Above His Station by Darren Craske

Author:Darren Craske [Craske, Darren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour
ISBN: 9781482531435
Google: pR10mAEACAAJ
Amazon: B008FPK1II
Goodreads: 15731639
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

11

‘You know that feeling you get when you think you’re going to puke?’ said the rat.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ve got that.’

The rat then proceeded to vomit into my anorak pocket and I wondered if my day could possibly get any worse. Well, yes it could actually. I had just been transcendentally transported approximately 1.6 billion miles across the Solar System in the blink of an eye and I now found myself stood inside a gigantic glass dome on the surface of one of the moons of Uranus with a queasy rat and an alien snake. There was nothing that I could have done to prepare myself for this moment. The opportunity would simply never have presented itself.

‘I hope you’re ready, human,’ Astrid said. ‘This will be a trial in more ways than one.’

‘I’m ready,’ I said. ‘I suppose I have to be, don’t I?’

‘And what about you, rodent?’ enquired Astrid. ‘How do you feel?’

The rat then proceeded to vomit once again, this time down the front of my anorak.

I said that my day could get worse, didn’t I? And as I looked up at the enormous building towering in front of me, I knew there was more to come. These were the offices of the Sentient Life-form Ethical Treatment and Valued Diversity Tribunal Committee. Astrid had told me very little about what any of that actually meant, but she assured me that they were the only ones in the Universe that would hear my plea to save humanity, so I had little choice but to give the snake my complete trust and hope that she wasn’t leading me astray.

‘Ashtray,’ said the rat.

‘Pardon me?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘You said ‘ashtray’,’ I told it.

‘I did? When?’

‘Just then!’ I exclaimed. ‘I didn’t even know you smoked.’

‘I don’t,’ said the rat, unaware that it had said anything at all. ‘How peculiar.’

*

I’d take a gamble and say that you’ve never had to walk a few steps behind an alien snake as it makes its winding way across a gravel footpath towards a bone-white municipal building on one of the moons of Uranus, but if by some bizarre stroke of misfortune I’m wrong then you will no doubt concur that it’s incredibly frustrating. I had to keep stopping and starting, careful not to step on the ruddy thing! In the end I was forced to slow my pace so much that to the casual onlooker it might have looked as if I was standing still.

If I can take a brief moment to describe the SLETVDTC building and the surrounding area, it was a bit like someone had picked up the sort of council offices that you might find in any reasonably-sized town and plonked them on a moon orbiting an alien planet. The huge glass dome above my head encapsulated the building and its extended grounds completely, even going so far as to supply synthetic oxygen into the environment, so Astrid informed me. Outside the dome it looked very much how you might imagine. The terrain was a sort of pebbly/chalky substance littered with rocks of all shapes and sizes.

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