep tee.

  “In fact, all they’ve done is eat our garbage and bounce up and down hopefully.”

  “What about Zoya’s seismometer?”

  “She never used it anyway.”

  “Right.” Kepler has freckles on her chest, too.

  “So maybe you and Ramaswamy should cool it with the ‘we’re all going to die’ stuff, and just kind of … get on with things?”

  “Things?” Marlene never wore sleep tees. She had ruffly matching camisole and knickers sets. I thought all women wore the same sort of stuff at night, until I came here.

  Kepler drained her chocolate milk, stood up, and dropped the carton on the floor. “Like science,” she said. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing?”

  Diary, on reflection, she’s right. I am letting myself get distracted from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to obtain a raise, a modest degree of fame, and comped guest speaker gigs. Starting tomorrow, I will leave all Wot-related speculation to Pushever, and get back to work.

  12 Just add water. It is amazing what they can do with freeze-dried food these days. And all vegetarian, too! Even the ham.

  13 Poetic license. In fact, she was red-faced, sweaty, and somewhat pungent from a whole day in the exosuit. She chomped a hi-protein chocolate bar and swigged a green smoothie while relatin

  DAY 78

  **Voice of Ramaswamy** “Ben, isn’t this that antique recorder thing of yours?”

  Jesus. It is. Where’d you find it?

  **Voice of Ramaswamy** “It was in with the dirty laundry.”

  Thanks, Rammy. Wonder if it still works?

  Later

  Well, well, it does still work. And I see the last time I updated my journal was more than two weeks ago.