Free A Toaster on Mars by Darrell Pitt Page B

reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic card. ‘Spend some.’
    Milton Xanthrob nervously made his way to the door.
    ‘We’ll look after the store,’ the robot promised.
    ‘Everything’s priced,’ Milton said. ‘Just hand out a receipt.’ He appeared thoughtful. ‘I might go to the moon.’
    Zeeb says:
    Which is probably the second most stupid thing you’ll read in this book…
    ‘That was easier than I expected,’ Blake said, breathing a sigh of relief after Milton left.
    ‘Poor man,’ Astrid said. ‘Mustn’t get out much.’
    ‘We’re probably doing him a favour,’ Nicki said.
    ‘Except for the hole in his wall,’ Blake said.
    They went to a storage room in the back where they found a kitchenette and rows of shelves stacked with antiques.
    ‘This looks pretty organised,’ Astrid said.
    ‘It does,’ Nicki agreed, grabbing a shelf, pulling it over and destroying a thousand years of history.
    ‘Nicki!’ Blake yelled. ‘What the sprot are you doing?’
    ‘Was that stuff valuable?’
    ‘That little man is going to hate us,’ Astrid said.
    ‘I’ve been hated before,’ Nicki said. ‘I survived.’
    Blake rapped on the wall. ‘You’re sure this is where we go through?’ he asked Nicki.
    ‘Definitely. Beyond this wall lies a disused elevator that’ll take us down to a tunnel. We can follow that all the way to a cavern under the GADO complex.’
    ‘I wonder how we should break through.’
    Nicki pushed back her hair. ‘Fortunately,’ she said, ‘I’m trained in twenty-two different forms of martial arts.’
    ‘So?’ Astrid frowned.
    ‘I can generate a one-inch punch that will easily knock a hole in the wall.’
    ‘We could also just use our blasters,’ Blake said. ‘A single shot at high intensity—’
    ‘And rob me of the opportunity to show off?’ Nicki said. ‘No way.’
    She drew her right arm back, focused, took a deep breath and slammed her fist into the wall. A torrent of water burst through the gap, knocking Nicki over and demolishing another shelf.
    ‘Hmm,’ Nicki said, pushing debris aside. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
    Zeeb says:
    Strangely, this expression has been used many times over the centuries, mostly by people of science. Faraday used it when he discovered electromagnetic induction, Archimedes when he overflowed his bath and Marju Rastor said it when he invented the quantum drive.
    One of the more unfortunate times these words were uttered came about when Janck Ontono discovered material transmutation. The Mantaris scientist had been struggling for decades to find a way to turn one object into another.
    On this particular day, he was attempting to turn an apple into a lemon. The apple had been sitting in his multi-nucleonic transmutation device for over an hour with nothing happening. Finally, he made a minor adjustment to the radioactive bombardment, and something strange started to occur.
    Something very strange.
    Everything began to take on a yellow hue. Not just the apple—everything. Including the transmutation device, Ontono himself, and the room around him.
    ‘I wasn’t expecting that,’ he murmured.
    A second later, the planet Mantaris turned into an enormous lemon floating in space. There was even a green bit sticking out from where the planet’s north pole used to be.
    This was all very unfortunate for two reasons. First, ‘I wasn’t expecting that’ are not great famous last words for a ten-million-year-old civilisation. And second, while it’s really wonderful to be handed a lemon in life and turn it into lemonade, you really need a planet to do it.
    ‘Nicki!’ Blake yelled as more water spurted through the hole. ‘I thought you said the tunnel was behind here?’
    ‘I did,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think this is the right wall.’ She spent the next few minutes pulling over shelves and punching holes in walls before turning to the others and yelling, ‘I’ve found it! The elevator shaft is here!’
    ‘Great,’