"This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far!"
Those of you who know me and my artistic escapades will no doubt be aware of my novel, Laszlo Hadron and the Wargod's Tomb, which I have been working on for quite some time now. Specifically, I've been writing various forms of the tale since before the 13th of April 2008. I've been at this for over two years. It's starting to get a bit silly.
So, what I intend to do is to have the first draft of this space opera yarn completed and ready to be fully read by the end of this very year. By January 1st, I will have written a full novel. The dawn that sees 2011 will see Laszlo Hadron, this I pledge to no-one in particular.
-------------------------------
Anyhoo, with vows and such out of the way, I'll leave you with some of my old fiction: the curious misadventures of Professor Theophilus Bespectacled and his robot assistant Wilmot.
First, before the characters even had names, "Pyrrhus Device":
"I don't believe you have any right to complain, this device is a revolution! A triumph of science!"
The mad-haired scientist gesticulated wildly, almost losing his balance several times. In his angrily flailing hand he clutched a small glowing box, which hummed softly to itself. The scientist's robotic lab assistant simply folded his steel arms and glared his cold glare.
"I complain because we paid far too high a price for this."
"Well, of course the price was high! Science isn't a mere child's game, it requires work and funds!! Lots and lots and funds!!"
"No, that's not what I--"
"Do you know how hard it was to isolate the sub-molecular tachyon stream?"
"Look, I--"
"And do you think the lithium arrays precisely aligned themselves?!"
"It--"
"Not to mention the arduous task of splicing the binary neutrino strings with the tachyon field! A quantum computing engine doesn't build itself, you know!"
"I'm not referring to your finances!" the robot testily declared. "I was trying to indicate--"
"You can indicate anything you like, but the invention of this computer will revolutionize the human race for centuries to come!!"
"But wasn't the human race all on the planet at the time of invention?"
"Oh. Crap."
The shattered remains of the Earth continued to drift into the black hole.
"I still say it was worth it."
"Whatever."
--------------------------------
Second, "H-Gun"
"... and that's essentially what happened" concluded Professor Theophilus Bespectacled.
"So, let me get this straight," his robot assisstant Wilmot replied. "You had a dream..."
"Yes."
'... in which you built a gun..."
"A gun, yes."
"... the function of which you have forgotten by the morning..."
"Unfortunately."
"... but you have a sneaking suspiscion that it's capable of enormous destructive potential..."
"Goes without saying, really."
"... and in spite of this, you build it anyway."
"Precisely."
Wilmot stood up and walked around the lab as his CPUs attempted to puzzle this one out. As he walked he passed the various forgotten and not-even-remotely-finished creations of his absent-minded master, wires and parts hanging out of them like leaves from an up-turned plant pot. Their tragic state was almost entirely due to professor Bespectacled's chronic forgetfulness, that seemed not to be a mere propensity for memory loss, but a malevolent memory-eating beast that had settled into Bespectacled's mind and wouldn't come out for love nor money. It was his scientific pursuits that bore the brunt of this, however, as many old and dusty would-be gadgets lay decaying all about, function long since lost to the mists of senility. Far below this lab were the holding cells, wherein lay machines that had not forgotten their function, but apparently had forgotten their threat detection programming, or had never had any in the first place. It was all a testament to the danger of misguided science, as indeed none were more misguided than Professor Bespectacled...
Presently, Wilmot came to the device that currently occupied his thinking. It didn't look terribly threatening, bearing more resmblance to a water gun than a real one. He picked it up (carefully, as years of service had taught him) and carried it over to his seat by the professor's desk, where he gently laid it down again.
"So...," he aked. "Any thoughts?"
The professor scrutinised the gun carefully, deep in thought. It was a rifle, built from a patchwork of welded metal plates, with a large tank protruding from the back, emblazoned with a thick black 'H'. The long thin barrel ended with a perforated flashguard, into which fed two copper wires. These wires were apparently magnetic, as evidenced by their menacing hum, occasional bluish spark and influence over several nearby paperclips, which were skittering madly towards them. The professor picked up the rifle, wrapping his slender fingers around the trigger and lacing one hand on its purpose-built handhold. He "hmmed" and "hahed" interestedly, bringing the barrel up to eye level and carefully watching the copper wires and the chain of paperclips dangling comically from them.
"Well?" Wilmot asked after a good minute of this behaviour.
"No idea, I'm afraid" the professor replied, dropping the gun back on the table in defeat, scattering the paperclips everywhere. "This thing is a complete mystery to me. I can't even guess what that 'H' means. Hydrogen? Could be anything, really."
If Wilmot could have sighed, he would. This was a happenstance he was all too familiar with, which was depressing given the obvious genius of the professor. Even a cursory glance around the lab would prove that whoever had built it knew a lot more about science tham the rest of humanity put together. It was clearly that the professor still did, given his brief flashes of inspiration, but it spent most of its time locked behind amnesia. "I suppose I'll have to put these with the rest of your half-invented inventions, then."
"Now, hold on, Wilmot," the professor interrupted. "We may not know what it does, but we can soon find out."
"And how is that, exactly?" Wilmot aksed warily. The specifics of the gun may have been unknown, but it was quite clearly still a gun.
"Come now, where's your sense of adventure? It's only a small gun, surely one shot couldn't hurt?" The Professor picked up the rifle and walked over to the window, opening it with the press of a button. Wilmot joined him, morbid curiosity stirring in him. The professor looked out over the city, apparently looking for something in the night-time dark.
"Ah-ha!" He seemed to have found it. "See that scrapped car over there?" He pointed to the city scrapyard, where an old, rusted Robin Reliant forlornly sat, hunched brokenly over its ungainly three wheels.
"Yeess?" Wilmot slowly answered, his vision magnifying to study the car.
"Let's see if I can't hit its wing mirror with this," the professor challenged, hefting the rifle and readying it. He peered through the scope, took careful aim, and... There was a flash and a high-pitched hiss as a bright blue beam emerged from the gun, charging at relativistic speeds towards its target. It connected, and, with an incredible roar of white noise, bloomed out in a pure white light, which proceeded to expand rapidly, engulfing everything it touched.
"Oh," the professor said. "Ah."
The long tower silently overlooked the black crater where it had once been located before engaging emergency safety protocols and launching into space, and where both a country and very short-lived star had been, in that order.
"Well," the professor at the window said after a time, "I think we know what the gun does now, at least."
Wilmot buried his metal head in his metal hands. Not again, he thought.
---------------------------------------------
Third, "Time Machine"
"Professor, for God's sake, this isn't just dangerous, it's... it's..."
Wilmot the robot continued to stare down the barmy-haired Prof. Theophilus Bespectacled, who folded his arms and returned the glare.
"Did Columbus turn back when he saw America? Did Franklin decide against flying a kite in a thunderstorm? Did the caveman stop after he burnt his fingers?" he testily returned.
"With all due respect," Wilmot countered "those men only threatened themselves. You're threatening... EVERYTHING!! Not just your future, but every future! Not just the future, but the past! Everything!!"
The two looked once more upon the Professor's latest creation. It looked a bit like a telephone booth, with an enlarged screen and a confusing series of levers and switches in place of the handset. It also bore the legend "TIME MACHINE" in place of the more usual BT logo. As cliches go, some are truly inescapable.
"What's wrong with it? If we take care--"
"If we take care, our screw-ups will be all the harder to solve."
The professor sighed in frustration. "This could be the greatest boon to history and science, and you'd have me simply dismantle it, not half an hour after its successful testing..."
If looks could maim, Prof. Bespectacled would have been left in a basket.
"Successful test...?" Wilmot's voice was commendably low, given the situation.
"Yes, yes, I just took a quick trip to 2000, nothing serious. Except... well..."
"Except what?"
"I... may... have accidentally been responsible for George W. Bush's election" Bespectacled uneasily admitted.
Wilmot glared.
"Butterfly effect, you know."
Wilmot glared.
Bespectacled chuckled nervously.
Wilmot glared, and presently spoke.
"This thing is dismantled tonight."
"Oh, come now! You can't--"
"You've done enough damage. This thing must be destroyed."
"Tommorrow, then. I'm too tired now, I'm off to bed."
Bespectacled crankily ambled to the spiral staircase, gazing somewhat lingeringly at the time machine.
---
It was late at night, or early in the morning, depending on your perspective. The lab was as quiet as the grave (even quieter, in fact, than some graves Bespectacled had experience with. But that's a different story...). Bespectacled was padding softly down the stairs, rather stealthier than usual. He trod gently over to the time machine, grinning as nothing happened. He reached his hand out towards the door handle... and leapt back in shock as the lab's strip lights switched on.
"I knew it."
Bespectacled leapt back again, in the other direction. Wilmot stood, arms folded, in angry triumph.
"I knew you simply couldn't resist."
"Wilmot, for God's sake, I'm a scientist!!"
"You're an idiot."
"No, you know what I mean!" Bespectacled shouted. "You can't seriously expect me just to ignore this! What kind of explorer of the Universe would I be if I simply destroyed it?!"
Wilmot shook his head. Typical Bespectacled.
The argument would have continued here, if not for the appearance of a mirrored silver cuboid nearby. The shining reflectivity faded to reveal a machine identical to Bespectacled's time machine, and the door opened with a creak. Out stepped...
"Wilmot?"
It looked like Wilmot. Same dark grey metal, same red eye... but he was different. His design was sleeker, more advanced. His torso stood not on a thick spinal column, but on half a sphere, that connected to its twin on his pelvis via a blue spire of energy.
"Don't mind me, I'm just here for a while," the new Wilmot said as he strode purposefully over to the other time machine, with a large baseball bat in hand.
"Wait, wait! What are you doing?!" Bespectacled demanded.
New Wilmot paused, then pointed at old Wilmot. "I'm pretty certain he's explained it sufficiently." He then lifted the bat and proceeded to smash the old time machine to pieces. It exploded a little and whined as it finally died. New Wilmot threw down the half of the bat he held and put his hands on his hips, with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"What have you done?" old Wilmot asked in horror.
"I arrived from a future where Professor Bespectacled couldn't stop screwing with history. A little tweak here, a tiny fiddle there. By the end of it, there were dinosaurs prancing about the Middle East, the Cold War quickly stopped being Cold, and the Nazi Empire had taken Britain and was having a fair go at Russia and Asia. I had to come back here and end it before it started.
"Did... did the temporal fiddling damage your technology in any way?" Bespectacled asked carefully.
"No, no, of course not. Well, yes. A bit."
Old Wilmot and Bespectacled exchanged glances.
"See, what happened was that the time machine suffered a bit of damage on the Isla Iberia, back when it became an island. Anyway, he needed a couple of my brain circuits," he tapped his steel temple, "to repair it. I'm alright now, just a bit nutty is all... teapot... "
Bespectacled and old Wilmot exchanged more glances."
"So, you don't know what'd happen if the old time machine were destroyed?" old Wilmot asked.
"Oh, of course I do. The new machine would simply cease... to... oh..."
The final thought of the Universe was reflected in our three heroes' collective final words:
"Oh, bollocks."
------------------------------------
And finally, "C-Engine"
Far out in the depths of space, a robot seethed.
"So, what went wrong this time?" it said, with commendable calm.
"Well, I went to attach my C-Engine to the ship's hull, a delicate task at best..." his barmy-haired companion replied.
"Yes, I can see sense in that..."
"And you must understand that this is an ill-understood science at best. A lot could go wrong."
"Again, yes."
"But when I was sealing the drive in place, the particle welder conked out..."
"Right..."
"... and rather than attempt the arduous repairs in the middle of an already frustrating project, I elected to seek an alternative method of adhesion."
"But why in the name of Asimov did you settle upon duct tape?!"
Wilmot twisted in the passenger seat to look once again at the plastic tarpaulin that had hastily been spread over the hole in the floor of the Volkswagen van, a vehicle that only Professor Theophilus Bespectacled would even think of considering converting into a faster-than-light starship.
"Look, I admit the situation looks bad, but you must concede that this is a remarkable technical achievement" the professor tetchily stated, adjusting his glasses.
"It is, I will give you that. We are hundreds, if not thousands of light-years from Earth, with no workable means of propulsion, a dwindling supply of oxygen and no food except a bag of Doritos and half a can of Red Bull, but we are technological pioneers. I'm honoured, really I am."
"I didn't build you to spout sarcasm all the time, you know" Bespectacled huffed.
"Well, nothing you build does what you want, does it?"
"Oh, shut up."
There was a long annoyed pause.
"So how do you propose we return home?" Wilmot asked. "Or had that not entered your calculations?"
"Of course it did, you robo-twit," Bespectacled snarkily replied. "There's a back-up C-Engine on the roofrack."
Wilmot allowed another few empty seconds to go by.
"On the roofrack."
"Yes."
"On the outside of the car."
"Yes."
"In the freezing vacuum of space."
"Yes."
"And that doesn't strike you as the least bit problematic?"
"N-ah wait, I see the problem now. You can't get at the spare drive without posing a threat to my wellbeing."
"Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't seem so dire..."
Bespectacled glared but didn't pass comment.
"So, any thoughts?"
"I'm sure I'll think of something."
"Oh joy."
---
"Alright, the C-Engine should be up and running... now!"
"Excellent! Yes, it's powering up nicely. Sterling work there, Wilmot!"
"It was your idea, Professor. And, truth be told, it was an amazing bit of thinking."
"Oh, I don't like to boast. It's just lucky we had that ornithological encyclopaedia under the seat."
Wilmot clambered back into the passenger seat and fastened his seatbelt.
"Right!" Bespectacled declared, rubbing his hands together and clutching the steering wheel. "All that remains is to locate Sol..."
He turned the wheel, and the van followed suit. The emptiness that had filled the windscreen gave way to a staggering pantheon of stars spread against space, a broad sweep of sparkling motes streaking across the cosmos, a truly dazzling celestial display.
A dazzling celestial display in which it was almost impossible to tell one star from another.
The pair's enthusiasm gave out with a wet fizzle.
"Right..."
"Well then..."
Bespectacled rubbed his chin in thought.
"Could that be... ? No, no..."
The two continued to stare at the view.
"Umm... any more bright ideas?" Wilmot ventured.
"Well, I do have one..."
The professor raised a finger dramatically, and pointed to a star...
"Eeny meeny miny mo..."
So, what I intend to do is to have the first draft of this space opera yarn completed and ready to be fully read by the end of this very year. By January 1st, I will have written a full novel. The dawn that sees 2011 will see Laszlo Hadron, this I pledge to no-one in particular.
-------------------------------
Anyhoo, with vows and such out of the way, I'll leave you with some of my old fiction: the curious misadventures of Professor Theophilus Bespectacled and his robot assistant Wilmot.
First, before the characters even had names, "Pyrrhus Device":
"I don't believe you have any right to complain, this device is a revolution! A triumph of science!"
The mad-haired scientist gesticulated wildly, almost losing his balance several times. In his angrily flailing hand he clutched a small glowing box, which hummed softly to itself. The scientist's robotic lab assistant simply folded his steel arms and glared his cold glare.
"I complain because we paid far too high a price for this."
"Well, of course the price was high! Science isn't a mere child's game, it requires work and funds!! Lots and lots and funds!!"
"No, that's not what I--"
"Do you know how hard it was to isolate the sub-molecular tachyon stream?"
"Look, I--"
"And do you think the lithium arrays precisely aligned themselves?!"
"It--"
"Not to mention the arduous task of splicing the binary neutrino strings with the tachyon field! A quantum computing engine doesn't build itself, you know!"
"I'm not referring to your finances!" the robot testily declared. "I was trying to indicate--"
"You can indicate anything you like, but the invention of this computer will revolutionize the human race for centuries to come!!"
"But wasn't the human race all on the planet at the time of invention?"
"Oh. Crap."
The shattered remains of the Earth continued to drift into the black hole.
"I still say it was worth it."
"Whatever."
--------------------------------
Second, "H-Gun"
"... and that's essentially what happened" concluded Professor Theophilus Bespectacled.
"So, let me get this straight," his robot assisstant Wilmot replied. "You had a dream..."
"Yes."
'... in which you built a gun..."
"A gun, yes."
"... the function of which you have forgotten by the morning..."
"Unfortunately."
"... but you have a sneaking suspiscion that it's capable of enormous destructive potential..."
"Goes without saying, really."
"... and in spite of this, you build it anyway."
"Precisely."
Wilmot stood up and walked around the lab as his CPUs attempted to puzzle this one out. As he walked he passed the various forgotten and not-even-remotely-finished creations of his absent-minded master, wires and parts hanging out of them like leaves from an up-turned plant pot. Their tragic state was almost entirely due to professor Bespectacled's chronic forgetfulness, that seemed not to be a mere propensity for memory loss, but a malevolent memory-eating beast that had settled into Bespectacled's mind and wouldn't come out for love nor money. It was his scientific pursuits that bore the brunt of this, however, as many old and dusty would-be gadgets lay decaying all about, function long since lost to the mists of senility. Far below this lab were the holding cells, wherein lay machines that had not forgotten their function, but apparently had forgotten their threat detection programming, or had never had any in the first place. It was all a testament to the danger of misguided science, as indeed none were more misguided than Professor Bespectacled...
Presently, Wilmot came to the device that currently occupied his thinking. It didn't look terribly threatening, bearing more resmblance to a water gun than a real one. He picked it up (carefully, as years of service had taught him) and carried it over to his seat by the professor's desk, where he gently laid it down again.
"So...," he aked. "Any thoughts?"
The professor scrutinised the gun carefully, deep in thought. It was a rifle, built from a patchwork of welded metal plates, with a large tank protruding from the back, emblazoned with a thick black 'H'. The long thin barrel ended with a perforated flashguard, into which fed two copper wires. These wires were apparently magnetic, as evidenced by their menacing hum, occasional bluish spark and influence over several nearby paperclips, which were skittering madly towards them. The professor picked up the rifle, wrapping his slender fingers around the trigger and lacing one hand on its purpose-built handhold. He "hmmed" and "hahed" interestedly, bringing the barrel up to eye level and carefully watching the copper wires and the chain of paperclips dangling comically from them.
"Well?" Wilmot asked after a good minute of this behaviour.
"No idea, I'm afraid" the professor replied, dropping the gun back on the table in defeat, scattering the paperclips everywhere. "This thing is a complete mystery to me. I can't even guess what that 'H' means. Hydrogen? Could be anything, really."
If Wilmot could have sighed, he would. This was a happenstance he was all too familiar with, which was depressing given the obvious genius of the professor. Even a cursory glance around the lab would prove that whoever had built it knew a lot more about science tham the rest of humanity put together. It was clearly that the professor still did, given his brief flashes of inspiration, but it spent most of its time locked behind amnesia. "I suppose I'll have to put these with the rest of your half-invented inventions, then."
"Now, hold on, Wilmot," the professor interrupted. "We may not know what it does, but we can soon find out."
"And how is that, exactly?" Wilmot aksed warily. The specifics of the gun may have been unknown, but it was quite clearly still a gun.
"Come now, where's your sense of adventure? It's only a small gun, surely one shot couldn't hurt?" The Professor picked up the rifle and walked over to the window, opening it with the press of a button. Wilmot joined him, morbid curiosity stirring in him. The professor looked out over the city, apparently looking for something in the night-time dark.
"Ah-ha!" He seemed to have found it. "See that scrapped car over there?" He pointed to the city scrapyard, where an old, rusted Robin Reliant forlornly sat, hunched brokenly over its ungainly three wheels.
"Yeess?" Wilmot slowly answered, his vision magnifying to study the car.
"Let's see if I can't hit its wing mirror with this," the professor challenged, hefting the rifle and readying it. He peered through the scope, took careful aim, and... There was a flash and a high-pitched hiss as a bright blue beam emerged from the gun, charging at relativistic speeds towards its target. It connected, and, with an incredible roar of white noise, bloomed out in a pure white light, which proceeded to expand rapidly, engulfing everything it touched.
"Oh," the professor said. "Ah."
The long tower silently overlooked the black crater where it had once been located before engaging emergency safety protocols and launching into space, and where both a country and very short-lived star had been, in that order.
"Well," the professor at the window said after a time, "I think we know what the gun does now, at least."
Wilmot buried his metal head in his metal hands. Not again, he thought.
---------------------------------------------
Third, "Time Machine"
"Professor, for God's sake, this isn't just dangerous, it's... it's..."
Wilmot the robot continued to stare down the barmy-haired Prof. Theophilus Bespectacled, who folded his arms and returned the glare.
"Did Columbus turn back when he saw America? Did Franklin decide against flying a kite in a thunderstorm? Did the caveman stop after he burnt his fingers?" he testily returned.
"With all due respect," Wilmot countered "those men only threatened themselves. You're threatening... EVERYTHING!! Not just your future, but every future! Not just the future, but the past! Everything!!"
The two looked once more upon the Professor's latest creation. It looked a bit like a telephone booth, with an enlarged screen and a confusing series of levers and switches in place of the handset. It also bore the legend "TIME MACHINE" in place of the more usual BT logo. As cliches go, some are truly inescapable.
"What's wrong with it? If we take care--"
"If we take care, our screw-ups will be all the harder to solve."
The professor sighed in frustration. "This could be the greatest boon to history and science, and you'd have me simply dismantle it, not half an hour after its successful testing..."
If looks could maim, Prof. Bespectacled would have been left in a basket.
"Successful test...?" Wilmot's voice was commendably low, given the situation.
"Yes, yes, I just took a quick trip to 2000, nothing serious. Except... well..."
"Except what?"
"I... may... have accidentally been responsible for George W. Bush's election" Bespectacled uneasily admitted.
Wilmot glared.
"Butterfly effect, you know."
Wilmot glared.
Bespectacled chuckled nervously.
Wilmot glared, and presently spoke.
"This thing is dismantled tonight."
"Oh, come now! You can't--"
"You've done enough damage. This thing must be destroyed."
"Tommorrow, then. I'm too tired now, I'm off to bed."
Bespectacled crankily ambled to the spiral staircase, gazing somewhat lingeringly at the time machine.
---
It was late at night, or early in the morning, depending on your perspective. The lab was as quiet as the grave (even quieter, in fact, than some graves Bespectacled had experience with. But that's a different story...). Bespectacled was padding softly down the stairs, rather stealthier than usual. He trod gently over to the time machine, grinning as nothing happened. He reached his hand out towards the door handle... and leapt back in shock as the lab's strip lights switched on.
"I knew it."
Bespectacled leapt back again, in the other direction. Wilmot stood, arms folded, in angry triumph.
"I knew you simply couldn't resist."
"Wilmot, for God's sake, I'm a scientist!!"
"You're an idiot."
"No, you know what I mean!" Bespectacled shouted. "You can't seriously expect me just to ignore this! What kind of explorer of the Universe would I be if I simply destroyed it?!"
Wilmot shook his head. Typical Bespectacled.
The argument would have continued here, if not for the appearance of a mirrored silver cuboid nearby. The shining reflectivity faded to reveal a machine identical to Bespectacled's time machine, and the door opened with a creak. Out stepped...
"Wilmot?"
It looked like Wilmot. Same dark grey metal, same red eye... but he was different. His design was sleeker, more advanced. His torso stood not on a thick spinal column, but on half a sphere, that connected to its twin on his pelvis via a blue spire of energy.
"Don't mind me, I'm just here for a while," the new Wilmot said as he strode purposefully over to the other time machine, with a large baseball bat in hand.
"Wait, wait! What are you doing?!" Bespectacled demanded.
New Wilmot paused, then pointed at old Wilmot. "I'm pretty certain he's explained it sufficiently." He then lifted the bat and proceeded to smash the old time machine to pieces. It exploded a little and whined as it finally died. New Wilmot threw down the half of the bat he held and put his hands on his hips, with the satisfaction of a job well done.
"What have you done?" old Wilmot asked in horror.
"I arrived from a future where Professor Bespectacled couldn't stop screwing with history. A little tweak here, a tiny fiddle there. By the end of it, there were dinosaurs prancing about the Middle East, the Cold War quickly stopped being Cold, and the Nazi Empire had taken Britain and was having a fair go at Russia and Asia. I had to come back here and end it before it started.
"Did... did the temporal fiddling damage your technology in any way?" Bespectacled asked carefully.
"No, no, of course not. Well, yes. A bit."
Old Wilmot and Bespectacled exchanged glances.
"See, what happened was that the time machine suffered a bit of damage on the Isla Iberia, back when it became an island. Anyway, he needed a couple of my brain circuits," he tapped his steel temple, "to repair it. I'm alright now, just a bit nutty is all... teapot... "
Bespectacled and old Wilmot exchanged more glances."
"So, you don't know what'd happen if the old time machine were destroyed?" old Wilmot asked.
"Oh, of course I do. The new machine would simply cease... to... oh..."
The final thought of the Universe was reflected in our three heroes' collective final words:
"Oh, bollocks."
------------------------------------
And finally, "C-Engine"
Far out in the depths of space, a robot seethed.
"So, what went wrong this time?" it said, with commendable calm.
"Well, I went to attach my C-Engine to the ship's hull, a delicate task at best..." his barmy-haired companion replied.
"Yes, I can see sense in that..."
"And you must understand that this is an ill-understood science at best. A lot could go wrong."
"Again, yes."
"But when I was sealing the drive in place, the particle welder conked out..."
"Right..."
"... and rather than attempt the arduous repairs in the middle of an already frustrating project, I elected to seek an alternative method of adhesion."
"But why in the name of Asimov did you settle upon duct tape?!"
Wilmot twisted in the passenger seat to look once again at the plastic tarpaulin that had hastily been spread over the hole in the floor of the Volkswagen van, a vehicle that only Professor Theophilus Bespectacled would even think of considering converting into a faster-than-light starship.
"Look, I admit the situation looks bad, but you must concede that this is a remarkable technical achievement" the professor tetchily stated, adjusting his glasses.
"It is, I will give you that. We are hundreds, if not thousands of light-years from Earth, with no workable means of propulsion, a dwindling supply of oxygen and no food except a bag of Doritos and half a can of Red Bull, but we are technological pioneers. I'm honoured, really I am."
"I didn't build you to spout sarcasm all the time, you know" Bespectacled huffed.
"Well, nothing you build does what you want, does it?"
"Oh, shut up."
There was a long annoyed pause.
"So how do you propose we return home?" Wilmot asked. "Or had that not entered your calculations?"
"Of course it did, you robo-twit," Bespectacled snarkily replied. "There's a back-up C-Engine on the roofrack."
Wilmot allowed another few empty seconds to go by.
"On the roofrack."
"Yes."
"On the outside of the car."
"Yes."
"In the freezing vacuum of space."
"Yes."
"And that doesn't strike you as the least bit problematic?"
"N-ah wait, I see the problem now. You can't get at the spare drive without posing a threat to my wellbeing."
"Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't seem so dire..."
Bespectacled glared but didn't pass comment.
"So, any thoughts?"
"I'm sure I'll think of something."
"Oh joy."
---
"Alright, the C-Engine should be up and running... now!"
"Excellent! Yes, it's powering up nicely. Sterling work there, Wilmot!"
"It was your idea, Professor. And, truth be told, it was an amazing bit of thinking."
"Oh, I don't like to boast. It's just lucky we had that ornithological encyclopaedia under the seat."
Wilmot clambered back into the passenger seat and fastened his seatbelt.
"Right!" Bespectacled declared, rubbing his hands together and clutching the steering wheel. "All that remains is to locate Sol..."
He turned the wheel, and the van followed suit. The emptiness that had filled the windscreen gave way to a staggering pantheon of stars spread against space, a broad sweep of sparkling motes streaking across the cosmos, a truly dazzling celestial display.
A dazzling celestial display in which it was almost impossible to tell one star from another.
The pair's enthusiasm gave out with a wet fizzle.
"Right..."
"Well then..."
Bespectacled rubbed his chin in thought.
"Could that be... ? No, no..."
The two continued to stare at the view.
"Umm... any more bright ideas?" Wilmot ventured.
"Well, I do have one..."
The professor raised a finger dramatically, and pointed to a star...
"Eeny meeny miny mo..."