‘I apologize once again for having to bring you in by the service elevator,’ remarked the robot, ‘entrance to the Starship is normally at Embarkation Level.’
‘Hey!’ exclaimed Dan. ‘How come you speak English?’ Dan felt better now he’d found something concrete to question.
‘I beg your pardon, but I am not speaking… what did you say – “English”? All robotic functions on this ship are equipped with infra-violet translation sensors which automatically scan the brain-impulses of passengers for language patterns. These patterns are then rearranged inside your heads so that you can understand and speak intelligibly whilst on the ship. You are actually speaking and understanding Blerontinian. Pretty convenient for writers of science fiction – uh?’
Dan wasn’t sure what to make of this last remark -was the robot implying that he was nothing more than a figment of some writer’s mind and that this whole thing was not really happening? However, before he could think any further along these lines, his mind was overwhelmed by the fantastic situation in which they now found themselves: they were speeding vertically up the vast keel towards the main body of the Starship, a mile above the surface of the Earth.
Nigel stabbed out a number on his mobile, and called halfheartedly out of the car window: ‘Dan? Lucy? Nettle?’ But his voice barely reached the crumbled brickwork of the ruined house.
The next moment he heard a ghostly roar – like seas beating on a far-off shore.
‘Hello?’ said his mobile. ‘Oxford Police Station. Can I help you?’
Nigel didn’t reply. He was too busy watching the vast unbelievable thing as it rose up into the air again and disappeared towards the Milky Way.
‘Hello? This is Oxford Police Station,’ insisted his mobile phone. ‘Who is this?’
Nigel looked at the smashed Victorian rectory, and the driveway where his friends had stood a few moments ago, and replaced his mobile on its cradle. ‘It didn’t happen,’ he murmured to himself. ‘It didn’t happen.’
You might have thought there was a tinge of relief in the way his shoulders relaxed, but of course you would have dismissed such an idea as total fantasy.
In any case, at that same moment, Nigel suddenly became very unrelaxed again. In fact, he very nearly jumped out of his Armani trousers; he certainly hit his head on the roof of the car. ‘Ouch!’ he yelled. An old man with a flowing white beard was sitting quietly in the passenger seat; there were tears in his eyes and one of his eyebrows was just about to fall off.
9
The moment the ship took off, Dan felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. This was, of course, simply the result of the incredible G-Force that was being exerted upon his body. But Dan, who had no idea that the ship had taken off, merely thought that he was getting nervous. The sinking feeling in the stomach was quickly followed by a draining of blood from the brain, leading to momentary light-headedness, followed by total black-out.
If he hadn’t just blacked-out, Dan would have noticed that the take-off had affected Lucy and Nettle in an identical way – even though none of them knew what was happening.
‘Nothing to be alarmed about, sir, madam and thing.’ The polite robot seemed to be addressing this last to the now comatose Nettle. ‘A perfectly routine take-off. You life-forms have a good snooze while us machines get on with running the ship.’ The Doorbot, itself, then blacked out and lay in a tidy heap, while the ship accelerated at speeds far beyond its original specifications, towards an unknown quarter of the InterGalactic Space-Time Continuum.
The robots on board must have recovered consciousness before the human beings. Nettle found herself undressed and tucked up in bed in a tiny cabin about the size of her flat back in Harringay.
Apart from the size, everything about the place was unfamiliar. The sheets on the bed were made of some material that felt like silk but much thicker and heavier. The mug holding the toothbrush bore a picture of an elderly Egyptian opera singer – or at least that’s who it looked like to Nettle. She’d once received a postcard of an elderly Egyptian opera singer, and had kept it in a drawer. The toothbrush itself was rather weird, since it kept ducking its head and brushing its own handle – rather like a bird preening itself.