The Gat’s heart sank. His last line of defence shrivelled before his eyes and he knew he was condemned to eat at least one ‘fish-paste’ canape´ before the launch was over. The taste, he knew, would endure for months.
And a Blerontin month was equivalent to several lifetimes if you happened to come from Earth. Which, of course, nobody there did.
In fact nobody, in that entire throng of some fifty million Blerontinians who had turned up to see the launch of the Greatest Starship in the History of the Universe, had ever even heard of the Earth. And if you’d asked them they wouldn’t have been able to understand you because translation blisters were not allowed to be worn on a ‘fish-paste’ event. It was another of those stupid little traditions that made the Gat furious.*
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* The Blerontins insist on serving so-called ‘fish-paste’ sandwiches during Festivals and Important Book Launches, despite the fact that all Blerontins find them disgusting. It is a tradition that dates back to a time when Blerontin was an impoverished planet living on the edge of starvation. Having run out of every other kind of food, the Blerontin team were reluctantly forced to offer up ‘fish-paste’ sandwiches as their entry for the Centennial Inter-Galactic Canape´s Championship. For some unaccountable reason, the ‘fish-paste’ appealed to the jaded palates of the judges, clinched the championship for Blerontin, and paved the way for Blerontinian domination of the entire Galactic Centre for aeons to come.
– – – – – –
And still Leovinus did not appear.
‘Everyone here is holding their breath and keeping their fingers crossed,’ whispered the Head Reporter of the Blerontin News Gathering Bureau into his invisible microphone. ‘No one has yet even caught so much as a glimpse of the fabulous Starship, but everyone is certain that it will not only be the most technologically advanced but also the most beautiful Starship ever to have been created. It is, after all, the brain-child of Leovinus, to whose architectural genius we owe the great North – South bridge that now links our two polar caps, to whose musical inspiration we owe the Blerontin National Anthem “Our Canape´s Triumph Daily”, and to whose unsurpassable mastery of ballistics and biomass energetics we owe our third sun that now shines above us with its own famous on-off-switch… But there’s news just coming in that… what’s that?
Ladies and gentleman and things, it appears that the great Leovinus has gone missing! Nobody has seen him all day. Surely they can’t start the launch without him… but the crowd are beginning to demand some action… And uh-oh! What’s that?’
A sour note had swept through the crowd, as a band of short individuals, dressed in ragged overalls and flat caps, suddenly forced their way into the spectators’ area. They were shouting in a language no one could understand (because of the ban on translation blisters) and they were brandishing indecipherable placards.
‘It looks as if the Yassaccan delegation has managed to gain entry!’ An edge of alarm had entered the Head Reporter’s voice. This was mainly because he had his entire commentary written down in advance – as he always did. The thought that an unforeseen turn of events might now force him to look at what was actually going on and then improvise was a nightmare that had dogged his sleep for all the years that he had been in the reporting business.
‘Um!’ said the Head Reporter. He felt his head going light. ‘Er!’ He fought for breath, as he felt his bowels starting to move. ‘Oh! Ahm! What can I say?’ He was praying that the words would come to him. In his recurring nightmare – the one that he always had after eating snork chitterlings – he was in this very situation – something unforeseen had occurred – his script was whisked away by some unseen hand – and the words just never came.
It has to be explained, in defence of the Head Reporter, that unforeseen circumstances seldom occurred during public events on Blerontin, owing to the fact that the authorities exerted a pretty tight control over these things.