Douglas Adams - Starship Titanic Read online

  That was the theory. That was what Leovinus had viewed, with great complacence, on his telepresence and in his Virtual Reality Viewer at home. But that was not what he now saw in front of him. Real Reality was different.

  What he now saw was what is referred to architecturally as a 'shambles'. The vast glass canopy stretched above, as it should, displaying the immense stretches of pink silk sheeting which covered the ship. But below all was confusion. The beautiful polished parquet floor was approximately one tenth beautiful polished parquet floor - the rest was exposed girders and cable-work, gaping holes, protruding wires and polystyrene cups. Where the large, sprawling brasserie for Second Class Passengers should have sprawled, there was only a large, sprawling empty space littered with builders' rubble and more polystyrene cups. How could this be? They didn't even use polystyrene cups on Blerontin! And yet there they were! There was no disguising the ghastly, unthinkable fact that the Promenade Deck was not finished - nor likely to be before the launch tomorrow morning.

  The Journalist turned to see that Leovinus had fallen to his knees. He suddenly looked like the old man that he was. The swagger and gallantry that usually marked his public appearances seemed to have been sucked out of him - leaving him like a crumpled empty bag.

  'It can't be true...' he was mumbling into his beard. 'Even Brobostigon... even Scraliontis couldn't lie so... I mean... Only this morning they told me it was all...'

  'Good morning, sir, would you like to cut your nasal hair?' A Doorbot had suddenly activated itself and was apparently trying to usher them into a cement mixer.

  Leovinus cracked at last.

  'BASTARDS!' he screamed at the flapping silk sheets beyond the canopy. 'BASTARDS!' he yelled at the unfinished works.

  Suddenly a movement behind one of the pillars caught his eye. Taking The Journalist totally by surprise, Leovinus seemed to regain all his vitality in an instant, and had sprinted across the parquet flooring and pounced behind the pillar. A solitary worker, in drab overalls, was crouching down, trying to lose himself in a crevice of the unfinished floor.

  'What the devil are you doing here?' screamed Leovinus.

  The worker stood up shiftily and pretended to be adjusting a loose end of wire. 'Just making good,' he said.

  'Making GOOD?' yelled Leovinus. 'You call this GOOD?' He threw his arm around the vast unfinished reaches of the Promenade Deck. 'We launch the ship tomorrow and there's months more work to do here!'

  'Yeah... It's... bin a bit... slow...' The worker was edging towards the sleek, stainless-steel lift that offered him his only means of escape from this elderly lunatic.

  'What were you doing just now?' demanded the elderly lunatic.

  'Me? Just now?' replied the worker.

  'Yes! I saw you doing something!'

  'Me? No, I wouldn't do nothing, I only came to collect my parrot.' The words fell out of his mouth and seemed to freeze in the air, and then like lumps of solid ice they hit Leovinus, one after the other, and he reeled from their impact.

  'Parrot?' he said. 'Parrot!!! What parrot?'

  'It's... er... just a parrot... you know... couple of wings... that sort... you know...'

  'What is a PARROT doing on board my beautiful ship?' demanded the outraged genius.

  'Oh! There's the lift!' said the worker, and the next moment he was in it with The Journalist hard on his heels; the door closed and they were both dropping to the lower floors.

  'A parrot! On my Starship! What the hell has been going on?' Suddenly the great, the magnificent, the envied Leovinus was hunched up in a corner, weeping over a statue of a winged female.

  'Titania!' he was sobbing. 'Titania! What has happened? What shall we do?'

  Titania! The genius of Leovinus was nowhere so evident as in this - his last and best-loved creation; Titania was the brains of the ship and her statue appeared everywhere on board - serving as the eyes and ears and communicating essence of the ship's intelligence. But the ship's intelligence was also imbued with emotional life as well. And this is where Leovinus had excelled himself. Titania was not only the brains but also the heart of the ship.

  Titania's emotional intelligence had to be carefully crafted to match her task. To run a gigantic ship of such bewildering complexity, to manage its crew, and to look after an enormous complement of passengers of different races, species, mentalities and bodily functions and make them all feel happy, safe and cared for required that Titania be hugely intelligent, kind, wise, caring, serene, warm... and she was all these things.

  Like her image - all those giant brooding angels in every room on every deck - Titania's spirit should also have been imbuing the entire ship. Quite clearly, it wasn't.

  4

  'Antar Brobostigon, please.' Leovinus spat the name into the phone.

  'I'm afraid Mr Brobostigon is not here. Would you like to speak to Mrs Brobostigon?'

  Leovinus had always felt secretly sorry for the project manager's wife. He could not imagine what it must be like living with such a duplicitous, cold-bloodied egomaniac as Antar Brobostigon - his pity was only slightly modified by the knowledge that Crossa Brobostigon herself was, if anything, marginally more duplicitous, cold-blooded and egoistical. Perhaps the two cancelled each other out and the Brobostigons lived a warm, intimate and caring family life. It was a mystery to the Great Inventor.

  'So nice to hear from you, Leo,' said Crossa Brobostigon. Leovinus hated it when people called him that, and he knew she knew he knew she knew it. 'How is the family?'

  'I don't have any family, Crossa,' said Leovinus with what he hoped she could hear was strained patience. 'Where is Antar?'

  'I think... in fact I'm sure he's at the ship. He went there with Droot a couple of hours ago. Some panic about something or other - you know how those guys worry themselves sick over your ship.'

  He knew: about the same way an anaconda does over a goat it's just eaten.

  'Is there somewhere they can reach you when they get back?'

  Leovinus flicked the phone off. A deep sense of foreboding spread from his thighs, up to his abdomen and across his chest into his heart.

  'Brobostigon and Scraliontis on the ship! What the devil are they up to?' The deep sense of foreboding suddenly changed into sharp stabbing pain in his stomach. He felt cold. He felt sick. He had to talk to the only person that could help: Titania.

  He made his way down onto the canal level, along the Grand Axial Canal, Second Class, towards the Central Dome. When he reached the vast statue of Titania that dominated the Central Dome and the head of the Central Well, he disappeared into a doorway under one of her wings. A long staircase led up to the vital heart of the ship: the secret chamber of Titania herself.

  Leovinus had long enjoyed his reputation as the originator of Ironic Architecture. There was the famous house he designed for Gardis Arbledonter, the Professor of Mathematical Implausibilities at Blerontis University, in which the doors were actually radio sets and entrance and egress was gained via the bath. But here, on the Starship, he believed he had constructed one of his most satisfying constructional ironies: Titania's Secret Chamber, her central intelligence core, was located in the very middle of the great Central Dome; it formed the giant chandelier that hung above the Central Well. The secret heart of the ship was hidden in full view of every passenger and every member of the crew.

  The chamber itself hung upside-down, but it had been surrounded by an inverted gravity field so that, when you entered it, it appeared the right way up. The serrated ribs that transversed the Great Dome were, once you had entered the inversion field and submitted to the disorienting process of gravity reversal, in fact long upside-down staircases leading up to the chamber, and the Great Dome itself was a vast concave floor at the bottom of the immense Central Well that stretched up above, topsy-turvy, in an arrangement that bewildered and astonished the first-time visitor.

  Leovinus sprinted up the staircase, two steps at a time. His mind focused on one thought: Titania! The love of his old ag
e. The obsession of his ageing heart:

  intelligent, kind, wise, caring, serene, warm .. Titania!

  He burst into the secret chamber and gasped. His head went into a spin - and, when you have a mind the size of Leovinus's, a spinning head is a formidable sensation. He vomited. He could scarcely bring himself to look at the horror before him and yet he could not take his eyes off it: Titania - his Titania - his darling creation - his joy - had been dismembered. She lay there in the centre of the chamber, her hair and wings spread out in their perfect circle around her. But her beautiful, gracious head was grotesquely disfigured: her mouth had been ripped away, her eyes gouged out, and her nose torn off, leaving a gaping cavity of raw microcircuitry...

  But before he could even so much as mutter the word 'Fiends!' Leovinus became aware of someone else in the room. A figure was crouching behind the Vac-U-Bus console.

  'Brobostigon!' Leovinus ground the word out like a piece of gristle. 'What in the name of Darkness are you playing at?' Without thinking, Leovinus found himself lunging at the project manager. A small glowing silver shard fell from Brobostigon's grasp and tinkled to the floor. Leovinus glanced down and realised that one of Titania's incredibly delicate cerebral arteries - the central intelligence core of Titania's brain - was lying against his foot. 'You're destroying her!'

  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?

  There was no time to lose. He must retrieve all Titania's missing parts and reassemble them before the unthinkable could happen.

  5

  Some moments later Leovinus was to be found in the starboard Embarkation Lobby, yelling at the Deskbot, 'Of course you know Scraliontis!'. The Deskbot, whilst remaining perfectly polite, was showing no inclination to be helpful.

  'Scrawny little man! Glasses! He's the accountant of this whole project for crying out loud!' insisted Leovimis. 'You've seen him snooping about in here thousands of times!'

  'Much to my regret, sir, I have been scanning my acquaintance database and am unable to come up with anyone matching the criteria you indicate, However I am in a position to offer you a berth on the starboard Super Galactic Traveller E-Deck, The rooms are painted pink, and the noise from the disposal unit is hardly noticeable.'

  'I want to know where Scraliontis is,' yelled Leovinus, at the same time flashing a small gold card in front of the Deskbot. Written on the card was the legend: 'Sixty Million Miles Club.'

  'Certainly, sir!' The Deskbot sat up brightly. 'I would suggest you look for Mr Scraliontis in the First Class Restaurant.'

  The First Class Restaurant was a black-tie only affair, so the Maître D'Bot was understandably shocked when a disreputable elderly man suddenly bunt in and shouted: 'Scraliontis! I know you're in here!'

  'What an honour to have you here, sir!' exclaimed the Maître D. genially. 'However, I am sure sir would be more comfortable in the Second Class Brasserie...'

  'Shut up!' said Leovinus.

  'Of course, sir. It will be a great pleasure to not only shut up but belt up, cease to babble, and generally get lost, for you, sir, but may I point out that we would be only too happy to oblige sir with some appropriate attire, if sir would be so good as to follow me...'

  Leovinus had spotted Scraliontis who was standing at the controls of the telepresence robot, trying to fit something into the Vac-U-Bus. He glanced up when he heard Leovinus's voice, smiled thinly, and hid whatever it was inside his dinner jacket.

  'But as sir would surely not want to feel at a disadvantage vis-â-vis the other diners, may I recommend a change of vestment before partaking of cocktails?' The Maitre D'Bot blocked Leovinus's path as he headed toward Scraliontis. For a moment the Great Man lost sight of the accountant as the robot bobbed and weaved, bowing and nodding in front of him.

  'Just get out of the way!' growled Leovinus.

  'It would be my pleasure, sir, but may I remind you that whilst smoking is permitted in the First Class Restaurant it is a jacket and tie affair, and I am afraid I shall have to call for assistance if sir proceeds any further.'

  'You're too late, Leovinus!' yelled Scraliontis. 'This thing is going nowhere! And it's going there tomorrow at noon - fast!' The accountant
always did enjoy talking in elliptical sentences that didn't quite make sense; it gave him the feeling that he was in some way literary, despite his occupation.

  'Stop whatever it is you're doing!' shouted Leovinus. 'We appreciate your visit, sir, and hope to see you many times in the future, but if you could just lower your voice a touch, I will show you the exit as soon as...'

  'I said: shut up!' Leovinus suddenly turned on the robot, as it made yet another bow in front of him, picked it up and hurled it bodily at Scraliontis.

  'May I recommend sir to the fire exit? I think sir will find the plainness of the corridors more suited to his current garb...' remarked the Maitre D'Bot as it hit the accountant full in the face, sending him sprawling. The object Scraliontis had been hiding fell onto the floor with a tinkle - it was the other cerebral artery of Titania's brain! At the same moment, the robot bunt apart on the elegant floor of the restaurant. Scraliontis scrambled to his feet, grabbed one of the robot's legs and charged at Leovinus. The old man side-stepped, picked up the robot's right arm and faced the accountant.

  For a few moments the two circled each other. Then Scraliontis opened with a straight thrust into an open line - the robot's leg grazed against Leovinus's shoulder scoring a high outside. Leovinus replied with a simple parry from the fourth position executing a deft circle with the robot's arm that gained him the right to riposte. But Scraliontis was clearly fencing under a different rule book for he went straight to a redoublement regardless of Leovinus's right to riposte. The Great Genius was outraged. He flung the robot's arm at Scraliontis, in an attack that certainly did not figure in any rule book, and closed in for a corps a corps throwing any pretence to duelling etiquette to the wind.