A Toaster on Mars (11 page)

She'd mostly become used to being disappointed. After all, how many times could someone be let down before it became second nature? But Lisa couldn't forget the look on Martha Farnworth's face. The girl's family was made of
old
money, earned seven centuries before by an ancestor who had owned a thimble factory.

‘Maybe your dad had to work,' Martha had suggested. ‘There are lots of people who still do that.'

Martha wasn't being intentionally cruel. She had looked concerned.

And that
hurt
.

Today Lisa had realised something she had forgotten. Despite his many failings, she still loved her father.

The cell seemed to close in around her. She tried to quell the quaking in her stomach. Her parents weren't the sort to sit back and do nothing, and neither was she.

Bartholomew Badde might think he has the upper hand
, she thought.
But he doesn't know what he's letting himself in for.

16

Blake marvelled at his own stupidity. He had successfully landed himself in yet another dark and smelly place.

Why does this always happen to me?

This dark and smelly place, like so many others, was filled with strange sounds. They were made by rats—or Blake hoped they were.

The elevator had deposited the three of them in a tunnel that Nicki had quickly confirmed led to the Global Arms Defence Organisation. It had been a relief at first to be away from Perfection, but now Blake had the unpleasant feeling they were being followed.

He shone the torch behind them, cutting the gloom like a laser. The large tunnel had railway tracks, and
disused pipes along the walls. It was obvious no one had been down here for years. Maybe centuries.

‘What is it?' Astrid asked.

‘Just checking,' Blake said.

‘Like hell. What's back there?'

They all peered into the distance, a wall of solid black far beyond the range of the torch.

‘I can't see anything,' Blake said.

‘Me neither,' Astrid said.

‘My eyes, despite their radiant beauty,' Nicki said, ‘can't make out anything either, though I can check my other sensors.'

As she held out an arm, a patch of golden skin slid sideways and a radar dish popped out. It spun around, beeped a few times and rapidly snapped back out of sight.

‘Hmm,' she said, ‘that's a worry. I'm getting unusually high levels of radiation.'

‘Radiation?' Astrid said. ‘What's that?'

‘Back in the 20th century,' Nicki explained, ‘primitive humans had a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with nuclear energy.'

‘What sort of idiots were they?'

‘Well, on the Hopkins Chart of Idiot Behaviour, they ranked—'

‘Never mind,' Blake interrupted. ‘Just tell us if we're in any danger?'

‘That depends on your definition of
we
,' Nicki said. ‘My deutronium skin is virtually indestructible, so I could live down here for centuries with no ill effects.'

‘And what about us?'

‘You'll be fine, just as long as you don't mind losing all your hair, your teeth falling out, and ending up looking like a prune—'

‘How long have we got?'

‘Your organs will suffer irreparable damage in about an hour,' Nicki said. ‘After that you will both be reduced to melted bags of glow-in-the-dark goo.'

‘What a relief,' Astrid said. ‘I thought we might be in trouble.'

‘My map shows that this tunnel reaches a junction in about a mile. The walls are reinforced there and should protect us.'

‘Then we'd better hurry,' Blake said.

Doubling their speed, they rushed down the tunnel. They didn't see the creature slithering after them. It had existed quite happily for hundreds of years without interference. But now it had been disturbed—and it didn't like it.

Where it came from, or how it had come into being, was beyond the creature's comprehension. All it knew was that it did not exist and then it did. There was the
before
and there was the
after
. Of the before, it knew nothing. In the after, it found itself surrounded by cold, moist blackness. Over time, it gradually came to realise that other living things also inhabited this strange ecosystem.

It also knew it was hungry.

Mostly, the creature was satisfied by a diet of rats and passing cockroaches. Once, many years before, a
stray dog had fallen down an ancient ventilation shaft, landing only a few feet away.

The dog's name was Casper and he had broken one of his legs. Whimpering, he had limped about in the dark. There was a strange smell down here, Casper thought.
A cheesy smell
.

Then Casper stepped onto something spongy and warm. Before he could react, Casper was abruptly folded in half, chopped into multiple pieces, sucked down a six-inch digestive tract and reduced to acidic sludge.

The creature still remembered the taste of the dog, often recalling its demise with great pleasure. Or what passed for pleasure. It remembered the myriad scents it had picked up from the dog before its death—strange, tantalising odours that teased it with hints of another world.

The creature had often wondered about that world.

Today, some of it had intruded into its domain.

It had begun with:

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Then—

‘You're on my foot!'

‘You weigh a ton!'

‘Get off my hand!'

The sounds had meant little to the creature, but the scents had piqued its interest. One of the newcomers
held no more appeal than a brick, but the other two were positively…desirable. They could be its best meal in two centuries.

‘Garrrfffff,' it said.

The cry carried down the long tunnel to where Blake had just climbed over a rockfall where the ceiling had collapsed.

‘Did you hear that?'

‘I did,' Nicki said. ‘I think we're being followed.'

‘By what?' Blake asked.

‘Well, it's a thing.'

‘A
thing
?' Blake stared at her. ‘An IQ of 30,000,000 and the best you can come up with is
It's a thing
?'

‘Okay.' Nicki paused. ‘It's a really
big
thing.'

‘Let's just get moving,' Astrid said. ‘Whatever it is, we should keep our distance.'

They hurried down the tunnel, but the sound of slithering, accompanied by a wheezing growl, grew closer.

‘We haven't known each other long,' Nicki said to the others. ‘But I've grown quite fond of you.'

‘Thank you, Nicki,' Astrid said.

‘I'd hate to see you devoured by an underground monster.'

‘Nice of you to say,' Blake said.

‘To see you torn limb from limb,' Nicki continued. ‘To see your eyes sucked from their sockets, to see your headless corpses—'

‘We get the idea.'

‘Uh oh,' Astrid said.

‘Uh oh—what?' Blake asked.

But in the next instant he knew. The tunnel abruptly ended at a concrete wall.

‘What the sprot is this?' Blake said.

‘Oh dear,' Nicki said. ‘The maps haven't been updated.'

‘I think it's a sewerage pipe,' Nicki said. ‘Breaking through would flood the tunnel. I'd be fine, but those of us who need oxygen would have problems.'

Another growl rolled down the tunnel from behind.

‘That sounds closer,' Astrid said.

‘It is.' Nicki studied her datapad. ‘This is interesting. The thing, uh, the really
big
thing, is a result of radioactive waste.' She did a double take. ‘That's very odd.'

Before Nicki could define
very odd
, Astrid raised a shaking arm and pointed to the rockfall they had
crossed only a minute before. Something had filled the gap above it.

Something dark. Something large.

The creature slithered resolutely over the obstacle, raised what passed for a head and sniffed the air with what could optimistically be called a nose.

Blake froze. Would their blasters work on the creature?

He made a tiny hand motion to the others to remain still. Maybe if the creature didn't see them, it would assume it had lost its prey and slither back to whatever hellhole it called home. Its ‘head' moved about like a slug testing the air.

The creature seemed frustrated, as if sensing it had lost the trail, and slowly began to turn around.

It's working!
Blake thought.
It's—

‘Yippee!' Nicki screamed. ‘Come and get us,
you sprot eater
!'

The creature roared and then charged.

17

Barnaby Hazleton loved art.

His mother had taken him to the Louvre when he was a child and he had literally jumped for joy as she led him from room to room. As far as he was concerned, science helped you to live, but art gave you a reason
to
live.

Fortunately, his mother was a wealthy woman, allowing Barnaby to pursue his passion. As soon as he was old enough to pick up a paintbrush, he started producing his own paintings. He worked day and night, studying under the best art teachers Earth had to offer. But by the time of his twenty-first birthday, he had to face the terrible truth.

He had no artistic talent.

Oh, he could copy. He could reproduce Leonardo's
Mona Lisa
or Bargetti's
Seven Drapnas Eating the Mayor of Fellshaw
as accurately as a photograph. More accurately, some would say. His own teachers marvelled at how he could reproduce not only every brushstroke of the original artist but a sense of the artist as well. His teachers all agreed he was a marvellous copier, but as far as being able to
create
original work…

‘Some of us have it,' Señor Felipe, his favourite teacher, told him one day. ‘And some of us do not. Your composition is unbalanced. Your colours are wrong. Your tonal gradients…' He shuddered in silent horror. ‘Well, you understand what I mean.'

‘But surely I can improve!'

Señor Felipe had tried to be encouraging. ‘Stick to what you are best at,' he said. ‘Copying.'

This evaluation was so soul-destroying that Barnaby had given up art for a year. By this stage his mother had moved them to Neo City, purchasing an enormous underground apartment on the east side of town. Unfortunately, as her age increased, so did her eating, and by sixty she weighed over 400 pounds. Barnaby, meanwhile, remained in his room, gloomily watching soap operas and nature documentaries.

Barnaby realised he had reached rock bottom when he found himself actually enjoying the entire series of
The Giant Snail Families of Antareas
. All nine episodes followed the path of a family of snails as they travelled a mile across a rocky ledge during the long Antareas winter. The more memorable episodes were ‘Herman Bruises an Antenna', and the grand finale, ‘Felix Reaches a Rock'. When Barnaby finished watching the last episode he found himself limping to the kitchen, wondering if he might have been happier as a snail.

That's when two events changed his life forever. His mother was watching a program in the living room about a painting destroyed in a fire. Peering over her shoulder, he almost wept when he realised the work was Dobvey's
I Looked Up and Saw a Garble
, one of his most revered pieces.

‘My God,' Barnaby said. ‘What a terrible loss.'

Which was when the second thing happened that changed Barnaby forever. He discovered the reason for his mother's silence: she was stone-cold dead, taken suddenly by a heart attack.

Slumping onto the couch beside her, he was surprised he didn't feel particularly upset about his mother's death. Instead, his eyes focused on the television.
I Looked Up and Saw a Garble
was lost forever, but that did not mean it could not live again.

And so began Barnaby Hazleton's second life.

After his mother's funeral, he dragged out his canvases and paints that had been languishing in the cupboard
and started working on his version of the painting. Day and night he studied computerised images, applying paint to canvas with an obsessive zeal to reproduce the original. Nine months later, he staggered back from the canvas with an exhausted sigh.

I Looked Up and Saw a Garble
did not just look similar to the original; it was identical in every respect.

Over the next twenty years he created dozens more copies of other famous paintings, gradually tearing out most of the underground apartment's fixtures to expand his gallery of history's greatest works.

Or, at least, his versions of history's greatest works.

At the age of forty-five, Barnaby had just completed his pièce de résistance. Five years before, someone had stolen Leonardo's
Last Supper
from its location in Old Milan. In the middle of the night, an industrious thief had removed the entire wall upon which it was painted.

Now, Barnaby stood before his version of the original. The work had been taxing. This time he had pushed himself to the limit, working for days at a time without food or sleep. In the end, however, Barnaby felt he had outdone himself. The faces of the apostles were truly expressive, exhibiting various levels of shock and dismay as Jesus revealed that one would betray him.