Saucerers and Gondoliers - Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - Outside

The airlock door was operated by Sergeant Sheldrake, who wound it open using sheer muscle power and a wheel mounted next to the door labelled MANUAL OVERRIDE. This, to Ant, suggested that the door had originally been electrically operated, which in turn suggested that the electricity had long since failed. While he wound the wheel, Sergeant Sheldrake kept an anxious eye on the world outside the door he was opening.
The door was made of steel, thick as a brick. It had dents and scratches in its outside surface. Luckily there was no sign outside of whatever had made the scratches; only a jumble of enormous rocks covered with what looked and smelt like dead stinking seaweed. Ant, who had been expecting a rush of fresh air when the door opened, ground his teeth together in frustration.
"Stick to the path", said Sergeant Sheldrake. "Do not touch anything, no matter how pink and fluffy it appears. I am thinking particularly here of those of you of the female persuasion."
What the Sergeant could have meant by that, Ant had no idea - until, a few steps out into the reeking air, they passed a rock wall covered with what looked for all the world like fluffy pink pencil cases of the sort small girls would fight to possess. No girl, without being warned, could have resisted reaching out of pet them, and possibly even insert pencils into them, an action which would almost certainly have resulted in the creatures attempting to defend themselves.
"Jackson's Deadly Carmine Sea Puff", said Sergeant Sheldrake with gruff respect. "They get stranded here at high tide. Their plush pink envenomed integuments will despatch a fully grown Rebel prisoner of war in under a minute."
Ant wondered briefly how Sergeant Sheldrake got such information - but secretly, he knew the answer, even if he was not sure he wanted to. And this information led him inevitably to the conclusion: When our own Rebel prisoner of war, Mr. Turpin, is fit to leave the hospital, what will happen to him then?
He pulled his wrist up close to his mouth and, pretending to look at his watch, hissed:
“Rude Dog to Princess Meow, I think we have a problem, over.”
Around his wrist, a tiny radio communicator that had been carefully stolen by Cleo buzzed back: “Princess Meow to Rude Dog, we are approaching Location Thunderzord with The Goods, it had better be a damn good problem, over.”
“Am approaching Location Thunderzord myself, but our problem is Mr. Turpin. I think if he stays here he’s going to die, Cleo, over.”
“I’m Princess Meow, not Cleo, idiot. Everyone with a functioning wrist communicator now knows who I am, over -”
Glenn Bob leaned over to Ant. “She’s quite right there, actually”, he said.
"NO - TALKIN - IN - LINE." Sergeant Sheldrake picked up Ant and Glenn Bob, with one hand on the scruff of each of their uniform collars, and marched them to the front of the line. Great, thought Ant. Now we’ve no chance of getting away.

"On your LEFT" (went Sergeant Sheldrake's running commentary, his hand fixed on Ant's shoulder like the claws of a ten ton parrot) "is what appears to the untutored eye to be a beautiful blue rock pool." Ant took Sergeant Sheldrake's word for it. In the red light from the sky, all things were varying shades of scarlet. The Carmine Sea Puffs might actually have looked white in Earth sunlight.
Why, Ant thought to himself, does everything at ground level on this planet look like it belongs on a beach at low tide?
Sergeant Sheldrake pulled a pinch of tofu jerky from his pocket and tossed it into the pool. The pool walls closed like a camera shutter, splattering pool water over the nearby rocks where it steamed and sizzled like eggs frying on a hot griddle. Where the pool had been was now a boulder-sized mass heaving like a whole kennel of dogs fighting in a sack.
"That is the above-ground stomach of a Spivey's Common Nibbler", said the Sergeant. "Had that been your leg in there, it'd've been a long hop home. The first sign of the presence of a Nibbler is the wonderful clear blueness of the water. This is on account of the fact that Nibbler stomach juices contain sulphuric acid. It is not pond water y'all are observing. It is bile."
How do these people live on such a planet, thought Ant, and then reminded himself that, of course, they didn't. They cowered underground and hid from the planet instead.
"Of course, the really dangerous critters are excluded by our Electrified Perimeter", drawled the Sergeant. "Hence the reason for our excursion, ladies."
Sheldrake had now stopped in front of a heap of gloves, masks, kneeling pads, and shovels.
"You will use the gloves; you will wear the kneeling pads; you will wear a mask. If you do not and one of the weeds bites you, chances are you might not make it back to sickbay."
Bites you? thought Ant.
The gloves were of tough, scratchy material, and reached up to Ant's elbows. The masks were so heavily pitted and scratched as to make wearing them like seeing the world through a toilet window. The shovel had seen better days. With the kneepads strapped on together as well, Ant felt like a cricketer going out to bat.
The perimeter fence was the most impressive item of engineering Ant had seen on New Dixie. It was twice the height of a house, supported on immense concrete pillars and strung with cable stretched taut up to the top, where coils of rusty barbed wire were tangled. The taut wires, Ant guessed, would be the electrified ones.
The Sergeant threw a shovel against the fence. It bounced off without being electrified.
"Current's off", he said. "Get to work."
He propped himself on a high boulder out of the way of the wind, and scanned the terrain outside the fence nervously. Ant noted that his hands were still round the trigger and foregrip of his rifle.
How do I get out of this? thought Ant. I can't run away from here to Airlock Thirteen without being missed, and this is the only part of the perimeter where the current in the wire's switched off. How are we going to escape all together, with Mr. Turpin, and get through the wire?
Devegetation turned out to be back-breaking work. The rocks were covered with a dense thatch of what Sergeant Sheldrake described as 'Gorgons’ Hair', a slippery, oily plant that resembled seaweed and did indeed cling to the rock like hair to a head. What had looked like an educational excursion on the school timetable was, Ant suspected, actually the use of his class as free slave labour.
"Careful chippin them there roots away; don't put a hole in your glove there, or it'll take root in your skin", cautioned the Sergeant. "It'll take root in steel iffen you give it a chance. We got to spray them concrete pillars yonder with pesticide an replace em once every five years."
He gestured at the support pillars for the perimeter fence, which did indeed look in a bad way. They were covered in plant life, and every time the wind blew, the one nearest to Ant creaked like his grandma's legs.
"How long since these pillars were replaced?" whispered Ant to Glenn Bob.
"About ten year", said Glenn Bob, looking up at the pillars in fear.
Ant looked up at the pillars, and down at the nearest rock pool to him, which was a beautiful, luminous blue.
He looked back at Glenn Bob. "You still ready to get out of here?"
Glenn Bob nodded.
Ant nodded back. "Then do exactly as I say. I have a plan which cannot fail."
***
They could still hear the screams of the school devegetating party behind them as they splashed through the freezing cold water of the rock pools.
"OW!" yelled Glenn Bob, as loudly as he could whilst still maintaining a whisper. "I got me bit for sure!"
"Rubbish!" said Ant. "It's just the cold of the water. They only tell you everything is venomous in order to keep you underground."
"Did we have to take off our boots?"
"Would Sergeant Sheldrake have believed we'd dived into a Nibbler leaving only our gloves?"
Glenn Bob shook his head dumbly.
"But only a pair of complete lunatics would run away after throwing their boots into a Nibbler stomach", said Ant proudly. "Therefore, the Sergeant will reason that the two pairs of boots and socks he found floating in that Nibbler back there are all that remains of our horribly mangled bodies."
"He might be right afore long", said Glenn Bob. "A kin't feel ma feet."
"Come on, it's only a hundred metres or so. How can we get stung or infected or otherwise killed inside a hundred metres?"
"Just you watch where you steppin", said Glenn Bob darkly.
***
Ant whispered into his communicator. "We're here."
"Where's here, idiot?"
"Airlock Thirteen."
"I thought we were going out of twelve!"
"There's been a change of plan. Airlock Thirteen is where the sickbay is."
There was a deep and brooding silence. Then: "I've got to wheel this thing back past two supervisors."
"Then you'd better hurry it up." Ant switched the communicator off. He realized that he was shivering. Glenn Bob, at his side, was doing likewise.
"A kin’t feel ma feet", Glenn Bob repeated.
Ant switched the communicator on again. "Erm - and Cleo?"
"YES? What is it NOW?"
"Can you bring us a couple of changes of footwear?"
"And s-socks", said Glenn Bob.
"And socks", added Ant.
The communicator did not reply.
"I ain't goin nowhere without I wear socks", said Glenn Bob. "All them pictures of Huckleberry Finn wearin no socks was lies. Lies!" He looked at his corpse-white toes in great concern. "Tain't possible for a human bean to wear no socks for a protracted period of time in my opinion."
Ant turned his attention to the airlock. The lock was a huge, heavily corroded steel door sunk into the base of a cliff face. Ant remembered that the whole Croatoan colony was built into a flat-topped mesa - the airlocks might be the only way to get out and down to the land around it.
The lock had equally huge, rusted metal spikes poking out between the rocks around it, as if to protect anyone entering or leaving it against attacks by some gigantic creature.
"That's your Aboriginal Megafauna", said Glenn Bob, seeing Ant's amazement. "Sometimes they get through the wire."
There was no handle or knob on the outside of the airlock door - nothing but a depressingly large, corroded steel wheel, labelled MANUAL OVERRIDE. Ant remembered Sergeant Sheldrake's red face and bulging muscles as he'd worked the wheel on Airlock Twelve.
"You push up that side", he said to Glenn Bob. "I'll pull down on this one."
The wheel was a mass of rusted metal, and Ant was afraid of the steel breaking.
"PUSH!" he hissed.
"I AM PUSHIN", Glenn Bob hissed back.
The door also made a sound like a creaking door as soon as they leaned on it. But then, they both stumbled into the muck underfoot as the wheel suddenly turned a precious millimetre. They sat and let their breath come back, and then went at the wheel again.
Suddenly, a hideous gurgling cry rang through the air. Both boys stopped moving, and in Ant's case, breathing.
"What was that?" said Ant.
"Some sort of Megafauna, I imagine", said Glenn Bob. "Aboriginal too, shouldn't wonder."
He fell quiet a moment, then said:
"Usually they don't get through the wire."
The two of them threw themselves at the door like demons. It took what seemed like hours to turn the wheel all the way out of the metal, then a minute or so of hanging backwards off the door in very quiet panic to get the lock to open. Clumps of rust fell off it when it eventually did.
"We are not closing this door behind us", said Ant, and ran inside. The corridors stank like one long school changing room after the relatively fresh rotting weed smell of the outside, though the floors were noticeably cleaner than they had been a week ago. Poor Cleo, thought Ant. There were no signs for the sickbay. Glenn Bob explained that signs had been removed from most of Croatoan to hamper Communists if they ever invaded, and helpfully showed the way up a companionway to the floor above. Red alarm lights were blushing lethargically in the corridor roofs. "That's for us", said Glenn Bob. "We're Missing."
"We're not very missing", said Ant. "Not enough for them to waste any energy turning on a proper alarm system, at any rate."
Eventually, they came to a doorway cut into the rock of the corridor wall. A sign fixed above it, clearly legible by Communists, read SICKBAY, Y'HEAR.
The one bed inside was empty. A small note pinned to the pillow said:
YOU ARE TOO SLOW!!!!
I HAVE TAKEN MR. TURPIN. WILL RENDEZVOUS
WITH YOU AT THE REVISED RENDEZVOUS POINT.
C.
"Now there's efficiency", said Ant.
"What's a Rendezvuss?" said Glenn Bob.
"It's Spanish for rendezvous", said Ant.
"Gee willickers. Why didn't she just plumb say so."
"Let's get moving."