That was a bit of an odd thing to say, he thought.
'Sorry. I've been on my own for three million years. I'm just used to saying What I Think.'
For some time now, well, the last two hundred thousand years to be exact, Holly had grown increasingly concerned about himself.
For a computer with an IQ of six thousand, it seemed to him he was behaving in a more and more erratic way.
In fact, he'd long suspected he'd gone a bit peculiar. Just as A Bachelor who spends too much time on his own gradually develops quirks and eccentricities, so A Computer who spends three million years alone in Deep Space can get, well, set in his ways.
Become quirky.
Go a little bit ... odd.
Holly decided not to burden Lister with this anxiety, and hoped his oddness would eventually sort itself out now he had a bit of company.
'So, what happened?'
Holly told him about the cadmium II radiation leak; how the crew had been wiped out within seconds; how he'd headed the ship pell-mell out of the solar system, to avoid spreading nuclear contamination; and how he'd had to keep Lister in stasis until the radiation had reached a safe background level.
'So ... How long did you keep me in stasis?'
'Three million years,' said Holly, as casually as he could.
Lister acted as if he hadn't heard. Three million years? It had no meaning. If it had been thirty years, he would have thought 'What a long time.' But three million years. Three million years was iust ... stupid.
He wandered over to the chair opposite the console he'd seen Kochanski operate.
'So, Krissie's dead,' he said, staring at the hummock of dust. 'I always...'
His voice tailed away.
He tried to remember her face. He tried to remember the pinball smile.
'Well, if it's any consolation,' said Holly, 'If she had survived, the age difference would be insurmountable. I mean, you're twenty-four, she's three million : it takes a lot for a relationship with that kind of age gap to work.'
Lister wasn't listening. 'I always thought we'd get back together. I, ah, had this sort of plan that one day I'd have enough money to buy a farm on Fiji. It's cheap land there, and, in a half-assed kind of way, I always pictured she'd be there with me.'
This was getting morbid. Holly tried to lighten the atmosphere.
'Well,' he said, 'she wouldn't be much use to you on Fiji now.
'No,' said Lister.
'Not unless it snowed,' said Holly, 'and you needed something to grit the path with.'
Lister screwed up his face in distaste. 'Holly!'
'Sorry. I've been on my own for three million years. I'm just used to saying what I think.'
For some time now, well, the last two hundred thousand years to be exact, Holly had grown increasingly concerned about himself.
For a computer with an IQ of six thousand, it seems to him he was behaving in a more and more erratic way.
In fact, he'd long suspected he'd gone a bit peculiar. Just as a bachelor who spends too much time on his own gradually develops quirks and eccentricities, so a computer who spends three million years alone in Deep Space can get, well, set in his ways. Become quirky. Go a little bit ... odd.
Holly decided not to burden Lister with this anxiety, and hoped his oddness would eventually sort itself out now he had a bit of company.
Another slight concern which he tried to put to the back of his RAM was that, for a computer with an IQ of six thousand, there was a rather alarming amount of knowledge he seemed to have forgotten. It wasn't, on the whole, important things, but was nonetheless fairly disturbing.
He knew, for instance, that Isaac Newton was a famous physicist, but he couldn't remember why.
He couldn't remember the capital of Luxembourg.
He could recall pi to thirty thousand digits, but he couldn't say for absolute certain whether port was on the left side, and starboard on the right, or whether it was the other way round.
Who knocked Swansea City out of the FA Cup in 1967? He used to know. It was a mystery now.
Obviously none of this missing information was absolutely vital for the smooth running of a mining ship three million years out into Deep Space. But technically he was supposed to know more-or-less everything and, frankly, there were some worrying gaps. He could remember, for instance, that in the second impression, 1959 publication of Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov, printed in Great Britain by the Shenval Press (London, Hertford and Harrow), page 60 was far and away the dirtiest page. But was Nabakov German or Russian? It totally eluded him.
Maybe it wasn't important. Of course it wasn't important.
Still, it was for Holly a source of perturbation.
It's a source of perturbation, he thought. Then he wondered whether there was such a word as 'perturbation', or whether he'd just made it up. He didn't know that either. Oh, it was hopeless.
***
Lister sat in the empty Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar and poured a triple whisky into his double whisky, then topped it up with a whisky. Absently, he lit the filter end of a cigarette and tried to assimilate all the information Holly had thrown at him.
Everybody was dead.
Everybody.
He'd been in stasis three million years.
Three million years.
Since one drunken night outside the 'Marie Lloyd' off Regent Street, London, every step he'd taken had led him further and further from Home. First it was Mimas, then Miranda, and now he was three million years away. Three million years out into Deep Space. Further than any human being had ever been before.
And he was totally alone.
The enormity of all this was slowly beginning to sink in when Holly dropped his final bombshell. The one about the human race being extinct.
'What d'you mean, "extinct"?'
'Well, three million years is a very good age for a species. I mean, your average genus only survives a couple of hundred thousand years, max. And that's with a clean-living species, like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn't totally screw up the environment. They just went around quietly eating things. And even then, they didn't get to clock up the big one mill. So the chances of the human race making it to the big three-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh are practically nonexistent. So I'm afraid you just have to face up to the very real possibility that your species is dead.'
Much to his surprise, Lister had let out a sob.
'Were you very close?' Holly tilted his head sympathetically. 'Well, yeah, I suppose you must have been, really.' That was a bit of an odd thing to say, he thought.
Lister took out his shirt-tail and blew his nose. 'So, I'm the last human being alive?'
'Yeah. You never think it's going to happen to your species, do you? It's always something that happens to Somebody Else's.'
***
Lister spent the next few days going to pieces.
There seemed little point in getting dressed, and so he wandered around naked, swigging from a bottle of whisky.
He didn't know what to do.
He didn't know if there was anything to do.
And worst of all, he didn't much care.
He slept wherever he fell, a painful, dreamless sleep. He hardly ate, and drank a small loch-worth of whisky. He didn't even like whisky, but beer was too cumbersome to carry around in sufficient quantities to achieve oblivion.
He lost a stone in weight, and started shouting at people who weren't there.
Every evening, at around 5 p.m. he'd stagger, stark naked, into the Drive Room and, waving his whisky bottle dangerously in the air, he'd belch incoherent obscenities at Holly's huge visage on the gigantic monitor screen.
Sometimes Lister imagined he'd heard the phone ring, and he'd rush to pick it up.
On the evening of the fifth day as he staggered through the Red Dwarf shopping mall, toasting invisible crowds, he keeled over and blacked out.
When he woke up in the medical unit, a man with an 'H' on his forehead was looking down at him with undisguised contempt.
TWO
'So I am,' said Rimmer.
'You died in The Accident,' said Lister.
'So I did,' said Rimmer.
'What's it like?'
'Death?' Rimmer mused. 'It's like going on holiday with a group of Germans.' He cradled his head in his hands. 'I'm so depressed I want to weep. To be cut down in my prime - a boy of thirty-one, with the body of a thirty-year-old. It's unbearable. All my plans; my career, my future; everything hinged on my being alive. It was mandatory.'
'What happened to me? Did I black out?'
'Excuse me, I'm talking about my being dead.'
'Sorry. I thought you'd finished.'
'I'm so depressed,' repeated Rimmer, 'so depressed.'
Over the next couple of days, Lister slowly recovered in the medical bay. One morning, while Rimmer was off reading the How to Cope With Your Own Death booklet for the fifteenth time, Lister took the opportunity to ask Holly why he'd brought Rimmer back.
'You'd gone to pieces. You couldn't cope. You needed a companion.'
'But Rimmer??'
'I did a probability study,' lied Holly, 'and it turns out Rimmer is absolutely the best person to keep you sane.'
'Rimmer?'
Holly's disembodied head tilted forward in a nod.
'Why not Petersen?'
'A man who buys a methane-filled twenty-four bedroomed bijou residence on an oxygenless moon whose only distinction is that it rotates in the opposite direction from its mother planet - you seriously expect me to bring him back to keep you sane? Gordon Bennett - he couldn't even keep himself sane, let alone anyone else.'
'Yeah, but at least we had things in common.'
'The only thing you had in common was your mutual interest in consuming ridiculous amounts of alcohol.'
'Selby? Chen?'
'Ditto.'
'What about Krissie?'
'Dave, she finished with you.'
'But, Rimmer?? Anyone would have been better than Rimmer. Anyone. Hermann Goering would have been better than Rimmer. All right, he was a drug-crazed Nazi transvestite, but at least we could have gone dancing.'
'It was Jean-Paul Sartre,' said Holly, thinking it may very well actually have been Albert Camus, or Flaubert, or perhaps it was even Sacha Distel, 'who said Hell was being trapped for Eternity in A Room with Your Friends.'
'Sure,' said Lister, 'but all Sartre's mates were French.'
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