Greegs & Ladders (21 page)

Reg did
not at first reply. Often he appeared to not be listening. He was
in fact doing more than listening. He was reading. Whenever someone
says something lengthy or above his intelligence level, as in
whenever someone speaks at all, Reg is forced to observe the words
as automatically printed out to him by his desperately
needed
Smart-into-Dumb Translator
. This gadget also provides Reg with a suitably
intelligent example reply that he does not always choose to
follow.

“You give
milk? We feed to Crabbit?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I
said.

The previously
chosen Specters were sent to round up the few hundred gallons of
milk from our ship. As part of their courtroom duty, Specters are
given the ability to physically move items of low weight through
the technological aid of telekineto-beams. They are only able to
move what Reg instructs them to, otherwise they would have just
tossed a grenade or two in my general direction and retired to the
afterlife.

“
I can't believe you gave away all our milk,”
whispered
Rip
.

“You didn't
even know we had it in the first place,” I replied.

“
Exactly!”

“Shall we
continue with the trial?” urged one of the Specters.

“Yes,” said
Reg. “Wait. No.”

“No?”

“I’ve not got
my plate of Crabbits. How can I expect to be cruel and heartless
without some dead flesh to toy with? Someone get me a fresh
plate.”

“Right away,
sir.”

A Specter
promptly vanished from the room and returned with a tray of
Crabbits. Reg took one look at the plate and threw it against the
wall.

“What is
this?” he angrily shouted. “Where are all the bones?”

“These
Crabbits have been specially de-boned for you, sir.”

“What for?
Everyone knows I collect the bones for making furniture and other
useless doohickeys with. It’s the only reason I kill these things.
They taste like band-aids.”

Rip looked
confused.

“
What’s a band-aid?”
he whispered in my ear.

“Something you
would need wrapped around your brain, if they made them small
enough.”

“We thought it
would be a more pleasant dining experience without the bones,”
replied the specters. “You’ve been rapidly losing teeth from biting
down on sharp fragments. We thought you’d like to retain some teeth
for the purposes of eating. It is another annoying catch-22.”

“If Crabbits
have such weak bones, then why are they causing my teeth to
break?”

“Your weak
teeth has something to do with a lack of vitamin A in your
diet.”

“Why aren’t I
getting any vitamin A?”

“All you eat
are Crabbits. We’ve just gone over several times at length how
Crabbit meat contains no vitamin A whatsoever. This is all overly
simplistic.”

Reg looked
infuriated. “Is my whole life just made up of catch-22’s?!”

“It seems
so.”

“Then somebody
get me some of that damn milk!”

“Right away,
sir.”

A Specter
frantically floated off to get some milk. He momentarily returned
empty-handed.

“There’s no
milk left, your honor. It’s all been taken down to the Crabbit
beach, at your recent request that we introduce a source of vitamin
A into their diet.”

“Well then get
down to the beach and bring me a Crabbit that has ingested
milk.”

“Ok,” said the
specter as he headed to the beach. He again momentarily returned
empty-handed.

“Sorry, your
honor. It seems the Crabbits don’t like milk. The ones who tried it
were instantly putrefied. The rest then knew to stay away.”

Reg slammed
his fist down, shattering the table and spilling his drink onto the
crowd. Some of it splashed onto Rip’s arm, causing his skin to
slightly bubble as if the drink had been concocted from pure
sulfuric acid, which in fact it had.

“Ok,” said
Reg, feeling a little better after his violent outburst. “Let’s
carry on.”

“
May I
have a glass of water?” asked Rip. He was desperately hoping to
stall the trial in any way he could. The ingestion of water is
actually lethal to Rip’s internal organs, but he had learned about
the diversion tactic of asking for a glass of water many times in
American movies with trial scenes or police interrogations.
Other than his familiarity with
dramatic courtroom movies, Rip didn't know anything about America.
The reason he even knew about those movies was because they are the
only human achievement to transcend the barrier between planet
Earth and Rip's own home planet. American trials were so
compellingly dramatic to Rip's people that they henceforth made it
the basis for their own legal courts. Not because human legality
was considered efficient or fair, but simply because all the
shouting, crying, cheating, gavel-banging and opportunities for
rousing speeches, applause, more crying and other histrionics were
about as entertaining as justice could get.

“What the hell
is water?” asked Reg.

“Fair
enough.”

The lights
were dimmed. The compilation disc of ambient courtroom music was
ritualistically stomped on. The broken disc was then swept up and
thrown out the window. The wind sent the shards drifting into the
open door of a nearby apartment, where someone with too much time
on their hands spent years inventing the technology capable of
repairing the disc. Once finished, this person was severely
disappointed to learn the disc was a mediocre compilation of
ambient courtroom music. The mysterious character then shattered
the disc and proceeded to fix it all over again, just for something
to do.

The fragments
of the broken Crabbit gavel were also swept up. The trial had
officially begun.

“You three are
on trial for the reckless crashing of a space-ship into the surface
of Lincra, the most popular planet in existence. How do you
plead?”

“Guilty by
necessity,” replied Rip.

“What are you
doing?” I whispered. “They’ll have us chopped up and made into
tables or something.”

“Ssh. They
already know we did it.”

“Guilty by
necessity?” asked Reg.

Rip stood up.
“Yes. We had to crash that ship. It was a clear case of us or
them.”

“How do you
figure that?”

“Well… it’s a
long story. But while my friends, I mean acquaintances, and I were
exploring Lincra, our ship was descended upon by savage thieves who
stole our fuel. We didn’t notice we were out of fuel until we’d
already flown away, and by that point it was too late. Fumes
allowed us to take off, but the instant we reached orbit it was
clear we were about to crash back into the surface of the planet.
So it was us or them. We were forced to drain the fuel out of one
of our fleet ships, and if that meant the fleet ship would then in
turn be the one to crash, well, so be it.”

Reg consulted
some important documents that had been placed in front of him.
“Yes, except the fleet ship contained 492 crew members, all of whom
perished in the crash. And the ghosts of whom are now inhabiting
this courtroom,” he added as he pointed around at the Specters.

“And we're not
the only ones!” shouted a Specter. “Many other ships filled with
crew have been lost in their suicidal adventures! I don't even
think there's any ships left at this point!”

“Yeah!” joined
in another Specter. “We're only a small percentage of the lost
Obotron crew. Many of the dead could not be here, for the manner in
which they perished left them in a suspended state of eternal limbo
without any hopes of achieving Spectral Finality.”

“How so?”
asked Reg.

“There were
some ships that got swallowed by a Galactic Gobbling Groobin. They
were sent spiralling through a time-travelling wormhole into an
irreversible dimensional gateway. We've never seen any Specters
from those particular crew members. And a more recent devastation
had an entire ship sink to the bottom of the Hroon ocean. Haven't
seen any Specters turn up from that ship either. We suspect they're
trapped down there, living out a claustrophobic existence with
nothing for entertainment except their minimal collection of VHS
tapes. The fact that we were supplied with movies modified from
their original version says everything about the sort of barbaric
working conditions we were expected to tolerate. We would attempt
some sort of rescue mission for our lost brothers, if it were not
for us being dead and therefore having no means of retrieving a
ship from the bottom of an ocean. We can't even get anyone alive to
go into the ocean for us, because everyone knows Hroon is populated
by dangerous monsters.”

“And some of
the crew were actually cooked and eaten by that unholy trio!”
another Specter randomly added.

“Is this
true?” asked Reg. “Did you cannibalize your crew members?”

“Yes,”
answered Rip.

“I regret
cannibalizing the crew,” I said. Indeed it wasn't one of my finer
hours.

“You're
right,” said Rip. “None of the crew deserved to be cooked with such
low quality standards. Who wants to be remembered as the too-chewy,
over-salted dinner that somebody else had to choke down at the risk
of offending the chef?”

“No. I
actually regret it. We could have gone hungry before resorting to
savagery.”

“Resorting to
savagery?! But that's your nature!”

“
It
was
my nature,”
I said.

“Yes,” said
Reg. “Except the death of the crew members is not the issue here.
Everyone knows those crew members were expendable. All they had
ever done was fold the towels once.”

“Not even,”
corrected Rip. “For the towels were always folded, having never
left their factory sealed packages.”

“Point taken.
The real issue at hand here is the property damage done to the
surface of Lincra.”

“Uh-oh,”
whispered Rip. “I was worried about this part.”

“Someone bring
me... The Report!” bellowed Reg.

A Specter
appeared, producing a stack of paper several feet high.

“This is only
an account of the most expensive damage, your honor. The report on
trivial damage is being housed in our underground warehouse.”

“We have room
for that in the underground warehouse?” asked Reg
incredulously.

“No,” your
honor. “We were forced to extend the warehouse into a virtual
higher-dimensional plain, one of the ones capable of bypassing the
standard laws of physics by existing within spatially infinite
parameters.”

“
I see,”
lied Reg. He was confused. The last paragraph had been translated
to read
“We
made more room by combining science and magic!”
Reg had been left cold by this
translation. To begin with, the word 'combining' had a syllable
more than his usual maximum preference of two. There was also the
disturbing presence of the word 'science,' which suggested far too
many intelligible subjects. Reg told the Translator to dumb things
down a few times until finally the last paragraph merely
read
“Magic!”
He was
pleased with this all-encompassing explanation of how the crowded
warehouse had been able to store such a detailed damage
report.

Reg consulted
the damage report for several minutes, during which he was brought
a new plate of Crabbit meat. He was also brought a fresh glass of
sulphuric acid. Rip backed his chair away, not wishing to undergo
any more third degree burns should Reg suddenly have a violent
outburst.

“Hmm,” began
Reg, “it seems the ship struck the planet in a way that maximized
the potential amount of damage. The rapid speed of the plummeting
ship alone ensured it would not have even slowed down until it had
crashed through at least ten subterranean layers, and yet it
perfectly fell into the Master Ladder Tunnel, allowing the ship to
chaotically free-fall until it collided with the fiery core. Many
layers were destroyed. Considerable damage was done to Subterranean
12, the Layer Where Nothing is Done Except For Cutting Onions. The
entire surface of Layer 12 disintegrated when a breach was caused
in the conjoining Layer of Uncontrollable Highly Explosive Things.
Chunks of onion were scattered all over the planet.”

“So?” argued
Rip. “It’s just a bunch of onions! Did anyone die because of these
onions?”

“
179
trillion creatures. The explosion of onions caused so many beings
to cry that collectively their tears made up a great washing flood
that swept through the planet. A big-budget disaster film is still
in production. I believe the working title is:
The Great Flood of Tears: A
Musical Chronicle into the Devastation of Lincra.

“Will the
box-office proceeds go to the families of the victims?” blurted
Wilx, who had thus far remained relatively quiet.

“1% of the
gross will be donated to the families. After taxes it will be
something more like .0001%. Another 2% will go the screenwriters.
The rest will be spent on badly needed new leather chairs for the
studio fat-cats.”

“Why do the
studio fat-cats need new chairs so badly?”

“People tend
to go through a lot of chairs when they sit around all day doing no
work of any kind.”

Reg cleared
his throat. He didn’t actually have a throat to clear, but he made
a wretched sound not dissimilar to what one would expect if he
did.

“Let’s hear
from our first witness. I call to the stand Mr. Nickbas L.
Turkey.”

“Who’s that?”
said Wilx.

“No idea,”
said Rip.

Nickbas
entered the courtroom and sat down at the witness bench.

“Oh no, not
this guy,” groaned Rip as he noticed that Nickbas was in fact the
unkempt map vendor from the Lincran parking lot. The one who made
maps so terrible that Rip had been compelled to rip them to
shreds.