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AMBASSADOR AT LARGE“Find the Ambassador!” - Spot’s voice trembled. Never before had the crew members seen Captain Spot so close to losing his balance. Ambassador Lillion Locust, an elderly lady, had done nothing to make herself popular with the crew since she had boarded the norocket two weeks before. She made it very clear how unpleasant it was for someone of her status to be confined on a ship with ordinary starsailors and astrogators. After all, she belonged to the world of diplomacy and power, where the future of the Entire Inhabited Universe (EIU) was negotiated and decided. |
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After Loop had spilled a bottle of chi-beer onto her hair, she spent most of the time in her cabin and had all her meals sent there. No-one missed her until the room delivery robot complained that unopened food trays were piling up in her cabin. The crew turned the rocket inside out, so to speak, looking for Ambassador Locust. Zen found a meteorite scraper that he had been missing, and Spot came across two tons of rotting spacepears that Jigger had forgotten in the library under letter ‘s’. But no sign of the Ambassador. Finally, Spacefox found one of her pumps in the engine hall, in front of the garbage chute. All crew members gathered in front of the shoe and the garbage door. GarbageNowadays, of course, it is out of the question to just throw the rubbish overboard as in the old days of cosmonautics. The garbage disposal system was based on an invention by Zen. He had installed a mini black hole that eagerly swallowed and annihilated anything that was thrown into it. It would obliterate anything, without distinction, even a distinguished Ambassador! Gloom pervaded the engine hall. “Boy, what a mess,” the crew members were thinking. “The first paying passenger in a long time, and we lost her in the garbage!” They looked at their hands, their tentacles and those who had neither hands nor tentacles simply at the floor while they felt Spot’s icy glance fixing them one after the other. |
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