Authority

“It is a good thing to be An Authority. People are fragile. Because of that, life is difficult and suffering common. Ameliorating that suffering — ensuring that everyone has food, clean water, sanitary facilities, and a place to take shelter, for starters—takes initiative, effort, and ability. If there is a problem to be solved, and many people involve themselves in the solution, then a hierarchy must and will arise, as those who can do, and those who cannot follow as best they can, often learning to be competent in the process. If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not Power. It is The Authority that properly accompanies ability.

  Now, it is self-evidently appropriate to grant power to competent authorities, if they are solving necessary problems; and it is equally appropriate to be one of those competent authorities, if possible, when there is a perplexing problem at hand. This might be regarded as a philosophy of responsibility. A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently — even ambitiously — for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

  Ambition is often — and often purposefully — misidentified with The Desire for Power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert Power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. 

When people wield Authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence — a competence that is spontaneously recognised and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that Justice is being served.

  Those who are power hungry — tyrannical and cruel, even psychopathic — desire control over others so that every selfish whim of hedonism can be immediately gratified; so that envy can destroy its target; so that resentment can find its expression. But good people are ambitious (and diligent, honest, and focused along with it) instead because they are possessed by the desire to solve genuine, serious problems. That variant of ambition needs to be encouraged in every possible manner. It is for this reason, among many others, that the increasingly reflexive identification of the striving of boys and men for victory with the “patriarchal tyranny” that hypothetically characterizes our modern, productive, and comparatively free societies is so stunningly counterproductive (and, it must be said, cruel: there is almost nothing worse than treating someone striving for competence as a tyrant in training). “Victory,” in one of its primary and most socially important aspects, is the overcoming of obstacles for the broader public good. Someone who is sophisticated as a winner wins in a manner that improves the game itself, for all the players. To adopt an attitude of naive or willfully blind cynicism about this, or to deny outright that it is true, is to position yourself—perhaps purposefully, as people have many dark motives—as an enemy of the practical amelioration of suffering itself. I can think of few more sadistic attitudes.

  Now, power may accompany authority, and perhaps it must. However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power. This constraint manifests itself when the authoritative agent cares, and takes responsibility, for those over whom the exertion of power is possible. The oldest child can take accountability for his younger siblings, instead of domineering over and teasing and torturing them, and can learn in that manner how to exercise authority and limit the misuse of power. Even the youngest can exercise appropriate authority over the family dog. To adopt authority is to learn that power requires concern and competence—and that it comes at a genuine cost. Someone newly promoted to a management position soon learns that managers are frequently more stressed by their multiple subordinates than subordinates are stressed by their single manager. Such experience moderates what might otherwise become romantic but dangerous fantasies about the attractiveness of power, and helps quell the desire for its infinite extension. And, in the real world, those who occupy positions of Authority in functional hierarchies are generally struck to the core by the responsibility they bear for the people they supervise, employ, and mentor.

  Not everyone feels this burden, of course. A person who has become established as an authority can forget his origins and come to develop a counterproductive contempt for the person who is just starting out. This is a mistake, not least because it means that the established person cannot risk doing something new (as it would mean adopting the role of despised fool). It is also because arrogance bars the path to learning. Shortsighted, willfully blind, and narrowly selfish tyrants certainly exist, but they are by no means in the majority, at least in functional societies. Otherwise nothing would work.

  The Authority who remembers his or her sojourn as voluntary beginner, by contrast, can retain their identification with the newcomer and the promise of potential, and use that memory as the source of personal information necessary to constrain the hunger for power. One of the things that has constantly amazed me is the delight that decent people take in the ability to provide opportunities to those over whom they currently exercise authority. I have experienced this repeatedly: personally, as a university professor and researcher (and observed many other people in my situation doing the same); and in the business and other professional settings I have become familiar with. There is great intrinsic pleasure in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible professionals. It is not unlike the pleasure taken in raising children, and it is one of the primary motivators of valid ambition. Thus, the position of top dog, when occupied properly, has as one of its fundamental attractions the opportunity to identify deserving individuals at or near the beginning of their professional life, and provide them with the means of productive advancement.

“Don't be scared by the word ‘Authority’. 

Believing things on Authority only means believing them because you've been TOLD them by someone you THINK Trustworthy. 

Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on Authority. 

I believe there is such a place as New York. 

I haven't seen it myself. 

I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must BE such a place. 

I believe it because RELIABLE people have TOLD me so. 

The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority - because The Scientists SAY So. 

EVERY historical statement in the world is believed on Authority. 

None of us has SEEN the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. 

None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. 

We believe them simply because people who DID see them have left Writings that TELL us about them: in fact, on Authority. 

A Man who jibbed at Authority in other things as some people do in Religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

— C.S. Lewis

Escape

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A.) Hercules.

This is our famous hedge maze. 

It's a lot of fun. 

But I wouldn't want to go in there unless I had an hour to spare to find my way out. 

“I did not look at it again for a number of years until it came out in rental. And then I picked it up a couple of times. And, what, you had three days in order to watch a rental? 

And so, I can remember watching it over and over again during those three days and really taking a good look at it then. And I was able to think "Oh, yes, this is what I remember. This is what I thought I saw," and then catching more things. 

But it wasn't, of course, until DVD came out that I was really able to sit down and take a good look at it as far as just running through it over and over and over again. 

Kubrick presents these things where it's, you know, real... you know, it's realistic. You're not supposed to see what's actually going on. 

You've got Danny. He's in The Game Room. He turns around. We're supposed to be focused on the two girls there. 

And than you... I saw... over on the left, I see this skiing poster. 

And the thing is that you already have Jack. 

He's already asked about skiing. But why isn't... you know, "What about skiing? Isn't the skiing good here in the hotel?" 

And he's already given the story of why it isn't good, why they can't do that. 

But you got the skiing poster. 

And my eye is drawn to it. And I realize that's not a skier. That's a... that's a minotaur. It just leaped out at me. 

And so that was something that I was able to look at later on VHS and say, "Yes, I had actually seen a minotaur there," where the upper body, you've got this really, you know, overblown physique, very physical physique. 

And then you've got the suggestion... you have a suggestion of a skiing pole there, but it's not really there. It's just a suggestion of one.

And the lower body is positioned, the way the legs are, it's like a minotaur, the build is. And you've actually got the tail there. 

And so it is a minotaur. 

And this is in... on the opposite side of the door you have a cowboy on a bucking bronco, so... and so you got a kind of echo there, where you got the minotaur on one side, the bull man, and on the other side, you got the cowboy, the man on the bucking bronco. 

And this is just following the scene where they... Ullman has been taking Jack and Wendy through the Colorado Lounge, showing off the Colorado Lounge. And they go into the hall behind the Colorado Lounge. And what's there, but on the wall, there is a painting of an American Indian with a buffalo headdress on. 

And at that point, Ullman is discussing with Wendy who has stayed there at the hotel. 

Royalty, the best people, stars have stayed there. Royalty? All the best people. 

You have "monarch" on the bottom, which, you know, keys in with royalty. And you also have this whole idea of the stars. And the minotaur's name is, what, Asterius? His name is Asterius, which means "starry." So you know, you got several things there to do with mythology that fit in. It's very exciting to me. That was the... you know, that's the kind of leap-up-end-down moment where you go, "Oh, wow, look at what Kubrick has there." 

Yeah, I mean the minotaur lives at the heart of the labyrinth. He's a part of the labyrinth. The labyrinth, at least in the myth... you know, in this particular myth... was built for the minotaur. 

The Hotel is... you know, it is The Labyrinth. 

And Jack is The Minotaur. 

You have scenes with him where he... such as in... what is it? The Thursday scene. The snowfall has started. You have Wendy and Danny outside playing. And Jack is inside the Colorado Lounge, and he's looking out at them. His head is tilted down, and his eyes are somewhat... his eyes are elevated. They're pointing up. And his eyebrows are drawn up. But he has this expression on his face that he gets progressively throughout the film that is very bull-like. It has a very minotaur-like expression. It's the same kind of expression that Kubrick pulls out in other films, such as it was on Private Pyle's face in the berserker scene in the bathroom in Full Metal Jacket. So it's, you know, not specific to this film. There's more minotaur imagery and labyrinth imagery. There's the Gold Room. In front of the Gold Room, you have the "Unwinding Hours" sign. And that plays in with the labyrinth, where you have... Theseus enters into the labyrinth, and he has the thread with him that he ties at the beginning that, you know, assists him in going through the labyrinth, where he can find his way back out. And so I see the "Unwinding Hours" sign as having to do with that thread. For a while there, I was into baseball. And I get very excited with baseball when I'm into baseball. You know, I can be by myself, and I will be leaping up and down. And Kubrick is like that for me, where all I have to do is see the minotaur poster there, and I go, "Oh, my goodness. Look at this!" Because you're not supposed to see the minotaur. Danny is shown riding his big wheel through the hotel three times. The first ride, I think, is about realism. That's Danny is a... Danny is doing a loop around the lounge set. You know, he goes through the service hallway and then he goes through the lounge and then he goes back into the service hallway. And, you know, when you first see the movie, you're like, "He's just wandering around. It's crazy, it's just"... But it... no, it's very... it's just a very simple loop. He does it once. But that gives you an idea of where... of what that place is. I mean, you know, all right, you understand that that set is real. You know, like, it's a continuous shot. There are no tricks. In the second ride, in the hexagonal hallway, there are a lot of... there are more tricks. Like, he doesn't do a loop. He does kind of like a key-shaped... you know, or a p-shaped loop around this hallway. And you see the realism of the connection to the lounge set. And... but you also see the fakery of the fake elevators. And you see... for just one second, you see the big stained glass windows out of the corner, in the corner of the frame right before he takes a turn around the elevator. Like, that's incredible because, like, that connects that whole hallway to the giant Colorado Lounge set. I mean, that's just for one second. They didn't have to do that, you know? But it's also... you know, it's a metaphor because he's also elevated. He's one level up from where he was before. Like, he starts in the same place, just one floor up, you know, in the northeast corner of the set. So now he's in the northeast corner and one level up. And if you take it as a metaphor of, like, going from a mundane reality to up into your head to more of a fantastical reality... The third one is even stranger, 'cause he starts off in the service unit. He starts off in the same, you know, northeast corner of the lobby hall, of the lobby service hallway. And then he takes a turn, and suddenly he's upstairs in the area outside their apartment So, like, it's a kind of a combination of the first two, where like he's down low and then he's up high. And then he takes a turn, and he's suddenly... he's in that that yellow, yellow and blue wallpaper. Let's say that's in the service hallway area. He's, you know, right outside his parents' bedroom, so there's this connection between him going on these big wheel rides and dreaming. Like, he's near his bedroom. He's near... like, you see his parents are working downstairs, but he's upstairs. You know, like, you see his mom on the telephone, and then he's flying. He goes above her to the bedroom, which is above where she's working, just as the hexagonal hallway is above where his dad is working. 

So these big wheel rides become like a visionary way of Danny to explore his parents' headspace. 

You know, like, room 237 is his, like... that's his father's fantasy chamber where, like, he gets it on with the witches. 

And the twins are like his mother's fantasy... fantasy headspace where, like, they're these double blue women who want to play with Danny forever and ever. We're all gonna have a real good time. 

My interpretation of The Shining is that there's many levels to this film. 

This is like three-dimensional chess. 

And he's trying to tell us several stories that appear to be separate but actually are not. 

And he's doing this both through the overt script that he wrote. 

He's telling it through tricks of the trade, the subliminal imagery and these constant retakes, giving him odd angles and things. 

And he's also telling you through the changes that he made to the Stephen King novel. 

So if you watch those three things, you begin to understand this deeper story. 

And this deeper story has its birth, I guess, in the idea that Stanley Kubrick was involved with faking the Apollo moon landings.

The White Man’s Burden

“ When I had a chance... when I was doing a story out in Denver, we went up to Estes Park. It was in the off-season. Went into the Stanley Hotel, and I asked to see the manager. 

And he came out, and we were just having lunch with him. And I said, "Can we talk to you? I write about The Shining." 

He said, "Really?" This fellow told me that he got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, who said, "I think I want to make a movie about The Shining." 

And then he would keep this fellow on the phone for a long time. 

He said, "We had many long, long conversations in which he picked my brain about everything." 

And at that point, he said, "Kubrick was talking about maybe coming here to make the movie here," which I expect, at that point, that fellow liked the idea of, so it would make his hotel famous. 

And Kubrick said, "I'd like to send out a research team." 

And so he then sent out... the man said it was something like two or three people who came out here and stayed here for two or three months, taking photographs everywhere. 

And they spent a lot of time also down in Denver in the Colorado state archives, finding out, as I would now expect, the full history of Colorado, which... the flag of which plays a part. 

And the gold rush, the Colorado Gold Rush was also a very big event. And there's all... there's still a lot of American Indian/white people tension in Colorado with Navajos and Arapahos just to the south. 

This research team found out absolutely everything about Colorado, about Estes Park, about the Stanley Hotel, about its entire history, took photographs all over the place. 

Three months was the impression that I have of what he said about how this research team gathered absolutely everything. 

Kubrick unearthed an enormous amount about the real history of Colorado, where this takes place, because what he has done is found a way to dig into all of the patterns of our civilization, our times and our cultures, and the things that we don't want to look at. 

And this movie is very much also about denial of the genocides that we committed... we white folk from Europe... committed here and not that... not that white folks are the only people who do genocide. 

All humans do, as Kubrick makes clear in this movie. 

He would research everything and the full history and nature of everything you're gonna see in the movie on the screen and then boil it down and boil it down until he got the universal human and global patterns that make it so real. 

“White Man's Burden, Lloyd, My Man. 

White Man's Burden. 

I Like you, Lloyd. I always liked you. 

You were always the best of 'em. 

The best goddamned bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine, 

or Portland, Oregon, for that matter.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

What does it mean? 

Jack saying, "You always were the best of 'em." 

Starting in Timbuktu? 

Jack The Schoolteacher was never in Timbuktu, but Jack The Universal Weak Male hired by armies to go commit atrocities has always been there. 

Now, of course, the word "Portland" is neat because it means where we landed or where The British or The Europeans landed. 

And Portland, Maine... 

Oregon is where they may have taken off from to go further west. 

Kubrick is thinking about the implications of everything that exists. You know, The Power of The Genie is in its confinement, as the great American poet Richard Wilbur said. 

Boiling it down, you know, 10,000 years in a little lamp, you got to get your act together. 

But that's the essence of great art. 

It's like a dream. 

It's boiled everything down to an emblematic symbol that's got all of life in it. 

Now, if you'll allow me to make a little bit of a link here. 

As I've thinking of this more in recent years, what we now understand to be the nature of What Dreams Are, I mean, it seems to be, the general theory is, that it's a way for the brain to boil down all of the previous experiences and then add in that day's experiences as well to see what kind of overall universal patterns there are to be found, so that you can be aware of what the patterns are out there, so that your subconscious will be all the more ready to react suddenly when you see something dangerous happen or something important happen that may lead you to a mate or to some food or away from danger. 

And therefore, the way Kubrick made movies was not unlike the way, according to these current theories, our brains create memories and, for that matter, dreams. 

That's the ultimate shining that Kubrick does. 

He is like a mega brain for The Planet who is boiling down with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of Our World and then giving them back to us in a dream of a movie... because movies are like A Dream... and that's related to why I think there's a lot of evidence that what Kubrick also gave us in The Shining is a movie about The Past. 

Not just any past. The Past. 

I mean past-ness. 

It's a movie about how The Past impinges. That's what ghosts are. That's what those skitter-y voices in the opening shot that are following are about. 

There's two phrases from T.S. Eliot that I often think of when I'm thinking about The Shining. One of them is "The night"... 

I think they're both from T.S. Eliot... 

[ It’s James Joyce. ]

"The nightmare of history... How can we awake from The Nightmare of History?

And the other is his phrase... T.S. Eliot's phrase... "History has many cunning passages." 

And I think both of those phrases are directly apt for The Shining, in which we see many cunning passages in The Maze and in The Hotel itself and in which The Past becomes a nightmare, and in which Kubrick shows us how you escape from the nightmare of The Past by retracing your steps, as Danny does in that last line, which means acknowledging what happened and learning about The Past and then getting out, only if you are going to be able to shine and see what the patterns are so you know to get away from them and avoid them and go for the good things. 

I mean, The Shining is his movie about how families break down, whether they are an individual family or the larger societal family that tries to break up individual families. 

And his hat movie, Eyes Wide Shut is the opposite. It's about a family sorely tried, Bill Hartford and his wife and child, that survives all the horrible temptations that are in our DNA.”

And We All Shine On….

"It is A Story  that hints at the dangers of Intellectual PRIDE and shows how A Man's Reason can be overthrown when he fails to acknowledge those forces •inside• himself which he simply CANNOT understand."

Q. :But WHY would he make The Movie so COMPLICATED? 

A. : Yeah, I mean, but why did Joyce write Finnegan's Wake? 

It's a way of, like, opening doors from, like, a hermetically sealed reality into possibilities. 

And it's also a way of TRAPPING Someone Like ME. Like, who goes looking for clues and, like, keeps finding them. 

And next thing you know, you're like, "Man, I've been... I've been trapped in this hotel forever. I'm dreaming about this place." 

You know, I'm Like Jack. I'm, like, all Work and no Play. 

OR, The Other Way around. 

It doesn't really MATTER, like... You're, like, in this LOOP. 

But, you know, There are ESCAPE Routes, like the... like, I think he puts Escape Routes into it, into This Maze, into This TRAP. 

I mean, there ARE ways OUT of it — And Danny finds a way out of it, you know, by •retracing• His Steps, by going BACKWARDS and forwards. 

And once you start, you know, studying, you know, Synchronicity and Symbolism, then, like, suddenly, like, you're noticing in Your OWN Life, like, things start popping out. 

Things that you hadn't noticed before, you know, like 

Your... Point of View is being ALTERED by Your Study. 

And, you know, it's the... 

It's Quantum Physics, you know, like, The ACT of OBSERVING, like, affects you know, The Thing Observed. 

“Hi, Lloyd.”

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it gets weird because, like, I'd... you know, as I've been obsessing over this thing, you know, I've been home, like, I'd been out of work for a while, like... 

I have a small son. 

You know, we're thinking of moving out to, like, somewhere isolated. 

I mean, Things get STRANGE, you know? Like, you're... like, 

“Wow, My Life 

has actually BECOME 

The Shining, you know?”

Listy

Lister had never been up to the Drive Room before.

It was enormous.

Hundreds of people scurried along the network of gantries stretching above him.

Banks of programmers in white officers' uniforms clacked away at computer keyboards, in front of multi-coloured flashing screens arranged in a series of horseshoe shapes around the massive chamber. Skutters, the small service droids with three-fingered clawed heads, joined to their motorised bases by triple-jointed necks, whizzed between the various computer terminals, transporting sheets of data.

Occasionally a voice could be heard above the unrelenting jabber of hundreds of people talking at once.

'Stop-start oA3! Stop-start oA3! Thank you! At last! Stop-start oA4! Is anybody listening to me?!'

Lister followed Petrovitch as he zigzagged through a maze of towering columns of identical hard disc drives and people pushed past them, desperate to get back to wherever they had to get back to.

Up above them, Holly's bald-headed digitalized face dominated the whole of the ceiling, patiently answering questions and solving quandaries, while dispensing relevant data updates from other areas of the ship.

Through the computer hardware Lister caught sight of Kochanski, expertly clicking away at a computer keyboard, happily going about her business, just as if nothing had happened. Lister didn't exactly expect her to be sobbing guiltily onto her keyboard. But smiling? Actively smiling? It was obscene. Lister remembered reading in one of Rimmer's Strange Science mags that an Earth biochemist claimed he'd isolated the virus which caused Love. According to him, it was an infectious germ which was particularly virulent for the first few weeks, but then, gradually, The Body recovered.

Looking at Kochanski merrily tippy-tapping away, Lister was inclined to believe the biochemist had a point. She'd shrugged him off like a bout of dysentery.

She'd recovered from him like he was a dose of 'flu. She was fine and dandy.

Back to normal.

They climbed the gantry steps to the Admin level, where glass-fronted offices wound round the entire chamber, like the private boxes which skirted the London Jets Zero-Gee football stadium.

Five minutes later they arrived outside the Captain's office. Petrovitch knocked, and they went in.

'Lister, sir,' said Petrovitch, and left.

The office looked like it had been newly-burgled and freshly-bombed. The Captain was mumbling into a phone buried beneath gigantic reams of computer print-out, surrounded by open ledgers and piles of memoranda.

Lister shifted uncomfortably and waited for her to finish her call.

'Well, you see he does exactly that,' finished the Captain, and before the phone had even hit its holder, and without looking up, she said: 'Where's the cat?'

'What?' said Lister.

'Where's the cat?' repeated the Captain.

'What cat?'

'I'm going to ask you one last time,' she said, finally looking up: 'Where is the cat?'

'Let me get this straight,' said Lister. 'You think I know something about a cat, right?'

'Don't be smart.' The Captain was actually smiling with anger. 'Where is it?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Lister, not only are you so stupid you bring an unquarantined animal aboard.

Not only that,' she paused, 'you have your photograph taken with the cat, and send it to be processed in the developing lab. So, let's make this the last chorus. Where's the cat?'

'What cat?'

'This one,' she shouted, pushing a photograph into Lister's face. 'This goddam cat!'

Lister looked at the photograph of himself sitting in what were unmistakably his sleeping quarters, holding what was unmistakably a small black cat 'Oh, that cat.'

'Where'd you get it? Mimas?'

'Miranda. When we stopped for supplies.'

'Don't you realise it could be carrying anything? Anything. What were you thinking of?'

'I just felt sorry for her. She was wandering the streets. Her fur was all hanging off...'

'Her fur was hanging off? Oh, this gets better and better.' Two of the Captain's phones were ringing, but she didn't answer them.

'And she had this limp, and she'd walk a few steps, then let out this scream, then walk a few more steps and scream again.'

'Well, now I'm screaming, Lister. I want that cat, and I want it now! D'you think we have quarantine regulations just for the hell of it? Just to make life a bit more unbearable? Well, we don't. We have them to safeguard the crew. A spaceship is a closed system. A contagious disease has nowhere else to go.

Everybody gets it.'

'She's better now. Fur's grown back, I've fixed her leg. She's fine.'

'It's impossible to tell. You got the cat from a space colony. There are diseases out there, new diseases. The locals develop an immunity. Now, get that cat down to the lab. Double-time.'

'Sir...'

'You're still here, Lister.

'What are you going to do with the cat?'

'I'm going to have it cut up, and run tests on it.'

'Are you going to put it back together when you've finished?'

'The Captain closed her eyes.

'You're not, are you?' persisted Lister. 'You're going to kill it.'

'Yes, Lister, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill it.

'Well, with respect, sir.' said Lister, taking a cigarette from his hat band, 'what's in it for the cat?'

Lister smiled. The Captain didn't.

'Lister, give me the cat.'

Lister shook his head.

'We'll find it, anyway.'

'No, you won't.'

'Let me put it like this' - the Captain reclined back in her chair -'give me the frigging cat.'

'Look, she's fine, there's nothing wrong with her.'

'Give me the cat.'

'Apart from anything else, she's pregnant.'

'She's what? I want that cat.'

Lister shook his head again.

'Do you want to go into stasis for the rest of the jag and lose three years' wages?'

'No.'

'Do you want to hand over the cat?'

'No.'

'Choose.'

Petrovitch led the way and Lister followed, flanked by two unnecessary security guards. They stopped at the door to the stasis booth.

'Last chance, Lister. Where's the cat?'

Lister just shook his head.

'Three years in stasis for some stupid flea-bitten moggy? Are you crazy?'

Lister wasn't crazy. Far from it.

He'd first heard about the stasis punishment from Petersen. Now that the booths were no longer used for interstellar travel, their only official function was penal. Lister had spent six long, boring evenings, shortly after Kochanski had finished with him, poring over the three-thousand-page ship regulation tome, and had finally tracked down the obscure clause.

The least serious crime for which stasis was a statutory punishment was breaking quarantine regulations. When Red Dwarf had stopped for supplies at Miranda, he'd spent the last afternoon of his three-day ship leave and all his wages buying the smallest, healthiest animal with the best pedigree he could find. For three thousand dollarpounds he'd purchased a black long haired cat with the show name ‘Frankenstein’. He'd had her inoculated for every known disease, to ensure that she didn't actually endanger the crew, and smuggled her aboard under his hat.

A week later he started to panic. The ship's security system still hadn't detected Frankenstein's presence.

It was tricky.

On the one hand he wanted to get caught with the cat, but he didn't want the cat to get caught and dissected. Eventually he hit on the idea of having his photograph taken with the cat, and sending off the film to be developed in the ship's lab.

Finally, and much to his relief, they'd caught him Three years in stasis was everything he'd hoped for. OK, his wages would be suspended, but it was a small price to pay for walking into a stasis booth, and walking out a subjective instant later in orbit around the Earth.

He'd hidden Frankenstein in the ventilation system. The system was so vast she would be impossible to catch, and also provided her with access for foraging raids to the ship's food stores.

So, all in all, as Lister stepped into the stasis booth, he was feeling pretty pleased with himself, or, at least, as pleased as anyone could expect to feel who was actually as miserable as hell.

Petrovitch gave him one last, last chance to surrender the cat, which Lister naturally refused.

As the cold metal door slammed behind him, he sat on the cold smoothness of the booth's bench and exhaled. Suddenly a warm, green light flooded the chamber, and Lister became a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero. 

He ceased, temporarily, to exist.

Lister spun the cap off the bottle of Glen Fujiyama, Japan's finest malt whisky, and poured a generous measure into a pint mug. Rimmer lay on his bunk, whistling pleasantly, his hologramatic eyes a-twinkle. Every opportunity he got, he tried to catch Lister's eye and wink at him cheerily.

Lister took a gulp of whisky. 'You're loving this, aren't you?'

'Oh, you're not still going on about your impending death, are you? For heaven's sake,' Fake Scouse accent: 'change der record. Flip der channel. Death isn't der handicap it once was. For smeg's sake, cheer up.'

'You are, aren't you? You're loving it.'

'Holly - I'd like to send an internal memo. Black border. Begins: "To Dave Lister. Condolences on your imminent death."' Rimmer half closed his eyes.

'What's that poem? Ah, yes ...

Now, weary traveller,Rest your head,For just like me,You'll soon be dead.'
'You're really sick, you know that?'

'Come o-o-o-on, -' Rimmer made the 'on' last three full seconds - 'it's all you ever talk about. Frankly' Lister' it's very booooring.'

'You are, you're loving it.'

'You're obsessed.'

'You realise when I die' you're going to be on your own.'

'Can't wait.'

'I thought you didn't want that. I thought that's what you were bleating on about before.'

'No, what got me down before wasn't being on my own. It was the idea that you were doing so much better than me. Staying young, and being alive; it was all too much to take. Now, me old buckeroo, the calliper's on the other foot.'

Lister gave up trying to argue. It was just adding to Rimmer's pleasure.

'I remember my grandmother used to say: "There's always some good in every situation."'

'Absolutely, absolutely' agreed Rimmer; 'and looking on the bright side in this particular situation, you are about to do the largest splits you've ever done in your life.'

'So, I get blown up' right?'

'Bits of you do. What's that thing - I think it's part of your digestive system - the long purply thing with knobbly bits? You only ever see them hanging in Turkish butcher shops. Well, whatever it is, that fair flies across the Navicomp Chamber. It was like a sort of wobbly boomerang.'

'Smeg off!'

'Temper.'

'I don't want to die.'

'Neither did I.'

'But it's not fair. There's so much I haven't done.'

Lister started to think about all the things he hadn't done. For some reason one of the first things that came to his mind was the fact that he'd never had a king prawn biriani. Whenever he'd seen it on the menu, he'd always played safe and ordered chicken or lamb. Now he never would have a king prawn biriani.

And books. There were so many he'd meant to read, but hadn't found the time.

'I've never read ... I've never read ...' Actually, when he thought about it, he realised he'd never read any book. It wasn't that he didn't like literature, it was just that generally he waited for the film to come out.

And A Family. He'd always assumed one day he'd have A Family. A Real Family, not an adopted one. A Real One. And he'd always wanted to spend a lot of time doing the thing you had to do if you wanted to get a family. He hadn't done nearly enough of that. Not nearly enough. A lot, but not nearly enough.

He was dimly aware that Rimmer was speaking, and Lister grunted occasionally to give the impression he was listening. But he wasn't. He was remembering his old job, back on Earth. His old job parking shopping trolleys at Sainsbury's megamarket, built on the site of the old Anglican cathedral.

One time the manager had caught him asleep in the warehouse. He'd constructed a little bed out of bags of salt, hidden from view behind a wall of canned pilchards. The manager had two GCSEs, a company car and a trainee moustache.

He'd lectured Lister for an hour about how, if he applied himself, within five years he could be a manager himself, with a company car - and, presumably, a trainee moustache. On the other hand, the trainee moustache warned him, if he didn't apply himself he'd be parking shopping trolleys for the rest of his natural.

Lister, who knew he was no genius, also knew for absolute certain he was one hundred and forty-seven times smarter than the manager. Nonetheless, he'd found this pep-talk extraordinarily disturbing. He knew he didn't want to spend all his life parking shopping trolleys, and equally he couldn't get excited about becoming stock control manager at Sainsbury's Megastore, Hope Street, Liverpool.

The manager took him by the lapels and shook him. He told Lister he had to make the grade and become an SCM, or his life would 'never amount to shit.'

And now, as he sat there knowing he'd probably only got a few hours to live, it occurred to him for the first time ever that the pompous goit with the trainee moustache would probably turn out to be right. And that hurt. That really hurt.

And that was how he spent most of the evening. Tugging at the whisky bottle, reviewing his crummy life. And it wasn't the mistakes he made that haunted him, it was the mistakes he hadn't got round to making. He flicked through the catalogue of missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises. He thought about the magnificently unlikely string of coincidences which had brought him into being.

The Big Bang; the universe; life on Earth; mankind; the zillions-to-one chance of the particular egg and sperm combination which created him; it had all happened. And what had he done with this incredible good fortune? He'd treated Time like it was urine, and pissed it all away into a big empty pot.

But no, it wasn't true: he'd had triumphs, a little voice from the whisky bottle was telling him. He'd been at the Superdome that night in London when the Jets played the Berlin Bandits in the European divisional play-offs, when Jim Bexley Speed, the greatest player ever to wear, the Roof Attack jersey, had the greatest game of his great career. He'd seen that famous second score when Speed had gone round nine men, leaving the commentators totally speechless, for the first time in history for fully nine seconds. That was a triumph. Just being there. He was alive and there that night. How many men could say that?

Then there was that time at the Indiana Takeaway in St John's Precinct when he'd tasted his first shami kebab, and become hopelessly and irrevocably hooked on this Indian hors d'oeuvre. True, he'd dedicated a good deal of the rest of his life searching for another truly perfect shami kebab. And, true, he'd never found one. But at least he'd tasted one. One food-of the-gods, perfect shami kebab. How many men could say that?

And then there was K.K. True, they'd only dated for five weeks. And the last week had been a bit sour. But four weeks of Kristine Kochanski being madly in love with him. Kristine Kochanski, who was so beautiful she could probably have got a job on the perfume counter at Lewis's! And she'd fallen in love with him!

For four weeks! Four whole weeks. How many men could say that? Not that many, probably.

And that night in the Aigburth Arms when he played pool. That night when, for some unknown reason, everything he tried came off. The Goddess of Bar Room Pool looked down from the heavens and blessed his cue. Every shot tnuk! Straight in the back of the pocket. They couldn't get him off the table. He was unbeatable.

Three and a half hours. Seventeen consecutive wins. He became a legend. He never played pool again, because he knew he wasn't that good. But that night in the Aigburth Arms he became a legend. A legend at the Aigburth Arms. How many men could say that?

The whisky bottle clanked emptily against the rim of his glass. He'd drunk half a bottle of whisky in two hours. How many men could say that?

He was drunk. How many men could say that?

He fell asleep in the chair. How many men could say that?

At three in the morning he was woken up by Holly.

'Emergency. There's an emergency going on. It's still going on, and it's an emergency.'

Rimmer sat up in bed, his hologramatic hair pointing stupidly in every compass direction. 'What is it?'

'The navicomp's crashed. It can't cope with the influx of data at light speed.

We've got to hook it up to the Drive computer and make a bypass.'

Lister slung his legs over the bunk. 'The navicomp? The navicomp in the Navicomp Chamber?'

'If we don't fix it, the ship will blow up in about fifteen minutes and twenty-three seconds.'

Lister jumped down to the floor. 'This is it, then.' 

Rimmer looked at him.

'Don't go.' 

'What d'you mean "Don't go"? You said yourself I can't avoid it.'

'Let's get it over with. What was I wearing?' 

'Your leather deerstalker, and that grey T-shirt.' Lister pulled on his deerstalker with deliberate precision. 

Then he walked across to the washbasin and lifted the metal towel rail off its support. 'Let's go.' 'What's that for?' Lister patted the towel rail against his left palm. 'I'm going out like I came in - screaming and kicking.' 

'You can't whack Death on the head.' 

'If he comes near me, I'll rip his tits off.' Then he was gone.