Omega

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It had been amazingly simple, the fur-clad engineer from Florida told himself, to turn the Earth into a huge electric battery, with terminals 12,700 kilometres apart, give or take a few. But it would have been one hell of a lot more comfortable for the terminal crews if Earth had arranged itself better, with land masses opposite land masses – instead of perversely (almost ingeniously, if you looked at the globe which some wit had made the decorative centrepiece of the Mess lobby) land opposite sea and sea opposite land.

Even worse, the more civilized the climate of any given hunk of land – Florida, for instance – the vaster, emptier and less hospitable was the stretch of ocean which diametrically opposed it.

Earth was a mean bitch, he decided, crunching his frosty way up Sunset Strip (all of four metres wide – there were too many witty guys around here) towards the Control Complex.

Why, for Christ's sake, did she have to balance the United States of America with nine million square kilometres of Indian Ocean – except for this Godforsaken strip of Antarctica, leased from Norway in Princess Astrid Land for uncountable dollars, just because it lay opposite equally Godforsaken Alaska?

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