Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Remiel later recalled that the first ten pubs on the route were the best.

And the next ten pubs, they were the best too.

Pubs twenty to twenty nine, he deeply enjoyed.

After that things began to warm up.

The crawl had started out with five of them, himself, Cornelius, Luther, Wilson and Daz. This valiant drinking crew, who were all, incidentally, members of the band, drank one measure of the tipple of their choice at each of the pubs on the route. The first to drop out was Wilson, who left after the 35th pub, when he finally worked out where he had left his car. Unsubstantiated reports claim that he drove the car through his own front window before passing out with his head on the horn. Shortly after this, Daz got arrested for attempting to solicit the automatic teller at a bank which the merry gang passed. This left just three of the original inebriate quintet on the crawl, Remiel, Cornelius and Luther.

The intoxicated trio rounded a corner, all singing the same song, but never hitting the same note at the same time. Luther was singing in 4/4, Cornelius was singing in 3/4, and Remiel, who had drunk far too much at each pub on the route, wavered between 7/8 and Pi r²/13+4j. The threesome were all in the process of forgetting the words to the song, which is a task that takes some effort when the song is "Here we go". As they reached the glaring neon sign of the large building, Cornelius squinted, double-visioned, at the garish pink letters.

"Wha's this place then?" slurred Remiel in drunken tones, realising that the procession had ground to a halt only when the air seemed to thicken a lot, and in fact turned out to be a wall.
Cornelius stuck out one finger at the board and slowly moved his way between letters, his lips moving in silent thought. After two minutes of this, he turned to Luther and Remiel and announced in a triumphant, cheery voice,
"Dunno, I've forgotten how to read."
Cornelius attempted to walk back towards the others, but somehow the road seemed much too inviting, and his worldview altered by roughly 90°. Luther shuffled in an erratic path towards the door and tried the handle.
"Wha's happened, 's shut." he muttered, banging on the door and ignoring the chorus of "Butterflies do it on the wing" which Cornelius had struck up behind him, "Lemme in, we've got another eleventeen pubs to do!"
Remiel glanced upwards at the sky, the deep blue, close to blackness, of the night, with its pale leaf-light was still unchanged, although a pale glow was just beginning to issue through, as the fluorescing Glow-globe began to flicker. Suddenly, the blazing glory of day Plinked into being. Remiel smiled the smile of one who was about to say something very, very silly.
"Oh look," he announced to Luther, the prone but singing form of Cornelius and the world at large, "It's tomorrow."

A distant rumble started as the Nectar mines and Chlorophyll refineries began their morning shifts. A slightly perturbed look crossed Remiel's mind as he realised something.
"I guess this means the end of the pub crawl," he thought out loud.
A little of the enthusiasm and energy which had sustained the trio in the pursuit of alcohol, ebbed when they all realised how tired they were. Cornelius lumbered to a standing, lurching position, stood swaying for a few seconds, then almost fell onto Luther as his body sagged, and ten years appeared to hit him in the small of the back.
"I've got to get home." yawned Remiel, "I've got to get up ten minutes ago."
"You get yourself to bed," suggested Luther, who appeared to have been hit less hard by the drink than Remiel or Cornelius, "I'll get the big guy home".
"Tha's the best idea I've heard all day." said Remiel, congratulating Luther on what he obviously thought was a brilliant plan and attempting to pat him on the back, missing, and instead patting the floor. After he had pulled himself from the arms of the welcoming floor, he gave his drinking companions a warm farewell, and weaved his way through the street, despite the fact that it was empty.

Luther stood and watched Remiel leave. Aside from the fact that he had had to pour away all of the drink he had bought that evening, thus wasting a fortune, the night had gone fine. He was still sober enough to complete the work. The pub crawl had kept Remiel away from the farm for long enough for Markos and Lucien to do their jobs, but not too long, so Remiel would not get suspicious. With any luck, Remiel would get back before the bomb went off, but not long enough for him to be able to do anything about it. Now there was just one loose end to tie up and he could get out of here.
"Come on Cornelius," he said, all traces of drink gone from his voice, shouldering the nearly recumbent caterpillar's mass across his broad shoulders, "Let's get you to a resting place".

In the main building of the farm, all was quiet, except for the occasional beep from the device inside the computer cabinet. The two aphids showed no sign of movement, both were too securely bound for this to be any help whatsoever. The countdown slowly flicked from 1:00:01 to 1:00:00, as the eleventh hour passed relentlessly

Luther walked down the near deserted streets, dragging Cornelius, who gradually got more and more sober. By the time they had gone a mile, he could actually read again. This he proved when he saw the street sign as they hung a left.
"Luther?" he pulled his head up to drunkenly inquire, his brain addled by the drink.
"No. This is a recorded message." came the reply from the patiently toiling caterpillar beneath him.
Luther seemed to accept this for a second. His head sunk again for a moment, until he figured out that Luther was being sarcastic. He tried again.
"Didn't you say we were going home?"
"Yes I did," Luther said, "Although I'm surprised you had the presence of mind to hear what I was saying."
"It's just, isn't Vernon Alley a bit out of the way?"
"Don't worry" instructed Luther, inventing wildly and hoping that Cornelius was still so drunk he would fall for it, "It's - it's a shortcut."
"Oh," mumbled Cornelius, and passed out again, before the lack of logic in this statement permeated his alcohol saturated brain.
"Fuck!" The voice speaking swore softly in a voice that was quiet, but expressed all the more anger and frustration for its low volume.
Luther was still walking, feigning a lack of care that he did not feel, his mind was racing. He hadn't counted on Cornelius getting sober again this quickly, obviously the proof spirit that Luther had poured into the other two caterpillars' drinks hadn't worked all that well. Either that or Cornelius had an unbelievably high alcohol threshold.

Unbeknownst to Luther, the truth was far more significant than this.

Mrs Brandt had never told Cornelius, or anyone else except the family doctors, about the anatomical differences between her son and the standard members of the caterpillar species. Cornelius had only known that he was taller than anyone else in his class at school, except for Remiel, and was consistently in the top 5% of subjects, but the truth was nearly beyond the barriers of credibility. The truth was that Cornelius was very, very different from the average caterpillar. Almost as different as the Caterpillars were from the occupants of the Ceres Hydroponics plants. It was almost as if the natural evolutionary techniques which would eventually lead to taller, stronger caterpillars as they were more likely to breed than the weaker members of the species, had allowed the Brandt family to produce a distant descendant aeons before his time. To imagine a human parallel of this, think of a modern man, with additional height and broader build, being born into the Neolithic tribes of Africa. Cornelius was stronger, more intelligent, quicker, and more dextrous than most of his counterparts. This was, however only the surface representation of his mutation. Cornelius was a creature very, very different from the average caterpillar, although he himself did not know this at all.

The Magellan caterpillar always had evolved at higher speed than other races, the rapid way in which the upper limbs fused was testament to this. This evident rapid evolution was partly due to the fact that only the best 5% of the race entered the fertile adult stage, the others entering a mature state of sterility. This unnatural part of the selection ensured that additional strength, speed and other abilities would be passed on in a more concentrated and speedy manner than in other species. This goes some way to explaining how the Caterpillars managed to become proto-humans in only a few thousand years. Another factor was the unusual cellular system of the Magellan Caterpillar. The Caterpillars on the station are not affected by cancer in the same way that people are. In people, the rogue growth of cells is seen as being dangerous, and can kill. In Caterpillars, this rogue growth is harnessed by the body and can be induced to adapt the body permanently to environmental conditions. If a caterpillar loses a limb, for example, cell growth in flesh and chitin can grow a new one in around a year. This astonishing regeneration capability cannot be seen in humans, except in the early stages of foetal development. If a Caterpillar were to find itself in conditions without much digestible food, the body's cellular system could be induced to adapt the stomach to extract nutrients from inedible flora and fauna, or, if the body was kept to starve for long enough, grow cells that would photosynthesise and create glucose, or even alcohol, which occasionally made cold turkey a difficult activity to carry out. This only happened in a limited degree in individual Caterpillars, but as the developed characteristics became hereditary, the caterpillars as a race adapted incredibly fast, and so evolved incredibly fast.

"What the fuck am I meant to do now?" Luther hissed under his breath, about half an hour later. Things were not going well. Cornelius was getting closer to consciousness, moment by moment. He had banked on Cornelius staying drunk long enough to get him to a place where he could be conveniently disposed of, but a sober Caterpillar would not walk to his own death.
"Why was I stupid enough not to think of something? Too much rests on this for anything to go wrong at this stage. Think, you stupid bastard. What can you do if he actually comes round somewhere like this? I knew I should have brought a fucking hip flask!"
It was no use thinking anything like this now, of course. Nowhere selling any kind of alcohol was open at this time of the morning. He did, of course, have other means of keeping Cornelius under, but it wouldn't do to use that now, not until he had got where he was going, or exhausted every other avenue of possibility. Luther kept walking, absorbed in his thoughts.
In fact, he was so absorbed in his thoughts on these matters that he didn't notice the mob closing in on all sides.

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