It’s so difficult to know what things are supposed to be when you suddenly turn up unexpectedly on a different world which has a different culture, a different set of the most basic assumptions about life, and also incredibly dull and meaningless architecture.
The sky above the buildings was a cold and hostile black. The stars, which should have been blindingly brilliant points of light this far from the sun were blurred and dulled by the thickness of the huge shielding bubble. Perspex or something like it. Something dull and heavy anyway.
Tricia wound the tape back again to the beginning.
She knew there was something slightly odd about it.
Well, in fact, there were about a million things that were slightly odd about it, but there was one that was nagging at her and she hadn’t quite got it.
She sighed and yawned.
As she waited for the tape to rewind she cleared away some of the dirty polystyrene coffee cups that had accumulated on the editing desk and tipped them into the bin.
She was sitting in a small editing suite at a video production company in Soho. She had `Do not disturb’ notices plastered all over the door, and a block on all incoming calls at the switch- board. This was originally to protect her astonishing scoop, but now it was to protect her from embarrassment.
She would watch the tape all the way through again from the beginning. If she could bear to. She might do some fast forwarding here and there.
It was about four o’clock on Monday afternoon, and she had a kind of sick feeling. She was trying to work out what the cause of this slightly sick feeling was, and there was no shortage of candidates.
First of all, it had all come on top of the overnight flight from New York. The red eye. Always a killer, that.
Then, being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing your job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she was sure it was worth a few dozen points.
It wasn’t that the journey had been particularly stressful. It had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.
Well that was pretty astounding wasn’t it? Flying to the outer limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard-of form of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they agreed that it was pretty good.
`But how does it work?’ she had demanded excitedly. She was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.
She found that part of the tape and played it through to herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves, were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make the ship go.
`Yes, but what principle does it work on?’ she heard herself demand, from behind the camera.
`Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something like that?’ they said.
`Yes,’ persisted Tricia. `What is it?’
`It probably is something of the kind,’ they said.
`Like what?’
`Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You’d have to ask the Flight Engineer.’
`Which one is he?’
`We don’t know. We have all lost our minds, you see.’
`Oh yes,’ said Tricia, a little faintly. `So you said. Um, how did you lose your minds, exactly , then?.’
`We don’t know,’ they said, patiently.
`Because you’ve lost your minds,’ echoed Tricia, glumly.
`Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight. We watch television. It is something we enjoy.’