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LEP?”
    “Scout’s honour.”
    jixX sighed deeply and swung
his legs out of bed. He threw on a ship’s dressing gown and went to
investigate.
    “Where’s it coming from?” he
asked as he headed in the direction of the sounds.
    “The dining room,” said LEP.
    The din got louder and louder
as he approached. It stopped just as jixX opened the door. He peered in. The
room was the same as before except that the serving plates and dishes had been
cleared. He entered and stopped in front of the magnificent hand-carved
mahogany dining table. Or rather, in front of half of the magnificent
hand-carved mahogany dining table. The thought that sprang instantly into his
mind was: “What happened to the other half of the magnificent hand-carved
mahogany dining table?”
    Just then a mop of
dishevelled hair and two bespectacled, half-crazed eyes appeared over the edge
– the sawn-off edge – of the magnificent hand-carved mahogany dining table.
    “I’m not disturbing you, am
I?” asked twaX the carpenter. His whole boyish face seemed to radiate an
enraptured delight.
    “What’s going on?” jixX
walked round the truncated table towards the carpenter.
    “Wood!” exclaimed twaX, his
eyes glowing feverishly. “Real wood!”
    jixX stared at piles of
sawn-up mahogany fragments lying on the floor and at the heaps of mahogany
sawdust on the lush carpet.
    The carpenter was nearly
beside himself with excitement. “None of that plasto-lignose polycellulose
nonsense, but the real stuff!” he was saying. He picked up a sawn-off table leg
from the carpet and offered it to jixX to examine, but jixX just stared at it
in disbelief. “And what wood it is, too! Look at it: mahogany, no less.
Mahogany! A dream come true! Can you appreciate what it’s like for me to hold
it, to touch it, to feel its sensuous texture, to stroke its delicate grain,
and then saw it in half?”
    jixX said nothing, could say
nothing.
    “Think what it’s like to
shape it with sweeping strokes of hammer and chisel, to glide a plane along its
silken surfaces, and then to nail the bits together!”
    The carpenter grinned and
turned his attention back to the pieces of wood lying on the floor all around
him. “Can you guess what I’m making?” He pointed to several pieces of wood
arranged in a rectangle on the floor.
    jixX shook his head numbly.
    “Window-frames!” cried the
carpenter enthusiastically.
    jixX raised an eyebrow.
“Window-frames,” he echoed tonelessly, finally finding his voice.
    “Yes. Mahogany window-frames.” The carpenter grinned proudly.
    “Er, what use are mahogany
window-frames on a Class XI phonon-drive spaceship?”
    But twaX was already lost in
his work, fitting two mitred pieces of wood together and preparing to drive a
nail through them.
    jixX put his fingers to his
ears and left the dining room, gently closing the door behind him as the
banging resumed.

 

    Chapter 5
     
    jixX
slipped back into bed and closed his eyes. The distant banging had stopped for the time
being and he was able to drift back to that land between waking and sleeping.
    LEP waited patiently. He
wanted to allow the captain some much-needed rest before bothering him again,
so he allowed him exactly one minute and forty seconds of calm, restful repose,
before saying gently, “Wakey, wakey, captain.”
    jixX groaned and turned to
face the wall. “Go away,” he said.
    “But captain, you have to get
up. We must perform the course corrections to steer us into Singularity
SCN8-4.”
    “Not now,” moaned jixX. “I’ve
only just got into bed.”
    “We have to do it now,
cap’n,” insisted LEP. “Or we’ll miss the singularity.”
    “What about auto-pilot?”
asked jixX. “Can’t it be done automatically? Or, you do it?”
    “Nope,” said LEP. “The Skyway
Code forbids it.”
    “Well, can’t it wait until
morning? Why don’t we just circle the singularity until then?”
    “If we do that,” said LEP,
“then, according to the Laws of Physics,