Out to Launch Read online

  Jack did not have a lot going for him, though his farting talent had made him a lot of friends at school – strange friends, admittedly, who were spottier and smellier than he was.

  Meanwhile, at the top-secret production facility hidden deep in Tristan da Cunha/Patagonia/Wales/Belgium/Poland,20 work on the MUD (Moon Unit Dwelling) was progressing according to Radius’s instructions.

  ‘This isn’t a construction that we’re going to use over and over again,’ Radius explained to the builders, ‘so you don’t need to use strong materials, like thick sheets of titanium. Thin aluminium will do, with fibreglass and gaffer tape. You could even use flattened tin cans here and there for some of the smaller bits, but make sure you take the labels off first. I mean, we don’t want baked-bean labels drifting around the moon.’

  ‘Right, boss,’ said the foreman.

  ‘That was a joke,’ said Radius. ‘The bit about the tin cans.’

  ‘Oh. Haha, boss, great joke!’

  ‘Though, actually, flattened tin cans are pretty strong,’ said the designer. ‘We could use them in quite a few places where there isn’t any stress on the framework.’

  ‘Oh. Haha, great joke!’ said the rest of the construction team.

  ‘I wasn’t joking,’ said the designer. ‘We could save thousands.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Radius. ‘That’s my kind of thinking. But do remember to take the labels off.’

  Radius told them all that every cost-saving measure they could come up with would earn them a bonus. This, of course, meant that there was some serious cost saving – though the designer did draw the line at using toilet-roll tubes. So the builders went online and bought:

  1. Several garden sheds = bedrooms

  2. Lots of clear plastic sheeting = living areas and bits to join the sheds together

  3. Buckets = kitchen

  4. Different buckets = lavatories

  5. Mops and different, different buckets = see point 3 and especially point 4

  6. Gaffer tape = join everything together

  7. Other stuff

  There were some things they had to buy from proper Outer Space Colony Suppliers, like lunar panels,21 oxygen tanks, water tanks, food, bandaids and a nuclear fusion bacon generator.22

  After the whole thing had been covered in several layers of cooking foil, the MUD looked pretty good, unless you were actually considering living in it in zero-gravity conditions with zero oxygen or unless you looked at it from closer than five metres away. But Radius had thought of that and had already ordered some special rose-coloured romantic soft-focus camera lenses for the outside shots of the building. He also had several small MUD models in a ‘genuine’ moon landscape set on a small table in one of the cellars under Limpfast Manor for filming long shots.

  ‘It will look brilliant,’ he told Fiona, who agreed.

  ‘It looks brilliant,’ he told the Contrasts, when he showed them the photos.

  The family were impressed, apart from Primrose, who said, ‘It looks like a little model.’

  ‘So do you, dear,’ said Radius.

  The people in the casting office at LIMP-TV headquarters, who usually selected the actors and actresses lovingly called ‘contestants’ for the reality TV shows, had gone through the files and made a shortlist of six possible grannies. So while the Contrasts went through a course of fitness training in the woods that surrounded Limpfast Manor, Radius and Fiona flew back to the city to audition the grannies.

  The fitness training wasn’t exactly hard work. Fiona had told the family they would be doing Pilates, which is a strangely popular exercise regime for yuppies. The Contrasts had heard of it, but hadn’t the faintest idea what it was. So they were delighted to discover that Fiona Hardly’s version was actually called ‘Pielattes’ and involved eating meat pies and drinking cafe lattes at three-hourly intervals throughout the day and doing a bit of running around and jumping up and down in between.

  ‘Though, of course,’ Fiona explained, ‘once you get to the moon, you won’t be able to do either of these things or else you will float off into space. You could try doing them inside the MUD with the gravity unit turned on, but it’s quite small so you’d probably keep hitting your heads.’

  Fiona did not tell them that, because of the rather small old-technology solar panels on the MUD, the gravity unit would only be turned on at meal times and when they were doing their ‘live broadcasts’23 to Earth. Nor did she tell the Contrasts that every minute of every day when they were not doing their ‘live broadcasts’, they would be secretly filmed in every part of the MUD except for the lavatories. That was one thing Radius had not been happy about.

  ‘I mean,’ he’d objected, ‘just think of the hilarious material we’d get. One of them sits down on the toilet and just as they do a poo we turn off the gravity unit.’

  ‘Gross,’ said the designers.

  ‘Totally,’ Radius agreed. ‘Great, isn’t it?’

  The designers, who had early on realised the only way to get Radius to agree to something was to tell him it would save him money, said that poo floating around inside the MUD would get into the equipment and probably wreck it. So Radius reluctantly agreed to no cameras in the toilets and automatic gravity when anyone used them.

  ‘It’s a hell of a wasted opportunity, though,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the designers, ‘but it’s saving you money.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ said Radius.

  ‘All the poo and stuff will go into a methane generator and produce free electricity,’ the designers explained.

  Being told it would save money cheered Radius up, though he still wished he could have played around with the toilets.

  None of the six shortlisted grannies were what Radius had in mind.

  ‘Are you sure there weren’t others who might be better?’ he asked the casting office.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘There were lots who were great in some ways but completely wrong in others, and there were dozens who were just too old.’

  ‘We want old,’ said Radius.

  ‘Yes, we know that, but I’m sure you want them to live long enough to make it to the moon and that you want them to have all their marbles. We had two who seemed perfect on paper, but then they died in the waiting room while we were doing the interviews.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And dying on TV is not a big crowd-pleaser,’ said the casting people. ‘Remember what happened with the cobra juggler on So You Think You’ve Still Got Your Marbles?’

  ‘Oh, yes, bit embarrassing, that,’ said Radius. ‘Not to mention the payout we had to make to the family.’

  There was a clattering and a crash outside the door followed by quite a lot of superb, top-quality swearing. The door opened and a tea trolley came in, pushed by an old lady.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Trolley crashed into a small boy. I mean, who leaves a small boy lying around in a TV station? No adult anywhere looking after him.’

  ‘You mean he was lying on the floor?’ said Radius.

  ‘Well, he was after the trolley ran into him,’ the tea lady explained.

  One of the casting staff went to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Radius asked her.

  ‘I’m going to see if the child is all right,’ she explained.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Radius said. ‘The cleaners will clear him away. No, no, sit down, this is far more important.’

  ‘But …’ the casting lady began.

  ‘Come on, sit down,’ Radius said and turned to the tea lady. ‘So, have you ever been on TV?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said the tea lady. ‘I’m a tea lady, not an actress. Mind you, it doesn’t look that difficult. But look at me, I’m an old lady.’

  ‘You are indeed,’ Radius agreed. ‘And an old lady is exactly what we are looking for.’

  ‘What are you talking about, you silly man?’ said the tea lady, completely unaware of who Radius was. ‘Here, h
ave a cup of tea and a biscuit.’

  Radius told her who he was and was quite upset when she didn’t seem in the slightest bit impressed, but not as upset as he normally would’ve been because he knew that the tea lady was exactly what he was looking for. He told her why he thought that she’d be the perfect granny.

  ‘Perfect? It’s a long time since anyone’s called me that,’ she said. ‘Go to the moon, you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Radius. ‘What do you reckon? You haven’t got any chocolate digestives, have you?’

  ‘Chocolate digestives? They’re only allowed for the top executives, but then, that’s you, isn’t it? Here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Radius. ‘So what about it then?’

  ‘What about what?’

  ‘Going to the moon,’ said Radius. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I’d need to get my hair done first,’ said the tea lady. ‘You’d have to pay for that. I can’t afford it on my wages.’

  A quick phone call to the wages department made Radius go white with shock and then red with embarrassment.

  ‘I will pay you exactly one hundred times what you are earning now,’ he said. ‘And on top of that, you will become the world’s most famous granny.’

  Then he explained exactly what was involved. He told her about the Contrasts, who they were and where they were and how they had no granny of their own.

  ‘You mean, the winning family has been chosen?’ said the tea lady. ‘What are all those crowds doing out there, then?’

  ‘Well, we haven’t actually told anyone about the Contrasts,’ Radius explained. ‘You’re the first person outside the family to know about it. Oh, by the way, what’s your name?’

  ‘Apricot,’ said Apricot.

  ‘Apricot? That’s a strange name.’

  ‘My dad sold fruit, and apricots were his favourite,’ Apricot explained.

  ‘It may bit a bit unusual, but I like it,’ said Radius. ‘Granny Apricot – it’s got a good ring to it.’

  ‘Do you, er, like children?’ the chief casting executive asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Apricot. ‘I’ve never actually had any.’

  ‘And is there a Mister Apricot?’

  ‘No, dear, never had one of those, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was just that I never found one I wanted to keep,’ said Apricot.

  ‘So, no family at all?’ the Radius asked.

  Apricot shook her head.

  ‘Not even a distant cousin or nephew three times removed?’ said Fiona.

  ‘No.’

  Brilliant, Radius thought. That’ll save a bit on the insurance.

  While Radius sat in his office working out the best way to tell the world that the family had been chosen in a way that wouldn’t cause riots, Fiona took Granny Apricot out to get her hair done and to buy her some new clothes.

  ‘Mind you,’ Radius said to no-one in particular when he had come to the conclusion that there was no way to present the Contrasts to everyone without causing any anger, ‘it could make us a few dollars.’

  He rang his program planners.

  ‘New reality show,’ he said. ‘Production will start on Monday. Series title: So You Think You Can Riot.’

  ‘What?’ said the planners at first.

  ‘Wow, brilliant!’ they said when Radius explained it to them.

  On the other hand, Radius said to himself, we’ve got so many people tied up with Watch This Space, we’d have to take on a whole lot of new staff, and not only that, a riot series could distract people from our main thing.

  He was, as usual, absolutely right. Research had shown that ninety per cent of LIMP-TV’s viewers couldn’t concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and in fact sixty-four per cent couldn’t concentrate on one thing for more than fourteen minutes without needing a bag of chips.

  So he came up with fairly simple solution. LIMP-TV announced:

  ‘And, of course, by then our family will be up on the moon and everyone will forget about any auditions,’ Radius explained. ‘They’ll all be totally focused on the Contrasts.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Fiona and everyone else.

  Meanwhile, at another top-secret production facility hidden deep in Tristan da Cunha/Patagonia/the Australian Outback/Belgium/Poland,24 work was being done on the BUMPS (Bionic Ultrafast Moon People Spaceship) and the huge cargo rocket that would take the MUD to the moon.

  Even the chief engineer – José MacO’Learolski, who was one of Radius’s top engineers – did not know where any of the top-secret locations were, even though he was in charge of the MUD and the BUMPS. He controlled and coordinated everything from a small top-secret cave high up on Mount Everest/K2/Kangchenjunga/Lhotse/Mount Bongo25 and was connected to the two top-secret production facilities by a closed-circuit super top-secret internet.

  It wasn’t just that Radius was extremely suspicious of spies from the press and especially other TV networks leaking pictures of the MUD and of the BUMPS, it was also that he did not want anyone finding out about his ‘cost-effective measures’.

  So if a few of the MUD’s seals were filled with porridge instead of high-grade silicone sealant, all it would mean is that a tiny-weeny bit of the Contrasts’ air supply might leak out. It wouldn’t be a problem and if it was, well, hey, that’d make for great television and there was plenty more porridge in the larder unit.

  ‘And the family all seem very fit and healthy, so holding their breath for a bit while the robot fixes the leak won’t be a problem,’ Radius explained to José.

  What Radius didn’t know was that the mechanic who was fitting the seals loved porridge more than any other food, so some of the porridge used to seal the MUD’s windows was second-hand.26

  There were many other corner-cutting procedures. In fact, by the end, neither the BUMPS nor MUD had a single corner anywhere. They had all been cut, though Radius had not been as tight with the costs of the BUMPS as he had been with the MUD because it would have looked very bad if the Contrasts had died or exploded or crashed into the sea, a mountain, a tall building or the sun before they had landed safely on the moon. Also, he had reluctantly agreed with the designers that the spaceship should be able to bring the family safely back to Earth at the end of the series.

  Though coming back to Earth in a dramatic fireball would probably get the highest viewing figures ever and break all times-viewed figures on YouTube, he thought to himself.

  Fiona and Granny Apricot were going to spend the morning shopping, with the emphasis on the ‘spend’ bit.

  It was one of those incredibly rare moments when Radius was prepared to spend big. And rare as those moments were, this one was even rarer. It was unique,27 because Radius handed the credit card to Fiona. Letting someone else use one of his no-cash-limit credit cards was probably the most significant thing Radius had done since he had sold his grandmother to a research laboratory.28

  While Fiona stood with her back to him, watching every tiny move he made in the magnifying hinges of her glasses,29 Radius Limpfast opened the top-secret triple-locked safe hidden behind a painting of his mother,30 which hung on the wall behind his chair in his top-top-top executive office. Inside the safe was a safe, and inside that safe were some credit cards, a ridiculously massive diamond and an even more ridiculously massive gold nugget.

  Radius took one of the credit cards out of the safe and wiped the dust off it before locking both safes again and sliding his mother’s portrait back into place.

  As she took the card, Fiona realised the massive significance of the situation and her eyes almost but not quite filled with tears. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Radius’s mouth opened too and a very small scared whimper came out.

  They both wanted to rush into each other’s arms, but this is not that kind of book, so they didn’t.31

  Radius told Fiona to spare no expense in buying stuff for Granny Apricot. The old lady was like the kind granny he’d never had, as opposed to the nasty one he’d sold off.

&
nbsp; ‘We don’t want her to look like she’s rich,’ he said. ‘Just fit her out so she looks like she’s from those nauseating fifties American family TV series where everyone goes to Granny for reassurance and to eat her lovely apple pie, and she sorts out all their problems with sickly sweet advice and they live happily ever after. You know, nice cardigan, eau de Cologne and hair like the Queen Mother’s. We want the Contrasts to fall in love with her.’

  Fiona felt her beating heart calm down as she slipped the credit card in her pocket. ‘No problem, RR,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, we both know that old Apricot swears like a trooper and couldn’t be further from a sweet old TV granny if she tried,’ Radius added. ‘But hey, great ratings when all that comes out!’

  ‘Too right.’

  As Fiona took Granny Apricot down to the ground floor in the lift, she found herself thinking about ancient relatives and wondering if the rumours about Radius selling his grandmother to a research laboratory were true and, if they were, was it the same research laboratory she’d sent her doddery grandfather to? The fact that Radius had actually got paid for his grandmother was really impressive. All she’d got for hers was a receipt and a cup of tea.

  ‘We want to make you look nice and homely,’ she told Granny Apricot, as they stood in a sea of cardigans and twin-sets in the senior citizens department of the biggest and best store in town.

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Granny Apricot. ‘I’ve spent my whole life avoiding cardigans and face powder and big beige knickers. There was a time when I used to creep up behind old ladies who dressed like that and set fire to them.’

  ‘Oh, was that you?’ said Fiona. ‘I remember that. It was all over the news a few years ago. From what I know, they never found out who did it. They kept arresting teenage kids, but they couldn’t find the real culprit.’

  ‘That’s right, dear,’ said Apricot. ‘After all, who would suspect a little old lady?’

  ‘It was a miracle no-one was killed,’ said Fiona.