(2008) Mister Roberts (3 page)

On that night, after the
power cut off, Laurence slid open the heavy wooden door that led to the patio
and went out into the shaking, windblown night to stare up at the suddenly
revealed stars, stars which were normally hidden by the glare of the hundreds
of powerful streetlights that the mayor was obsessed with installing. One of
the things Laurence valued about his village was that there would never be any
balsamic vinegar or lemongrass in the shop there. Twenty different kinds of ham
certainly, but never anything that would not have been sold in the locale fifty
years before. Unfortunately, this conservatism did not extend to modern
technology He remembered when he’d first come to the village nineteen years
before. There’d been no street lighting and the stars in their billions had
been on show every night; now the power cut had made them visible for the first
time in ages. He stared hard at the blackness and the dusting of heavenly
bodies and took the opportunity to try to feel insignificant. Laurence had
heard people say that the sheer uncountable number of stars made you feel tiny
and meaningless when confronted with the uncaring and infinite vastness of the
universe. He figured that if he could only feel a little of that vastness then
he might not mind so bloody much about the costume-designing job on the big new
BBC-produced Henry James drama series being given to one of his younger rivals,
he might not find Stuart quite so annoyingly dim and he might not feel that if
he didn’t do every sodding thing for the British community in the village then
it simply wouldn’t get done. Laurence tried hard to look into his soul to see
if he could find some insignificance but there wasn’t any there. Hey ho, he
thought, trying to be relaxed about losing the TV job.

For a
while, a year or two perhaps, work had been gradually tailing off; the gaps
between projects getting longer and longer but this series going to somebody
else meant he wouldn’t have done anything for well over nine months.

It was
what happened: he was getting old. Of course, in his time he’d pushed out an
older generation of costume designers without a thought for how they felt and
now the same thing was happening to him, all the thrusting young directors and
producers who’d started out with Laurence were now organic sheep farmers, in
long-term psychiatric care or were commissioning editors and channel
controllers and so didn’t make programmes anymore, indeed this last group were,
in a way, more detached from TV than he was. If he still lived in the UK he
might have been able to mix with the new batch of producers, go with them to
rap concerts or skateboarding or whatever it was that they did for
entertainment, but from high up in his valley it was impossible. Laurence thought
to himself that in the new year he was going to have to return to the UK and
make a really serious effort to get back in the game. If he just took a few
meetings, chatted up a few old friends and looked up some of those godchildren
he’d neglected then the quality of his work would shine through and get him the
jobs he wanted.

Half a
mile away a rocket rose in the night sky and exploded with a cascade of sparks,
the muted boom reaching Laurence a few seconds later. He hardly noticed either.
At any time of the day or night at more or less any time of the year there were
explosions in the air above his valley The locals would tell you that the
firing of the rockets was connected with religious festivals or somebody’s
saint’s day or the European Year of the Dyslexic but everybody knew in their
heart that the impulse to fire them came from a deeper and older place. The
hissing smoke trails, the bangs and the bright flashes of light were their way
of frightening off devils. That in the dark, creeper-strung canyons and
rock-strewn flatlands of the mountains there lurked beasts capable of
unimaginable evil was accepted by all, and making a loud noise and a flash of
light was considered the best way to keep them at a distance. Rockets were such
a central part of life in the valley that most people kept a stock of them in
their larder next to the dried spices, cured sausage and preserved peppers.

But
then, as Laurence stared up into the black night sky, a more spectacular
stellar display dragged him from his self-pitying reflections: one of the
myriad of stars suddenly seemed to swell until it was as big as a tennis ball
and brighter than one of the big 20k lights they used at Pinewood Studios. At
first he assumed it was another projectile, but unlike a rocket it didn’t die
in a burst of sparkles. Instead the big burning ball hung seemingly only a few
thousand metres above him, then abruptly lurched sideways across the sky
Rapidly diminishing in size the intense point of light finally disappeared
behind one of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

A
bright star shining over the village on Christmas Eve? Laurence thought to
himself. My dear, how tacky is that? Then, with a sigh, he went back inside to
Stuart.

Laurence was wrong. The
bright shining light that had passed across the sky in front of him was not as
he’d thought a shooting star — it was a burning spaceship. For several hours on
that Christmas Eve, over on the dark side of the moon, an Imperial cruiser of
the Galactic Empire had been battling with attack ships of the Universal Rebel
Uprising. Time and again the tiny rebel fighters darted in, stinging the bulky
lumbering battleship with their guns and missiles.

Most of
the aliens on the big cruiser stuck to their task with brainless devotion but
deep in the entrails of the ship one of the crew was feeling a great deal of
fear. In appearance, like all his comrades, he was small and stocky, about a
metre and a half tall, strong muscular arms and legs covered in greenish/grey
scales with clawed hands and feet, his head longer than ours but with eyes,
golden in colour, at the front — the mark of the predator. Inside, though, he
was different from his fellows, he had a terror of death that had been bred out
of most of his race. This alien’s role on the ship was to monitor the condition
of the defensive shields and to effect repairs on the shield generators as they
sustained damage from enemy fire. With the knowledge his job afforded him he’d
known for some time that the battlestar’s defences could not take much more of
the assault and once the shields went down the ship was finished.

He
cursed the fact that through some accident of genetics or lack of conditioning
he did not subscribe to the Imperial cult of cold rationality whereby an
individual life was worth nothing and everything had to be sacrificed for the
collective well-being of the Empire. He was convinced there was no eternal
honour in dying for the common good as the Imperial political commissars
endlessly stated, and he had devised a desperate plan not to.

A power
surge from a missile strike caused an overload that exploded his bank of instruments,
a flying shard of metal slashed him across his body, creating a gaping wound.
Quickly, and without a backwards glance, he abandoned his post.

Clutching
his side the alien began to shuffle into the fume-filled corridor, towards the
outer hull of the ship some two kilometres away.

Over
the following hour the deserter journeyed, with determination and stealth, the
entire length of the crippled battlestar. He sped along moving walkways, he
hissed from one end of antigravity chutes to the other, his molecules were
disassembled then reconstituted as he teleported short distances and finally he
ran down some stairs. At last he fetched up at a door in a distant corridor
marked PLANETARY EXPLORATION SUITS. AUTHORISED ENTRY ONLY. After a quick,
cautious look around, the alien slid inside.

The
room he’d entered was bathed in a tranquil blue light and though it
occasionally shook with the nearby impact of incoming missiles he found it
strangely peaceful. As his eyesight adjusted to the gloom the alien saw far
into the distance row upon row of bulky forms, each standing on its own plinth.
These were the Planetary Exploration Suits. In essence, each outfit was a
full-sized, fully powered replica of the inhabitants of various worlds that the
Empire wished to explore without alerting the native population — a sort of
cross between a gorilla suit, a deep-sea diver’s outfit and a hollow cyborg.
Through an access panel in the rear of each costume its operator could climb
inside and once installed was able to activate it, to lift things and move
about.

The
alien deserter passed between the racks of lifeless forms, through their open
access panels he occasionally caught a gleam of metal, a brief sight of
glistening rods and highly polished swivel joints and a shadowy suggestion of
inert dials and screens. The deserter knew he didn’t have much time, the
faraway screaming of the ship’s engines told him the end couldn’t be long in
coming, but he also knew panic wouldn’t help so he tried to remain calm. The
alien was looking for one particular suit. As he searched he passed — amongst
others — a large tentacled beast, a three-metre high tusked, bear-like animal,
and an insectoid creature with enormous crab-like claws before he came to the
entity he was looking for.

This
Planetary Exploration Suit was the perfect replica of a member of the dominant
species on the primitive planet above which the battle was now being fought. It
stood in its storage tube immobile and lifeless — the figure of a big,
muscular, earth man in his mid-forties. Its hair was deep black, brushed back
from a high, intelligent forehead, its skin lightly tinged with olive. In the
days to come, though everybody was able to agree that as a whole his features were
broad and handsome, nobody was able to agree on greater detail, as if to each
of them he presented a different face.

The man
was dressed in a smart dark suit of a lightweight material, a white shirt and
dark tie, such as might have been worn on earth by a man who frequented jazz
clubs in Montmartre forty years ago — the time of the aliens’ last visit to the
earth.

The
deserter pressed a button at the foot of the tube and with a hiss the glass
cover rose into the roof. Looking round one last time he began to climb inside
the humanoid. First he wriggled his legs into its legs then slipped his arms
into its arms, squirmed his entire body inside the machine and finally fitted
his head into a head-shaped space at the top of the man’s chest. Once he was
completely inside, the access panel closed with a snap and the interior of the
machine burst into life. In front of his eyes a full-colour screen lit up, on
which were displayed the exterior view, as seen through the camera eyes of the
robot and grouped around the edges (like a head-up display in a fighter plane)
various read-outs and images, such as external temperature, infra-red night
vision, power reserves and so on.

Next,
the alien began to experiment gingerly with movement. He tilted his head and
the head of the robot moved, he moved his arms and the arms of the man moved
too. Satisfied, the alien took a step forward and the man in the business suit
strode clumsily off his podium and walked unsteadily out of the room.

In the
time that the deserter had been in the Planetary Exploration Suit Room the
condition of the ship had deteriorated rapidly and she was now in an extremely
bad way As the alien in the robot suit crept along the corridor the concussions
grew worse, flames and gases spouted from ruptured pipes and exploding
machinery, occasionally the big man would have to step delicately over the body
of a crew member. Eventually the robot came to another door marked SHUTTLE
CRAFT BAY, this one guarded by a single nervous trooper who didn’t see the big
humanoid leaping at him until the last moment by which time it was much too
late to raise his weapon or cry out before his neck was broken by a single blow
from the power-assisted arm of the robot. Without pausing, the alien opened the
door to the shuttle bay, dragged the body of the guard inside and closed it
behind him.

He was
now inside a large hangar within which were several small space craft, stubby,
inelegant little vessels used to ferry personnel between the battle cruiser and
nearby planets. The man climbed into the cockpit of one of these craft and
started it up.

Outside
the Imperial cruiser the battle raged fiercer than ever. The ship was taking
hit after hit and while its laser cannon caught numerous attacking fighters,
sending them spinning away in a thousand fragments they were instantly replaced
by other incoming craft. In the midst of this fury the stolen shuttle came
nosing out into the heat of battle from an exit hatch. It hung for a second on
the skin of the mother ship, then with a burst of its jets, powered away from
the fighting at top speed.

Soon
the battle was left far behind, and in minutes the tiny ship reached the edge
of the Earth’s atmosphere, the alien relaxed a little and began to consider
what he was going to do next. It dawned on him that he hadn’t really thought
through his escape plan that thoroughly While he’d been obsessed with getting
away from the doomed ship he hadn’t considered how he was going to live on
this foreign planet; from the reports he’d read on the ship’s central computer
he knew that the atmosphere was breathable and that with a few dietary
supplements he could eat the food, but he wondered what he was going to do with
his time, how was he going to keep himself amused? Seeing as every second of
his life up until that point had been ruled by the Empire, he thought he might
have to get some sort of a hobby.

The
scaly alien need not have worried about what he was going to do once he was on
Earth, since from the moment he’d left the battlestar his movements had been
tracked by an X-wing fighter. As the shuttle touched the penumbra of the earth
the shadowing rebel craft let loose with its cannons. The little ship took hit
after hit and, mortally wounded, spun out of control. In a cloud of burning
gases it fell through the air towards the night-time side of the blue-green
planet.