Brobostigon pushed Leovinus off him, and the old man staggered back and fell onto the floor across the outspread wings of his beloved creature.
‘You’re blind, Leovinus! You sit up there in your ivory tower, thinking you’re too high-minded and pure to deal with grubby things like business and finance! Well, this whole thing’s gone way out of control thanks to you!’
‘What d’you mean? What are you talking about?’ Leovinus was almost crying.
‘This whole project is a financial catastrophe! Didn’t you realise that? We’re on the brink of a major fiscal meltdown!’ Brobostigon was trying to get to the door, but Leovinus, with surprising agility, was back on his feet and cutting off the exit.
‘So what are you trying to do?’ But even as he asked the question, Leovinus suddenly saw – with total clarity – the whole plot ‘The insurance!’ he gasped. ‘You were going to scuttle my priceless ship and claim the insurance!’
‘Grow up!’ growled Brobostigon. ‘This is the real world…’ But he never got any further. The aged genius had hurled himself upon him, hitting the manager squarely on the chin with a remarkably mundane upper-cut. Brobostigon lurched backwards, caught his foot on one of Titania’s wings, and fell into the Vac-U-Bus tray.
The moment he did, the Vac-U-Bus robot was activated. It leant forward extending its brass snout: ‘Always a pleasure to dispose of your rubbish!’ it announced, and sucked Brobostigon up. There was an unpleasant crunching sound and a slight plop! and the project manager was gone!
The Vac-U-Bus system was a rather controversial part of the ship’s design. In an age when telepresence was all the rage, the idea of transmitting objects around the ship quite physically and literally, by means of vacuum tubes, seemed old-fashioned and retrogressive. But Leovinus had insisted. It was yet another little irony that he cherished. He finally carried the day by using the safety argument. Physical transport was always less risky than teleportation or any pseudo-travel arrangement. What’s more, his Vac-U-Bus robots would be able to categorize and sort everything put into their tray – so if you failed to tell them where you wanted your object sending, they would do it automatically.
The system, however, was not designed for human beings, and the Vac-U-Bus was supposed to be programmed to reject any living human who might fall into the tray. Clearly this was yet another area where compromises had been made. Leovinus knew, with a queasy tingle, that Brobostigon had become the victim of his own plot and would now be a condensed cube of detritus on its way to the ship’s bilge.
And now the full impact of the situation began to come home to the Great Man. Here he was – the Greatest Genius the Galaxy Had Ever Known – the day before the launch of his ultimate masterpiece, with an unfinished ship, a financial crisis (of which he had known nothing) and a dead project manager caught in the act of sabotage. This was not going to look good in the official biography.
Meanwhile – where was Scraliontis? Crossa Brobostigon had said her husband had come to the ship to meet the accountant.
Leovinus knelt beside the disfigured Titania, and lovingly slipped the silver shard into the nerve centre at the base of her skull. His hand shook as he realized the other artery was still missing; in fact – now he came to look – most of her brain was missing – how had he not noticed that before? Titania’s brain! So delicate it was! The slightest shock or scratch could permanently injure it.
With a ship of this sophistication you couldn’t afford to have the nerve centre non-functional. There had been recent stories about a new phenomenon: a kind of high-tech metal fatigue that could afflict certain artifacts which had too high a density of logic systems built into them: SMEF. Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. Leovinus knew it was theoretically possible if unlikely. He also knew that practically every molecule on the Starship Titanic was in some way part of the ship’s logic system. If the thing were launched in its present state – who knew what catastrophe might follow?