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.It was a filthy, laborious task even with a full crew.For a Mechanoid, a hologram and forty-seven skutters, it was back-breaking.Rimmer moaned constantly.He couldn’t understand how the Space Corps could spend zillions upon zillions of dollarpounds designing a ship the size of Red Dwarf, and not put a couple of buckquid to one side for the fitting of a ‘start’ button.Just one little red button marked ‘blast off’.How much would that have set them back?Kryten pointed out repeatedly that Red Dwarf wasn’t designed to stop.The nearest the ship ever came to rest was when it went into orbit around a planet.The idea that it might one day come to a grinding halt had never occurred to anyone.The explanation seemed to matter little to Rimmer, who kept on obsessively calculating the prices of small, plastic buttons.Even the most expensive button, Rimmer surmised, even one that came in a futuristicky kind of shape, carved from rhinoceros tusk, with ‘blast off’ hand-painted by Leonardo da Vinci in radioactive gold dust, couldn’t have cost all that much.Kryten patiently explained that it probably wasn’t so much the design of the button that had proved too expensive, but more the vast network of computer relays and the thousands of miles of cables the button would have to be connected to, that made it prohibitive.But Rimmer wasn’t interested.Moaning helped him get through the mind-numbing task of supervising the skutters as they primed the spark chambers.He whiled away many an hour mentally embellishing the fabulous ‘blast-off button, studding it with diamonds and rubies and trimming it in platinum, yet still keeping the cost below that of a single sleeping quarters compartment.Even so, the work was going well; in fact they were slightly ahead of schedule, and well within the safety margins they had built into the timetable, when Rimmer made his mistake.It happened in one of the piston towers - a half-mile-high steel cylinder which housed the massive piston heads.In all, there were twelve hundred of them.Rimmer’s section took six hundred, Kryten’s section dealt with the rest.Naturally, Rimmer wanted to complete his half of the task before Kryten, so he had the skutters switch themselves up to maximum so they could triple their speed.Their little engines whined and screamed as they raced in and out of the towers, checking the spark-chamber relays were open.After each tower had been primed, its eight-thousand-ton piston head had to be tested.Rimmer thought the twenty skutters that made up his ‘A’ section were in piston tower 137 when he cleared piston tower 136 for testing.He listened as the piston head thundered down, then nodded to his secretary skutter to tick the check sheet, and moved on to piston tower 138.For some reason, ‘A’ section was missing.Of course - it must already be on to the next tower.He ordered 137 to be tested, and moved hurriedly along.He waited.He couldn’t believe it.Now ‘B’ section was missing, too.He searched all the towers, from 150 back down, and still couldn’t find a single skutter.It didn’t make sense.Where could they be?Finally, he walked into tower 137 and spotted a wafer-thin layer of sheet metal covering the piston tower’s floor.He’d never noticed it before, but there was another one in 136.It was a very familiar feeling for Rimmer - the horrible slow dawning, the internal denials, the frantic mental search for someone else to blame, the gradual acceptance that, once again, he’d done something so unspeakably asinine it would live with him for the rest of his days, lurking in the horror pit of his mind along with nine or ten other monstrous ineptitudes that screamed and railed there, never allowing him to forget them.This one, he reckoned, ranked number four.The squashing to death of forty skutters now eased into Rimmer’s horror charts, just above accidentally shooting his father through the shoulder with his own service revolver, and just below the time he inadvertently reversed over his Aunt Belinda’s show poodle.With half the skutters destroyed, it was now impossible to start up the engines in time.There was only one option left.Abandon ship.FOURLister and the Cat, suspended in neighbouring medi-suits, stared up at the video monitor on the ceiling.Bored wasn’t the word for it.They’d been cooped up in the MU for the best part of three weeks, and Kryten still insisted they stay put.They were sick of being sick.And the more they recovered, the worse the feeling got.Part of the problem was that they’d spent almost two years in Better Than Life, and they were both used to getting anything they wanted, the instant they wanted it.They’d forgotten the countless delays, compromises and general inconveniences of reality
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