Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

TEE-POL: I can be [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] diplomatic. Ask any [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] alien bastard.

POL-TEE: What a load of [REPRODUCTIVE BODY PARTS]! Remember your interview? You shat in the face of the Venusian ambassador.

TEE-POL: For the [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] thousandth time – I thought that was the official greeting !

POL-TEE: Oh, just forget this. The Tellurians aren’t going to rescue us. Let’s just grab supplies and find another ship to fix.

TEE-POL: Yes, then after we’ve spent another 400 years repairing it, you can forget to lock that one, too!

POL-TEE: Oh, I’m in charge of locking the [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] ship now, am I?

TEE-POL: What d’you think that badge is for? A rocket ship with a lock next to it – Put a Chain Round My [ERECT MALE SEXUAL ORGAN]?

POL-TEE: Well, you do have a…

TEE-POL: That’s nothing to [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] do with it! Just snag what you can and let’s get out of here.

POL-TEE: Hang on, there’s a bath here. I haven’t had a bath in centuries.

TEE-POL: Really? That’s not a big secret to me. Or anyone within nasal range.

TEE-POL: What the [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] are you doing ?

POL-TEE: Have they got any soap, the dirty mother-[PROFANITY EXPUNGED]? Here – this packet’s got a picture of a bath on it. Must be bubble bath?

TEE-POL: Seriously? You’re seriously going to have a bath?

POL-TEE: Oh. They look like bath bombs. [SNIFF] Smell a bit [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] porky.

TEE-POL: Just [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] get on with it. [SPLASH]

[PAUSE]

POL-TEE: Oh crap.

TEE-POL: What the [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] have you done now?

POL-TEE: There’s hundreds of the bastards! They’re stampeding.

TEE-POL: What are they? What are they?

POL-TEE: It’s a [PROFANITY EXPUNGED] Tellurian trap, the evil scum! I told you we should have blasted the planet to smithereens.

TEE-POL: Stop shooting you dozy [PROFANITY EXPUNGED]! You’ll breach the airlo–

POL-TEE: Look out – it’s going to bl–

TEE-POL: [PROFANITY EXPUNGED]

TEE-POL/POL-TEE: Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuu–!!!

Typewritten note. Author: Unknown. Date: Unknown, but almost certainly from this iteration of 1952

MY dear professor Quandherh0rn,

just a kind note, to give you ample warning: I’m freee, and Im coming for you. Vengeance will indeed be midne. Not just for me, but for all of us. Put your affairs in order and prepare to die, your Friend,

And in a scrawled, almost illegible hand:

Edmond Dantès

Fat

Incompetence

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Gollancz an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

Copyright © Rob Grant & Andrew Marshall, 2018

The moral right of Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 473 22402 5

ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 22404 9

Martians have a notoriously underdeveloped sense of humour. The most popular joke on Mars goes as follows: “ Knock Knock . If you don’t stop knocking on my door, I will kill you with this Death Ray. Knock Knock . Zap.”

There is no direct translation for Waku-Tingg in any Earth tongue. The best we can guess is: ‘Hot blast of wind that can split a rock.’ The other alternative is that Guuuurk simply made it up. This would not be the first time.

Named after Mars’ outer moon. Deimos, in Martian fable, visits the hovels of the poor during the Festival of Misery, which occurs 72 times a year, when Martians are encouraged to leave out cake, sweet-smelling herbs and a selection of erotic literature to avoid offending Deimos (the Spirit of War), lest he steal into their children’s bedrooms and sew their legs together. Many parents gaily sew their children’s legs together under cover of darkness to maintain this delightful myth.

In Martian myth, Norgar the Loose-Bowelled was a warlord who would only fight armies of women and/or extremely old people. There were, therefore, rarely any spoils to distribute, and his starving troops finally ate him.

From Guuuurk’s Report: ‘What the Deimos is that peculiar little braided object Brian keeps rescuing surreptitiously? Is it something he applies to his genitalia during the mating ritual in some way, like the red-hot Barbed Hoopno employed in the Martian honeymoon ceremony? He certainly seems very attached to it (though not in the way one becomes attached to the red-hot Barbed Hoopno). We’re all laughing behind our hands whenever he gets it out!’

Clearly, this is one of Guuuurk’s many Martian expressions which fail to translate into any Earth language. Thank goodness.

Guuuurk often boasts of his proficiency in various Martian martial arts. Oddly, they are never called the same thing twice.

The other members of the crew clearly picked up a number of Guuuurkian expressions along the way.

This document, a single page torn from Hansard, was pasted in a scrapbook discovered in the Quanderhorn cache. From the rather daringly ‘Gallic’ nature of certain of the snapshots in the book, we may assume it was compiled by Mr Jenkins.

The various combinations of Martian raised eyebrows (there are 720 different permutations) are detailed in appendix 4: Martian Ocular Signalling System.

In the Professor’s own notebooks, there are many sketches of an ‘Alpha-Matic Sleep-Speeder’ headset, which supposedly compacts eight hours of sleep into two and a half minutes. Some accounts claim the Professor had stocked up on considerable reserves of sleep while attending a Beat Generation interpretation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, featuring bongo-playing Valkyries in black leotards.