Nettie shook her head. 'I'm not much cop at astronomy! I'll get the others up on deck.'
But neither Dan nor Lucy had any more idea than Nettie about the local constellations, and Rodden shook his head wearily at the Earth folks' ignorance.
But worse was to come.
'Look!' Rodden suddenly exclaimed. 'D'you see that star! There! That must be your Sun!'
And so it proved to be. Within the hour the Starship was slowing down, and they could clearly see the Sun as a tiny disc.
'And so which of these planets is the Earth?' It was a simple question Rodden had asked, but it threw the three Earth folk into utter confusion.
'I think it's the fourth planet from the Sun,' ventured Dan.
'Or is it the third?' asked Nettie.
'It's the second!' said Lucy.
The Navigational Officer had to excuse himself at this point. He left the Bridge and locked himself in the washroom, where he proceeded to bang his head against the sink unit for several minutes. How could any living creatures be so utterly and abysmally ignorant of their own planet?!
'Look!' said Dan. 'On the outside: Pluto - right?'
'Yes.'
'Neptune... Saturn... or is it Jupiter next?'
'Saturn,' said Nettie.
'Saturn... Jupiter... Mars... Earth! So it's the sixth planet in!'
'Very good!' exclaimed Captain Bolfass. 'Then we are approaching it at this very moment! Stand by to fire retardation rockets and stabilize ship for slow-down! Orbit around Earth to be established in thirty-five edoes time. Landing by small landing craft.'
By the time the Navigational Officer came out of the washroom, the Starship Titanic was in orbit around the Earth.
'Do the Starship's windows make everything look red?' asked Nettie.
'Maybe it's the weather,' said Lucy. The Earth did look extremely red.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' said Captain Bolfass. 'It is my privilege to accompany you down to your landing craft. If you would follow me...'
'Hang on!' said Nettie. 'We missed out Uranus! This is Mars!'
The Navigational Officer left the room again. He could feel one of those terrible Yassaccan rages overtaking him. In the washroom, he got out his SD gun and blew his own head off. After which he calmed down and returned to the Bridge.
By this time, they were approaching a blue planet, patched with brown and flecked with white whorls. It was definitely the Earth, and even old Rodden couldn't help feeling sympathetically towards the three Earth folk as he saw their spirits rise and their hearts beat with pride and wonder at this vision of the planet that had given then life.
As they assembled in the tiny landing spacecraft, Bolfass spoke briefly and unemotionally.
'We have exactly one day in which to find Leovinus and, hopefully, the Titanic's missing central intelligence core, and get it back to the ship and into Titania's brain. But we have less than that. I did not mention this before, but I have to now ... We only have half a day, since, if you have not returned by midday, we will have no option but to fly the Starship off to a safe distance and man the life-boats before she explodes. May we all be saved from such a fate. Go! And good luck!'
Nettie took Dan's hand as he helped her into the landing craft. The Journalist jumped in beside Lucy. 'Oh, Dan?' he said. 'There's something I've been meaning to ask you.'
'Well - go ahead.'
'Will you be our best man?'
Dan thought about hitting The Journalist but instead he smiled. 'Yes,' he replied. 'I'll be glad to.'
'Great!' smiled The Journalist. 'We can have a real Blerontinian White Wedding. You'll love it.'
Dan raised his eyes heavenwards and Nettie smiled, as the cover of the landing craft was placed over them.
Captain Bolfass retreated to the viewing chamber; the side of the great Starship opened, and the tiny landing craft blasted itself away towards the blue planet.
27
Leovinus was not in a good mood. Despite all the things he was good at - astrophysics, architecture, molecular biology, geophysics, painting, sculpture, mechanical design, physics, anatomy, music, poetry, crystallography, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, philosophy and canape´ arrangement - he'd always been hopeless at languages. Consequently, when he found himself on an alien world, without a translation blister, he was understandably frustrated. Here he was - the Greatest Genius The Galaxy Had Ever Known and he couldn't even ask these aliens, in their strange blue suits, for a cup of tea.
'I definitely think he is, Sarge,' said Constable Hackett.
'What, gay?' asked Sergeant Stroud, who'd noticed the old man's eyebrows were stuck on with toupee tape.
'No, Lebanese,' said the constable.
'Do we know anyone in the Oxford area who speaks Lebanese?'
'Well, it's kind of Arabic, innit?'
'Yes, must be plenty of them in the university.' And so a call was made, and Leovinus shortly found himself confronted by a large man with a nose the shape of Africa who told him in Arabic that his name was Professor Dansak. But to no avail.
Leovinus was beginning to lose his temper by now. Not only was no one treating him as you would expect a race of clearly inferior minds to treat the Greatest Genius The Galaxy Has Ever Known, but everyone was treating him as if they actually wanted to get rid of him.
'I hereby charge you with being an illegal immigrant.' Sergeant Stroud was reading from a formal charge-sheet. 'I have to warn you that anything you may say will be held against you and that you will be held in a place of custody until such dine as Her Majesty's Government is able to repatriate you to your own country.'
'Assuming we can find out where that is,' muttered Constable Hackett.
Professor Dansak had recommended a Professor Lindstrom, who held the chair in Linguistic Studies. Professor Lindstrom listened carefully to the little that Leovinus was prepared to say to him, and concluded that the elderly gentleman in the white beard and false eyebrows was probably making the language up.
'It bears no resemblance,' said Professor Lindstrom, 'to any of the Judo-European branch of languages. If, indeed, it is a language, I am prepared to state categorically that it has no relation to Uralic, Altaic nor to the Sino-Tibetan language groups. Malayo-Polynesian is not my field, but I would be surprised if it had any affinity there. As for the Eskimo-Aleut and the Paleo-Asiatic I am convinced it is not. I suspect, in short, gentlemen, that you have here a confused old gentleman, talking that widely-spoken language: gobbledygook. He probably ought to be with his family at home or else being cared for in an institution.'
Leovinus at this point had decided to treat these inferior beings to a recitation of edited highlights from his recent work, The Laws of Physics, a radical reappraisal of the subject which had turned the entire science on its head. It was, perhaps, the single most important volume ever written in the Galaxy, and merely to hear it again gave the great man a sense of belonging and reminded him that he was an individual of immense importance- no matter how they treated him on this remote and primitive planet.
He was still reciting from his Tenth Law of Thermodynamic Stress, when Sergeant Stroud banged the door of his cell behind him. Leovinus looked around his new environment. His suspicion was that he was not in a hotel. Entry appeared to be regulated by a simple locking device, and defecation appeared to be in a bucket. What a savage world he had got himself stuck
on. If only he'd regained consciousness before the Starship crashlanded! But he hadn't. After his fight with Scraliontis, he'd remained unconscious throughout the entire launch, the SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure) and the crashlanding on this godforsaken planet, wherever it was. He'd only come to when that wretched journalist had unrolled him from the curtain. Thinking it was still the morning before the launch and that Scraliontis must have returned home to gloat over his evil scheme, Leovinus had commandeered the service lift and charged off out of the Starship screaming for revenge. In the dark he had failed to notice that he was no longer on the launch pad at Blerontis. It was not until he was a good distance from the ship that he heard the sound of the great power-drive coming to life. He had spun round and, to his horror, he had watched his great masterpiece rise up into an alien night sky - leaving him stranded on an unknown, unidentifiable world.