The thing about human beings was this : human beings couldn't agree. They couldn't agree about anything. Right from the moment their ancestors first slimed out of the oceans, and one group of sludge thought it was better to live in trees while the other thought it blatantly obvious that the ground was the hip place to be. And they'd disagreed about pretty well everything else ever since.
They disagreed about politics, religion, philosophy - everything.
And the reason was this : basically, all human beings believed all other human beings were insane, in varying degrees.
This was largely due to a defective gene, isolated by a group of Danish scientists at the Copenhagen Institute in the late 1960s. This was a discovery which had the potential for curing all humankind's ills, and the scientists, naturally ecstatic, decided to celebrate by going out for a meal. Two of them wanted to go for a smorgasbord, one wanted Chinese cuisine, another preferred French, while the last was on a diet and just wanted to stay in the lab and type up the report. The disagreement blew up out of all proportion, the scientists fell to squabbling and the paper was never completed. Which was just as well in a way, because if it had been presented, no one would have agreed with it, anyway.
Small wonder, then, that homo sapiens spent most of their short time on Earth waging war against each other.
For their first few thousand years on the planet they did little else, and they discovered two things that were rather curious : the first was that when they were at war, they agreed more. Whole nations agreed that other nations were insane, and they agreed that the mutually beneficial solution was to band together to eliminate the loonies. For many people, it was the most agreeable period of their lives, because, apart from a brief period on New Year's Eve (which, incidentally, no one could agree the date of), the only time human beings lived happily side by side was when they were trying to kill each other.
Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the human race hit a major problem.
It got so good at war, it couldn't have one anymore.
It had spent so much time practising and perfecting the art of genocide, developing more and more lethal devices for mass destruction, that conducting a war without totally obliterating the planet and everything on it became an impossibility.
This didn't make human beings happy at all. They talked about how maybe it was still possible to have a small, contained war. A little war. If you like, a warette.
They spoke of conventional wars, limited wars, and this insane option might even have worked, if only people could have agreed on a new set of rules. But, people being people, they couldn't.
War was out. War was a no-no.
And like a small child suddenly deprived of its very favourite toy, the human race mourned and sulked and twiddled its collective thumbs, wondering what to do next.
Towards the conclusion of the twenty-first century, a solution was found. The solution was sport.
Sporting events were, in their way, little wars, and with war gone people started taking their sport ever more seriously. Scientists and theoreticians channelled their energies away from weaponry and into the new arena of battle.
And since the weapons of sport were human beings themselves, scientists set about improving them.
When chemical enhancements had gone as far as they could go, the scientists turned to genetic engineering.
Super sportsmen and women were grown, literally grown, in laboratory test-tubes around the planet.
The world's official sports bodies banned the new mutants from competing in events against normal athletes, and so a new, alternative sports body was formed, and set up in competition.
The GAS (Genetic Alternative Sports) finished 'normal' sport within two years. Sports fans were no longer interested in seeing a conventional boxing match, when they could witness two genetically engineered pugilists - who were created with their brains in their shorts, and all their other major organs crammed into their legs and feet, leaving their heads solid blocks of unthinking muscle - knock hell out of one another for hours on end in a way that normal boxers could only manage for minutes.
Basketball players were grown twenty feet tall.
Swimmers were equipped with gills and fins.
Soccer players were bred with five legs and no mouths, making after-match interviews infinitely more interesting. However, not all breeds of genetic athletes were accepted by the GAS and new rules had to be created after the 2224 World Cup, when Scotland fielded a goalkeeper who was a human oblong of flesh, measuring eight feet high by sixteen across, thereby filling the entire goal. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.
American football provided the greatest variety of mutant athletes, each one specifically designed for its position. The Nose Tackle, for instance, was an enormous nose - a huge wedge of boneless flesh that was hammered into the scrimmage line at every play. Wide receivers were huge Xs - four long arms that tapered to the tiny waist perched on top of legs capable of ten-yard strides. The defensive line were even larger, specifically bred to secrete noxious chemicals whenever the ball was in play.
Genetic Alternative Sports were a huge hit, and the technological advancements spilled into other avenues of human life.
Cars were suddenly coming off the production line made from human mutations. Bone on the outside, soft supple flesh in the interior, and engines made from mutated internal organs - living cars, that drove themselves, parked themselves and never crashed. More importantly than that, they didn't rely on fossil fuels to run. All they required was carfood - a special mulch made from pig offal. Cars in the twenty-third century ran on sausages.
The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere, and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children.
Finally, the bubble burst. The Gelfs rebelled, just as the Mechanoids had rebelled before them.
The unrest had been festering for half a century. The dichotomy was that, although Gelfs were created from human chromosomes, and therefore technically qualified as human, they had no rights whatsoever. Quite simply, they wanted to vote. And normal humans were damned if they were going to file into polling stations alongside walking furniture and twenty-feet tall athletic freaks.
The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank. They took the manager and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman was brought to justice for murder.
Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept that a crime had been committed.
The facts in the case were undisputed. It was a crime of passion. Holman had returned home from work unexpectedly one afternoon to discover his armchair sitting on his naked wife. He immediately leapt to the right conclusion, and shot the chair as it hurriedly tried to wriggle back into its upholstery.
Finally the establishment capitulated, and Holman was brought to trial. After the two-day hearing the court ruled that since Holman would have to live out the rest of his life being known as the man who was cuckolded by his own furniture, he had suffered enough, and was given a six-month suspended sentence.
And so the Gelf War started.
And for a short time, humankind indulged in its favourite pastime. Humans versus man-made humans.
Armchairs and vacuum cleaners fought side by side with bizarrely shaped genetically engineered sports stars and living, breathing motor cars.
The Gelfs didn't stand a chance, and most of them were wiped out or captured. The few remaining went to ground, becoming experts in urban guerrilla warfare. For a short time, Gelf-hunters proliferated, and a rebel vacuum cleaner waddling frantically down a crowded street, pursued by a Gelf runner, became a common sight.
But it wasn't the Gelf resistance fighters who caused the problem. The problem was what to do with those who'd surrendered. Legally, killing them constituted murder, but equally, the authorities could hardly send them back into docile human service.
Fortunately the problem coincided with the nomination of Earth as Garbage World. All the captured Gelfs were dumped like refuse on the island of Zanzibar and left to die.
Most of them did. But not all. Some survived. Not the brightest, not even the biggest, just those best equipped to cope with the harsh rigours of living on a planet swamped in toxic waste and choking poisons. The ones who could endure the endless winter as Earth soared through the universe looking for its new sun. And gradually, a new strain of Gelf evolved.
A creature who could live anywhere. Even in the revolting conditions on Earth. A creature with a sixth sense - telepathy. A creature who was able to read its prey's mind, even through hundreds of feet of compacted ice. A creature with no shape of its own: whose form was dictated by the requirements of survival.
These were the polymorphs.
The shape-changers.
They didn't need food for survival.
They fed on other creatures' emotions. Their diet was fear, jealousy, anger ...
And when no other creatures were left on the island of Zanzibar, they began to feed off each other.
Until finally, there were only a handful left.
The polymorph who'd assumed Lister's shape lay on the bunk, waiting for its energy to return after its metamorphosis, while Kryten and the Toaster stared at the suddenly blank screen.
'What've you done now? You've caused a malfunction.'
At the sound of the Toaster's tinny tones, Kryten's eyes rolled fully 720 degrees round in his head. 'The transmission stopped. It's nothing to do with me.'
'Why would the transmission suddenly stop? You must have pressed something. You must have pressed the wrong button.'
'I didn't press anything, they just stopped broadcasting.'
'Says you.'
Kryten had had it up to his stereophonic audial sensors with the Toaster. Frankly, old Talkie was beginning to get on Kryten's nipple nuts. Fourteen hours of bouncing around in the hover dinghy, scouring the swamps, with the Toaster navigating, had driven him to the very limits of his almost limitless patience.
Few relationships can survive the ordeal of travelling to an unknown destination over any kind of distance, with one driving and one reading the map. If Romeo and Juliet had ever been forced to jump in a family saloon and drive from Venice to Marbella, they would have split up long before they hit the Spanish border. Hopelessly lost, bawling and screaming in some deserted lay-by in the middle of God-knows-where, there'd have been no talk of suicide - they'd have been more than ready to murder each other.
And Kryten didn't have the advantage of being madly in love with the Toaster to start with. The sight of the Toaster didn't send his soul into rapture. He thought the Toaster was an infuriatingly perky little geek.
And that was before the journey.
Fourteen hours stuck together had not improved things, and, uncharacteristically, Kryten was beginning to have fantasies wherein he set about the Toaster with a petrol-powered chainsaw.
'No way would that screen have gone blank if I'd had anything to do with it,' the Toaster chirped. 'Absolutely no way.'
'Please. I'm trying to discover what's wrong.'
'I'll tell you what's wrong. You. You don't know what you're doing. You're a sanitation Mechanoid - bog-cleaning, that's all you're good for. You're a bog-bot. A lavvy droid. A mechanical basin bleacher.'
'Really?' Kryten's voice was dangerously quiet. 'And I suppose a novelty Toaster is infinitely better-equipped to cope with the complex communications system aboard this vessel?'
'Well, a certain so-called "novelty” Toaster certainly didn't do a half-bad job at getting us all out of a certain Black Hole I could mention.' The Toaster gave an arrogant twist of his browning knob.
Kryten discreetly crushed a small section of the console's facade, and continued trying unsuccessfully to restore the communication link with White Giant.
The pale waxy figure on the couch listened to them bickering. The words themselves meant nothing, but the shapes and colours of their emotions were new and exciting. As soon as its energy returned, it would feast. It had lived for so long on tiny morsels of insect emotion - mainly fear - and the little snacks it managed to cannibalize from weaker members of its species, that every shape change left it drained and temporarily helpless.And now the Shadow Time was almost on it. It would need nourishment and sustenance if it was to survive the Aftering. It didn't think these things. It simply knew them. It had no capacity for abstract thought, it couldn't plan. It was a matter of instinct. The instinct to survive, moment by moment, for as long as possible.But the water was helping. The cooling water on its brow was helping its strength to return.
Kryten dipped the cloth back in the water, then draped it back over his patient's forehead. 'I don't know what's wrong with the communication link. Still, that's not for you to worry about. I'm sure they'll be in touch soon.' Kryten tutted. Lister looked absolutely awful. 'Are you quite sure there's nothing else I can do?'
'What he needs,' chipped in a tinny voice, 'is some nice, hot...'
'No!' Kryten snapped.
'... tea. I was going to say "some nice, hot, sweet tea.” What did you think I was going to say?' said the Toaster.
And then the Shadow Time came, and with it, the pain.
Kryten was half-way back to the communication console when Lister started convulsing. His back arched up off the bed, and his limbs threshed uncontrollably in the crash couch recess. Strange sounds, barely human, drove out of his juddering throat.
'He's choking!' yelled the Toaster.
'I can see that!' said Kryten, hauling Lister into a sitting position and slapping him on his back.
'Perhaps he's swallowed a fishbone!'
'Swallowed a what?'
'A fishbone. And you know what the cure is for a fishbone lodged in the throat.'
'What?'
'Dry toast! Oh, joy! I've waited for a moment like this all my life! Get me some bread!'
Kryten yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall and hurled it at the Toaster, catching it a glancing blow on its browning knob. The Toaster was temporarily stunned into silence, and Kryten went back to slamming the still-convulsing Lister between the shoulder blades.
And just when it seemed the convulsions could get no worse, they stopped. Something dislodged from Lister's throat, and fell into Kryten's outstretched palm.
'It's a piece of bubble-gum.' Kryten held out the small pink wad of gum for Lister to see.
Pale and sweating, the Lister morph sank back on to the couch, exhausted. Kryten dropped the gumball into a metal trash can, just as the communication screen crackled back to life.
'What's going on?' asked the Toaster.
Lines of silent machine code scrolled up the screen.
'It's machine code.' said the Toaster.
'Yes,' hissed Kryten, 'I'm perfectly well aware of that.'
'Why are they communicating in machine language?'
'I haven't the slightest clue.'
'No,' agreed the Toaster, 'you haven't, have you? D'you want me to translate it? I'm fairly fluent in machine code.'
'I can manage.'
'Well? What does it say?'
'If you can just give me half a second, I'll tell you.'
'Yes?'
'It says: 'Extreme danger. You have ...' Kryten's voice tailed off.
'You have what?'
'Nothing.' Kryten's eyes flitted across the screen, absorbing the message.
'What d'you mean, "nothing”?'
Kryten craned round and looked at the figure on the couch. The lifeless milky eyes stared back at him.
'Come on - what d'you mean, "nothing”? There can't be five hundred lines of nothing on the screen.'
'I mean ... I can't translate it,' Kryten lied. 'I don't know what it says.'
The Toaster sighed extravagantly, and turned, by flipping its bread-release lever rapidly up and down on the table top, to face the screen. 'Once more the cavalry, in the form of a handsome yet reasonably inexpensive red toasting machine, bugles over the hill to the rescue. The message,' it said, 'runs thus: "Extreme danger. You have on board a genetic mutation” ...'
'Shut up.'
'... "It is not, repeat, not Lister” ...'
'That's enough.'
' "Abandon your vessel” ...'
'Quiet!'
'... "and engage self-destruct.” Honestly, this is really easy. You'd have to be a moron not to be able to translate this. What's this next bit...?'
Before it could continue, Kryten had wrenched the two thin steel ashtrays from the arms of the relaxation chairs and hammered them into the Toaster's bread vents. It was silenced immediately.
The Lister creature on the couch swivelled upright and watched, expressionless, as Kryten sidled back towards the glass cabinet that contained the emergency fire axe.
Abandon ship? How could he abandon ship? They were no longer on Garbage World, they were in space, half-way back to Red Dwarf.
Something was happening. The shapes, the colours of the emotions of the prey were changing. The tall, thin one, the mobile one made of plastic and metal, was afraid. Very afraid.Delicious.Nurture the fear. Help it grow.Then feast on its succulence.Feast to gorging.Must change.Must change, to nurture the fear. But weak. Too weak to complete.
Kryten's elbow smashed into the glass casing behind him, and his hand found the grip of the fire axe. Then he froze.
It was a horrible sound. The most horrible sound Kryten had ever heard. Crunching bones and sickening wetness, and a scream that dipped all the way down to Hell.
Lister stopped being Lister and started to become something else. His body folded in on itself, and when it re-emerged it was inside out. The slimy, mucus-coated organs quivered and gurgled as the ribcage split open and a strange serpent-like suction head slithered out and began sliming across the floor towards Kryten's feet.
Kryten stood there, waxwork-still in terror, as the unspeakable appendage coiled itself up his legs. The rest of the creature lay writhing ecstatically on the floor: Lister from the shoulders up, blubbery gore below.
The grotesque tentacle wound its way effortlessly up Kryten's torso, and wrapped around his neck, until its drooling tip quivered inches from his lips.
It reared back, like a snake about to strike. The tentacle tip split and a pink, fleshy, pursed mouth flicked out and grinned.
Then there was a voice. It was high pitched and metallic. It was the Toaster.
'Hey, pal.'
The creature's mouth slowly turned towards the bright red plastic box on the table.
'Would you like a little toast?'
The Toaster jiggled its crumb tray, so that it toppled on to its front, then slammed down its bread-release lever. A red-hot metal ashtray skimmed through the air, slicing through the creature's tentacle. The severed appendage thrashed and flailed, spraying green gloop around the entire control room.
The part of the creature that was half Lister, half something else screeched with blind agony and lurched towards the Toaster.
'Hey - don't get angry. I have a slice for you, too.'
The second ashtray sizzled across the control room, ploughed through the neck of the Lister beast, decapitating it, silencing its inhuman shriek forever.
The Toaster flipped back up on to its base, and said, in a voice as macho as its tinny larynx would allow: 'Was it something I said?' it burred. 'He seems a trifle cut up.”
Kryten slithered down the bulkhead wall, sat on the deck and groaned, a long, low grumble of a groan. This was possibly the worst thing that could have happened. Saved, yet again, by the Toaster. Now it would scale new peaks of obnoxiousness.
The Toaster was already in its stride. A little puff of smoke trilled from the top of its grill. 'Toast, quantum mechanics and now slimebeast-slayer. Not a bad buy for $£19.99, wouldn't you say?'
Without interrupting his groan, Kryten punched the re-heat button to take Blue Midget back to Red Dwarf, double speed.
It was a strange feeling for Lister, staring down at his own dead features. He shook his head. 'It doesn't make sense - I don't understand how you managed to kill it so easy.'
'Hardly easy,' the Toaster objected. 'It was a mono a mono, ninja-type struggle, where a brave, rather ruggedly handsome red kitchen appliance finally managed to come out on top.'
Lister wasn't listening. His finger hovered over the fire button of his heavy-duty mining laser. 'It must have been weak.'
'Weak? It was on the brink of squeezing the very life out of a series 4000 Mechanoid. That's how weak it was. You just can't tolerate the thought that, yet again, your old buddy Talkie Toaster saved everybody's neck.'
'Why did it wait so long to feed? It doesn't make sense, none of it.'
'It didn't feed because it was engaged in a titanic battle a morte with a samurai toaster. It was too busy trying to dodge lethal discs of red-hot steel to be thinking about nosh time. Oh, you should have seen me, I was magnificent. I feinted right, I dodged left - I was ducking and diving, weaving and bobbing, and he didn't lay a sucker on me.'
Lister shook his head again, and clicked and whistled a cockroach expletive.
Kryten prodded the polymorph's remains with the shaft of his fire axe, and looked up at Lister. 'What I don't understand is why it looks thirty years younger than you do.'
'It read your mind. You were expecting to find me the same age as you left me. That was the only data it had. So it turned into what it knew you were looking for.'
Rimmer stood outside the hatchway on the embarkation ramp, still steadfastly refusing to enter Blue Midget. 'You've encountered these things before, then?' he called to Lister.
Lister nodded. 'Once. One of the scouting roaches brought one back to the valley. Wiped out half the settlement before we finally punched its card. After that we always kept lookouts, but no others ever showed up. I don't think they're that intelligent. They're like mynah birds - they copy things without really understanding what it is they're copying.'
'So what now, Mr Lister, sir?'
'I don't want to take any chances. I think we should shoot Blue Midget into space, and detonate the auto-destruct.'
'Destroy Blue Midget?' Rimmer's head leaned in through the hatchway. 'We've already lost Starbug. That leaves us with only one transport craft.'
'Rimmer - I know what these things can do.'
'It's dead! It can't do anything.'
'I know. But I want to get rid of it. Every last bit of the smegger. And the only way to be sure of that is to torch the ship.'
Rimmer continued his protests all the way to the Shuttle-Bay Launch Suite, but Lister was adamant; adamant and stubborn in a way he'd never been when he was younger There was simply no arguing with him.
They were gone. It was safe now to move. Safe to change.
The wad of pink gum folded in on itself and began to fizzle as it turned into a cloud of steam and floated out of the metal trash can towards the air lock. The steam wrapped itself into a ball and solidified into a round black stone. The stone clanked loudly as it hit Blue Midget's deck, and rolled up against the air-lock door.
Then the stone became ice. And the ice became water. And the water tried to seep through the air-lock seal.
No way out.Not here.
The water became steam again, and wafted around the craft's interior, looking for an exit.
Nothing. The whole craft was air-tight.
Then the engines rumbled, jets fired, and the vessel began to rise.
The steam floated up to the rear viewport window, became a fly and flung itself against the reinforced glass.
Blue Midget bucked and bobbled as its steering jets swung the craft round and aligned it with the damaged bay doors.
The fly became a feather and floated ineffectually against the glass. The feather became a bullet. Its rear-end ignited and it blasted against the glass, ricocheting back and tumbling once more to the deck.
It lay in silence.
It was young. It knew of no more shapes.
It needed more knowledge.
Something primeval inside it, some instinct it didn't understand told it to seek out the minds of its prey. The signals were weak - only just in range.
It searched through their memories, and changed into things it found there. Many things. And none of the shapes it became could get through the glass.
Blue Midget passed under the bay arch, and swept out into space.
And it was only then that the creature turned into the one thing that could pass through the glass.
A light beam.
It became a beam of light that flashed through the glass and streaked back through the open bay doors.
It was back.
Back on Red Dwarf.
It became a small puddle of water - the least demanding of all its shapes - and rested.
When its strength returned, it would feed.
It would feed well.
Kryten craned over the crumpled handwritten recipe sheet he'd been given by Lister. It was Lister's own concoction: 'shami kebabs diabolo', which he'd once claimed proudly had put Petersen in the medical unit for over a week. But surely there was some mistake. The amount of chilli peppers called for could have launched a three-stage Deep Space probe from Houston Mission Control to the outer reaches of the galaxy. This wasn't a shami kebab - it was a thermo-nuclear device.
Still, orders were orders. Kryten plugged the food-blending attachment into his groinal socket and thrust his hips towards the mixing-bowl. It was something of a design flaw with the series 4000 that the power socket was so indelicately placed. It looked particularly preposterous whenever Kryten was called on to use the three-foot vacuum hose. He tugged his right ear and the blender whirred into life. He whistled happily and began mincing together the ingredients of the kebab.
***
Thin fast beads of water battered over Lister's body as he gloried in the warmth of the shower. He filled his cupped palm with a ludicrously generous amount of shampoo, and massaged it into his already well-lathered scalp.
Shampoo and soap were two of the luxuries he'd failed to duplicate adequately on Garbage World. For a third of a century he'd had to wash using salt. His attempts to make real soap by boiling decomposing vegetable fats had proved too revolting for words. He always ended up smelling worse after he'd bathed than before he'd started. He finally gave up his soap-making attempts when he noticed that the cockroaches had started avoiding him, and ever afterwards relied on salt.
He blinked through sudded eyes at his reflection in the cubicle's mirrored wall. He hadn't bothered with mirrors as a vanity device - he really had no desire to impress roaches with a well-groomed appearance - and all the mirrors and reflective surfaces he'd collected over the years were used to harness the sun's heat. It was strange having an old body; he still thought of himself as a permanent twenty-five.
Where did all the years go?
Who'd stolen that fabulous body he'd once had for a couple of months when he was eighteen? Who'd given him this one instead? OK, so it was pretty well preserved for its sixty-one years, and, curiously, it was fitter in many respects than it had been when he'd first arrived on Garbage World, thanks to all his labours in the field. But there was no getting away from it - he now lived in a body that was nine years away from being seventy.
Nearly seventy.
Soon he would have to face the fact that in all probability he would never play professionally for the London Jets.
He might not even live to see the conclusion of his plan to tow Earth back to its solar system.
He heard a voice through the shower's roar, and turned down the taps.
It was Kryten: 'Ready in two minutes, Mr Lister, sir.'
Lister smiled. He was two minutes away from his first shami kebab in three-and-a-half decades. He'd given up meat, of course, on Garbage World, and he had no regrets about that. But shami kebabs were something else. Fantasizing about this Indian hors d'oeuvre had kept him going when times had been rough.
And now he was going to have one.
He chuckled out loud, and began clicking and whistling an up-beat cockroach song as he rinsed the soap from his hair.
***
Kryten pulled on three sets of oven gloves, one on top of the other, and took the three sausage-shaped kebabs out of the oven. They looked innocent enough, but quite frankly he'd have felt safer handling them wearing an asbestos suit, preferably with long-range, remote-controlled mechanical arms.
These babies were hot.
He put the plate on the sleeping quarters' table and backed away nervously.
'Dinner is served, sir.'
'Just coming.'
As Kryten crossed the sleeping quarters, a small, brightly patterned beach ball bounced through the hatchway and into the room.
Kryten caught it on its fifth bounce, placed it on the table, next to Lister's kebabs, and went outside into the corridor to investigate.
There was no one there.
The corridor was empty.
Kryten ducked back into the sleeping quarters. Now the beach ball wasn't there either.
Kryten failed to notice that the three kebabs on the plate had become four.
'He-e-eyy!' Lister stepped out of the cubicle, tugging together the cords of his shower robe, 'Shami kebabs!' he orgasmed. 'Thirty-four years. I hope you haven't skimped on the old chillies, there, Kryters, old buddy, old pal.'
Lister sat down and prepared to eat. As his fork bore down towards his plate, one of the Indian sausages leapt out of the bed of lettuce and hurled itself around his throat. He catapulted back and crashed to the ground in his chair; his desperate fingers clawing at the choking kebab; his legs kicking and bucking.
Kryten turned from the wash basin at the sounds of Lister's agonized writhing.
He shook his head and tutted. 'Are you seriously telling me you like them that spicy?'
Lister gagged. His face started to blacken.
'Far too many chilli peppers,' Kryten clucked. 'Didn't I tell you?'
Lister's eyes bulged as he rolled over and over on the sleeping quarters' floor.
'And this is your idea of an enjoyable snack? It's sheer insanity.'
'The kebab,' Lister rasped, 'it's trying to kill me.'
'Well, I'm not the least bit surprised.'
Finally, Lister's clawing fingers found some purchase, and he ripped the lethal shami from his neck and slung it across the sleeping quarters.
He hunched, coughing and choking as it slid with snake speed underneath the bunks. 'Where'd it go?'
'Where did what go?'
'The polymorph! There's another polymorph!'
'What? Where?'
Lister staggered back against the bunks. 'I think it went under Rimmer's architect's desk.' He reached down and picked up his red boxer shorts from the floor and struggled into them. 'Come on, Kryten - we've got to get out of here.'
Lister grabbed a baseball bat from beside the bunk and started backing towards the hatchway.
There was a loud cracking sound, and Lister doubled up.
'Are you all right, sir?'
'Guhhhh!'
'What's the matter?'
'My ... ah! ... My boxers... aaah! .. . They're shrinking!' Lister staggered forward, his eyes double size with fear as a second creak wrenched his body into spasm. 'The polymorph! It's turned into a pair of boxers ... getting smaller... Ahhhh! No! God! Please! Please!'
Lister staggered and then toppled on to his back. 'Kryten -help me! Please help me! My boxers - get them off- pull them down! Please, God, I'm begging you.'
Kryten fell to his knees between Lister's splayed legs, ripped open his shower robe, and tugged frantically at Lister's boxer shorts.
Rimmer skidded into the quarters. 'What the hell's going on?'
'Keep still, Mr Lister!'
'I can't stand it anymore. Get them off- please! Do it now!'
'We need some kind of lubricant.' Kryten's eyes scanned the room. 'Butter. I'll get some butter.'
'Anything! Anything! Just do it quick!'
Rimmer shook his head. He couldn't say he was totally shocked. He wished he could, but he couldn't. He'd bonk anything, Lister. Not even a male android was safe from his vile appetites. And what was that dangling from Kryten's groinal socket? A food blender? Oh, it brought tears to his eyes just thinking about it.
With a final effort, Kryten ripped off Lister's tiny shorts and stood up. The boxers were minute, doll size. Lister scrambled backwards towards the hatchway. 'It's a polymorph! Don't just stand there holding it! Get rid of the smegger!'
Suddenly the tiny red shorts folded in on themselves, and Kryten was holding the tail of a rat.
'Oh my God!' Lister's stomach surged for his throat. It was a plague rat, two and a half feet long, not counting its tail.
Lister hated rats.
Hated them.
And this one came from his nightmares : its razor-sharp yellow teeth, its black matted fur streaked with blood, its cold, dead eyes.
It wriggled, snapped and drooled as Kryten staggered towards him, still grimly holding it by its tail. 'What shall I do, sir? Where shall I put it.'
'Just get it out of here! Just get it away from me!'
Kryten swung the beast and flung it hard towards the bulkhead wall, but it twisted in the air, flipped back and changed direction. Lister watched in adrenalin-induced slow motion as the rat landed...
on
his
FACE.
'Wuuuuhaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!' A voice Lister had never heard before screamed from deep inside him. He felt the rat's foetid breath crawl up into his nostrils.
'Oh my Guhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnn!'
Then the most hideous, revolting, disgusting, foul, vile thing that had ever happened to Lister, happened to Lister.
Some of the rat's rabid spittle drooled into his gaping mouth.
'Oh, shiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrhhhhhhhhggggggggghhhhhh!'
Lister's fear was complete.
Terror pushed him to the very edge of insanity.
Then it happened.
The rat's head folded in on itself, split open and disgorged the polymorph's feeding tentacle. The slimy puckered mouth on the tip of the tentacle smacked on to Lister's head.
And the polymorph began to feed.
Kryten ripped the half-rat from Lister's face and pitched it against the bunkside wall. It squelched down the wall, leaving a trail of gloop and gore, and fell into the open laundry basket. Kryten launched himself across the quarters and slammed down the lid.
Lister rose from the floor and picked up the baseball bat. 'I hate rats.' He shuddered. 'They freak me out totally. They're my second all-time worst fear.'
Rimmer cleared his dry throat. 'What's your first?'
The metal lid blasted into the air, and a new form loomed out of the basket. Its head hung hugely above them. Mucus pulsed through the gaps in its armour-like endoskeleton. Its enormous jaws carried two hundred needle-sharp silver teeth, glistening with demonic slobber.
'This,' said Lister. 'This is my all-time worst fear.'
The creature's jaws opened to their limit, and a feeding tentacle shot out of its mouth and fastened on to Lister's head.
The half-sated polymorph completed its meal.
'So what are you saying?' The Cat frowned. 'This thing feeds off emotions?'
Kryten nodded. 'Exactly. It changes shape to provoke a negative emotion - in this case, fear. It took Mr Lister to the very limit of his terror, then sucked out his fear.'
'Then what happened?'
'It vanished. It turned into a cloud of steam and floated out of the room.'
The Cat looked down at Lister's inert form on the medical unit's biofeedback couch. 'Is he OK?'
'Apparently so. It's just he no longer has any sense of fear.'
Rimmer stopped pacing. 'The question is: what are we going to do?'
Lister's eyes flicked open, and he lurched upright on the couch. 'Well, I say let's get out there and twat it.'
