Pew! Pew! - Sex, Guns, Spaceships... Oh My! Read online

Well, what has happened in the meantime?

  Not much, to be honest.

  I’ve been working hard and productively. So has everyone else. Things have really calmed down around here. I won’t say it is because of the Wots, but in a way it is: Pushever has stopped harassing us and as a result everyone is happier. Who knew the solution was just to find him some work to do?

  He’s been doing something with the Wots outside that involves piling up a lot of stones. It’s another of his intelligence tests, I think. Anyway as long as they leave a gap for me to go through to get to the boat, it’s no concern of mine.

  I went out in the boat today. I took my new sampling drone—I’ve been busy the last two weeks building it—and obtained some samples.

  This isn’t much of a diary entry. It is almost Victorian in its terseness.

  Something else must have happened today.

  Oh, Kirsty and Ramaswamy made vegetarian lasagna for supper.

  DAY 80

  Out in the boat again. More samples. Vegetarian sushi (Hiroto).

  DAY 82

  From now on I will update this journal daily. What is the point of keeping a diary on Titan otherwise?

  Vegetarian goulash (Kepler).

  DAY 83

  What is the point of keeping a diary on Titan when every day is exactly the same?

  Vegetarian gumbo (Zoya).

  DAY 84

  Vegetarian chicken kung pao

  Oxymoronic yet tasty

  What dread chemical wizardry made thee?

  No.

  Dread chemical wizardry, sustaining our dreary lives

  No.

  Vegetarian chicken kung pao, with thy unnatural reddish tint to the sauce

  The same color as Kepler’s hair

  No.

  It is no use. That chicken kung pao gave me the first poetic inspiration I have had in weeks, but it has vanished like a flash of lightning in Titan’s atmosphere.

  Oh, I noticed today that the steps down from the airlock are remarkably clean, despite Pushever’s practice of shovelling all the rubbish outside for the Wots to sort out. Hitherto they have been eating the plastics and leaving the other stuff on the stairs, but now they have taken the other stuff away, too. I wonder what they’ve done with it?

  The stone wall around the hab is now too high to see over from the ground. Kepler has started calling it the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  DAY 89

  Samples obtained yesterday contain water ice. Proof of interior seepage into lake floor. Convection hypothesis is proved.

  Why am I not elated?

  Why does this feel like just another day on Titan?

  Oh, well. Suppose I’d better get to work writing up my results.

  It is Pushever’s turn to make supper tonight. Prediction: vegetarian tacos.

  I almost miss the old days of everyone for him- or herself, sandwiches for breakfast or breakfast cereal at midnight, crumbs all over the floor and drifts of packaging in the corners …

  What am I saying? We now live a CIVILIZED existence. We all sit down together for meals, at a clean and tidy kitchen table, and discuss our day.14 No one yells, bitches, or makes sarcastic remarks. It is not the Wots’ fault that this is—all right, I admit it—as tedious as hell.

  276 days until we can go home.

  14 i.e. listen to Pushever droning on about his ground-breaking, history-making achievements with the Wots. But it is all the same really.

  DAY 90

  I was right: vegetarian tacos. Let’s have a big hand for Ben the Psychic!

  The truth is that I have suffered through several meals “made” by Pushever already. All he can “make” is tacos. It merely requires him to dump the fillings out on plates and put them on the table. Last night he even managed to scorch the taco shells in the microwave.

  Dinner conversation was marginally less tedious than usual. Pushever lectured us about the Wots’ supposed intelligence. He thinks they are at least as smart as chimpanzees. As evidence he adduced the wall they have built outside, which is now as tall as Camp Squalor, and blocks out much of the light from the kitchen windows.

  I said, “Ants build more complex structures than that.”

  He got huffy and said that ants have a collective consciousness.

  “How do you know Wots don’t have a collective consciousness, too?”

  “It is perfectly evident from their performance on game theory tests,” he said, and hared off on a mind-numbing tangent about making the Wots play games with zeroes and ones on a screen and rewarding the winners with crisp packets.

  Kepler interrupted to say that she had found a lot of deep-frozen crisps (of course she says “chips”) wedged into the Big Rock Candy Mountain recently.

  Hiroto stuck up for Pushever and said that the only right place for sour cream and onion flavor is the great outdoors. But I suspect Pushever has been throwing away good food just so that he can give the wrappers to the Wots. My mother, rest in peace, would have a heart attack.

  After supper, Pushever as usual chased everyone out so he could clear up. I waited until I heard his heavy footsteps go down the hall towards the room he shares with Hiroto. Then I went and peeked at the external monitor.

  The steps down from the airlock were an absolute avalanche of lettuce and vegetarian taco meat. The Wots were all over the stuff, picking it up in their flippers and carrying it away to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  We never left that much on our plates.

  It is clear that Pushever used the excuse of “making” supper to take far more food than necessary from the pantry, so that he could feed the packaging to the Wots.

  I think I will go have a look in the pantry.

  Later

  Sneaking along the hall, I heard the sound of quiet sobbing.

  It was coming from Kepler and Zoya’s room.

  I stood outside the door, listening.

  I approached my hand a few inches towards the sensor.

  Then I withdrew it.

  For should I then presume?

  And how should I begin?

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  I know what good poetry is, you see, even if I can’t write it.

  I was about to continue down the hall when the door suddenly opened. There stood Zoya. “I thought I heard your squeaky socks,” she said. “Come in and see if you can talk to her.”

  “Me?”

  “She won’t talk to me.”

  With trepidation, I entered the room. It smelled feminine, like nail polish15. The sobs proceeded from a humped, blanket-shrouded form on Kepler’s bed. I stood over the bed, not knowing what to do. Zoya stood behind me with her hands on her hips.

  “Kepler?” I said.

  The blanket took wing. Kepler’s face shot out. It was all blotchy. “Are you happy now?” she half-snarled, half-sobbed.

  “Me?”

  “Yes!”

  I said, “Kepler, I am not sure what it even means to be happy. I thought I was happy when I was married, but in retrospect, it was an illusion. Anyway, I am a poet. Poets are never happy. It would be counter-productive.”

  Why did I say that? Why? I can only suppose I was thrown off-balance by the dark, scented room, and the late hour, and the tear-stained woman in front of me.

  Thank God, neither of them seemed to notice my slip. Perhaps I am losing my mind, and when I thought I was saying ‘poet,’ I actually said ‘psychroplanetic climatologist.’

  “Happiness is not necessarily consonant with productivity,” I mumbled.

  “Oh you,” Kepler said. “You’re never satisfied, are you? The place is as clean as the inside of someone’s colon after an enema, which is what you always wanted, but you’re still moping around like Eeyore! Ugh!”

  Her ugly yet apt simile distracted me to the point that I lost the thread.

  Zoya picked it up. “I know what happiness is,” she said. “It’s sitting on my own fr
ont porch in Ann Arbor, in spring, with my cat on my lap, eating yogurt and grading essays on a strict curve. That’s what I wish I was doing now.” Her voice trembled.

  The terrifying thought that both of them might start crying gave me courage. I squatted down by Kepler’s bed. “Kepler,” I said. “Would you like to go on an adventure?”

  Later Still

  So we did.

  All three of us went on an expedition to the pantry, which is a large store-room with an automated inventory system. Bypassing the computer, we investigated the contents for ourselves. It was rather thrilling, tiptoeing about and whispering by the light of the computer screen, which kept irritably blinking at us, “SELECT MEAL TYPE AND MENU.” However, what we found was sobering.

  Two related hypotheses offer themselves:

  Pushever is a megalomaniac with no survival instinct.

  Evidence: He has seriously depleted our food stores. He seems to have started with the stuff no one likes, such as Spinach Chex and skinless boneless meatless chicken tenders—those boxes were empty—and then moved onto other things, such as ham, tomatoes, lettuce, etc. Almost every box has been lightly plundered from the bottom, where no one would notice. Except an enterprising psychroplanetic climatologist, and it took me almost too long.

  Conclusion: Disputed. I say maniac. Kepler says terminal narcissist. Zoya says singlemindedly dedicated to the furtherance of his xenobiological researches.

  We do not have enough food left to survive for another 274 days.

  Evidence (ignoring the automated inventory system; which Pushever seems to have hacked): My own eyes.

  Conclusion: We will have to call Earth and request an early pick-up.

  This means revisiting the radio dilemma.

  What am I going to do?

  Someone will have to confront Pushever. It may be necessary to compel him to give us the password. But how? Shall we have to hold him down and torture him? I couldn’t. Apart from native squeamishness I wouldn’t know how.

  I can’t stand this. It is no good thinking about it.

  **Voice of Ramaswamy** “All right, what are you jabbering about over there?”

  15 Zoya’s, not Kepler’s. Kepler has adventurer’s hands.

  DAY 91

  I ought to explain how I have got away with dictating my diary for so long, in a hab where there is no such thing as privacy. My secret is that Ramaswamy snores like a chainsaw. Whenever he is sacked out, I can lie in bed, mumbling away, in the confidence that my dictation will be unheard by anyone, least of all by him.

  However, last night, distressed by our discoveries in the pantry, I did not even notice that he wasn’t snoring.

  He demanded an explanation. I tried to get away with “scientific notes” but he pointed out that “I can’t stand thinking about it,” while a perfectly normal response to the contemplation of one’s own work, is not worth waking up for in the middle of the night, indeed the opposite. Ramaswamy says he has recently been tempted to simply stay in bed all the time. “With Kirsty, I only wish,” he added with a leer. Then he asked me which of the “girls” I had been doing the naughty with.

  Shocked that he could think me capable of imposing my dubious charms on anyone, I blurted out the entire story of Pushever’s depredations on the pantry, improvising in passing the lie that my diary is a record of his misdeeds that I have kept with an eye to future disciplinary proceedings. Well, actually, it wasn’t a lie. It is.

  “Criminal proceedings, more like,” Ramaswamy said. “That’s if any of us survives to bring charges.”

  He was all for marching down the hall and confronting Pushever straightaway. I managed to persuade him to wait until breakfast, when we would be able to catch Pushever red-handed. The shame of exposure, I argued, might persuade him to give up the password.

  Diary, breakfast never came.

  I was awakened, after what felt like five minutes of sleep, by what sounded like a troop of Cossacks dancing on the roof.

  Either one of Titan’s rare hurricanes had caught us unawares, or …

  I dashed to the airlock, and found Kepler in the suiting room, already transformed into a Lego man. Her face, seen through the visor, was still puffy. “I’m going to freaking fix them,” she said, picking up a shovel in one mighty yellow glove.

  We emerged from the airlock to a surreal scene of impending catastrophe.

  Overnight, the Big Rock Candy Mountain had finally achieved the elevation necessary for the Wots to spring from its summit onto the roof.

  There were a dozen of them up there, kangarooing up and down in an attempt to reach all that yummy plastic in the radio transmitter.

  I howled. Kepler threw her shovel. Neither action had the slightest effect.

  Whereupon that fearless woman began to scale the BRCM. Slipping, sliding, falling back, never giving up, she achieved a height of some five feet off the ground, and yelled, “Are you gonna give me a hand or not?!!”

  I dashed over to her. She placed her boot in my gloves. I boosted, she sprang, and in Titan’s low gravity she sailed onto the roof.

  Then ensued the most beautiful thing I have seen yet on Titan. She kicked and hurled Wot after Wot into the ochre murk. They hurtled away on low ballistic trajectories like lacrosse balls with flippers, and were seen no more.

  Unfortunately, their 1000 or so friends dozing around the cold lab didn’t go anywhere.

  “I played rugby in college,” Kepler explained, leaping to the ground. She made a run at the Wots around the cold lab. They skittered nimbly away. “Damn! You can’t get near them, can you? I was only able to catch the ones on the roof because they were so determined to get at the transmitter. We’ll have to tear down the BRCM right now, anyway.”

  This turned out to be easier said than done. All the frozen food stuck in the chinks has glued the rocks together like mortar. We kicked it, shoved it, leaned on it with all the (minuscule) weight of the exosuits. Ramaswamy and Kirsty came out and tried to help. It did not budge.

  Kepler said despairingly, “In that case we’d better put a guard on the roof.”

  I said, “And I will sort Pushever.”

  I found him in the cold lab. He had not even noticed the morning’s hair-raising drama, in that sense of noticing I mentioned before, meaning noticing that it could have any repercussions for him. He was back at his research, administering tests to a brace of Wots kept cooperative with handfuls of plastipaper. My hair stood on end inside my exosuit to see those crumpled sheets. He has resorted to tearing pages out of his own collection of published works, which he brought with him as a sort of portable brag wall.

  “More game theory?” I said, after watching the Wots play a sort of glorified tic-tac-toe for some minutes.

  “Yes,” Pushever said. “Their aptitude is off the charts.”

  “I am not surprised to hear that,” I said. “They’ve game-theoried you.”

  His Lego-man head lifted crossly.

  “They correctly inferred that you would continue to feed them as long as they stuck around. But this is a zero-sum game, Pushever. There is only so much plastic on Titan. And now they all want to play. Have you seen how many of them are out there?”

  “A few,” he said grouchily.

  “A few?” I grasped the arm of his suit and dragged him out of the cold lab. I forced him to look at our colleagues wading through the sea of blobby six-legged monsters. “There are thousands of them. And there is not enough plastic for them and for us.”

  A commotion broke out at the foot of the BRCM. Ramaswamy was trying to boost Kirsty to the top of the mountain. The Wots rushed the backs of Ramaswamy’s legs. He stumbled and fell. Kirsty fell on top of him. We all heard her scream.

  “Now see what you have done,” I said to Pushever. “Your folly has injured the young woman who trustingly followed you to Titan, you selfish, lecherous old careerist.”

  He was no longer beside me. He was floundering towards Kirsty. He called out to me over the radio, “N-O-B-E-L-P-
R-I-Z-E.”

  “What?”

  “The new password, idiot! Call Earth and request a medevac!”

  God knows where he had heard that word. He was dreaming, of course. There are no medevacs from Titan.

  Nobel Prize! I should have guessed that. I feel like an idiot. But I do not care. I have called Earth—well, actually the mining outpost in orbit around Saturn—and told them that we require early evacuation due to unforeseen complications.

  They asked me what sort of complications.

  “Tedium,” I said. “Excruciating tedium.” And then I burst out laughing like a madman.

  I think that is what convinced them to say they would send the ship.

  Later

  Kirsty’s back is not broken, as she initially thought it was. Her heart, however, she says, is. “You lied to me,” she shouted at Pushever, sitting on the kitchen table while Zoya bandaged her lightly sprained left wrist. “You said this would be fun. Titan is the most boring place on Earth.”

  Hiroto, a pedant, coughed.

  “Oh all right. It is the most boring place in the solar system. In the galaxy. In the universe!”

  You see, Diary, she has not yet noticed that we are in grave danger. There is a non-zero chance that the Wots will literally eat us out of house and home before the ship arrives. They have deduced, with their amazing IQs, that Camp Squalor contains a cornucopia of plastic. They have started to throw rocks at the walls.

  Kirsty, however, remains preoccupied with her romantic woes. “I wish I’d never given you that model of E.T. sewn from hand-woven yak hair fabric and stuffed with lavender!” she shouted, referring to the love-token that initiated their doomed affair.

  “I still have it,” Pushever said.