J: The Confusing Chronicles of Joe Bloggs

Introduction

Before we begin, I'd like to say that this story makes absolutely no
sense whatsoever. The fact that it exists at all defies the laws of
physics, common sense and at least two speed restrictions in Grimsby.
Were any of it to be discovered as being true, the person who proved it
would be carted off to the nearest lunatic asylum and locked up for a
Very Long Time.
The fact that it makes no sense, is mind-beguilingly complicated and
makes frequent references to fish and chip shops in Burnley is only one
speck of dust in its universe of incomprehension.
It had been banned in at least fourteen galaxies. Thirteen of these
banned it because they don't believe in time travel, the infinities of
the universe or fish and chip shops in Burnley. The other galaxy banned
it because the translation of the word Chronicles in their language
means something rather rude. Shame really, they'd have enjoyed
it.
And so I present it to you. At least sixty-million, five hundred and
twenty three scholars, wise men and burger bar attendants all over the
known universe have tried to make sense of it and failed. So, I
suppose, it's down to you now. Nervous? No, of course not. But that's
because you don't know what's coming. Joe Bloggs never
did&;#8230;

Chapter 1

It started, as most things do, with a toothbrush. It was one of those
electronic ones that fizzed around in your mouth and tended to leave a
mess on the walls if left to it's own devices. Many hailed its
invention as a revolution in teeth cleaning. Others said, 'What's the
point' and quite rightly went on to ask what was next. The electric
hair brush? The electric flannel? The glow in the dark camouflage?
Granted, the last one wasn't associated with personal hygiene, but he
still had a point.
Joe Bloggs didn't really care. He just used it to clean his teeth
with. At this point in time and space, which was in his bathroom and
eight in the morning, he was doing his teeth in front of the mirror as
he always did He'd only just bought this toothbrush yesterday to find
out what all the fuss was about, but now he wished he hadn't. It had
cost him a tenner and the only different thing it did to a manual one
was go 'Buzzzz'. And when you're not a morning person, a 'Buzzz'ing
sound is not what is called for.
He swilled, he spat, and he dried his mouth on a towel. Looking back
up at himself in the mirror, he said,
" Big day, today." He stroked his newly shaven chin to make sure it
wasn't still bristly and smiled at him. Then he tried another smile,
because he didn't like the first one.
" Hi," he said, putting up his hand to himself to shake. " I'm Joe.
Yeah. I'm really looking forward to the interview. No." He shook his
head and started again. " Hi, I'm Mr. Bloggs, I'm here for the
interview. No. Hello Sir, I'm here to try and get that job that pays
loads of money." He shrugged and sighed. " At least it's honest."
Before he left the bathroom, he was sure he saw a slight twitch in the
shower curtain that was pulled across. He didn't remember pulling it
across. Ah well, he thought, I'm often forgetful when I'm
nervous.
Leaving the bathroom, he thought he saw something move out of the
corner of his eye. He shrugged and went into his bedroom. Joe's room
wasn't like most bachelors' rooms. For instance, his didn't look like a
bomb or too would improve the over all aesthetic effect. It was quite
tidy in actual fact, with only the odd dirty shirt lying on the carpet.
Joe himself reflected the room. He wasn't big, he wasn't particularly
good looking and he wasn't particularly untidy. He was
just&;#8230;one of those people who look like everybody else. Bored,
tired and none too bright.
He got dressed and walked out onto the landing. He paused for a moment
and felt a breeze coming from the guestroom. He didn't remember opening
a window in the guestroom. He shrugged again. He walked downstairs and
went through to the kitchen. There was a man stood in his
kitchen.
" Hello?" he stuttered, not knowing quite what to say on finding a
stranger in your kitchen pouring milk on his cereal. The man, who
seemed bizarrely to be wearing the same clothes as him, turned round.
There was a long silence between the two men, mainly because they
weren't two men at all - they were the same man.
" Oh, Hi, Joe," said the man and proceeded to eat his cereal. Joe
gasped and gibbered for a bit before raising a shaking finger at the
man. He had noticed, of course, the similarity between them, the way
that their voices were largely the same and the way that the man in
front of him had his shirt label sticking out like his own always
did.
Then the man who looked remarkably like his mirror did walked past him
unconcernedly and sat down at the dining table.
" But&;#8230;but&;#8230;who are you?" asked Joe. The man
continued eating his cereal and didn't look up much as he spoke.
" I'm Joe - no scratch that, I'm you," said Joe at the table. Joe on
the weak-willed legs gibbered some more.
" What was it that guy said again?" said Joe at the table, looking off
into the distance out the window. " Something about a space-time
continuum? Probably a load of rubbish anyway. Don't worry though, Joe.
Your bad day is just beginning. Trust me, I've seen the next five
minutes of it." The man, let's call him Joe mark II finished his
cereal, rose, patted Joe on the shoulder and said,
" Don't worry. Just let it wash over you. I do." And he left. Joe was
left mumbling to himself like a madman. He suddenly felt very dizzy,
like the bottom of his cereal box had been gnawed at by rats and all
his frosted flakes were falling out below him. It wasn't a sensation he
liked. But all the talk of food made him hungry so he decided, in a
sort of daze to have some breakfast. It seemed like the sort of thing
one should do.
He went through to the kitchen; his legs on a sort of autopilot as his
brain packed up and went on a paid vacation, opened the cupboard and
got a bowl out. Miles away, he seemed to hear rain coming down against
the window, but it didn't seem to matter. What did?
As he was pouring the cereal into his bowl and hoping that this was
the world's worst hangover; he heard a creaking out in the dining room.
Not more surprises? He picked up the milk and splashed it onto his
cereal waiting at any moment for the ceiling to collapse and for him to
wake up.
" Hello?" said a tentative voice behind him. Joe looked round for a
moment and for some reason was spectacularly unsurprised to see himself
standing there.
" Oh, Hi Joe," he said, his mouth moving without him really telling it
to do anything. As he continued to pour his milk, he heard a familiar
gibbering sound behind him. When he turned back, his other self was
holding up a shaking finger, but he ignored him and went to the dining
table. He was too confused to make any sense of what was going on, so
he thought he might as well take his own advice. Just let it wash over
you.
" But&;#8230;but&;#8230;who are you?" his-self asked. Joe shook
his head absent-mindedly. Why did he have to be so stupid?
" I'm Joe," he said and then he realised that the other guy was too. "
No, scratch that, I'm you." He shook his head once more and ploughed on
with his cereal. When he was confused, he was often hungry and today
was no exception. In fact, today was the mother of all confused-ness
and his stomach seemed to be wailing for more. It was like the Raggrack
beast of Grankro, Delta-9. But of course, he didn't know about that
yet.
He felt that he should give himself some kind of explanation and tried
to remember what that other guy had told him.
" What was it that guy said again?" he thought aloud. " Something
about a space-time continuum? Probably a load of rubbish anyway," he
reasoned, seeing the puzzled look on his own face. In fact, puzzled was
an understatement. Understatement was an understatement of an
understatement. Pigs have flown with less confusion on their faces than
Joe had on his right now.
" Don't worry, though Joe," he said in what he hoped was a re-assuring
voice. " Your bad day is just beginning. Trust me, I've seen the next
five minutes of it." And he thought he might as well impart the gem of
advice that himself had given himself about five minutes ago.
" Don't worry. Just let it wash over you. I do," he added truthfully
and he decided to leave the room. As he closed the door behind him he
watched himself wobble uncertainly and then go through to the kitchen
for breakfast. Good idea, he thought. It seemed like the sort of thing
one should do.
He walked back towards the stairs, saw another version of himself
coming down them and pushed his back to the wall of the stair well and
breathed a sigh of relief as his other self walked on past him. He went
back up the stairs and dived into the nearest room as his partially
dressed self left the bathroom, and he hoped that he hadn't been
spotted.
Feeling by now the wrong side of sane, he shook his head quickly to
try and clear it for now and instead filled it with the phrase 'Let it
wash over you'. His mind started sounding like a 'Water Phobia
Session'.
" Now what do I do?" he said aloud. He didn't know why he was asking
himself, he had no clue whatsoever. I've got to get out, he finally
thought. He ran over to the window of the room he was in, which
happened to be his guest room (which was entirely pointless in itself,
because the only guests he'd ever had to stay was a colony of
cockroaches, and those had been uninvited), flung open the window and
then stopped.
There was something he couldn't leave without. What was it? His pocket
calculator? No. His toaster? No, couldn't be that. His mind? No, he'd
already lost that.
His toothbrush! His Gran had always told him to take his toothbrush
with him where-ever he went.
" You never know when you'll need a toothbrush," she'd always told him
with her toothless grin. Despite the fact that she didn't have any
teeth and was hardly the person to consult on dental hygiene, he'd
always stuck to this rule. He ran back out onto the landing and then
stopped stock still as he heard himself talking to himself in the
mirror.
" Hi, I'm Joe," he was saying. Get on with, idiot, thought Joe. He
didn't want to spend one more moment in this mad-house. " I'm here for
that job that pays loads of money." Joe suddenly remembered something
and ran back into the guest room, just as Joe in the bathroom was
saying,
" At least it's honest," and walking out onto the landing. Joe only
just made it into the guestroom as this happened and he hoped dearly
that he hadn't seen himself doing it. Or something. When he was sure
the coast was clear, he went back out onto the landing and tip-toed
into the bathroom. Let it wash over you, he thought as he grabbed his
toothbrush. Just as he was about to leave the bathroom and get out of
this place, he heard the other Joe leaving his room and going down the
stairs, now fully dressed. He nipped back into the bathroom just in
time. As he breathed a sigh of relief, he left the bathroom again, only
to see a partially dressed, extremely groggy version of himself leaving
his bedroom. He ducked back into the bathroom. Where could he hide? He
thought. Shower!
He put the toothbrush back on the shelf in front of the mirror and
leapt into the shower as quietly as he could and pulled the curtain
round himself. He tried to hold his breath as the other him came into
the bathroom, and started running a bowl of water, but he found that he
couldn't do it very well. He just stood as quietly as he could and
listened to the splashing of water. Wash, he thought. Then came the
humming of the shaver. Shave. Then a minute or two later he heard the
unmistakable 'Buzz'ing noise of the electronic toothbrush. Teeth, he
thought.
" Hi, I'm Joe," his other self said in front of the mirror and Joe in
the shower twitched the curtain aside to peek at himself. He was
holding his hand up towards the mirror like was going to shake his own
hand. Idiot, he thought.
" At least it's honest," his other self finished and just as he was
turning to the towel rack, Joe in the shower remembered that he was
quite visible through the curtain so he let it drop back into place. He
heard himself stop and look at the shower curtain. Joe's heart beat
fast and only started slowing down when his other self left the
bathroom to go and get dressed.
He climbed out of the shower, grabbed his toothbrush again and left
the bathroom. As he turned the corner and leapt into the guestroom, he
heard his other self leaving the bedroom, now dressed. He waited
silently as his other self paused on the landing wondering why a breeze
was coming from the guestroom. When he'd gone, he breathed yet another
sigh of relief (he thought that he'd probably used up his fair share of
those this morning) and went over to the window.
Standing in the refreshing breeze, he suddenly saw how big the drop
was. His eyes widened as the ground seemed to stretch away from him,
but he shook is head and blinked slowly a few times.
" Right," he said. " Good luck." And he jumped.

Chapter 2

Joe knew nothing. In fact, he knew less than nothing. If he'd have
known that he knew nothing, then he'd have known something, but he
didn't, so he knew nothing.
He saw lots of twinkling lights around him and yet he wasn't really
aware of seeing anything. Things just were. He didn't know where he
was. He didn't know for sure if his legs were where they used to be, or
his arms. He had no sensation in any part of his body. In fact, he
didn't feel like he had a body.
He just was.
Then something happened. He heard some kind clicking noise and suddenly
he knew he had a body. He knew he had legs, he knew he had arms and he
also knew that they felt worse than turkey at Christmas. He
groaned.
Opening his eyes, he didn't see twinkling lights at all - just
blackness. Indeed, he wasn't even sure that he had opened his eyes,
because the view was just the same either way. There was no sound,
regardless of what he saw. But it wasn't just quiet or even silent - it
was an absence of sound altogether. It was like a vacuum, only there
was no vacuum, because the only vacuums Joe knew of had big noses and
were called Henry - they also made a lot of noise.
So, he could see nothing, hear nothing and smell nothing - apart from
his own sweat which he'd been producing throughout the whole morning.
Was it morning now, he thought? He wasn't sure where-ever he was had
such things as morning, afternoon or evening. Which was a shame,
because that meant he'd never see Eastenders again.
There was another clicking noise and a flash of green light thundered
across his conscience. And then he was dimly aware of sitting on the
floor, but the floor was completely, like the walls, or what he assumed
were walls.
" Hello," said a voice behind him. He span round. A young man, about
his age, had appeared in this void with him.
" Er&;#8230;hello," said Joe, and, although he was aware of saying
it, the words didn't seem to come, but instead seem to exist only in
his mind. The other man, who thankfully looked nothing like another
version of himself, seemed to hear every word, though.
" How are you?" he asked. Joe thought about this. It was, all in all,
the most difficult question he had ever been asked in his life. How was
he? So far today, he'd met about seven other versions of himself,
jumped out of his guestroom window and found himself in a void of
absolute nothingness with a strange man who wore white trainers.
" Fine," he replied.
" Good," said the man. " I was worried for a while." Joe just sat and
stared while the other man apparently had a held a one ended
conversation remarkably well.
" Yes, for a while back there I thought I'd lost you. But I'm glad
you're all right." Joe continued to stare, open-mouthed.
" I can appreciate how tricky Inter-Momentary travel can be," the man
went on. " Of course, I'm used to it now, but the first time. Woo!" As
Joe sat and watched, he was taking in every detail about the man. He
was, like I said, about his age, if not a little younger and he wore a
green baseball jacket, a black trilby hat, multi-coloured polka-dot
trousers that were far too big for him and white trainers. If Joe
hadn't been so off his proverbial rocker at this moment, he would have
thought that this man had all the fashion sense of lampost, but today,
he just nodded and let it all wash over him.
" I bet your feeling like your head is being pounded by a thousand
Preecewallas, right?" said the man, beaming. He was obviously very
pleased to see him. Joe wasn't.
" What?" said Joe, dazedly.
" Oh, that's right. Erm&;#8230;elephants," he said finally. Joe
marvelled at how this man had so much energy. He must have had coffee
intravenously pumped into his system all night.
" I'm Bugsy," said the man, holding out a hand.
" I'm Joe Bloggs," said Joe Bloggs. " I'm here about the&;#8230;"
Then he stopped talking and shook his head. Labelling talking now as a
bit of a danger along with Trying to Make Sense of Anything and Trying
to be a Hit Among the Ladies, he rested back on his elbows and let it
all wash over him.
" I believe Bugsy was a hyper-intelligent mammal on your planet," said
Bugsy.
" Bugs," said Joe. " Bugs Bunny. I think." He wasn't really of
anything at the moment, other than none of this made any sense
whatsoever.
" That's right. I thought maybe you would find all this easier to take
in if I took the name of a great leader on your planet," said
Bugsy.
" No - he wasn't a great leader," said Joe.
" Well, one of the average ones then," said Bugsy.
" No," said Joe, clinging to this one thing he knew to be true as a
man overboard clings to driftwood. Desperately. " He wasn't a leader at
all. He was just an entertainment figure." Bugsy looked
crestfallen.
" But wasn't he a great doctor as well? Did he not contemplate the
universal question, What is Up?"
" No," said Joe, shaking his bewildered head.
" Well, that's a beggar."
" Why?" asked Joe.
" Now I've got to tell my boss that Elmer Fudd wasn't a great
warrior." There was a long silence, in which the absence of anything
continued to be. Joe didn't like that feeling, so he spoke again.
" What is inter-momentary travel?" he asked, trying to get to his
feet, but failing miserably. Whatever this place was, the floor, if
that's what it was, refused to stay still. So while his dignity was
still only in tatters, he decided he'd stay on the floor for a bit
longer.
" It's a molecular hyper-sting voyage through the space-time
continuum," said Bugsy.
" Oh, one of those," said Joe sarcastically. He was good at being
sarcastic. He was also good at letting things wash over him - he
thought he was doing a very good job of that. But now he wanted some
answers and ones that preferably start with the word molecular.
" Where am I?" he asked.
" You are nowhere," replied Bugsy.
" What's this place then?"
" This place is the nothingness between seconds. We are travelling
through time." Let it wash over you, let it wash over you, let
it&;#8230;
" WHAT?" yelled Joe. Bugsy jumped with fright. Joe was now standing
but he wasn't quite sure what everything else was doing. The walls
seemed to spin away from him and Bugsy seemed to be doing the
Riverdance.
" Time&;#8230;travel&;#8230;travel&;#8230;time?" muttered
Joe.
" That's about the gist of it," said Bugsy, doing up the zip of his
jacket. Joe stumbled around the spinning room, feeling like he was
going to be sick and to explode in one violent moment.
" It's not all that complicated, really. You wait here in a state of
absolute nothing and then when you come to the time you want, you
simply&;#8230;hop off."
" Hop off?" asked Joe. This was beginning to sound like a train
advert.
" Yes. Nothing to it, really. On some planets, they call
it&;#8230;Kranfatchrest isspog klariplontoby. Translated, I believe
it means Easy as Taking Candy from a Diseased Gerbil."
" A baby," Joe muttered as he stumbled from side to side. There was a
word in the sentence Bugsy just spoke that hadn't agreed with him, but
he couldn't figure out what it was.
" Ah yes, that'd make more sense." Bugsy came over and put an arm
round Joe's wait to hold him steady.
" Easy there. Just relax."
" RELAX?!" screamed Joe. " RELAX?" There was a long silence.
" I know a song that helps," said Bugsy.
" Songs never help," replied Joe.
" I don't know - the children in the future sing it when they use
inter-momentary travel for the first time." There was that word again.
What was it?
" It goes:
I'm-a going through time,
Eating Oranges and Lime,
I'm-a going through time,
Singing this rhyme,
I'm-a going through time,
Not committing any crime,
I'm just going through space and time."
" Stop!" yelled Joe.
" Can I do the second verse? It involves ice-cream and certain types
of iguana."
" No!" Joe held his stomach. " I don't want a second verse, I don't
want to be travelling through time, I don't want to be standing next to
a man who takes his name from a cartoon rabbit and I certainly,
certainly, do not want to hear anything about certain types of iguana."
In the silence that followed, you could almost hear the tumbleweed
rolling past.
" I suppose this would be a bad time to tell you I'm from the future?"
That was it. That was the word. And it was the last thing Joe knew
before he promptly passed-out.

Chapter 3

When he came to, he wasn't surprised to find himself staring at the
blue sky, with fluffy clouds flitting here and there across his vision.
He began to laugh. It was all a dream! He'd imagined the whole thing!
Oh, thank goodness for that, he thought. He'd been so worried
about-
" Morning," said a voice.
" ARRGGHH!" screamed Joe, sitting bolt upright as he saw Bugsy looming
over him. Then he looked straight forward.
" ARRRGGHHH!" he screamed again, this time more prolonged. He was
sitting on top of what looked suspiciously like a sky-scraper, looking
out over a bustling city. Except this was no ordinary bustling city.
This bustling city was filled with a plethora of unbelievable
sights.
There were flying cars, robotic parking attendants, stupidly large
megastores, metal pavements, self-cleaning windows, super-sized,
zeppelin-shaped aeroplanes zooming overhead, huge 3-D signs blazing
across the sky, pedestrians with flying shoes, self-carrying shopping
bags, robotic dogs, and so many more things that Joe couldn't even
describe. He sat still and panted like a dog. This was too much. He
looked at his shaking hands and then up at Bugsy and then back at his
shaking hands because he didn't like Bugsy's expression.
" I nearly lost you again for a minute," said Bugsy cheerfully. He
sounded like one of those people who are perpetually cheerful, no
matter what time of the morning it is.
" I wish you had," muttered Joe.
" Hmm?"
" I said you're a real cad." He looked back out on the city-scape.
Some of the buildings not only took the breath away, it held it to
ransom and called it rude names. There was a large shopping centre that
swirled about beneath, all open-air with large flashing signs welcoming
you to 'Shoptropolis - Where you Can Shop After you Drop'. People
seemed to be escorted round on beds after they'd grown too tired to do
any more shop. He caught himself thinking 'My Mum'd like one of those.'
Each shop projected huge 3-D characters into the sky, where they
advertised what their shop had to offer.
" Amazing, isn't it?" said Bugsy. Amazing was not a word Joe would
have chosen to describe it. It sounded too&;#8230;mundane. Indeed,
no word in the English Dictionary was suitable. There just was no
description.
" What is it?" asked Joe, as he felt a strong gust of wind blow his
hair back and billowed his shirt.
" This is the future, Joe."
" The future&;#8230;" mumbled Mr. Bloggs, who's usual idea of a
wacky day out involved three ladders and a gallon of custard. But in
some ways he wasn't surprised to hear it called that - he'd half
expected that that was what it was.
" The year 2512," exclaimed Bugsy proudly, like he was unveiling a new
invention to an excited audience equipped with clipboards. Instead, he
was addressing a rather bemused young man. And he didn't have a
clipboard. Just his toothbrush. He pulled this out of his pocket, as
the last piece of sanity that he could hold onto, no matter what his
eyes were seeing, or what Bugsy was telling him.
" No!" hissed Bugsy and he pushed the dental instrument quickly back
into Joe's pocket.
" What?" asked Joe bemusedly.
" Not here, not now." The look on Bugsy's face made him laugh
hysterically. He even started holding onto his stomach he laughed so
hard and pointed a hysterical finger as he rolled about on the concrete
roof.
" Shh!" Bugsy whispered, putting his finger to his lips. Luckily, this
sign meant the same for humans in the past and the future. With other
races in the galaxy, he wouldn't have been so fortunate. For example,
on the planet Wollarong, that gesture was grounds for inter-planetary,
age-long war.
But Joe Bloggs knew what it meant and he reluctantly obeyed. That was
the best bit of this whole day and he didn't want to stop.
" I'll tell you more later," said Bugsy, looking around to make sure
no-one was listening.
" Bugsy, we're on a roof," said Joe.
" You never know," said Bugsy and by the way he said it, Joe could
tell he was being serious. " While we're here, would you like to see
the city?"
Joe's first reaction to this was 'No!' like it had been to everything
else that had happened this morning, except that with everything else,
he hadn't been afforded a say in the matter. But when he thought about
this for a moment, he said,
" Yeah!" Seeing his city&;#8230;10&;#8230;20&;#8230;well,
lots of years in the future would be cool! If he'd have known what
would come of it, he'd roll back into a ball and tell the world to go
away. As it was, he got up and followed Bugsy happily towards the edge
of the roof.

Chapter 4

There was something bothering Joe Bloggs. It wasn't, surprisingly,
that he'd seen at least seven other versions of himself this morning,
the fact that he'd met a man called Bugsy who took the word 'clothes'
as a suggestion or the fact that he was at this precise moment in the
year 2512 on the roof of a skyscraper. The thing that was starting to
worry him was the fact when Bugsy had offered to take him down to show
him the city, he'd started walking to the edge of the roof. Now, call
him old-fashioned, but Joe always thought stairs were a good way of
leaving high buildings.
" Right then," said Bugsy as he perched on the very brink of the roof,
looking down at the 300 metre drop like he was checking if anything
interesting was happening down there. " Are you ready to jump?"
Joe didn't have a fear of heights. He had a just had a moral
disagreement with whole 'high' thing.
" What?" he asked.
" To jump? Are you ready?" asked Bugsy, now swinging his arms backward
and forward over the drop in a way that made Joe's stomach do
somersaults.
" Not exactly&;#8230;ready&;#8230;per se," said Joe.
" It's actually quite easy. I think you once had a saying for it back
in your time&;#8230;what was it? Ah yes - It's Just Like Riding a
Depressed Hippopotamus."
" Bicycle," corrected Joe instinctively.
" Ah yes&;#8230;that would fit better. Anyway look, it's easier
than it looks."
" Why can't we just use the stairs?" asked Joe, his voice grinding its
heels as it was dragged closer to the edge.
" No-one uses stairs in the year 2512. In fact, it's been out of
fashion for the best part of a millennia."
" What a shame, I just missed it."
" Well, you get to sample it now."
" I was being sarcastic."
" Right. But look, see over there?" he pointed westwards to a row of
houses. Joe said that he could. He could see a woman in one of the
upstairs windows. She appeared to be opening on of them.
" What's she doing?" asked Joe.
" She's doing what everybody does in the year 2512 - leaving the
house."
" But what about the stairs?" protested Joe and he felt like he was a
member of the 'Save our Stairs' campaign. Which was no joke on certain
planets in the galaxy.
" Stairs just take up unnecessary space within the household. So they
were replaced by Mini-Teleporters. But people wanted a quicker way than
that to get out of their house, so&;#8230;well, just watch." The
woman flung herself out of the window.
" Nooo!" yelled Joe, leaping instinctively forward. But the woman, who
didn't look at all bothered, and, in fact, a little narked at the yell,
turned upright and seemed to apply brakes as she slowed down towards
the ground. Her high-heels made contact and she strolled off to catch a
flying taxi, which was easier than it sounds.
" Wow," said Joe. " That's a turn up for the books."
" Yep."
" But how?"
" Well you see, every pavement in the world now is fitted with
Anti-Gravity-Projectors. You see those flying shoes they all wear?" Joe
nodded - he had. The looked like roller skates but actually hovered
above the ground as they effortlessly escorted their wearers quickly
along the pavement.
" They keep those in the air. So all you do is jump and the pavement
stops you. Simple. Like Riding a&;#8230;"
" Bicycle."
" Exactly."
After a count of three, the two men, holding hands, leapt off the
building. And they fell. And they continued to fall, because it was a
long way down.
" Nice day for it!" yelled a businessman who passed them on the way
down. Despite his tie hitting him constantly in the face, he seemed
extremely happy. Joe wondered why he was going quicker than they were.
He shot a puzzled look at Bugsy, who just said,
" Business Express." To Joe, it was the most amazing sensation he had
ever had. He felt like he was flying. No scratch that - he was flying.
He smiled as he flapped his arms and turned himself flat on his chest.
He span himself round. Now this was what the future should be about, he
thought.
And then, before he knew it, he was slowing down, the world whizzing
past him less hurriedly and in a few seconds, his feet touched the
ground.
" Wow," he said and was promptly sick all over the pavement.

Chapter 5

If you were walking down the main street of Wascally City on the day
of 25th February, 2512, you might have seen two men walking hurriedly
past you. If you kept on walking you will have seen something else on
the pavement which doesn't warrant a description. All you need to know
is that if you saw it, you might well have added your own unique brand
of what it was.
Anyway, Bugsy was strolling down the street while Joe followed on
behind. He was walking very slowly, looking at everything that he
passed: every shop, every house, every self-cleaning window. A woman
walked past him and muttered to her husband,
" Tourist."
It was almost too much to take in. Every where he looked there was
something new and exciting. Not the least of these were the flying
cars. They were something Joe had always dreamed about - in every
futuristic film you saw, there were always flying cars.
" How do these cars work?" asked Joe, pointing to one that had just
parked next to him.
" Impossibility," said Bugsy, walking back to where Joe now
stood.
" What's that? A brand of fuel?"
" Sort of. It was decided that a flying car was so impossible that the
impossibility stretched so far around the spectrum of Impossibility
that it actually appeared on the Possible side. If something's
impossible enough it actually becomes possible. Get me?"
" Not really." They carried on walking, with Joe emanating a whistle
and an awed silence every so often.
" I thought we were supposed to find renewable energy sources in the
future," said Joe.
" It never really took on," said Bugsy, now sucking a lollypop.
" Why not?"
" Well, people decided it probably wasn't worth it."
" What happened when the fuel ran out?"
" People just lounged around mostly. Then they invented the flying car
and now everything just runs on Impossibility. Great, eh?"
" Marvellous."
In the year 2222, there had been the biggest gathering of scientists,
scholars and Clever People in the history of the human race. They all
met at the Arctic Arena (an incomprehensibly huge venue that was built
over the whole of the Arctic after it was decided that no one would
really miss it) and the meeting was intended to invent all the things
that people had seen in futuristic movies. It wasn't that they were
trying to re-create the movies, it's just that people thought it was
about time that somebody invented these things. After all, film makers
had created them (albeit mainly out of pipe cleaners and superglue)
nearly three millennia ago.
The first day descended into something of a show and tell session. The
scientists would argue over who had invented the best thing since
sliced bread. Eventually, nobody won because all the inventions were as
useful as a solar powered torch. Another problem was that, from end to
end, the square table that they all sat round was approximately 400
miles long. This caused several problems, not the least of which were
differing time zones and climates between Mr. A. Aab and Mr.
Zzaff.
Eventually though, everything that was futuristic was finally created,
including flying cars, flying shoes, robotic dogs and trains that ran
on time. They presented their inventions to the world and sat down for
dinner in the now legendary Arctic Arena. The problem with this was
that by the time that the salt that Mr. Zzaff had passed reached Mr. A.
Aab, the latter was on the wrong side of living and really had no more
need for things like Salt.
" This is incredible," said Joe as he patted a passing robotic dog,
which barked realistically back and then got into a realistic fight
with another robotic dog, which resulted in two lost artificial limbs
and a few dangerously loose wires. And then something struck Joe.
" But why am I here?" he asked and Bugsy stopped walking and smiled. "
I mean, I remember this morning vaguely. I got up, met at least seven
other versions of myself, yadda yadda yadda, but then I&;#8230;I
jumped out of my guestroom window&;#8230;"
" I can tell you more about it later, but you are here because I felt
I should prove what I was telling you when we were in the state of
absolute nothingness. I knew for a fact you wouldn't believe me if I
didn't prove it to you some how." Joe nodded. That explained part of
it. But&;#8230;
" But why is all this happening in the first place?" he
complained.
" You'll know soon enough," said Bugsy infuriatingly as he began to
walk again. Joe seethed silently and hurried after him. He narrowly
avoided a rugged man who sped unsurely by on his flying shoes. Bugsy
jumped out of the way, turned round and waved a fist at him,
shouting,
" Drunk walker!" He looked at Joe, tutted and walked on.
Joe was still having trouble taking it all in. Each shop that they
passed boasted what was on offer, some posters bragged about the fact
that they had 200\% off all their products.
" What's that?" asked Joe, pointing into a window that had a large
cardboard star which said, 'Own a piece of the galaxy!'
" Oh, it's one of those stupid things where you give them a load of
money and they give you a square yard of the universe."
" What's the point of that?" asked Joe.
" Rather like how much I've eaten today - nothing at all. Come on,
let's get some breakfast," said Bugsy, turning and walking on down the
street. After a few seconds, he found his escort was missing a vital
ingredient - the man he was supposed to be escorting. He sighed and
walked back to where Joe still had his nose pressed against the window
like a Glass Taster. Most people would use the analogy of a sweet shop
in this instance, but Glass Tasting had become a huge craze. Not any
normal windows, you understand, but specially designed plates of
reinforced glass that were imported all over the world, for Glass
Tasting sessions Glass Tasters. If you happened to be walking by an
afore-mentioned Glass Tasting session, you might have heard things
like,
'Hmm&;#8230;this is a good year,' or 'I'm getting a hint of Perspex
and polythene'. It was a very popular pastime.
" Come on, Joe, it's starting to snizzle."
" It's what?" said Joe, turning aside from his need to a own a piece
of the universe. As he turned, he noticed that it had started rain
gently. But this was no ordinary rain. It was like a light snow,
falling very slowly toward the ground.
" It's a cross between snow and drizzle. Like a snow-drizzle.
Snizzle." Joe decided to let this one pass.
"But I want a piece of the universe!" he complained.
" But what's the point? You are occupying your own space in the
universe right now." There was a long silence while Joe considered the
philosophical implications of this.
" But you get a certificate."
" Joe&;#8230;"
" A certificate!" So finally Bugsy agreed to let Joe have a piece of
the universe and they entered the shop. For some reason, Joe expected
this activity to be the same as it would be in say, the year 2002,
where you would simply walk into a shop. But in the year 2512, the idea
took on a whole new meaning.
There was a small foyer, a gap between the outer door and the inner
door. Joe was about to reach for the second door when Bugsy snapped a
hand around his wrist.
" Wait," he said, looking up expectantly. After a few moments, a
calming, if slightly bored voice said,
" Greetings and welcome to Insert name of shop here. Please wait while
you are de-contaminated. Thank you." Joe looked across at Bugsy, who
seemed to find the information about de-contamination about as exciting
as a snizzly Tuesday.
Suddenly, a huge gust of wind seemed to blow around the sealed foyer
and Joe's clothes, which were already slightly torn in places, began to
billow like a boat's sails. A boat which sailed on the Goor Seas. The
Goor seas are infamous for being the roughest, toughest and basically
most rude seas in the whole of the universe. A boat that sails on the
Goor seas is a boat that doesn't have many ambitions in life.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, and it had started very suddenly,
it stopped. Joe's shirt began to deflate and he felt like he'd been put
through the spin-dryer.
" Thank you. Have a nice day and or daye," said the voice and the
inner door clicked open.
" What's a daye?" asked Joe, before he even got started on the whole
de-contamination thing.
" It was decided about five years ago by some people that a day was
too short, so they invented a daye."
" What's a daye?" repeated Joe, at the risk of sounding repetitive.
Which he did. He sounded so repetitive that he sounded like a stuck
record. A record that just went round and round and round and round and
round and round. And round.
" It's like a normal, 24 hour day, except that it lasts for 25 hours,"
said Bugsy, walking through into the shop. When Joe did the same, he
was hit by an extra-ordinary sense of well-being and happiness.
" Why can't people just stay up for another hour?" he asked with a
broad, but inexplicable grin on his face.
" Well, think about it. If you stay up and extra hour and then go to
bed, you're missing out on the extra hour."
" But you've already had an extra hour," said Joe calmly and
happily.
" Good point. Ah well. It's obviously really important anyway. Late
Night Workers and All Night Revellers needed the extra hour, so there
you go. Anyway, that's out of date now. Now there's also a Daiy, which
is 27 hours long, a Daiye, which is 32 hours long and a Dai which is
only 3 hours long."
" Why's that?"
" It's for Depressives who get bored with life very easily." Joe
nodded and with a supreme amount of mental balance, he strode over to
the desk which sat at the far end of the shop. For a shop, the place
was surprisingly bare and only really housed the desk which sat, as I
have already stated, at the far end of the shop. And behind the desk
sat a surprising individual. He was surprising, not because of what
he'd achieved in his life, in fact he'd achieved very little, but
because of the way he looked.
He looked like a car crash or two would clean him up a bit. He
appeared, at least at first sight, to have three legs, a mechanical
arm, a third eye, twelve differently sized armpits and one single hair
on the top of his head. He was, as Bugsy would tell him earlier, one of
the thousands who'd signed up for Prosthetic Surgery, a new craze that
had appeared at the beginning of the century. These new doctors
advertised on TV, stating that they could 'Improve you life in a number
of varying ways'. They could finally give you that eye in the back of
your head, which was very successful with teachers, who'd been
complaining of the need for one for millennia. They could give you that
extra leg that lonely runners needed to get into that three-legged
race. They could, at long, long last, give you those extra armpits in
which to spray those very manly and attractive sprays, of which I will
talk more about later.
There were of course, people who were born like that naturally and
they shunned people who had these faculties added. It was probably
because of this that Bugsy whsipered,
" Those are definitely inplants," as they approached the desk. He
wasn't one of the afore-mentioned unfortunates who'd been born with an
extra limb or two, but he was a supporter of the 'Campaign for Equal
Body Parts.'
" Hello gentlemen," said the man, rubbing at least two of his hands
together.
" Hi," said Joe, who still felt strangely happy and content, despite
It All.
" I take it that you have made the fantastic decision to own a piece
of the universe. Our gift package makes an ideal present for your
partner and/or loved one," said the old man. Joe took a while to
respond to this and that was only after Bugsy gave him a dig in the
ribs with his elbow. His delay was on account of never having met a man
with more eyes than hair and also on account of being quite amazed by
it.
" Oh - yes. I'd like to buy a piece of the universe. Please." To Joe,
this comment sounded so outrageously bizarre that it fit perfectly with
everything that had happened so far today.
" An excellent choice, Sir. And would Sir like the Premium package or
the Standard package?"
" I don't know, you'd have to ask him."
" He means you," hissed Bugsy into Joe's ear.
" Oh, right - what does each entail please?" asked Joe. The old man
lifted a glass case from under the desk, opened it and pulled out two
small boxes. One was purple, the other was blue. He picked out the
latter.
" This is your standard package. With this you get your piece of the
universe, a photograph of it and your certificate." He picked out the
purple one.
" This is the premium package," he said, in a voice that would have
sold a computer to an illiterate jellyfish. " With this one you get
your piece of the universe, a photograph, a fact file of your piece and
your piece's co-ordinates in the universe. Both come with a legal
contract that names you as that piece's owner including any stars,
planets or useful minerals that happen to be discovered there." Joe was
listening to all this with a sense of d?j? vu. Not that he'd ever been
offered a piece of the universe before, that was, thankfully, very new,
but he had remembered feeling like this before in one of those computer
shops. The salesman had been trying to sell him the newest computer but
Joe had as much knowledge about cutting-edge technology as a weasel
does about quantum physics and contrary to common belief, this is not
very much. The man had talked about bytes and gigahertz and ram and
set-up and something about some windows. It was all very complicated.
And that was why, as he stood in front of a man who had seemed to have
more legs and arms than a millipede, being told about two different
ways to buy a piece of the universe, he was very, very confused.
" What do you think, Bugsy?" he asked his newly-acquired friend.
" I don't know. Just pick one will you, I'm starving." Joe ummed and
arred about it for a little while longer and finally said,
" How much is the premium package?"
" 24 thousand Midgelons." Joe patted his pockets in a 'Now where is my
wallet' gesture, searched his shirt pocket in a 'I'm sure it was in
here some how' gesture and then finally looked across at Bugsy in a
'Can you stump me this one?' gesture. Bugsy wanted to give Joe a
gesture and it wasn't very nice.
" Oh all right. I'll shout you this one. But you owe me," he said,
taking out what appeared to be a matchbox out of his pocket, took out
twenty notes of some kind that were far too big to fit in the object
that appeared to be a matchbox and then he put the object that appeared
to be a matchbox back in his jacket pocket.
" I don't even have any Midge&;#8230;Midgelo&;#8230;"
" Midgelons," said Bugsy, giving the old man the red notes. " Don't
worry about it. What you have to do for me will put me in your debt."
Joe didn't really pick up on the importance of this statement - he was
far too excited about owning a piece of the universe. The old man
bagged up the purple box, handed the bag to Joe and smiled at them as
they left the shop.
As Joe stepped out into the street, he felt a little glum for some
reason, a little down. Suddenly the world seemed an awfully frightening
place especially when you were travelling with Bugsy.
" Bugsy?" he said as he finally found his footing on the slippery,
snizzle covered pavement.
" What?"
" Why did I feel happier in that shop than I do out here?" asked Joe
as they started to walk, Bugsy doing up his jacket against the cold
wind and Joe wishing he'd had the sense of mind to grab his jacket
before he jumped out of his guestroom window.
" Ah - that's the Mind Conditioning that they have here in the
future," said Bugsy with a wry smile.
" The what?"
" You know air conditioning?"
" Yes."
" Well this is kind of the same thing. People wanted more out of their
air conditioners so they decided that they wouldn't only pump cool air
into a room, but also Happiness and a Pleasing Sense of Well-Being.
Both of which come in handy air-fresheners for the home, incidentally."
Joe didn't feel that anything in the future was incidental. Each and
every minute detail seemed to be staggeringly, brain-searingly
important.
" The only draw back being that you feel slightly maniacally depressed
for a few minutes after leaving the shop. And it's all a bit of a
novelty anyway. I expect that shop owners only do it to make you buy
stuff."
" Does it work?" asked Joe, jumping out of the way as a robotic dog
ran happily, if slightly metallicly by.
" Oh yes. Most of these places make you so happy and well adjusted
that they could, as people said in your day, 'Sell the hind legs to a
donkey.'"
" That's talk the hind legs off a donkey," said Joe. " It's a phrase
used to describe people who talk a lot. If you're describing something
that's hard to sell, you'd probably use something humorous like a
solar-powered torch or an inflatable dartboard."
" That makes more sense," said Bugsy, staring off into the distance as
they walked. " After all, I expect that it'd be quite easy to sell a
pair of hind legs to donkey, what with it not having any and
all."
" Yes," said Joe, looking worriedly at Bugsy.

Chapter 6

Bugsy had lead him to a place that he said 'Made the best fried eggs
this side of Pluto'. And had replied 'The planet' to Joe's question. So
after about five minutes walk, in which Joe was offered a half-price
four piece suite, a quarter-price kilogram bag of sweets and a garden
gnome by different mascots for shops. Each one was a hologram and
played a recording until someone approached them, then they could
amicably hold a conversation. This had lead to problems though, when
they could be seen describing the advantages of a gas heater to a
passing hedgehog.
After entering the shop, which had a huge projected burger spinning
above it's roof, Joe immediately felt balanced and happy with his life
once again. The future, he decided, was a really cool place.
He took a seat at the nearest table and was shocked as the table gave
way beneath his arms and fell into a dark hole in the floor. He looked
round with an increasingly hot feeling under his collar with an 'I
didn't touch it' expression. But nobody seemed all that bothered and
just carried on slurping their drinks and eating their burgers. After a
few more embarrassed seconds, a new and clean table sprang up from the
same hole.
He decided not to draw any more attention to himself and to just put
his elbows back on the table. After a minute or two, Bugsy came back
with a red tray containing to full English Breakfasts.
" What just happened to my table?" asked Joe.
" Oh, it's the way they clean them here. Anything gets dirty, it goes
down to the basement where somebody wipes it and sends I back up. Saves
all the needless walking about and that."
" Oh," was all Joe could reasonably reply to this. Looking at the
breakfast, he began to drool. He was so hungry but he hadn't really
realised what with being in the future and all. And as he tucked in, he
found you could change lots of things in the future, but you couldn't
alter a good English breakfast.
He took out his little box and opened it. Inside there was a letter,
it said:
Dear recipient, many thanks for buying your own piece of the universe
and welcome to an ever-growing population of humans that own a stake in
the galaxy's fortunes. For if a vital mineral is found within your
piece, those scientist fellows will pay you handsomely for it. Please
visit your piece and tell us all about it. We value your feedback here
at Floorisyll and Co. Your future is in our hands and our hands are
steady and well-cleaned.
So enjoy your own little place in the universe where you can go for
piece of mind and without fear of recrimination or gas bills.
Yours Sincerely,
Max Treestump, Head of Floorisyll and Co.

" Don't you think this is amazing?" asked Joe.
" It's all right," said Bugsy, with an expression that expressed that
he didn't really think it was all that amazing.
" I think it's great."
" Of course you do. But in your day, people thought it was a pretty
cool idea to send a guy a dollar in return for a load of cash."
" Are you saying this might be a con?" asked Joe.
" No. I'm saying it is a con. Look at your photograph." Joe pulled out
the photograph and stared in amazement.
" Wow - that is amazing. Look at all that!" He showed Bugsy the
photograph, which showed miles and miles of infinite universe
stretching away into the invisible distance.
" No - your piece is that little white box - it's about three feet
square." Joe looked again at the photograph and this time he saw a
little box like the kind that show-offs draw to show that they can draw
in 3-D. It was, as Bugsy said, about three feet square.
" Oh." He took out the next photograph, which showed a more up close
picture of his piece. " Wait a minute," he said. " There's something in
my piece!" Bugsy snatched the photograph and then stared intently and
closely at the little box.
" I could be mistaken&;#8230;"
" Yes&;#8230;"
" But I think&;#8230;"
" Yes?"
" That in your space&;#8230;"
" Yes?"
" Is a toilet."
" What?!" Joe yanked the photo out of Bugsy's hands and looked at it
again. He was right. Inside his little piece of the universe, a
universe, which, I might remind you, is infinity personified, was a
toilet. A white, porcelain, run of the mill toilet. And the lid was
up.
" Why is there a toilet in my piece of the infinite universe?" he
asked Bugsy, who was busy tucking into his sausages and eggs.
" Beats me. But it seems to me like there's two options. One: It might
be that your particular piece of the whole universe has a particular
significance, which grants it's owner with powers that unbelievable
beyond our very imaginations."
" What's the other option?"
" It could just be a coincidence." Joe shrugged dejectedly, despite
feeling happier about his state of well-being than at any other time in
his life, and put the box away.
He started on the eggs. The eggs were, he found, delicious. The yolk
ran just right as he pierced its summit with the edge of his fried
bread, which was similarly perfect. The sausages were cooked to
heavenly taste and the bacon was crisp and chewy, just as he liked it.
He was glad to know that there was one piece of sanity in the
future.
" This is all synthetically created, of course," said Bugsy between
mouthfuls. Joe looked slowly up at him like a baby who's just had his
security blanket dragged out of his hands.
" What?" he whispered with a silent rage.
" Well, at the turn of the last century, it was decided by most
vegetarians that to eat meat was cruel."
" That's what all vegetarians think. Why only most?"
" Well, some were in it just for the fashion accessory. Anyway,
scientists came up with a way of synthetically re-producing every
single aspect of a full English. So - here we are." Joe had gone red in
the face with anger. Bugsy asked him if he was all right, offered to
perform the hiemlich manoeuvre, but Joe just stared back. That's it,
he's snapped, thought Bugsy, and he wished he hadn't mentioned about
the food.
Then Joe did something quite remarkable. He had never really done
anything remarkable in his life. The boldest thing he'd ever done was
when he rallied for chips to be put back on the menu for at school. It
was the kind of guy he was.
But now he climbed up onto his chair and held his synthetically
produced drink (although he didn't know this, thankfully) above his
head.
" Ladies and Gentlemen!" he exclaimed, and Bugsy buried his head in
his hands. The whole caf? became suddenly absent of any noise and you
could have heard a tiny pin drop. A tiny pin, minuscule really,
dropping onto a soft material of some kind.
" Thank you. I would just like to say that I am from the past!"
Needless to say, he lost most peoples trust and credibility with this
opening statement. " No no, seriously." And he was suddenly reminded of
some drunken wacko that had brought the M1 to a standstill once as he
bellowed something about the future. Most people had honked his off and
shouted some things that weren't pleasant. Even he had given a
reproachful honk, which was a pretty hard emotion to instil in a honk.
And now, as he thought about it, that man could have been telling the
truth all the time. How many people had he laughed at because their
stories were incredulous?
" I know I might seem like a bit of a loon, but seriously - I am from
the year 2002-3. I was around when you would wait for an hour in a
traffic jam and when you finally came to the spot of delay, you found
it was a few men laying traffic cones. I remember the days when toast
would land butter side up (he'd noticed that when a piece fell from the
checkout, little air boosters had righted it and brought it back up to
the till). I still recall the days when you had to wait on a phone
listening to how much they valued your call for nigh on 2 hours! How
can my call have taken 2 hours to get through if it was valued so
much?
And my point? It's this. We had real English Breakfasts back then.
Yeah. Not synthetic. Not manufactured and made to order. We enjoyed
waiting in traffic jams back then. We enjoyed sitting and waiting with
the phone. It may have been a dull and pointless waste of time but it
was our dull and pointless waste of time!" At which triumphant gesture,
some of his drink spilled from his cup and landed on his chair, which
promptly disappeared through the floor for cleaning.

Chapter 7

" I have never been so embarrassed in my entire life!" This statement,
if said by Joe Bloggs, would have made a lot of sense. After all, he
had just fallen ten feet on a chair into the basement of a caf?, where
he'd slipped from the chair when he'd seen the man approaching who, it
turned out, was only going to clean the stool. After bruising his hip
badly on the solid concrete floor, he'd attempted to get up, which
resulted in him slipping on some eggs that had been wiped off a
previous table. This fall gave him bruising on the other hip. When he'd
got out of the basement, he'd sheepishly apologised to everybody in the
shop and hobbled out with two bruised hips and a shirt covered in
egg.
But this was actually said by Bugsy. He had sat there through the
whole speech with his head in his hands, muttering something about how
this was it.
" You were embarrassed? You were embarrassed?" complained Joe. Bugsy
waved this all aside and pointed towards a tall building at the end of
the street.
" Come on, we're late," he said.
" Late for what?" asked Joe.
" Our appointment with Mr. Davies." Joe tried to keep up with Bugsy,
who was walking faster than a Reelwallor on Grackley Day, which, if
you've never been to Lossflom in the springtime, is very, very
fast.
Joe had grabbed a coffee on the way out and the man behind the counter
had let him have it on the house, which Joe thought was because of the
inconvenience they'd caused him. But the real reason was that they just
wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
" This coffee tastes strange," he said after tentatively sipping the
edge.
" It's de-caf," replied Bugsy, hurriedly crossing the street when a
gap became available. In the future, you have to take every opportunity
you get. The traffic moves in an constant stream because of the
irradication of the traffic jam in 2222. Everyone decided that they
were pretty pointless and now no-one stopped moving. If everybody kept
driving, no-one would ever have to stop again, meaning that the only
way to cross a road was to wait until there was an absence of cars for
a moment. Which was rare, because in the future, every human, and
certain species of rabbit, owns a flying car.
" But de-caf in my day didn't taste like this."
" That'll be because caffeine was discovered to harmful to health and
so was erased from existence. But some manufacturers went too far and
replaced it with exactly the opposite of caffeine which produces a
feeling of tiredness and under-hyperness."
" Right," said Joe and plonked the cup into the nearest bin.
" Oh, I get it," said a deep and growling voice behind him. Joe
stopped and turned round. There was no-one there.
" Ignore me, that'll make it all go away," the voice said again and
this time Joe was sure he'd heard it.
" Did you hear that?" he asked Bugsy after another turn round proved
fruitless.
" What?" replied Bugsy, gazing anxiously at his watch.
" A sort of&;#8230;voice?" Joe said as he took a few steps back
down the street, looking in at shop doorways.
" Over here, tally," growled the voice which sounded like it was
passed through a strict gravel check before it was allowed out into the
world. Joe span. It was coming from the bin.
" Hello?" he said.
" Oh, notice me did you?" said the bin.
" Yes," said Joe, after his mouth had had several attempts at forming
a sentence and given up.
" Good. That makes you about the first today." Joe was struck by a
memory of talking bins and big birds, but this situation still seemed
slightly odd to him. Most things seem only 'slightly' odd after you've
had the kind of day Joe was having.
" Come on, Joe. You can talk to bins at any time," said Bugsy.
" I can't - I've never met a talking one before!" exclaimed Joe.
" Oh - their a Midgelon a dozen around here. Come on."
" A Midgelon a dozen, am I?" sneered the bin. " Well guess what? You
guys ain't exactly rare!"
" Is this bin talking?" asked Joe, who, despite the fact that he was
no longer surprised by anything, was bowled over.
" I'd better be," squawked the bin, " Else I'd be pretty
worried."
" Come on," said Bugsy. " They're all like this. Moaning about having
rubbish thrown at them all the time." Joe shrugged despondently and
followed Bugsy as he departed.
" Come back 'ere, you!" the bin yelled, surprisingly aggressively for
an object of that size. " Get back 'ere! How'd you like it if all
people did was throw trash at you? Eh? Eh? Oh, he's gone."
He had indeed gone. He was at this moment stood in the biggest
reception that the human eye had ever seen. It was the biggest
reception the human hand had ever created. Of course, there were bigger
ones and they weren't called receptions. Also, you probably wouldn't
want to be in any of them, because they were all on another
planets.
The desk in itself was about thirty feet long, the fountain seemed
more like Niagara had just been told to 'Quiet down a bit' by his Mum
and the chandelier which hung from the amazing glass-panelled ceiling
of the rotunda was like a lamp shade gone mad. Thousands of layers of
sparkling crystals winked and twinkled at the beholder. It must have
been twenty or thirty feet wide and long if it was an inch.
All this wood and gold panelling made Joe just stare. Bugsy hadn't
taken into account that this was the first time Joe had seen the
Foeroari Institute's reception lounge and, as such, had forgotten to
leave a good minutes earlier and bring along a dishcloth to wipe away
the drool.
Eventually though, he managed to haul the astonished Mr. Bloggs to the
welcome desk, where a girl who appeared to be there and then disappear,
was sat. She was quite un-nerving. You know the kind of people who tend
to stare at you a lot while you're talking and make you feel insecure
because they're holding your eye for a bit too long? She was worse. In
fact, Joe realised, all the attendants behind the desk seemed to exist
and then not to. She would be there for a few seconds, flicker and
disappear, only to re-appear a few seconds later like nothing had
happened.
" Welcome to the Foeroari Institute of Time and Space," she said and
all was perfectly normal until she flickered like a light that's on its
last legs, and went out. Joe looked around him. He looked at Bugsy. He
looked back at the desk. And the girl re-appeared.
" How can I help you?" Joe looked around him some more and then back
at Bugsy, to see if anyone else found this behaviour rather odd. They
didn't.
" I've got an appointment with Mr. Ruckleberry at 11.30."
" 11.30?" asked the girl and Joe had bizarre thoughts about cans of
sugary drinks and window cleaners. But then, with what was happening
around him, his thoughts were perfectly normal.
" That's right." The girl searched the computer database, disappeared
and then re-appeared like a faulty neon light that needs a good kick to
get it going again.
" Ok, if you'd like to take a seat," she said. Bugsy smiled and walked
off to take a seat, but Joe just stood at the desk, aghast.
" How do you&;#8230;" But that was all he got to say because Bugsy
had come back and pulled him away by the arm. He lead him over to a
long row of blue, soft, comfy seats that seemed to stretch away into
the distance and sat him down.
" How do they do that?" asked Joe.
" Because they have so much to do, they are constantly use
Inter-momentary travel." Joe's expression suggested that this didn't
make any sense to him whatsoever. Bugsy sighed. " For instance, after
she said welcome to us, she went back in time to two hours previously
to finish of the paper work that she had on her desk. Two hours
previously the institute was closed hence no one interrupted her. Then
she came back to the present and asked us how she could help."
" I was wondering why those forms in front of us suddenly were all
filled in when she disappeared," said Joe.
" But that's the thing," said Bugsy. " They never disappear - they are
always there, except that she was there in the two hours before our
arrival."
" Right," said Joe, who felt like a cow in an advanced maths lesson.
In a couple of minutes, a man would arrive and take them upstairs, but
until then, Joe amused himself by watching the desk attendants. They
were there&;#8230;then they weren't. He was interested when one of
them appeared and then started doing some work. When it was finished,
she disappeared again. Then, a man walked into the reception and up to
the desk. The attendant said hello and asked him to wait one moment
while she disappeared and did the work that he'd just seen her doing a
minute ago. Except that the man was only waiting a few seconds,
presumably because when the attendant had done the work he'd seen her
doing a minute ago, she went back in time to the moment she'd come back
to do the work, then went back to the future where the new arrival had
only been inconvenienced for a matter of seconds. Joe was quite worried
that he was beginning to understand it. And now that he did, he
realised it was genius. Absolute genius. The amount of time that could
be saved by doing that would be enormous. If you got home too late to
clean the house before your in-laws arrived, you could zip back, clean
up, zip forward and your in-laws would be none the wiser. They also
wouldn't mention it all, because they never do.
" Good morning, gentlemen," said the man who had come to take them
upstairs, " If you'd like to follow me this way." He smiled briskly and
then strode off briskly. He was a very brisk man.
He lead them to a glass elevator which looked out on the side of the
city Joe hadn't seen. It was incredible. The sun shone off metallic
like liquid gold and flying cars went gracefully this way and that. A
huge dome building dominated the sky line.
" What's that?" asked Joe, pointing.
" Oh, you're a new arrival," said the brisk man. " It's a music hall.
The biggest in the universe. Well, it is now. After the one of
Galapotron B went up in smoke. Which was entirely an accident and
nothing to do with us," added the brisk man&;#8230;briskly.
" Wow," said Joe, staring as the sun illuminated the entirely
glass-panelled roof. A large group of birds was circling above the
city, which was an absolute marvel. He felt like he was on another
planet, which, he reminded himself, he practically was.
There was a loud beep and the elevator doors opened at what must have
been the top floor. He elevator was fast, but the journey had still
taken nearly three minutes.
" This is us," said the brisk man, who, against all odds, was called
Mr. Brisk. He led them down several corridors, all of which used the
same tasteful wood-panelling with a gold rail running along each wall.
People that they passed looked at Joe for what he felt was a little
longer than necessary and would proceed to whisper in a rather childish
way after he'd gone.
Eventually, after walking along what seemed like miles of soft carpet
and passing endless mahogany doors, they came to one which had a large
gold plaque on it. It said 'Mr. Ruckleberry - Head of the Institute for
Time and Space PhR, HnU, DOP, FNAY, IOU, RSPCA.' It was quite a list of
credentials, thought Joe. Presumably even more so if you knew what any
of them meant. It was this door that Mr. Brisk knocked on and stood
aside as a call of 'Enter' echoed from within.
It was a voice that made you obey. People always say , 'If you're
friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?' And if this man
was your friend then you most certainly would. You may even add a few
pirouettes and turnpikes in mid-air for good measure. It was an
authoritative voice that seemed to hold some command in Joe's legs -
they started walking forwards.
As he entered the room, he gasped. A huge window that stretched all
the way along one wall looked out onto the city, and indeed, the rest
of the world. But that wasn't the thing that was holding his attention.
What was was not only holding his attention, but also mugging it and
leaving it for dead.
A five-foot carrot sat behind a desk at the far end of the office. It
was a real carrot for all Joe could see, except that it seemed to have
legs and arms. And for all Joe could see, the carrot seemed to have
completely human characteristics, including a face. At the moment, it
was smoking.
" Ah, Bugsy," said the carrot, coughing on the cigar smoke as he stood
to greet the new arrivals. He gave both men a firm handshake,
especially for a man whose hands would go great with a salad. Sitting
back down behind his desk, he showed the two men into a couple of seats
that, though they weren't uncomfortable, were clearly meant to hold the
lesser inhabitants in the room. Joe had no yet taken his eyes off the
carrot. He had seen some strange things so far today, but this one took
the biscuit.
" And you must be Mr. Bloggs," said the carrot, checking his records.
" Good trip I hope?"
" Actually, I-"
" Good, good," said the carrot. " And good work, Bugsy. That's a
record time for you."
" Thank you, Sir." The carrot coughed on the cigar smoke again and
stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray.
" Nasty habit," said the carrot. " I'll probably go back a few years
and give it up before I take it up this afternoon." He stood. " Shall
we?"

Chapter 8

He ushered them through to the next room, which was no less impressive
in terms of size and interior decorating. But this room was a lot more
busy, people walking here and there, people with clipboards, people
without clipboards, people who wished they were important enough to
merely not have a clipboard.
And at the far end of the room, a line of variously attired men and
women stood to attention. Granted, some of the attention was a little
slouchier in some places. But it was the way that they were dressed
that amazed Joe. After a whole morning of seeing people dressed in
futuristic silver all-in-ones, the casual, 20th century look that
graced this line was quite a sight. They were all dressed like
him.
" Joe, if you'd like to join our line," said the carrot, heaving
himself into the nearest chair, which sat menacingly in front of the
line. Joe did as he was told because he'd never been told to do
anything by a carrot before and he was all up for new
experiences.
And as he joined the line at the end, he looked at the man who he
stood next to. He blinked. He blinked again, because the man was still
there.
" Peppy?" he said. The man was staring back at him with a glum face
and transfixed eyes.
" Joe?" replied the man. He was Italian. He was a rather small man,
greasy with a little moustache. Oh, and he wore a little hat that said
'Pizza Express'. Joe couldn't believe it. He had travelled
approximately 512 years into the future and he was now stood next to
the man who delivered his pizzas on Mondays and alternate
Fridays.
But he didn't have any time to quiz Peppy further, because Mr.
Ruckleberry started to speak.
" And that concludes our search. Ten human beings. Ten random human
beings gathered for a common purpose. It has been a long year. We have
planned, double planned and now we are here. The day when finally it
all comes together. You will, of course, all wonder what you are doing
here." Everybody nodded in a way that they would very much like to know
what they were doing here. Joe nodded and, while he was doing so, he
looked down the line. Most of them seemed to be dressed in morning
attire like dressing gowns, while some of them were dressed like him -
in the early stages of dressing for work. Joe looked down at himself,
at his cuffs that he hadn't yet had the time to button up.
" You have all been brought here to aid us in our time of need.
Please, step through to the briefing room."

Chapter 9

They all dazedly did as they were told, Joe, seeing the look on
Bugsy's face, turned left and walked through the double doors and into
what he assumed was the Briefing room. There was a large screen at one
end of the room and about a hundred seats facing it. Joe banged his toe
on one of the nearer seats because it was so dark in here. The only
faint light emanated from a slide machine at the back of the
hall.
He walked to the front and took the farthest seat, as the rest of the
troupe filed in behind him. Peppy crashed into the seat next to him and
said,
" What is going on, eh?"
" I have no idea. How did you get here?" asked Joe.
" Well, I had just got up and dressed and I did my teeth and then -
wham, I am a-here!" Joe shook his head. Whatever was going on here, it
smelt bad. Or maybe that was just Peppy's breath.
The carrot waddled its way up to the front. Joe felt like he was about
to be subjected to a motivational morning. He'd had one at his job a
few weeks back and the only thing it did was make him bored and
lethargic.
" First slide please," he called to the back, where a little man was
stood with his finger trembling on the button.
The screen was suddenly filled with a picture of a planet, offset by a
thousand stars. The audience would have been inclined to say a few
'Oooh's or at the very least, some 'Aaah's.
" Realify," barked Mr. Ruckleberry. Suddenly, the room started to melt
around Joe's head. The walls slid down on themselves, Mr. Ruckleberry
dissolved like dust and the screen flew towards him.
" Aaargghh!" he screamed, sure that the screen would kill him as it
fell towards his face. Then there was silence. Joe was no longer in the
room. He was in the picture, looking about him at all the stars, down
at the orange/green planet and at himself, who, he realised to his
horror, was just floating there. He felt like he was still sat on his
comfortable, cinema-style seat, but the seat was nowhere to be seen. He
was just&;#8230;bobbing.
Astonished and extremely frightened, he looked all about himself, but
could see no-one. What was going on?
Then he heard a voice, booming like there were massive speakers
attached to both his ears.
" What you are looking at is the planet of Rogueferry." It was Mr.
Ruckleberry. With a huge sigh of relief, Joe realised that this was
just a slide with some futuristic technology. He let it wash over
him.
" It is a small planet, rather like our own. Its surface is mainly
rough and desert-like. Next!" Joe's surroundings melted away again and
then he was some where else, on the planet's surface. He felt like he
should be extremely hot and bothered as the sun shone fervently onto
his head, but he felt nothing.
" What you see in the distance," continued Ruckleberry, and Joe
noticed a large metal building on the horizon, " Is one of their many
military stations." Joe heard a few gasps from what was presumably the
rest of the audience, but Joe couldn't see anyone around him.
" Now, this is where you come in. Next!" As the scenery fluttered away
again, Joe re-emerged in a small room. It was fairly dull, as there
were no windows, and the oak-walls and large leather seats did nothing
to brighten the place up. Around a large table sat
many&;#8230;aliens. There was no other word for them. Joe would
dearly have liked them to be anything else, but they were aliens.
Granted, they were aliens in suits and military uniform, but they were
still aliens.
They all had eyes and mouths - some had a few of each - and they all
looked vaguely human but there was no doubting it. If this was a sci-fi
movie, this would be the bit where you shrink back into your seat.
Unfortunately for Joe, he seemed to be sat in the room with them.
Fortunately though, they didn't appear to know he was there.
" This is Roguan Council. What they are planning will ultimately have
a terrible consequence for our planet. They are planning to wage war."
More gasps. " But this is why we have recruited you fine people.
Approximately 500 years ago, a threatening message was sent out by our
planet, a planet you ten alone were a part of. You will no doubt have
information as to why these messages were sent. Therefore, you will
travel to Rogueferry tomorrow morning to begin peace talks. You alone
stand between them and the destruction of our planet. Because, in ten
days time, the planet Earth is destroyed by the biggest fleet of
battleships the universe has ever known. End." The room dissolved
before Joe's very eyes. The aliens all submerged into one another, like
a fresh painting left in the rain. He himself started to fray at the
edges, but then he was back in the briefing room, all his edges neat.
He looked round at everyone else, who all seemed to have been on the
same journey that he had. They were all startled and afraid, and the
news of inter-stellar war hadn't softened the blow.
" Any questions?" asked Mr. Ruckleberry, whose voice was now coming
out of a carrot again. Joe tentatively raised his arm.
" Yes?" said Mr. Ruckleberry, pointing at Joe. Bugsy beamed like his
child was the most attentive in class.
" Can I leave?" Joe asked. Bugsy's smile vanished.
" No, no," Mr. Ruckleberry laughed. " Good one, though."
" I wasn't joking," said Joe, but no one was listening because someone
else was asking a question.
" What were these threatening messages?" a voice asked from the
back.
" Good question. Slide, please." Joe secured himself in his seat at
these words, but it turned out to be a normal slide. It was a picture
of some kind of mathematical working.
" As you will know, there was a large interest in the existence of
extra-terrestrial life. People called Scientists sent out mathematical
equations and binary quadratics into the universe, hoping against hope
that their sums would reach some kind of life form.
As you will also know, there was never any reply. In actual fact, the
messages were received by approximately twenty five million different
species of extra-terrestrial life within one week. Twenty four million,
nine-hundred thousand and ninety-seven of them discarded the message as
junk mail and went about their ordinary lives. Out of the other three
species, one of them gave the message to the secretary to put in the
in-box but which was inadvertently put in the out-box and eventually
thrown away by a grumpy caretaker; another decided not to reply because
the sender had not included a stamped addressed envelope and the last
species, the Roguans, were happy to receive the mail because all they
get these days are bills. They deciphered the message and.
Unfortunately for us, in their language the equations mean 'You're
Mother was a Chain-Smoking Goldfish' which didn't go down too well with
the locals. Eventually, they decided to wage war on us and searched the
universe looking for the senders of the offending message.
Unfortunately, the looked every where but on the other side of their
planet, where the Earth is quite visible and they invented the saying
'Isn't It Always in the Last Place You Look?'"
A heavy silence fell on the briefing room. The only noise was Peppy
snoring to the side of Joe and that ended abruptly as Joe whispered
something to the effect of 'Twenty margaritas and a can of coke,
please', which soon woke him up.

Chapter 10

Joe sat on his bunk bed, staring at his hands. It wasn't that his
hands were interesting - they weren't. But they seemed like a really
good idea at the moment. While everything else in his universe was
rapidly becoming like a plot in a Mission Impossible episode, i.e. hard
to understand, his hands remained normal and comforting. You may not
find your hands comforting, but just you wait till you're zapped
centuries into the future, only to find that the world is still barmy
and perhaps even a smidgen barmier.
The only other thing which was keeping him sane right now was at this
moment lying on the bunk above, his snoring louder than certain
industrial factories. Peppy was an alright guy. To Joe, he was a sight
for sore eyes (or at least hungry ones) on Mondays and alternate
Fridays. And finding him earlier had been the happiest moment of his
(as yet) brief spell in Earth's future.
And then he'd learned why he was there. It had suddenly become very
clear to him that he actually wasn't on a two week jolly to the future
- he was going to some stupid planet to make stupid peace talks with
stupid aliens who were about to launch stupid war on stupid Earth.
That's a lot of stupidness to deal with in one morning.
After the briefing, everyone had been given a partner and sent to
these rooms and luckily Joe had been given Peppy. Unluckily though,
Peppy's snoring was louder than certain industrial factories.
The door handle clicked open, which was a disappointment. It wasn't a
disappointment the door was opening, he was very glad to have visitors,
but it was a disappointment to him that in the future they didn't have
those doors that whooshed aside when you approached, like in all those
sci-fi movies.
But the door opened with an almost nostalgic creak and Bugsy walked in
and sat down.
" How are you feeling?" he asked.
" Oh fine."
" Really?"
" Yeah, considering that I'm insane."
" You're not insane."
" Really?"
" 'Fraid not."
" Not even a little bit?"
" Not even a little bit."
" Shucks. Then the answer to your question," said Joe, " Would be that
I feel like the whole world has come crashing down around my ears. In
short, I feel dazed, confused, angry, confused, hungry, surprisingly
confused and a little worse for wear. Does that answer your
question?"
" That one and so many more," said Bugsy, taking off his cap and
scratching his scalp. Joe sank back onto the bed and heaved a huge
sigh. There was silence in the room, except of course for the snoring
which would not only have raised the dead, it would have resurrected
them and sent them on their way with a cheeky ruffle of the hair.
" He's loud, isn't he?" said Bugsy.
" Pardon? I can't hear you with all this racket."
" I said - Oh, never mind." Joe nodded. That seemed like a good life
lesson at the moment. Joe sat back up and said,
" Why is Mr. Ruckleberry a carrot?"
" I was wondering when you were coming to that. Actually it's quite
simple. You see, as Head of the Institute for Space and Time, Mr.
Ruckleberry was one of the founders of Inter-Momentary travel and as
such as travelled through time more than you've had hot&;#8230;"
Bugsy took in Joe's bachelor pallor, " Food. And so, because
Inter-Momentary travel does have its effects, Mr. Ruckleberry is now a
vegetable. Some times he's an onion, some times a pepper, a pea, a
mange-tous. It really depends on what kind of mood he's in. A tomato,
some days."
" But a tomato is a fruit," said Joe, frowning.
" Not any more it's not. Everybody got rather narked at all the smart
alecs going around and saying that because Tomato's have seeds it's
actually a fruit. So scientists did away with the seeds so now it's
officially a vegetable." Joe nodded. This made sense. And as it did, it
was like a mule at a Mensa meeting.
" Why us?" asked Joe.
" How do you mean?" replied Bugsy, who thought that the only way that
this question could be made more vague was if the 'us' part was taken
away.
" Why do we have to go?" said Joe, nodding towards the top bunk, where
Peppy's snoring was like someone explaining to you exactly how their
new digital camera could take pictures and edit them into a slide show
at the same time - it just went on and on and on and on. And, just for
good measure, on.
" Well, Mr. Ruckleberry thought that because you were all around when
these messages were first sent out and that you will be of the same
disposition as these men who sent them, that would be best placed to
deal with it."
" But I thought that in the future," said Joe, " Robots would be
created to do all the dangerous jobs."
" Well, they are at times. But this isn't a dangerous job."
" Really?"
" Well&;#8230;not if you don't mess it up."
" Comforting." Bugsy sighed.
" Look, I'll be coming with you. As will each Agent who found someone
suitable to do this job." Joe nodded. He needed some sleep. But
first&;#8230;
" What were the requirements?" he asked. Bugsy smiled.
" I'd better get some rest." He stood and made for the door.
" What were the requirements?" insisted Joe.
" You need some too. See you later," said Bugsy, opening the door with
all the effort that it used to take back in the twentieth century, and
leaving. Joe sighed. Letting it wash over him, well, at least the
little bits, he snuggled down and got some sleep.

Chapter 11

During his sleep, Joe dreamed that he was in the future, he dreamed
that carrots talked and that, get this, he was going to go to some
stupid planet to make peace talks with an alien race!
Then he woke up.
" Typical. I have a great dream and it turns out to be flippin' well
real." He got up and left the room, and met Bugsy in the
corridor.
" Where are we going?" he asked.
" Breakfast. You did have that in the 21st century, didn't you?"
" Oh yes." The last time Joe had had some breakfast, he'd been
speaking to himself. He didn't have fond memories of it.
As they went down the corridor, others from it's own time left their
rooms and fell into line behind them. Finally, they arrived in a large
hall where a huge table was set for breakfast. Joe sat down next to
Bugsy and waited.
" What would you like then?" said a voice behind him.
" Excuse me?" said Joe, turning round to see a large woman with a huge
basket of cereals.
" Would you like Rice Toasties, Sugar Oats, Flakes o' Bran, Malt-O's,
Grey Flakes, Orange Flakes, Flakes with Sugar-"
" What do you suggest?" asked Joe impatiently.
" Toast." And she strode off to get him some. Joe resignedly poured
himself some orange juice and began to sip.
" Are you sure you want that?" asked Bugsy.
" Why not? I like orange juice."
" I'm not doubting that you do, as you say, like orange juice and
indeed if there was some orange juice at this table I'm sure you would,
as you say, like it. But that's not orange juice."
" What is it, then?" asked Joe reluctantly. Half of him really needed
to know and the other half said, 'Shut up unless you want to see
breakfast come back a few times&;#8230;'
" It is Reconstituted Badger Urine." A mouthful of Reconstituted
Badger Urine flashed across the table and hit an old man who was about
to attempt his first bite of Malt-O's.
" Sorry about that!" said Joe, rushing around to the other side of the
table, which took approximately two minutes, and then he started to
wipe away the urine from the man's face. But in his haste, he knocked a
mug of boiling hot coffee into the old man's lap.
" Aaargghhh!" screamed the old man. The old man then ran off to the
toilets. Joe went and sat back down. Bugsy gave him an apologetic
shrug.
" It is a high source of energy. You might feel some&;#8230;adverse
effects," he whispered as Mr. Ruckleberry entered the room. The old man
ran hurriedly back to his seat just as everyone stood to attention. The
old man attempted to stand, but, what with having his lap scolded, he
found this rather hard and just sort of bent double as a mark of
respect.
" Please, sit down," said Mr. Ruckleberry, who today, appeared to be a
cucumber. " Enjoy your breakfasts."
A plate of toast was placed in front of Joe.
" Oh thanks a lot, thankyou for the toast, it is much appreciated I
haven't had anything to eat you see for about oh must be a day or two
who can tell eh I can't What a morning it is isn't it a nice morning
very sunny great day for making peace talks with homicidal aliens isn't
eh?" He took a breath and the oxygen overload nearly killed him. The
woman with the breakfasts just shrugged. She'd seen this behaviour by
drinkers of the RBU on many occasions. Once, she'd just absorbed
everything the over-active little man had said and just waited
patiently for him to talk himself asleep. Which he did.
" What's going on Bugsy I can't stop talking see? I just keep talking
and talking and talking and my mouth keeps saying stuff and I know this
is really bad grammar and everything but I can't stop my mouth I just
keep talking and talking and talking and-" Bugsy punched Joe about the
side of the head. It was the humane thing to do.

When he awoke a few hours later, he found he was quite full up. Bugsy
was sat over him with an empty plate full of crumbs. Obviously, it
wasn't an empty plate if it was full of crumbs, but it was devoid of
any real food stuff.
" What happened?" he asked dazedly.
" I hit you," replied Bugsy.
" What?!"
" Don't worry, it was humane."
" Oh good," said Joe, feeling the swelling on the side of his head, "
As long as it was humane." There was a long silence in which Joe
groaned a little bit, but rather non-commitedly.
" You've got a RBU hangover. The effects last for&;#8230;about ten
more seconds," said Bugsy, checking his watch. In about ten seconds,
the effects wore off. Joe sat upright.
" I feel nicely full," he said, patting his stomach.
" Yes - I fed you you're toast while you talked in your sleep." Bugsy
got up, stretched and said, " Right, come on then. Let's go and talk
some sense into these Roguans." Bugsy left and the door made a pointed
attempt at not being opened.
Joe shivered. Bugsy had sounded like they were going to get a paper.
Joe wasn't an alcoholic, but it was at times like this when he wished
he'd taken it up as a hobby.

Chapter 12

Joe was walking. No, he was striding. He was striding forward, long
strides, arms swinging slowly backwards and forwards. He was walking in
slow motion, as were the rest of the crew of the HM1. They were
striding in slow motion through the hangar, as a hundred people stood
to applaud. It was the possibly the proudest moment of Joe's life. Just
ahead of winning the egg and spoon race at his school sports day when
he was five.
He was kitted out, as was the rest of the crew, in an orange spacesuit
and he held his big, bubble-like helmet under his arm. He saluted the
crowds.
He had decided, rather reluctantly that people did have worse jobs.
There were&;#8230;live TV presenters, for example. The people who
write those jokes that go in crackers. The man whose job it is to place
the second blade on a Mach 3.
And so he'd agreed. Actually, he had no choice and so everyone was
rather relieved that they didn't have to open a case of 'LaidBack 3000'
syringes. And now he was walking, as I said, in slow motion. Joe
thought he could hear a trumpet blowing slowly in the distance and see
a big American flag flying some where. He forgot about this and kept on
smiling.
After a while of walking in slow motion, they all got rather bored and
decided to get on with it. Climbing into the shuttle, Joe asked
Bugsy,
" Don't you have to go through years of strenuous training to be fit
enough for space travel?"
" No," said Bugsy, like Joe had just asked whether someone turns the
moon out at night. " Space travel in now as easy as&;#8230;well, I
think in your time they'd put it 'Easy as Riding a Humpback
Whale'."
" Bike," said Joe.
" Ah yes - that rolls off the tongue easier." Each group was taken to
an individual chamber and Joe, Peppy and Bugsy had a rather poky one.
Bugsy fastened the other two into their seats and then sat down
himself. He picked up a rather rare copy of the modern classic, The
Beano and began to read.
Peppy, who Joe sensed was rather nervous about their immanent
departure into outer space, was fiddling with his fingers and sweating
until his forehead had the effect of Niagara Falls relocated.
" My Mum always used to tell me," said Joe, " That if you're afraid,
it's good to sing yourself a little comforting song." This was just one
of the many, ludicrously intelligent things that Joe's Mum had told
him. Among these, the highlights were: " Don't look at me like that"
"You'll never amount to anything if you don't speak proper" "Clean your
mouth you look like you've been attacked by a Mars bar" and the seminal
"Take that out of your mouth". She was a very wise woman.
" Try it," continued Joe. " It's always worked for me." Peppy nodded a
little nervous nod and began to sing very quietly.
" When I'm delivering pizzas,
I know where I've got to go,
I look the address up on the map,
Then I wait till the pizzas get cold.

Singing: I'm just a pizza - deliverer,
And I'm just singing this song,
I'm setting out with an address in my hand,
But I know I'll get it wrong."

There was a long silence after this melodic travesty and one that let
everybody forget it entirely. By the way, if you want to hear the rest
of this song, contact this number: 4738 5779922-00117. The Asylum
attendant will be happy to help.

Chapter 13

About three days into their ascent, Joe realised he was flying in
space and he fainted. When he came round, he found that he was still
flying in space and was sick. When he recovered, he found that,
amazingly, he was still flying in space and promptly was sick and
fainted at the same time, which was bad because it caused a mess, but
it was good because Joe didn't have to clear it up.
He was now sat in a small medical bay. It was an odd place in many
respects, but the biggest and oddest of these respects was the fact
that instructions were constantly being piped through a sound system
which reverberated above Joe's head. They were the kind of instructions
that you read on the back of medical boxes, you know, those really
obvious ones. Joe couldn't figure out whether it was there to cheer him
up or give him sound medical advice.
" If you are taking Homogenous BCD Tablets with a dose of 24cc to the
gallon," said the soothing voice, " Do not operate any heavy machinery
whilst eating beans on toast. Also, it is not recommended to be a
child. If you are on a dose of 12cc's to the gallon, however, it is
acceptable to be a frog whilst eating beans on toast, but never if
you're a bean on a piece of toast, eating a frog." The problem with
having a soothing voice say all this was that, in Joe's opinion,
soothing voices should only be used to say really relaxing things, like
'Smooth Classics at seven', or 'Just relax and let it all wash over
you'. He didn't feel it worked saying things like '400 strong
Krangressants make you feel slightly woozy but only for a short time.'
Equally, it wouldn't work on Mechanic FM, a radio show that Joe hated
listening to. The soothing voice would be wasted on a catchphrase like
'Just tighten the right nut 73 degrees to the left with your Calibre
spanner and make sure the washer is in place. Then wait another hour so
that the bill is 'More like it' and then tell the customer that the car
is ready.' It just wouldn't work.
" How are you?" said a soothing voice behind him. It was Bugsy. Joe
was about to ask Bugsy why his voice was like that, but before he could
get past the word 'Why', he found his own voice was soothing.
" What's going on?" he asked in a soothing voice, holding his voicebox
tenderly.
" It's the SootheySynthesizer," said Bugsy soothingly. Joe felt lie he
was in a debt advert.
" The what?"
" The SootheySynthesizer." Despite the fact that Bugsy said it again,
it amazingly didn't make any difference to Joe's ignorance. " It's set
into the walls of the medical room to make every voice sound
soothing."
" Wow," said Joe softly. " The future is full of useless
inventions."
" Tell that to the inventor of the solar powered torch," said Bugsy,
looking at a small black tube disgustedly and throwing it into the bin.
" I had shares in that. Who'd have thought they would have
flopped?"
" Who'd have thought?" said Joe, lying back on the bed. " Can I ask
you something?" he asked as the soothing voice above his head proceeded
to explain how, if you were a medium sized gerbil, it was not wise to
play basketball while on a course of Humoas BG.
" What?" asked Bugsy, perching on a box that was attached to the wall.
All over the galaxy, there are places on walls on which one can perch.
It is a bizarre, but necessary component of life that, contrary to
common belief, which states that it's love, makes the world go
round.
" Why did I see lots of version of myself this morning?"
" Ah, that'll be a Time Tear."
" A time tear?"
" Yes. It happens all the time when we come back and get participants.
When there is a lot of Inter-Momentary activity going on, Time Tears
happen in the area. We've had reports before of a man two houses away
who finished his breakfast before he'd woken up. It's nothing to worry
about."
" Oh, good," said Joe, with all the sincerity of a gecko. " How do you
do it? Travel through time, I mean?"
" It's all about toothbrushes," said Bugsy, getting comfortable on his
perch.
" Toothbrushes?" repeated Joe, who felt something of a particularly
soothing parrot.
" Yes. We in the future got kind of bored of waiting for you lot to
move from manual toothbrushes to automatic ones, because they are the
time machines. When you brushed your teeth this morning, you opened
your end of the portal. My end was open and so I was transported. I was
actually waiting for you out in the garden."
" Why?" asked Joe as the soothing voice stated that being a tree was a
not a good idea if taking 2 Plassimya tablets a day.
" Because time after time, after people see themselves a few times,
they always jump out of their windows. When you fell, we went into
Inter-momentary nothingness, on the way here."
" Ah." Joe wasn't sure where 'here' was. The only thing he was sure
about was that it was a recommended to swim fifty lengths through honey
every week if you were prescribed 50 capfuls of FRONTRAS.
" Get some rest," said Bugsy. " We'll be there soon." And he left. Joe
wasn't sure where 'there' was. 'Here', 'There'. There didn't seem to be
any difference.
" Also," said the soothing voice, " It is not a good idea to be a
teenager. Full stop."

Chapter 14

Joe guessed that when Bugsy said 'We'll be there soon,' he actually
meant 'We won't get there for another five days at least'. He was
getting bored. After picking up a copy of 'Things to do in a space
shuttle when you're bored', he'd run through activities 1-114 and found
that one or two were repeats.
He'd already pretended he could fly in the anti-gravity chamber at
least twice and the novelty wore after a while, when you discovered
that you could fly. Some how, flying just wasn't as fun as pretending
you could fly.
He'd washed the little windows several times and he still couldn't
find out the surprise that this was meant to hold. The surprise, in
case you wanted to know, is that washing the windows is un-necessary,
as the space outside is just dark anyway. This entry was a little
controversial, as it had been proven to raise suicide rates in 33\% of
the galaxies that the book was published in.
He'd exhausted entry 43, which went 'Tell your crew that the Oxygen
tanks have been irreparably damaged and that you all will certainly
die'. After the first time, this one also lost its effect and Joe found
that he didn't really like it anyway. The idea of Oxygen tanks being
irreparably damaged was not one he wanted to consider for a very long
time.
And so, the seminal 'Things to do on a space shuttle when you're
bored' was thrown aside and Joe went in search of a bit of excitement.
He found that 'Reading the Beano' should be added to the book, as
should, in alphabetical order 'Ask the Pizza place to deliver to 42,
Space Shuttle Place, The Galaxy, The Universe', 'Talk crew members into
having a race through the anti-gravity chamber' and 'Listing things in
wrong alphabetical order'.
And so he was fairly chirpy when he accidentally teleported the whole
ship to the other side of the galaxy and landing them on a planet
called 'Haloolawoola'.
The ship crashed onto the sandy surface, sending small particles
flying in every direction, causing a near tidal wave of sandy
proportions. It turned and rolled as it slid along the beach and
finally came to a stop as it crashed into a huge boulder, crushing the
front end of the shuttle.
The occupants of the ship were thrown all over the place, hitting
control panels and bouncing off fortunately placed Bouncy Castles.
Peppy was woken, because the noise of searing metal was just a bit
louder than his alarm, which completely failed to wake him up each day.
Why he actually kept this alarm was a subject of no debate in his small
town - it was because he didn't want to get up, so an alarm which aided
him in this was quite welcome.
When finally everything stopped moving, the lights went out and things
went 'Oooom' in a rather 'losing power' sort of way, Joe found he was
sitting on himself. After climbing through the 4th chamber into the
living quarters, he found Bugsy hanging from the light fitting in the
ceiling.
" What are doing up there?" he asked.
" Pull ups, what does it look like?" replied Bugsy, leaping down. "
What did you do?"
" Nothing," replied Joe, because he found this a good reply to most
things, apart from the question 'How much did you steal?' when there
are fifty-pound notes emerging from your bursting coat lining.
Bugsy jumped down from the light and squared up to Joe.
" What did you do?" he asked slowly and deliberately.
" I pressed a button," said Joe.
" What button did you press, Joe?"
" One that said 'Please do not push this button', Bugsy."
" Right. So you pressed a button that said do not push this button, is
that correct?"
" Yes."
" So what you're saying is, that despite the fact that you were
explicitly told not to push the button, you did, in actual fact, push
it?"
" That's about it."
" Great." He scrambled out of the living quarters and met up with some
others who were rather startled at the whole being thrown around thing.
Joe felt he was going to be about as popular as de-hydration in a
Marathon.
Bugsy pushed past them, telling them it was going to be all right,
which of course, when you've pushed a button that says 'Do Not Push',
there is no chance of.
He made his way to the hatch and pushed it open.
" Wow," he said. He was looking out on the biggest beach ever seen by
human eyes and some alien ones. It was huge. Miles and miles into the
distance it stretched, not caring for the laws of physics or penny
arcade commercial value.
" Wow," he said again. The sea which roared away fairly quietly to his
left glistened like a thousand crystals under the noonday sun. But it
was completely empty. There were no sandcastles, no umbrellas, no
red-scorched tourist backs and definitely no surfers. It was just
peaceful.
" What's that?" asked Joe, who had arrived a minute ago and was
pointing over Bugsy's shoulder to a wooden sign that was standing in
the sand. Bugsy peered.
" Its says, 'Life's a Beach' and is covered with various Hawaiian
images," replied Bugsy, who couldn't take his eyes off the scene.
" Can we have a look?" asked Joe.
" I don't see how it would hurt," said Bugsy and, stepping out of the
shuttle and onto the beach, keeled over as the hot sand burnt his
feet.
" Ow," he said.

Chapter 15

" What did you have to go and do that for?" complained Bugsy, who was
strolling along the beach with Joe, who were both now wearing shoes.
Bugsy's mouth was betraying him slightly. As much as he was annoyed by
the inconvenience of being involuntarily transported to the other side
of the galaxy, he was enjoying this immensely. The views alone were
enough to make a grown man cry and the sand already had had that effect
on Bugsy.
" How did I know you weren't supposed to press a button that said 'Do
Not Push'?" asked Joe.
" Yeah," said Bugsy, with a sideways look, " If only there was some
kind of clue." Joe looked out at the horizon.
" Do you know, we used to think that there was an edge to the world,"
he said.
" Really. How depressingly stupid," replied Bugsy. Inside, he was
waging a personal war. On one hand, he felt that Joe really needed some
kind of abrasive punishment, preferably featuring stocks and juicy,
ripe tomatoes but that ignoring and being rude to him would have to do
at the moment. But on the other hand, he wanted to shake the guys'
hand. Not only had he had the gall to the push the button he'd been
dying to press for ages, but he'd also transported them to this
amazingly beautiful planet. Right now, the sun was dipping down past
the sea and he could imagine that there really was an edge to this
world, where the sun could just fall off the edge.
" It's beautiful, isn't it?" he said quietly, because the beach gave
that feeling that everything, including shouting should be done with
the least amount of noise.
" Yes," said Joe, was truly captivated by the sunset. It was actually,
officially, one of the most beautiful sights in the universe, listed in
Geyfrum's Top 10 of Everything (Including Numbers), along with, 'The
Great Glaciers of Portungolia', 'The Towers of Cyriap' and 'Buses
Getting Covered in Water from a Huge Puddle'.
" Hello there," said a croaky voice to their right. They both span to
their right, saw nothing, span left and saw an old man sat in a deck
chair. They looked to their right again but no one was there.
" It's all right," said the old man and Joe felt like everyone had
been saying that to him since he'd left the year 2002, " I'm good at
throwing my voice." Bugsy and Joe just nodded, staring at the old man
who was complete with string vest and a hanky over his head, which was,
of course, knotted at the edges.
" See?" he said and his voice seemed to yell from a distance.
" Impressive," said Bugsy. " How does that help you?"
" Oh, it doesn't help me," said the old man, who held a can of lager.
" It just gives me something to do during the day."
" What do you do at nights?" asked Joe, who thought, sensibly, that if
a man spent his days learning how to throw his voice, at nights he must
do something else really amazing.
" Sleep," said the old man. " What do you do?" He took his glasses
off, wiped his eyes and replaced them.
" I sleep too," replied Joe. " Although when I can't sleep, some times
I go to the toilet, or have a drink or maybe even watch some
tele-"
" Joe," hissed Bugsy, " It was a rhetorical question." Joe nodded and
just continued to stare.
" Why are you here?" asked Bugsy in what he hoped wasn't a 'Why are
you here?' tone. Which was difficult.
" Well, I don't know really," said the man, taking onboard some more
fluids.
" So you just sit here all day and watch the sea?" Bugsy said.
" Pretty much."
" Why?" asked Joe.
" Why not? Have you looked at it? It is officially one f the most
beautiful sights in the universe. And something as beautiful as this
needs someone to watch it and ogle at it." Joe pondered this and looked
around. Every where was empty.
" Are you the only one around here?" he asked. The man nodded his
hanky-covered head.
" Yes - the only one on the whole planet and the whole planet is a
beach."
" So why are you here?"
" Well, if something as beautiful as this has been created, someone
should watch it or else it might not exist. Haven't you ever heard of
the tree in the forest theory?" Joe checked his memory banks for trees
in forests and only came out with the answer 'Obviously'. He shook his
head.
" It is said that if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one
there to hear it fall, does it actually make a noise?" He stared at the
two men for a good while after this because they were just staring at
him.
" Well, obviously," said Joe after a while, breaking the stunned
silence at what was a particularly stunned point, " Because it fell. So
it made a noise."
" Ah, but did it?"
" Yes, because it fell. Things that fall, particularly big things like
trees, make noises. Didn't you ever learn that at school?" The little
old man seemed crestfallen and just looked down.
" I mean," continued Joe, " You don't see milk bottles blowing over in
the wind but you can hear that, can't you?"
" I think he means out of ear-range," said Bugsy and the little man
grabbed on to this like a life-boat. But Joe wasn't going to be
perturbed.
" Yes but you can hear milk bottles blowing over at the top of the
street, so you'd have to be a blooming long way away from a
tree-"
" Joe!" said Bugsy quietly but rather forcefully.
" No, it's all right," said the old man, croakier than ever. " He's
right. It's a stupid theory." Joe nodded at Bugsy in a way that
suggested a point had been scored and that there was no doubt who had
just scored it.
" But my job, as far as I know," said the old man, " Is to watch the
sea to make sure it exists." Totally and completely confused by this
whole bizarre conversation, Bugsy and Joe said goodbye and went on in
search of a Better Time.
They walked on through the sand as the sun completely disappeared from
view and it was night time. Stars began, as they do, to shine in the
dark sky and rain began to fall. It was the light rain that might grace
a rain forest and it was the particular type that irritated gardeners
no end. You'd just be planting your seeds when the rain would come.
You'd go indoors, thoroughly miserable and muttering something about
Alan Titchmarsh never having to go through all this, when the sky would
clear and the sun would come out. So out you'd go again, getting all
your gloves on and your tools ready. The first seed wouldn't be in the
ground by the time the rain would start again.
It was known as Sod's Law but was more commonly referred to as
'Blooming annoying'.
Bugsy and Joe dived for cover under a huge tree and sat down at the
base of it.
" Don't you think we should be getting back?" asked Joe, looking at
the beached shuttled in the distance. " The others will be wondering
where we are."
" Probably," replied Bugsy, still captivated by the sea, which now
shimmered under the starlight.
" What time is?" asked Joe.
" What time isn't it?" replied Bugsy. Joe didn't know what this meant
and was too tired to try and find out if it made any sense or not. He
put his head back against the soft trunk of the tree and relaxed.
Then, in the distance came a roaring sound. It didn't just roar, it
went past roaring and came through the other side, into a world of
broken ear-drums and shattered nerves. It enveloped the whole area with
its whining screech and then, a second a two later, when it all
stopped, there was a quiet hissing noise.
" What was that?" said Joe, although he couldn't hear himself say it
because his ears were ringing and he just had to trust his mouth, which
was never trustworthy at the best of times. He'd once asked a man who
had just revealed that he had ten days to live if he wanted to kick
off. Granted, it was at a Sunday morning football game for the team he
used to play for, but the man still ran off the pitch crying.
" I don't know," said Bugsy. There was the dampened sound of hurrying
feet, squelching in the rain. There was that patter-patter-patter sound
with really heavy rain hitting the ground and falling through the
leaves of the trees.
Then the footsteps suddenly became louder. A hundred men ran past
them, unable to see them in the dark. They wore space suits like they
were dealing with radiation and had visors that covered their faces.
The men held a huge hose under their right arms and the long line just
seemed to keep on going. Finally, the last man passed them and Joe and
Bugsy were able to sneak off after them.
Arriving on the fringes of the beach again, they watched from a safe
distance (about 20 metres, which is considered safe when facing giant
hose-wielding madmen) as the men sunk the end of the hose in the sea
and began running frantically backwards and forwards across the beach,
past where they hid behind a bush, to where the hose seemed to be fixed
in whatever they had arrived in.
Joe, who had got used to the sensation recently, couldn't believe his
eyes. He told them that they were lying to him, lying but they'd just
said 'Meh - take it or leave it'. The sea was being
drained&;#8230;
" Is that really happening?" he asked.
" It must be."
" Why?"
" Because I have a strange feeling that I've seen this some where
before," said Bugsy. This was making no sense.
" Let's get out of here," whined Joe like a little kid who's just been
denied the purchase of an ice cream and therefore sees no other reason
why he should be at the seaside.
" Wait," whispered Bugsy. The night was beginning to get cold and the
rain wasn't letting up. " What happened to that man?"
" What man?" asked Joe.
" The guy on the beach who said he had to watch it to make sure it
existed."
" Oh - that guy. I don't know."
The men continued to run to and fro until - unbelievably - the sea was
entirely drained.
" I can't believe this," said Joe.
" Well, it doesn't really matter if you do or not. If it's happening,
it's going to happen whatever you do. If it's not happening, then we
have nothing to worry about," replied Bugsy, surprisingly succinctly
for one of his scientific answers. He has been known to talk for
approximately seven days and nights on the subject of jam. And just the
strawberry kind.
" Right. Let's get out of here," said Joe and he stood up and ran
towards the shuttle. He thought he might be spotted but the workers,
no, the thieves didn't seem to notice him at all. In fact, they
probably wouldn't have noticed him if he was running naked with a sign
hung round his neck that said 'Notice me', because they were blind. It
made TV nights a bit of a damp squib, but no tea towels were necessary
on Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey nights.
Bugsy ran after Joe and reached him just as he boarded the shuttle.
They shut the door and began panting like big dogs with small
tongues.
" What happened?" asked Peppy, who looked greasy despite the fact he
hadn't been in a kitchen for what was in reality approximately 512
years but what was in fact four days.
" We ran into a bit of&;#8230;trouble," said Joe.
" You were gone for a-two hours!"
" It was&;#8230;long trouble." Joe and Bugsy pushed past Peppy and
sat down in the living quarters, where they were joined by the rest of
the crew. They were a motley looking bunch from Joe's time and so they
all looked vaguely like him - unshaven, unwashed, unsane.
Bugsy explained the whole thing and a woman called 'Mother Earth',
which Joe was later to find out was only a nickname and who was an
eco-warrior, said,
" We should get the sea back, man!" She was wearing a green outfit and
one that obviously hadn't been changed for a few hundred years, or, in
reality, about a few hundred years. But it only looked that why because
she had been crawling through tunnels for a few years, stopping people
building bypasses. She'd once stormed into a hospital to demand that
the bypass she'd heard about be stopped at once. When the surgeon had
explained, she'd left politely.
" It's not that simple," said Bugsy.
" Why not, polluting pig?" Bugsy looked stunned at this
criticism.
" All right, first of all, I'm not a polluting pig," he said. " I put
my bottles in bottle banks. I may not get them in the right ones some
times, but who can?" The people in the room murmured in a way that
suggested that they couldn't.
" And the problems are: a) we have a job to do. We shouldn't delay our
journey to Roguan any longer than is strictly necessary. And b) we
haven't the foggiest idea where they're taking it. And for all we know
they may be the local council come to clean it up or something." The
people in the room murmured something to the effect that they didn't
think this was very likely and Bugsy wasn't certain. Mother Nature felt
that this was about as likely as the man who's come to fix your fridge
actually managing to fix your fridge within the hour.
Mother Nature looked oddly familiar to Joe. He couldn't quite remember
where he'd seen her before but at the moment that wasn't the most
pertinent thing on his mind. What was included rashes of crispy bacon
and two fried eggs, but we won't go into that.
" We have to save the ocean, man," said Mother N.
" Ok," said Bugsy. " But will you please stop calling me man?"
" You are a man, aren't you?"
" Yes," replied Bugsy and then he replied it again, but this time with
a far deeper voice.
And so it was that after Peppy made some repairs to the outside of the
ship (for some reason he was used to vehicles breaking down and not
getting to their destination on time), that they hurtled off the planet
of Haloolawoola. They were in search of the huge spacecraft that a man,
who was called Data for some reason, just because he had an IQ higher
than 12 and carried glasses and a telescope, saw out of the starboard
porthole. He was another of the crew brought forward from the year
2002. He was rather squat, wore a little white coat and had a balding
head. He looked vaguely like one of those mad professors, with a ring
of hair round his head that made it look like Saturn.
" What did that button do?" asked Joe, when he and Bugsy were alone in
the bridge. It is a common belief that a bridge is a powerful place,
where brave men captain their huge ships across the galaxy and into
unimaginable danger. The truth was that after the first ship had been
built, it was pointed out that there'd have to be some where to drive
the thing and the space at the front was the only real space where it
would fit. In short, the first bridge was only designed because of
everything else in the ship. It was, in effect, an absence of space
that needed filling. Not a great story, I'll admit, but an interesting
piece of trivia.
" It 4th dimensionally spliced us," said Bugsy, flipping through the
pages of his Beano copy, that he was actually lucky enough to get
signed by Dennis the Menace himself. His Dad had hoped that he would
never found out what you can do with a big marker pen and a black
frizzy wig and thankfully, Bugsy was too stupid to.
" It did what?"
" At the moment that you pressed that button, we were spliced. One
version of us continued on to Roguan and another version, this one, I
think, went to Haloolawoola."
" So," said Joe, who felt like he was grappling with a Rubix Cube of
Incomprehension, " We are actually having those peace talks with the
Roguans?"
" Yes, I suppose we are," replied Bugsy, who then laughed because Ivy
the Terrible had just stolen a packet of sweets from a dolphin.
Introduction

Before we begin, I'd like to say that this story makes absolutely no
sense whatsoever. The fact that it exists at all defies the laws of
physics, common sense and at least two speed restrictions in Grimsby.
Were any of it to be discovered as being true, the person who proved it
would be carted off to the nearest lunatic asylum and locked up for a
Very Long Time.
The fact that it makes no sense, is mind-beguilingly complicated and
makes frequent references to fish and chip shops in Burnley is only one
speck of dust in its universe of incomprehension.
It had been banned in at least fourteen galaxies. Thirteen of these
banned it because they don't believe in time travel, the infinities of
the universe or fish and chip shops in Burnley. The other galaxy banned
it because the translation of the word Chronicles in their language
means something rather rude. Shame really, they'd have enjoyed
it.
And so I present it to you. At least sixty-million, five hundred and
twenty three scholars, wise men and burger bar attendants all over the
known universe have tried to make sense of it and failed. So, I
suppose, it's down to you now. Nervous? No, of course not. But that's
because you don't know what's coming. Joe Bloggs never
did&;#8230;

Chapter 1

It started, as most things do, with a toothbrush. It was one of those
electronic ones that fizzed around in your mouth and tended to leave a
mess on the walls if left to it's own devices. Many hailed its
invention as a revolution in teeth cleaning. Others said, 'What's the
point' and quite rightly went on to ask what was next. The electric
hair brush? The electric flannel? The glow in the dark camouflage?
Granted, the last one wasn't associated with personal hygiene, but he
still had a point.
Joe Bloggs didn't really care. He just used it to clean his teeth
with. At this point in time and space, which was in his bathroom and
eight in the morning, he was doing his teeth in front of the mirror as
he always did He'd only just bought this toothbrush yesterday to find
out what all the fuss was about, but now he wished he hadn't. It had
cost him a tenner and the only different thing it did to a manual one
was go 'Buzzzz'. And when you're not a morning person, a 'Buzzz'ing
sound is not what is called for.
He swilled, he spat, and he dried his mouth on a towel. Looking back
up at himself in the mirror, he said,
" Big day, today." He stroked his newly shaven chin to make sure it
wasn't still bristly and smiled at him. Then he tried another smile,
because he didn't like the first one.
" Hi," he said, putting up his hand to himself to shake. " I'm Joe.
Yeah. I'm really looking forward to the interview. No." He shook his
head and started again. " Hi, I'm Mr. Bloggs, I'm here for the
interview. No. Hello Sir, I'm here to try and get that job that pays
loads of money." He shrugged and sighed. " At least it's honest."
Before he left the bathroom, he was sure he saw a slight twitch in the
shower curtain that was pulled across. He didn't remember pulling it
across. Ah well, he thought, I'm often forgetful when I'm
nervous.
Leaving the bathroom, he thought he saw something move out of the
corner of his eye. He shrugged and went into his bedroom. Joe's room
wasn't like most bachelors' rooms. For instance, his didn't look like a
bomb or too would improve the over all aesthetic effect. It was quite
tidy in actual fact, with only the odd dirty shirt lying on the carpet.
Joe himself reflected the room. He wasn't big, he wasn't particularly
good looking and he wasn't particularly untidy. He was
just&;#8230;one of those people who look like everybody else. Bored,
tired and none too bright.
He got dressed and walked out onto the landing. He paused for a moment
and felt a breeze coming from the guestroom. He didn't remember opening
a window in the guestroom. He shrugged again. He walked downstairs and
went through to the kitchen. There was a man stood in his
kitchen.
" Hello?" he stuttered, not knowing quite what to say on finding a
stranger in your kitchen pouring milk on his cereal. The man, who
seemed bizarrely to be wearing the same clothes as him, turned round.
There was a long silence between the two men, mainly because they
weren't two men at all - they were the same man.
" Oh, Hi, Joe," said the man and proceeded to eat his cereal. Joe
gasped and gibbered for a bit before raising a shaking finger at the
man. He had noticed, of course, the similarity between them, the way
that their voices were largely the same and the way that the man in
front of him had his shirt label sticking out like his own always
did.
Then the man who looked remarkably like his mirror did walked past him
unconcernedly and sat down at the dining table.
" But&;#8230;but&;#8230;who are you?" asked Joe. The man
continued eating his cereal and didn't look up much as he spoke.
" I'm Joe - no scratch that, I'm you," said Joe at the table. Joe on
the weak-willed legs gibbered some more.
" What was it that guy said again?" said Joe at the table, looking off
into the distance out the window. " Something about a space-time
continuum? Probably a load of rubbish anyway. Don't worry though, Joe.
Your bad day is just beginning. Trust me, I've seen the next five
minutes of it." The man, let's call him Joe mark II finished his
cereal, rose, patted Joe on the shoulder and said,
" Don't worry. Just let it wash over you. I do." And he left. Joe was
left mumbling to himself like a madman. He suddenly felt very dizzy,
like the bottom of his cereal box had been gnawed at by rats and all
his frosted flakes were falling out below him. It wasn't a sensation he
liked. But all the talk of food made him hungry so he decided, in a
sort of daze to have some breakfast. It seemed like the sort of thing
one should do.
He went through to the kitchen; his legs on a sort of autopilot as his
brain packed up and went on a paid vacation, opened the cupboard and
got a bowl out. Miles away, he seemed to hear rain coming down against
the window, but it didn't seem to matter. What did?
As he was pouring the cereal into his bowl and hoping that this was
the world's worst hangover; he heard a creaking out in the dining room.
Not more surprises? He picked up the milk and splashed it onto his
cereal waiting at any moment for the ceiling to collapse and for him to
wake up.
" Hello?" said a tentative voice behind him. Joe looked round for a
moment and for some reason was spectacularly unsurprised to see himself
standing there.
" Oh, Hi Joe," he said, his mouth moving without him really telling it
to do anything. As he continued to pour his milk, he heard a familiar
gibbering sound behind him. When he turned back, his other self was
holding up a shaking finger, but he ignored him and went to the dining
table. He was too confused to make any sense of what was going on, so
he thought he might as well take his own advice. Just let it wash over
you.
" But&;#8230;but&;#8230;who are you?" his-self asked. Joe shook
his head absent-mindedly. Why did he have to be so stupid?
" I'm Joe," he said and then he realised that the other guy was too. "
No, scratch that, I'm you." He shook his head once more and ploughed on
with his cereal. When he was confused, he was often hungry and today
was no exception. In fact, today was the mother of all confused-ness
and his stomach seemed to be wailing for more. It was like the Raggrack
beast of Grankro, Delta-9. But of course, he didn't know about that
yet.
He felt that he should give himself some kind of explanation and tried
to remember what that other guy had told him.
" What was it that guy said again?" he thought aloud. " Something
about a space-time continuum? Probably a load of rubbish anyway," he
reasoned, seeing the puzzled look on his own face. In fact, puzzled was
an understatement. Understatement was an understatement of an
understatement. Pigs have flown with less confusion on their faces than
Joe had on his right now.
" Don't worry, though Joe," he said in what he hoped was a re-assuring
voice. " Your bad day is just beginning. Trust me, I've seen the next
five minutes of it." And he thought he might as well impart the gem of
advice that himself had given himself about five minutes ago.
" Don't worry. Just let it wash over you. I do," he added truthfully
and he decided to leave the room. As he closed the door behind him he
watched himself wobble uncertainly and then go through to the kitchen
for breakfast. Good idea, he thought. It seemed like the sort of thing
one should do.
He walked back towards the stairs, saw another version of himself
coming down them and pushed his back to the wall of the stair well and
breathed a sigh of relief as his other self walked on past him. He went
back up the stairs and dived into the nearest room as his partially
dressed self left the bathroom, and he hoped that he hadn't been
spotted.
Feeling by now the wrong side of sane, he shook his head quickly to
try and clear it for now and instead filled it with the phrase 'Let it
wash over you'. His mind started sounding like a 'Water Phobia
Session'.
" Now what do I do?" he said aloud. He didn't know why he was asking
himself, he had no clue whatsoever. I've got to get out, he finally
thought. He ran over to the window of the room he was in, which
happened to be his guest room (which was entirely pointless in itself,
because the only guests he'd ever had to stay was a colony of
cockroaches, and those had been uninvited), flung open the window and
then stopped.
There was something he couldn't leave without. What was it? His pocket
calculator? No. His toaster? No, couldn't be that. His mind? No, he'd
already lost that.
His toothbrush! His Gran had always told him to take his toothbrush
with him where-ever he went.
" You never know when you'll need a toothbrush," she'd always told him
with her toothless grin. Despite the fact that she didn't have any
teeth and was hardly the person to consult on dental hygiene, he'd
always stuck to this rule. He ran back out onto the landing and then
stopped stock still as he heard himself talking to himself in the
mirror.
" Hi, I'm Joe," he was saying. Get on with, idiot, thought Joe. He
didn't want to spend one more moment in this mad-house. " I'm here for
that job that pays loads of money." Joe suddenly remembered something
and ran back into the guest room, just as Joe in the bathroom was
saying,
" At least it's honest," and walking out onto the landing. Joe only
just made it into the guestroom as this happened and he hoped dearly
that he hadn't seen himself doing it. Or something. When he was sure
the coast was clear, he went back out onto the landing and tip-toed
into the bathroom. Let it wash over you, he thought as he grabbed his
toothbrush. Just as he was about to leave the bathroom and get out of
this place, he heard the other Joe leaving his room and going down the
stairs, now fully dressed. He nipped back into the bathroom just in
time. As he breathed a sigh of relief, he left the bathroom again, only
to see a partially dressed, extremely groggy version of himself leaving
his bedroom. He ducked back into the bathroom. Where could he hide? He
thought. Shower!
He put the toothbrush back on the shelf in front of the mirror and
leapt into the shower as quietly as he could and pulled the curtain
round himself. He tried to hold his breath as the other him came into
the bathroom, and started running a bowl of water, but he found that he
couldn't do it very well. He just stood as quietly as he could and
listened to the splashing of water. Wash, he thought. Then came the
humming of the shaver. Shave. Then a minute or two later he heard the
unmistakable 'Buzz'ing noise of the electronic toothbrush. Teeth, he
thought.
" Hi, I'm Joe," his other self said in front of the mirror and Joe in
the shower twitched the curtain aside to peek at himself. He was
holding his hand up towards the mirror like was going to shake his own
hand. Idiot, he thought.
" At least it's honest," his other self finished and just as he was
turning to the towel rack, Joe in the shower remembered that he was
quite visible through the curtain so he let it drop back into place. He
heard himself stop and look at the shower curtain. Joe's heart beat
fast and only started slowing down when his other self left the
bathroom to go and get dressed.
He climbed out of the shower, grabbed his toothbrush again and left
the bathroom. As he turned the corner and leapt into the guestroom, he
heard his other self leaving the bedroom, now dressed. He waited
silently as his other self paused on the landing wondering why a breeze
was coming from the guestroom. When he'd gone, he breathed yet another
sigh of relief (he thought that he'd probably used up his fair share of
those this morning) and went over to the window.
Standing in the refreshing breeze, he suddenly saw how big the drop
was. His eyes widened as the ground seemed to stretch away from him,
but he shook is head and blinked slowly a few times.
" Right," he said. " Good luck." And he jumped.

Chapter 2

Joe knew nothing. In fact, he knew less than nothing. If he'd have
known that he knew nothing, then he'd have known something, but he
didn't, so he knew nothing.
He saw lots of twinkling lights around him and yet he wasn't really
aware of seeing anything. Things just were. He didn't know where he
was. He didn't know for sure if his legs were where they used to be, or
his arms. He had no sensation in any part of his body. In fact, he
didn't feel like he had a body.
He just was.
Then something happened. He heard some kind clicking noise and suddenly
he knew he had a body. He knew he had legs, he knew he had arms and he
also knew that they felt worse than turkey at Christmas. He
groaned.
Opening his eyes, he didn't see twinkling lights at all - just
blackness. Indeed, he wasn't even sure that he had opened his eyes,
because the view was just the same either way. There was no sound,
regardless of what he saw. But it wasn't just quiet or even silent - it
was an absence of sound altogether. It was like a vacuum, only there
was no vacuum, because the only vacuums Joe knew of had big noses and
were called Henry - they also made a lot of noise.
So, he could see nothing, hear nothing and smell nothing - apart from
his own sweat which he'd been producing throughout the whole morning.
Was it morning now, he thought? He wasn't sure where-ever he was had
such things as morning, afternoon or evening. Which was a shame,
because that meant he'd never see Eastenders again.
There was another clicking noise and a flash of green light thundered
across his conscience. And then he was dimly aware of sitting on the
floor, but the floor was completely, like the walls, or what he assumed
were walls.
" Hello," said a voice behind him. He span round. A young man, about
his age, had appeared in this void with him.
" Er&;#8230;hello," said Joe, and, although he was aware of saying
it, the words didn't seem to come, but instead seem to exist only in
his mind. The other man, who thankfully looked nothing like another
version of himself, seemed to hear every word, though.
" How are you?" he asked. Joe thought about this. It was, all in all,
the most difficult question he had ever been asked in his life. How was
he? So far today, he'd met about seven other versions of himself,
jumped out of his guestroom window and found himself in a void of
absolute nothingness with a strange man who wore white trainers.
" Fine," he replied.
" Good," said the man. " I was worried for a while." Joe just sat and
stared while the other man apparently had a held a one ended
conversation remarkably well.
" Yes, for a while back there I thought I'd lost you. But I'm glad
you're all right." Joe continued to stare, open-mouthed.
" I can appreciate how tricky Inter-Momentary travel can be," the man
went on. " Of course, I'm used to it now, but the first time. Woo!" As
Joe sat and watched, he was taking in every detail about the man. He
was, like I said, about his age, if not a little younger and he wore a
green baseball jacket, a black trilby hat, multi-coloured polka-dot
trousers that were far too big for him and white trainers. If Joe
hadn't been so off his proverbial rocker at this moment, he would have
thought that this man had all the fashion sense of lampost, but today,
he just nodded and let it all wash over him.
" I bet your feeling like your head is being pounded by a thousand
Preecewallas, right?" said the man, beaming. He was obviously very
pleased to see him. Joe wasn't.
" What?" said Joe, dazedly.
" Oh, that's right. Erm&;#8230;elephants," he said finally. Joe
marvelled at how this man had so much energy. He must have had coffee
intravenously pumped into his system all night.
" I'm Bugsy," said the man, holding out a hand.
" I'm Joe Bloggs," said Joe Bloggs. " I'm here about the&;#8230;"
Then he stopped talking and shook his head. Labelling talking now as a
bit of a danger along with Trying to Make Sense of Anything and Trying
to be a Hit Among the Ladies, he rested back on his elbows and let it
all wash over him.
" I believe Bugsy was a hyper-intelligent mammal on your planet," said
Bugsy.
" Bugs," said Joe. " Bugs Bunny. I think." He wasn't really of
anything at the moment, other than none of this made any sense
whatsoever.
" That's right. I thought maybe you would find all this easier to take
in if I took the name of a great leader on your planet," said
Bugsy.
" No - he wasn't a great leader," said Joe.
" Well, one of the average ones then," said Bugsy.
" No," said Joe, clinging to this one thing he knew to be true as a
man overboard clings to driftwood. Desperately. " He wasn't a leader at
all. He was just an entertainment figure." Bugsy looked
crestfallen.
" But wasn't he a great doctor as well? Did he not contemplate the
universal question, What is Up?"
" No," said Joe, shaking his bewildered head.
" Well, that's a beggar."
" Why?" asked Joe.
" Now I've got to tell my boss that Elmer Fudd wasn't a great
warrior." There was a long silence, in which the absence of anything
continued to be. Joe didn't like that feeling, so he spoke again.
" What is inter-momentary travel?" he asked, trying to get to his
feet, but failing miserably. Whatever this place was, the floor, if
that's what it was, refused to stay still. So while his dignity was
still only in tatters, he decided he'd stay on the floor for a bit
longer.
" It's a molecular hyper-sting voyage through the space-time
continuum," said Bugsy.
" Oh, one of those," said Joe sarcastically. He was good at being
sarcastic. He was also good at letting things wash over him - he
thought he was doing a very good job of that. But now he wanted some
answers and ones that preferably start with the word molecular.
" Where am I?" he asked.
" You are nowhere," replied Bugsy.
" What's this place then?"
" This place is the nothingness between seconds. We are travelling
through time." Let it wash over you, let it wash over you, let
it&;#8230;
" WHAT?" yelled Joe. Bugsy jumped with fright. Joe was now standing
but he wasn't quite sure what everything else was doing. The walls
seemed to spin away from him and Bugsy seemed to be doing the
Riverdance.
" Time&;#8230;travel&;#8230;travel&;#8230;time?" muttered
Joe.
" That's about the gist of it," said Bugsy, doing up the zip of his
jacket. Joe stumbled around the spinning room, feeling like he was
going to be sick and to explode in one violent moment.
" It's not all that complicated, really. You wait here in a state of
absolute nothing and then when you come to the time you want, you
simply&;#8230;hop off."
" Hop off?" asked Joe. This was beginning to sound like a train
advert.
" Yes. Nothing to it, really. On some planets, they call
it&;#8230;Kranfatchrest isspog klariplontoby. Translated, I believe
it means Easy as Taking Candy from a Diseased Gerbil."
" A baby," Joe muttered as he stumbled from side to side. There was a
word in the sentence Bugsy just spoke that hadn't agreed with him, but
he couldn't figure out what it was.
" Ah yes, that'd make more sense." Bugsy came over and put an arm
round Joe's wait to hold him steady.
" Easy there. Just relax."
" RELAX?!" screamed Joe. " RELAX?" There was a long silence.
" I know a song that helps," said Bugsy.
" Songs never help," replied Joe.
" I don't know - the children in the future sing it when they use
inter-momentary travel for the first time." There was that word again.
What was it?
" It goes:
I'm-a going through time,
Eating Oranges and Lime,
I'm-a going through time,
Singing this rhyme,
I'm-a going through time,
Not committing any crime,
I'm just going through space and time."
" Stop!" yelled Joe.
" Can I do the second verse? It involves ice-cream and certain types
of iguana."
" No!" Joe held his stomach. " I don't want a second verse, I don't
want to be travelling through time, I don't want to be standing next to
a man who takes his name from a cartoon rabbit and I certainly,
certainly, do not want to hear anything about certain types of iguana."
In the silence that followed, you could almost hear the tumbleweed
rolling past.
" I suppose this would be a bad time to tell you I'm from the future?"
That was it. That was the word. And it was the last thing Joe knew
before he promptly passed-out.

Chapter 3

When he came to, he wasn't surprised to find himself staring at the
blue sky, with fluffy clouds flitting here and there across his vision.
He began to laugh. It was all a dream! He'd imagined the whole thing!
Oh, thank goodness for that, he thought. He'd been so worried
about-
" Morning," said a voice.
" ARRGGHH!" screamed Joe, sitting bolt upright as he saw Bugsy looming
over him. Then he looked straight forward.
" ARRRGGHHH!" he screamed again, this time more prolonged. He was
sitting on top of what looked suspiciously like a sky-scraper, looking
out over a bustling city. Except this was no ordinary bustling city.
This bustling city was filled with a plethora of unbelievable
sights.
There were flying cars, robotic parking attendants, stupidly large
megastores, metal pavements, self-cleaning windows, super-sized,
zeppelin-shaped aeroplanes zooming overhead, huge 3-D signs blazing
across the sky, pedestrians with flying shoes, self-carrying shopping
bags, robotic dogs, and so many more things that Joe couldn't even
describe. He sat still and panted like a dog. This was too much. He
looked at his shaking hands and then up at Bugsy and then back at his
shaking hands because he didn't like Bugsy's expression.
" I nearly lost you again for a minute," said Bugsy cheerfully. He
sounded like one of those people who are perpetually cheerful, no
matter what time of the morning it is.
" I wish you had," muttered Joe.
" Hmm?"
" I said you're a real cad." He looked back out on the city-scape.
Some of the buildings not only took the breath away, it held it to
ransom and called it rude names. There was a large shopping centre that
swirled about beneath, all open-air with large flashing signs welcoming
you to 'Shoptropolis - Where you Can Shop After you Drop'. People
seemed to be escorted round on beds after they'd grown too tired to do
any more shop. He caught himself thinking 'My Mum'd like one of those.'
Each shop projected huge 3-D characters into the sky, where they
advertised what their shop had to offer.
" Amazing, isn't it?" said Bugsy. Amazing was not a word Joe would
have chosen to describe it. It sounded too&;#8230;mundane. Indeed,
no word in the English Dictionary was suitable. There just was no
description.
" What is it?" asked Joe, as he felt a strong gust of wind blow his
hair back and billowed his shirt.
" This is the future, Joe."
" The future&;#8230;" mumbled Mr. Bloggs, who's usual idea of a
wacky day out involved three ladders and a gallon of custard. But in
some ways he wasn't surprised to hear it called that - he'd half
expected that that was what it was.
" The year 2512," exclaimed Bugsy proudly, like he was unveiling a new
invention to an excited audience equipped with clipboards. Instead, he
was addressing a rather bemused young man. And he didn't have a
clipboard. Just his toothbrush. He pulled this out of his pocket, as
the last piece of sanity that he could hold onto, no matter what his
eyes were seeing, or what Bugsy was telling him.
" No!" hissed Bugsy and he pushed the dental instrument quickly back
into Joe's pocket.
" What?" asked Joe bemusedly.
" Not here, not now." The look on Bugsy's face made him laugh
hysterically. He even started holding onto his stomach he laughed so
hard and pointed a hysterical finger as he rolled about on the concrete
roof.
" Shh!" Bugsy whispered, putting his finger to his lips. Luckily, this
sign meant the same for humans in the past and the future. With other
races in the galaxy, he wouldn't have been so fortunate. For example,
on the planet Wollarong, that gesture was grounds for inter-planetary,
age-long war.
But Joe Bloggs knew what it meant and he reluctantly obeyed. That was
the best bit of this whole day and he didn't want to stop.
" I'll tell you more later," said Bugsy, looking around to make sure
no-one was listening.
" Bugsy, we're on a roof," said Joe.
" You never know," said Bugsy and by the way he said it, Joe could
tell he was being serious. " While we're here, would you like to see
the city?"
Joe's first reaction to this was 'No!' like it had been to everything
else that had happened this morning, except that with everything else,
he hadn't been afforded a say in the matter. But when he thought about
this for a moment, he said,
" Yeah!" Seeing his city&;#8230;10&;#8230;20&;#8230;well,
lots of years in the future would be cool! If he'd have known what
would come of it, he'd roll back into a ball and tell the world to go
away. As it was, he got up and followed Bugsy happily towards the edge
of the roof.

Chapter 4

There was something bothering Joe Bloggs. It wasn't, surprisingly,
that he'd seen at least seven other versions of himself this morning,
the fact that he'd met a man called Bugsy who took the word 'clothes'
as a suggestion or the fact that he was at this precise moment in the
year 2512 on the roof of a skyscraper. The thing that was starting to
worry him was the fact when Bugsy had offered to take him down to show
him the city, he'd started walking to the edge of the roof. Now, call
him old-fashioned, but Joe always thought stairs were a good way of
leaving high buildings.
" Right then," said Bugsy as he perched on the very brink of the roof,
looking down at the 300 metre drop like he was checking if anything
interesting was happening down there. " Are you ready to jump?"
Joe didn't have a fear of heights. He had a just had a moral
disagreement with whole 'high' thing.
" What?" he asked.
" To jump? Are you ready?" asked Bugsy, now swinging his arms backward
and forward over the drop in a way that made Joe's stomach do
somersaults.
" Not exactly&;#8230;ready&;#8230;per se," said Joe.
" It's actually quite easy. I think you once had a saying for it back
in your time&;#8230;what was it? Ah yes - It's Just Like Riding a
Depressed Hippopotamus."
" Bicycle," corrected Joe instinctively.
" Ah yes&;#8230;that would fit better. Anyway look, it's easier
than it looks."
" Why can't we just use the stairs?" asked Joe, his voice grinding its
heels as it was dragged closer to the edge.
" No-one uses stairs in the year 2512. In fact, it's been out of
fashion for the best part of a millennia."
" What a shame, I just missed it."
" Well, you get to sample it now."
" I was being sarcastic."
" Right. But look, see over there?" he pointed westwards to a row of
houses. Joe said that he could. He could see a woman in one of the
upstairs windows. She appeared to be opening on of them.
" What's she doing?" asked Joe.
" She's doing what everybody does in the year 2512 - leaving the
house."
" But what about the stairs?" protested Joe and he felt like he was a
member of the 'Save our Stairs' campaign. Which was no joke on certain
planets in the galaxy.
" Stairs just take up unnecessary space within the household. So they
were replaced by Mini-Teleporters. But people wanted a quicker way than
that to get out of their house, so&;#8230;well, just watch." The
woman flung herself out of the window.
" Nooo!" yelled Joe, leaping instinctively forward. But the woman, who
didn't look at all bothered, and, in fact, a little narked at the yell,
turned upright and seemed to apply brakes as she slowed down towards
the ground. Her high-heels made contact and she strolled off to catch a
flying taxi, which was easier than it sounds.
" Wow," said Joe. " That's a turn up for the books."
" Yep."
" But how?"
" Well you see, every pavement in the world now is fitted with
Anti-Gravity-Projectors. You see those flying shoes they all wear?" Joe
nodded - he had. The looked like roller skates but actually hovered
above the ground as they effortlessly escorted their wearers quickly
along the pavement.
" They keep those in the air. So all you do is jump and the pavement
stops you. Simple. Like Riding a&;#8230;"
" Bicycle."
" Exactly."
After a count of three, the two men, holding hands, leapt off the
building. And they fell. And they continued to fall, because it was a
long way down.
" Nice day for it!" yelled a businessman who passed them on the way
down. Despite his tie hitting him constantly in the face, he seemed
extremely happy. Joe wondered why he was going quicker than they were.
He shot a puzzled look at Bugsy, who just said,
" Business Express." To Joe, it was the most amazing sensation he had
ever had. He felt like he was flying. No scratch that - he was flying.
He smiled as he flapped his arms and turned himself flat on his chest.
He span himself round. Now this was what the future should be about, he
thought.
And then, before he knew it, he was slowing down, the world whizzing
past him less hurriedly and in a few seconds, his feet touched the
ground.
" Wow," he said and was promptly sick all over the pavement.

Chapter 5

If you were walking down the main street of Wascally City on the day
of 25th February, 2512, you might have seen two men walking hurriedly
past you. If you kept on walking you will have seen something else on
the pavement which doesn't warrant a description. All you need to know
is that if you saw it, you might well have added your own unique brand
of what it was.
Anyway, Bugsy was strolling down the street while Joe followed on
behind. He was walking very slowly, looking at everything that he
passed: every shop, every house, every self-cleaning window. A woman
walked past him and muttered to her husband,
" Tourist."
It was almost too much to take in. Every where he looked there was
something new and exciting. Not the least of these were the flying
cars. They were something Joe had always dreamed about - in every
futuristic film you saw, there were always flying cars.
" How do these cars work?" asked Joe, pointing to one that had just
parked next to him.
" Impossibility," said Bugsy, walking back to where Joe now
stood.
" What's that? A brand of fuel?"
" Sort of. It was decided that a flying car was so impossible that the
impossibility stretched so far around the spectrum of Impossibility
that it actually appeared on the Possible side. If something's
impossible enough it actually becomes possible. Get me?"
" Not really." They carried on walking, with Joe emanating a whistle
and an awed silence every so often.
" I thought we were supposed to find renewable energy sources in the
future," said Joe.
" It never really took on," said Bugsy, now sucking a lollypop.
" Why not?"
" Well, people decided it probably wasn't worth it."
" What happened when the fuel ran out?"
" People just lounged around mostly. Then they invented the flying car
and now everything just runs on Impossibility. Great, eh?"
" Marvellous."
In the year 2222, there had been the biggest gathering of scientists,
scholars and Clever People in the history of the human race. They all
met at the Arctic Arena (an incomprehensibly huge venue that was built
over the whole of the Arctic after it was decided that no one would
really miss it) and the meeting was intended to invent all the things
that people had seen in futuristic movies. It wasn't that they were
trying to re-create the movies, it's just that people thought it was
about time that somebody invented these things. After all, film makers
had created them (albeit mainly out of pipe cleaners and superglue)
nearly three millennia ago.
The first day descended into something of a show and tell session. The
scientists would argue over who had invented the best thing since
sliced bread. Eventually, nobody won because all the inventions were as
useful as a solar powered torch. Another problem was that, from end to
end, the square table that they all sat round was approximately 400
miles long. This caused several problems, not the least of which were
differing time zones and climates between Mr. A. Aab and Mr.
Zzaff.
Eventually though, everything that was futuristic was finally created,
including flying cars, flying shoes, robotic dogs and trains that ran
on time. They presented their inventions to the world and sat down for
dinner in the now legendary Arctic Arena. The problem with this was
that by the time that the salt that Mr. Zzaff had passed reached Mr. A.
Aab, the latter was on the wrong side of living and really had no more
need for things like Salt.
" This is incredible," said Joe as he patted a passing robotic dog,
which barked realistically back and then got into a realistic fight
with another robotic dog, which resulted in two lost artificial limbs
and a few dangerously loose wires. And then something struck Joe.
" But why am I here?" he asked and Bugsy stopped walking and smiled. "
I mean, I remember this morning vaguely. I got up, met at least seven
other versions of myself, yadda yadda yadda, but then I&;#8230;I
jumped out of my guestroom window&;#8230;"
" I can tell you more about it later, but you are here because I felt
I should prove what I was telling you when we were in the state of
absolute nothingness. I knew for a fact you wouldn't believe me if I
didn't prove it to you some how." Joe nodded. That explained part of
it. But&;#8230;
" But why is all this happening in the first place?" he
complained.
" You'll know soon enough," said Bugsy infuriatingly as he began to
walk again. Joe seethed silently and hurried after him. He narrowly
avoided a rugged man who sped unsurely by on his flying shoes. Bugsy
jumped out of the way, turned round and waved a fist at him,
shouting,
" Drunk walker!" He looked at Joe, tutted and walked on.
Joe was still having trouble taking it all in. Each shop that they
passed boasted what was on offer, some posters bragged about the fact
that they had 200\% off all their products.
" What's that?" asked Joe, pointing into a window that had a large
cardboard star which said, 'Own a piece of the galaxy!'
" Oh, it's one of those stupid things where you give them a load of
money and they give you a square yard of the universe."
" What's the point of that?" asked Joe.
" Rather like how much I've eaten today - nothing at all. Come on,
let's get some breakfast," said Bugsy, turning and walking on down the
street. After a few seconds, he found his escort was missing a vital
ingredient - the man he was supposed to be escorting. He sighed and
walked back to where Joe still had his nose pressed against the window
like a Glass Taster. Most people would use the analogy of a sweet shop
in this instance, but Glass Tasting had become a huge craze. Not any
normal windows, you understand, but specially designed plates of
reinforced glass that were imported all over the world, for Glass
Tasting sessions Glass Tasters. If you happened to be walking by an
afore-mentioned Glass Tasting session, you might have heard things
like,
'Hmm&;#8230;this is a good year,' or 'I'm getting a hint of Perspex
and polythene'. It was a very popular pastime.
" Come on, Joe, it's starting to snizzle."
" It's what?" said Joe, turning aside from his need to a own a piece
of the universe. As he turned, he noticed that it had started rain
gently. But this was no ordinary rain. It was like a light snow,
falling very slowly toward the ground.
" It's a cross between snow and drizzle. Like a snow-drizzle.
Snizzle." Joe decided to let this one pass.
"But I want a piece of the universe!" he complained.
" But what's the point? You are occupying your own space in the
universe right now." There was a long silence while Joe considered the
philosophical implications of this.
" But you get a certificate."
" Joe&;#8230;"
" A certificate!" So finally Bugsy agreed to let Joe have a piece of
the universe and they entered the shop. For some reason, Joe expected
this activity to be the same as it would be in say, the year 2002,
where you would simply walk into a shop. But in the year 2512, the idea
took on a whole new meaning.
There was a small foyer, a gap between the outer door and the inner
door. Joe was about to reach for the second door when Bugsy snapped a
hand around his wrist.
" Wait," he said, looking up expectantly. After a few moments, a
calming, if slightly bored voice said,
" Greetings and welcome to Insert name of shop here. Please wait while
you are de-contaminated. Thank you." Joe looked across at Bugsy, who
seemed to find the information about de-contamination about as exciting
as a snizzly Tuesday.
Suddenly, a huge gust of wind seemed to blow around the sealed foyer
and Joe's clothes, which were already slightly torn in places, began to
billow like a boat's sails. A boat which sailed on the Goor Seas. The
Goor seas are infamous for being the roughest, toughest and basically
most rude seas in the whole of the universe. A boat that sails on the
Goor seas is a boat that doesn't have many ambitions in life.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, and it had started very suddenly,
it stopped. Joe's shirt began to deflate and he felt like he'd been put
through the spin-dryer.
" Thank you. Have a nice day and or daye," said the voice and the
inner door clicked open.
" What's a daye?" asked Joe, before he even got started on the whole
de-contamination thing.
" It was decided about five years ago by some people that a day was
too short, so they invented a daye."
" What's a daye?" repeated Joe, at the risk of sounding repetitive.
Which he did. He sounded so repetitive that he sounded like a stuck
record. A record that just went round and round and round and round and
round and round. And round.
" It's like a normal, 24 hour day, except that it lasts for 25 hours,"
said Bugsy, walking through into the shop. When Joe did the same, he
was hit by an extra-ordinary sense of well-being and happiness.
" Why can't people just stay up for another hour?" he asked with a
broad, but inexplicable grin on his face.
" Well, think about it. If you stay up and extra hour and then go to
bed, you're missing out on the extra hour."
" But you've already had an extra hour," said Joe calmly and
happily.
" Good point. Ah well. It's obviously really important anyway. Late
Night Workers and All Night Revellers needed the extra hour, so there
you go. Anyway, that's out of date now. Now there's also a Daiy, which
is 27 hours long, a Daiye, which is 32 hours long and a Dai which is
only 3 hours long."
" Why's that?"
" It's for Depressives who get bored with life very easily." Joe
nodded and with a supreme amount of mental balance, he strode over to
the desk which sat at the far end of the shop. For a shop, the place
was surprisingly bare and only really housed the desk which sat, as I
have already stated, at the far end of the shop. And behind the desk
sat a surprising individual. He was surprising, not because of what
he'd achieved in his life, in fact he'd achieved very little, but
because of the way he looked.
He looked like a car crash or two would clean him up a bit. He
appeared, at least at first sight, to have three legs, a mechanical
arm, a third eye, twelve differently sized armpits and one single hair
on the top of his head. He was, as Bugsy would tell him earlier, one of
the thousands who'd signed up for Prosthetic Surgery, a new craze that
had appeared at the beginning of the century. These new doctors
advertised on TV, stating that they could 'Improve you life in a number
of varying ways'. They could finally give you that eye in the back of
your head, which was very successful with teachers, who'd been
complaining of the need for one for millennia. They could give you that
extra leg that lonely runners needed to get into that three-legged
race. They could, at long, long last, give you those extra armpits in
which to spray those very manly and attractive sprays, of which I will
talk more about later.
There were of course, people who were born like that naturally and
they shunned people who had these faculties added. It was probably
because of this that Bugsy whsipered,
" Those are definitely inplants," as they approached the desk. He
wasn't one of the afore-mentioned unfortunates who'd been born with an
extra limb or two, but he was a supporter of the 'Campaign for Equal
Body Parts.'
" Hello gentlemen," said the man, rubbing at least two of his hands
together.
" Hi," said Joe, who still felt strangely happy and content, despite
It All.
" I take it that you have made the fantastic decision to own a piece
of the universe. Our gift package makes an ideal present for your
partner and/or loved one," said the old man. Joe took a while to
respond to this and that was only after Bugsy gave him a dig in the
ribs with his elbow. His delay was on account of never having met a man
with more eyes than hair and also on account of being quite amazed by
it.
" Oh - yes. I'd like to buy a piece of the universe. Please." To Joe,
this comment sounded so outrageously bizarre that it fit perfectly with
everything that had happened so far today.
" An excellent choice, Sir. And would Sir like the Premium package or
the Standard package?"
" I don't know, you'd have to ask him."
" He means you," hissed Bugsy into Joe's ear.
" Oh, right - what does each entail please?" asked Joe. The old man
lifted a glass case from under the desk, opened it and pulled out two
small boxes. One was purple, the other was blue. He picked out the
latter.
" This is your standard package. With this you get your piece of the
universe, a photograph of it and your certificate." He picked out the
purple one.
" This is the premium package," he said, in a voice that would have
sold a computer to an illiterate jellyfish. " With this one you get
your piece of the universe, a photograph, a fact file of your piece and
your piece's co-ordinates in the universe. Both come with a legal
contract that names you as that piece's owner including any stars,
planets or useful minerals that happen to be discovered there." Joe was
listening to all this with a sense of d?j? vu. Not that he'd ever been
offered a piece of the universe before, that was, thankfully, very new,
but he had remembered feeling like this before in one of those computer
shops. The salesman had been trying to sell him the newest computer but
Joe had as much knowledge about cutting-edge technology as a weasel
does about quantum physics and contrary to common belief, this is not
very much. The man had talked about bytes and gigahertz and ram and
set-up and something about some windows. It was all very complicated.
And that was why, as he stood in front of a man who had seemed to have
more legs and arms than a millipede, being told about two different
ways to buy a piece of the universe, he was very, very confused.
" What do you think, Bugsy?" he asked his newly-acquired friend.
" I don't know. Just pick one will you, I'm starving." Joe ummed and
arred about it for a little while longer and finally said,
" How much is the premium package?"
" 24 thousand Midgelons." Joe patted his pockets in a 'Now where is my
wallet' gesture, searched his shirt pocket in a 'I'm sure it was in
here some how' gesture and then finally looked across at Bugsy in a
'Can you stump me this one?' gesture. Bugsy wanted to give Joe a
gesture and it wasn't very nice.
" Oh all right. I'll shout you this one. But you owe me," he said,
taking out what appeared to be a matchbox out of his pocket, took out
twenty notes of some kind that were far too big to fit in the object
that appeared to be a matchbox and then he put the object that appeared
to be a matchbox back in his jacket pocket.
" I don't even have any Midge&;#8230;Midgelo&;#8230;"
" Midgelons," said Bugsy, giving the old man the red notes. " Don't
worry about it. What you have to do for me will put me in your debt."
Joe didn't really pick up on the importance of this statement - he was
far too excited about owning a piece of the universe. The old man
bagged up the purple box, handed the bag to Joe and smiled at them as
they left the shop.
As Joe stepped out into the street, he felt a little glum for some
reason, a little down. Suddenly the world seemed an awfully frightening
place especially when you were travelling with Bugsy.
" Bugsy?" he said as he finally found his footing on the slippery,
snizzle covered pavement.
" What?"
" Why did I feel happier in that shop than I do out here?" asked Joe
as they started to walk, Bugsy doing up his jacket against the cold
wind and Joe wishing he'd had the sense of mind to grab his jacket
before he jumped out of his guestroom window.
" Ah - that's the Mind Conditioning that they have here in the
future," said Bugsy with a wry smile.
" The what?"
" You know air conditioning?"
" Yes."
" Well this is kind of the same thing. People wanted more out of their
air conditioners so they decided that they wouldn't only pump cool air
into a room, but also Happiness and a Pleasing Sense of Well-Being.
Both of which come in handy air-fresheners for the home, incidentally."
Joe didn't feel that anything in the future was incidental. Each and
every minute detail seemed to be staggeringly, brain-searingly
important.
" The only draw back being that you feel slightly maniacally depressed
for a few minutes after leaving the shop. And it's all a bit of a
novelty anyway. I expect that shop owners only do it to make you buy
stuff."
" Does it work?" asked Joe, jumping out of the way as a robotic dog
ran happily, if slightly metallicly by.
" Oh yes. Most of these places make you so happy and well adjusted
that they could, as people said in your day, 'Sell the hind legs to a
donkey.'"
" That's talk the hind legs off a donkey," said Joe. " It's a phrase
used to describe people who talk a lot. If you're describing something
that's hard to sell, you'd probably use something humorous like a
solar-powered torch or an inflatable dartboard."
" That makes more sense," said Bugsy, staring off into the distance as
they walked. " After all, I expect that it'd be quite easy to sell a
pair of hind legs to donkey, what with it not having any and
all."
" Yes," said Joe, looking worriedly at Bugsy.

Chapter 6

Bugsy had lead him to a place that he said 'Made the best fried eggs
this side of Pluto'. And had replied 'The planet' to Joe's question. So
after about five minutes walk, in which Joe was offered a half-price
four piece suite, a quarter-price kilogram bag of sweets and a garden
gnome by different mascots for shops. Each one was a hologram and
played a recording until someone approached them, then they could
amicably hold a conversation. This had lead to problems though, when
they could be seen describing the advantages of a gas heater to a
passing hedgehog.
After entering the shop, which had a huge projected burger spinning
above it's roof, Joe immediately felt balanced and happy with his life
once again. The future, he decided, was a really cool place.
He took a seat at the nearest table and was shocked as the table gave
way beneath his arms and fell into a dark hole in the floor. He looked
round with an increasingly hot feeling under his collar with an 'I
didn't touch it' expression. But nobody seemed all that bothered and
just carried on slurping their drinks and eating their burgers. After a
few more embarrassed seconds, a new and clean table sprang up from the
same hole.
He decided not to draw any more attention to himself and to just put
his elbows back on the table. After a minute or two, Bugsy came back
with a red tray containing to full English Breakfasts.
" What just happened to my table?" asked Joe.
" Oh, it's the way they clean them here. Anything gets dirty, it goes
down to the basement where somebody wipes it and sends I back up. Saves
all the needless walking about and that."
" Oh," was all Joe could reasonably reply to this. Looking at the
breakfast, he began to drool. He was so hungry but he hadn't really
realised what with being in the future and all. And as he tucked in, he
found you could change lots of things in the future, but you couldn't
alter a good English breakfast.
He took out his little box and opened it. Inside there was a letter,
it said:
Dear recipient, many thanks for buying your own piece of the universe
and welcome to an ever-growing population of humans that own a stake in
the galaxy's fortunes. For if a vital mineral is found within your
piece, those scientist fellows will pay you handsomely for it. Please
visit your piece and tell us all about it. We value your feedback here
at Floorisyll and Co. Your future is in our hands and our hands are
steady and well-cleaned.
So enjoy your own little place in the universe where you can go for
piece of mind and without fear of recrimination or gas bills.
Yours Sincerely,
Max Treestump, Head of Floorisyll and Co.

" Don't you think this is amazing?" asked Joe.
" It's all right," said Bugsy, with an expression that expressed that
he didn't really think it was all that amazing.
" I think it's great."
" Of course you do. But in your day, people thought it was a pretty
cool idea to send a guy a dollar in return for a load of cash."
" Are you saying this might be a con?" asked Joe.
" No. I'm saying it is a con. Look at your photograph." Joe pulled out
the photograph and stared in amazement.
" Wow - that is amazing. Look at all that!" He showed Bugsy the
photograph, which showed miles and miles of infinite universe
stretching away into the invisible distance.
" No - your piece is that little white box - it's about three feet
square." Joe looked again at the photograph and this time he saw a
little box like the kind that show-offs draw to show that they can draw
in 3-D. It was, as Bugsy said, about three feet square.
" Oh." He took out the next photograph, which showed a more up close
picture of his piece. " Wait a minute," he said. " There's something in
my piece!" Bugsy snatched the photograph and then stared intently and
closely at the little box.
" I could be mistaken&;#8230;"
" Yes&;#8230;"
" But I think&;#8230;"
" Yes?"
" That in your space&;#8230;"
" Yes?"
" Is a toilet."
" What?!" Joe yanked the photo out of Bugsy's hands and looked at it
again. He was right. Inside his little piece of the universe, a
universe, which, I might remind you, is infinity personified, was a
toilet. A white, porcelain, run of the mill toilet. And the lid was
up.
" Why is there a toilet in my piece of the infinite universe?" he
asked Bugsy, who was busy tucking into his sausages and eggs.
" Beats me. But it seems to me like there's two options. One: It might
be that your particular piece of the whole universe has a particular
significance, which grants it's owner with powers that unbelievable
beyond our very imaginations."
" What's the other option?"
" It could just be a coincidence." Joe shrugged dejectedly, despite
feeling happier about his state of well-being than at any other time in
his life, and put the box away.
He started on the eggs. The eggs were, he found, delicious. The yolk
ran just right as he pierced its summit with the edge of his fried
bread, which was similarly perfect. The sausages were cooked to
heavenly taste and the bacon was crisp and chewy, just as he liked it.
He was glad to know that there was one piece of sanity in the
future.
" This is all synthetically created, of course," said Bugsy between
mouthfuls. Joe looked slowly up at him like a baby who's just had his
security blanket dragged out of his hands.
" What?" he whispered with a silent rage.
" Well, at the turn of the last century, it was decided by most
vegetarians that to eat meat was cruel."
" That's what all vegetarians think. Why only most?"
" Well, some were in it just for the fashion accessory. Anyway,
scientists came up with a way of synthetically re-producing every
single aspect of a full English. So - here we are." Joe had gone red in
the face with anger. Bugsy asked him if he was all right, offered to
perform the hiemlich manoeuvre, but Joe just stared back. That's it,
he's snapped, thought Bugsy, and he wished he hadn't mentioned about
the food.
Then Joe did something quite remarkable. He had never really done
anything remarkable in his life. The boldest thing he'd ever done was
when he rallied for chips to be put back on the menu for at school. It
was the kind of guy he was.
But now he climbed up onto his chair and held his synthetically
produced drink (although he didn't know this, thankfully) above his
head.
" Ladies and Gentlemen!" he exclaimed, and Bugsy buried his head in
his hands. The whole caf? became suddenly absent of any noise and you
could have heard a tiny pin drop. A tiny pin, minuscule really,
dropping onto a soft material of some kind.
" Thank you. I would just like to say that I am from the past!"
Needless to say, he lost most peoples trust and credibility with this
opening statement. " No no, seriously." And he was suddenly reminded of
some drunken wacko that had brought the M1 to a standstill once as he
bellowed something about the future. Most people had honked his off and
shouted some things that weren't pleasant. Even he had given a
reproachful honk, which was a pretty hard emotion to instil in a honk.
And now, as he thought about it, that man could have been telling the
truth all the time. How many people had he laughed at because their
stories were incredulous?
" I know I might seem like a bit of a loon, but seriously - I am from
the year 2002-3. I was around when you would wait for an hour in a
traffic jam and when you finally came to the spot of delay, you found
it was a few men laying traffic cones. I remember the days when toast
would land butter side up (he'd noticed that when a piece fell from the
checkout, little air boosters had righted it and brought it back up to
the till). I still recall the days when you had to wait on a phone
listening to how much they valued your call for nigh on 2 hours! How
can my call have taken 2 hours to get through if it was valued so
much?
And my point? It's this. We had real English Breakfasts back then.
Yeah. Not synthetic. Not manufactured and made to order. We enjoyed
waiting in traffic jams back then. We enjoyed sitting and waiting with
the phone. It may have been a dull and pointless waste of time but it
was our dull and pointless waste of time!" At which triumphant gesture,
some of his drink spilled from his cup and landed on his chair, which
promptly disappeared through the floor for cleaning.

Chapter 7

" I have never been so embarrassed in my entire life!" This statement,
if said by Joe Bloggs, would have made a lot of sense. After all, he
had just fallen ten feet on a chair into the basement of a caf?, where
he'd slipped from the chair when he'd seen the man approaching who, it
turned out, was only going to clean the stool. After bruising his hip
badly on the solid concrete floor, he'd attempted to get up, which
resulted in him slipping on some eggs that had been wiped off a
previous table. This fall gave him bruising on the other hip. When he'd
got out of the basement, he'd sheepishly apologised to everybody in the
shop and hobbled out with two bruised hips and a shirt covered in
egg.
But this was actually said by Bugsy. He had sat there through the
whole speech with his head in his hands, muttering something about how
this was it.
" You were embarrassed? You were embarrassed?" complained Joe. Bugsy
waved this all aside and pointed towards a tall building at the end of
the street.
" Come on, we're late," he said.
" Late for what?" asked Joe.
" Our appointment with Mr. Davies." Joe tried to keep up with Bugsy,
who was walking faster than a Reelwallor on Grackley Day, which, if
you've never been to Lossflom in the springtime, is very, very
fast.
Joe had grabbed a coffee on the way out and the man behind the counter
had let him have it on the house, which Joe thought was because of the
inconvenience they'd caused him. But the real reason was that they just
wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
" This coffee tastes strange," he said after tentatively sipping the
edge.
" It's de-caf," replied Bugsy, hurriedly crossing the street when a
gap became available. In the future, you have to take every opportunity
you get. The traffic moves in an constant stream because of the
irradication of the traffic jam in 2222. Everyone decided that they
were pretty pointless and now no-one stopped moving. If everybody kept
driving, no-one would ever have to stop again, meaning that the only
way to cross a road was to wait until there was an absence of cars for
a moment. Which was rare, because in the future, every human, and
certain species of rabbit, owns a flying car.
" But de-caf in my day didn't taste like this."
" That'll be because caffeine was discovered to harmful to health and
so was erased from existence. But some manufacturers went too far and
replaced it with exactly the opposite of caffeine which produces a
feeling of tiredness and under-hyperness."
" Right," said Joe and plonked the cup into the nearest bin.
" Oh, I get it," said a deep and growling voice behind him. Joe
stopped and turned round. There was no-one there.
" Ignore me, that'll make it all go away," the voice said again and
this time Joe was sure he'd heard it.
" Did you hear that?" he asked Bugsy after another turn round proved
fruitless.
" What?" replied Bugsy, gazing anxiously at his watch.
" A sort of&;#8230;voice?" Joe said as he took a few steps back
down the street, looking in at shop doorways.
" Over here, tally," growled the voice which sounded like it was
passed through a strict gravel check before it was allowed out into the
world. Joe span. It was coming from the bin.
" Hello?" he said.
" Oh, notice me did you?" said the bin.
" Yes," said Joe, after his mouth had had several attempts at forming
a sentence and given up.
" Good. That makes you about the first today." Joe was struck by a
memory of talking bins and big birds, but this situation still seemed
slightly odd to him. Most things seem only 'slightly' odd after you've
had the kind of day Joe was having.
" Come on, Joe. You can talk to bins at any time," said Bugsy.
" I can't - I've never met a talking one before!" exclaimed Joe.
" Oh - their a Midgelon a dozen around here. Come on."
" A Midgelon a dozen, am I?" sneered the bin. " Well guess what? You
guys ain't exactly rare!"
" Is this bin talking?" asked Joe, who, despite the fact that he was
no longer surprised by anything, was bowled over.
" I'd better be," squawked the bin, " Else I'd be pretty
worried."
" Come on," said Bugsy. " They're all like this. Moaning about having
rubbish thrown at them all the time." Joe shrugged despondently and
followed Bugsy as he departed.
" Come back 'ere, you!" the bin yelled, surprisingly aggressively for
an object of that size. " Get back 'ere! How'd you like it if all
people did was throw trash at you? Eh? Eh? Oh, he's gone."
He had indeed gone. He was at this moment stood in the biggest
reception that the human eye had ever seen. It was the biggest
reception the human hand had ever created. Of course, there were bigger
ones and they weren't called receptions. Also, you probably wouldn't
want to be in any of them, because they were all on another
planets.
The desk in itself was about thirty feet long, the fountain seemed
more like Niagara had just been told to 'Quiet down a bit' by his Mum
and the chandelier which hung from the amazing glass-panelled ceiling
of the rotunda was like a lamp shade gone mad. Thousands of layers of
sparkling crystals winked and twinkled at the beholder. It must have
been twenty or thirty feet wide and long if it was an inch.
All this wood and gold panelling made Joe just stare. Bugsy hadn't
taken into account that this was the first time Joe had seen the
Foeroari Institute's reception lounge and, as such, had forgotten to
leave a good minutes earlier and bring along a dishcloth to wipe away
the drool.
Eventually though, he managed to haul the astonished Mr. Bloggs to the
welcome desk, where a girl who appeared to be there and then disappear,
was sat. She was quite un-nerving. You know the kind of people who tend
to stare at you a lot while you're talking and make you feel insecure
because they're holding your eye for a bit too long? She was worse. In
fact, Joe realised, all the attendants behind the desk seemed to exist
and then not to. She would be there for a few seconds, flicker and
disappear, only to re-appear a few seconds later like nothing had
happened.
" Welcome to the Foeroari Institute of Time and Space," she said and
all was perfectly normal until she flickered like a light that's on its
last legs, and went out. Joe looked around him. He looked at Bugsy. He
looked back at the desk. And the girl re-appeared.
" How can I help you?" Joe looked around him some more and then back
at Bugsy, to see if anyone else found this behaviour rather odd. They
didn't.
" I've got an appointment with Mr. Ruckleberry at 11.30."
" 11.30?" asked the girl and Joe had bizarre thoughts about cans of
sugary drinks and window cleaners. But then, with what was happening
around him, his thoughts were perfectly normal.
" That's right." The girl searched the computer database, disappeared
and then re-appeared like a faulty neon light that needs a good kick to
get it going again.
" Ok, if you'd like to take a seat," she said. Bugsy smiled and walked
off to take a seat, but Joe just stood at the desk, aghast.
" How do you&;#8230;" But that was all he got to say because Bugsy
had come back and pulled him away by the arm. He lead him over to a
long row of blue, soft, comfy seats that seemed to stretch away into
the distance and sat him down.
" How do they do that?" asked Joe.
" Because they have so much to do, they are constantly use
Inter-momentary travel." Joe's expression suggested that this didn't
make any sense to him whatsoever. Bugsy sighed. " For instance, after
she said welcome to us, she went back in time to two hours previously
to finish of the paper work that she had on her desk. Two hours
previously the institute was closed hence no one interrupted her. Then
she came back to the present and asked us how she could help."
" I was wondering why those forms in front of us suddenly were all
filled in when she disappeared," said Joe.
" But that's the thing," said Bugsy. " They never disappear - they are
always there, except that she was there in the two hours before our
arrival."
" Right," said Joe, who felt like a cow in an advanced maths lesson.
In a couple of minutes, a man would arrive and take them upstairs, but
until then, Joe amused himself by watching the desk attendants. They
were there&;#8230;then they weren't. He was interested when one of
them appeared and then started doing some work. When it was finished,
she disappeared again. Then, a man walked into the reception and up to
the desk. The attendant said hello and asked him to wait one moment
while she disappeared and did the work that he'd just seen her doing a
minute ago. Except that the man was only waiting a few seconds,
presumably because when the attendant had done the work he'd seen her
doing a minute ago, she went back in time to the moment she'd come back
to do the work, then went back to the future where the new arrival had
only been inconvenienced for a matter of seconds. Joe was quite worried
that he was beginning to understand it. And now that he did, he
realised it was genius. Absolute genius. The amount of time that could
be saved by doing that would be enormous. If you got home too late to
clean the house before your in-laws arrived, you could zip back, clean
up, zip forward and your in-laws would be none the wiser. They also
wouldn't mention it all, because they never do.
" Good morning, gentlemen," said the man who had come to take them
upstairs, " If you'd like to follow me this way." He smiled briskly and
then strode off briskly. He was a very brisk man.
He lead them to a glass elevator which looked out on the side of the
city Joe hadn't seen. It was incredible. The sun shone off metallic
like liquid gold and flying cars went gracefully this way and that. A
huge dome building dominated the sky line.
" What's that?" asked Joe, pointing.
" Oh, you're a new arrival," said the brisk man. " It's a music hall.
The biggest in the universe. Well, it is now. After the one of
Galapotron B went up in smoke. Which was entirely an accident and
nothing to do with us," added the brisk man&;#8230;briskly.
" Wow," said Joe, staring as the sun illuminated the entirely
glass-panelled roof. A large group of birds was circling above the
city, which was an absolute marvel. He felt like he was on another
planet, which, he reminded himself, he practically was.
There was a loud beep and the elevator doors opened at what must have
been the top floor. He elevator was fast, but the journey had still
taken nearly three minutes.
" This is us," said the brisk man, who, against all odds, was called
Mr. Brisk. He led them down several corridors, all of which used the
same tasteful wood-panelling with a gold rail running along each wall.
People that they passed looked at Joe for what he felt was a little
longer than necessary and would proceed to whisper in a rather childish
way after he'd gone.
Eventually, after walking along what seemed like miles of soft carpet
and passing endless mahogany doors, they came to one which had a large
gold plaque on it. It said 'Mr. Ruckleberry - Head of the Institute for
Time and Space PhR, HnU, DOP, FNAY, IOU, RSPCA.' It was quite a list of
credentials, thought Joe. Presumably even more so if you knew what any
of them meant. It was this door that Mr. Brisk knocked on and stood
aside as a call of 'Enter' echoed from within.
It was a voice that made you obey. People always say , 'If you're
friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?' And if this man
was your friend then you most certainly would. You may even add a few
pirouettes and turnpikes in mid-air for good measure. It was an
authoritative voice that seemed to hold some command in Joe's legs -
they started walking forwards.
As he entered the room, he gasped. A huge window that stretched all
the way along one wall looked out onto the city, and indeed, the rest
of the world. But that wasn't the thing that was holding his attention.
What was was not only holding his attention, but also mugging it and
leaving it for dead.
A five-foot carrot sat behind a desk at the far end of the office. It
was a real carrot for all Joe could see, except that it seemed to have
legs and arms. And for all Joe could see, the carrot seemed to have
completely human characteristics, including a face. At the moment, it
was smoking.
" Ah, Bugsy," said the carrot, coughing on the cigar smoke as he stood
to greet the new arrivals. He gave both men a firm handshake,
especially for a man whose hands would go great with a salad. Sitting
back down behind his desk, he showed the two men into a couple of seats
that, though they weren't uncomfortable, were clearly meant to hold the
lesser inhabitants in the room. Joe had no yet taken his eyes off the
carrot. He had seen some strange things so far today, but this one took
the biscuit.
" And you must be Mr. Bloggs," said the carrot, checking his records.
" Good trip I hope?"
" Actually, I-"
" Good, good," said the carrot. " And good work, Bugsy. That's a
record time for you."
" Thank you, Sir." The carrot coughed on the cigar smoke again and
stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray.
" Nasty habit," said the carrot. " I'll probably go back a few years
and give it up before I take it up this afternoon." He stood. " Shall
we?"

Chapter 8

He ushered them through to the next room, which was no less impressive
in terms of size and interior decorating. But this room was a lot more
busy, people walking here and there, people with clipboards, people
without clipboards, people who wished they were important enough to
merely not have a clipboard.
And at the far end of the room, a line of variously attired men and
women stood to attention. Granted, some of the attention was a little
slouchier in some places. But it was the way that they were dressed
that amazed Joe. After a whole morning of seeing people dressed in
futuristic silver all-in-ones, the casual, 20th century look that
graced this line was quite a sight. They were all dressed like
him.
" Joe, if you'd like to join our line," said the carrot, heaving
himself into the nearest chair, which sat menacingly in front of the
line. Joe did as he was told because he'd never been told to do
anything by a carrot before and he was all up for new
experiences.
And as he joined the line at the end, he looked at the man who he
stood next to. He blinked. He blinked again, because the man was still
there.
" Peppy?" he said. The man was staring back at him with a glum face
and transfixed eyes.
" Joe?" replied the man. He was Italian. He was a rather small man,
greasy with a little moustache. Oh, and he wore a little hat that said
'Pizza Express'. Joe couldn't believe it. He had travelled
approximately 512 years into the future and he was now stood next to
the man who delivered his pizzas on Mondays and alternate
Fridays.
But he didn't have any time to quiz Peppy further, because Mr.
Ruckleberry started to speak.
" And that concludes our search. Ten human beings. Ten random human
beings gathered for a common purpose. It has been a long year. We have
planned, double planned and now we are here. The day when finally it
all comes together. You will, of course, all wonder what you are doing
here." Everybody nodded in a way that they would very much like to know
what they were doing here. Joe nodded and, while he was doing so, he
looked down the line. Most of them seemed to be dressed in morning
attire like dressing gowns, while some of them were dressed like him -
in the early stages of dressing for work. Joe looked down at himself,
at his cuffs that he hadn't yet had the time to button up.
" You have all been brought here to aid us in our time of need.
Please, step through to the briefing room."

Chapter 9

They all dazedly did as they were told, Joe, seeing the look on
Bugsy's face, turned left and walked through the double doors and into
what he assumed was the Briefing room. There was a large screen at one
end of the room and about a hundred seats facing it. Joe banged his toe
on one of the nearer seats because it was so dark in here. The only
faint light emanated from a slide machine at the back of the
hall.
He walked to the front and took the farthest seat, as the rest of the
troupe filed in behind him. Peppy crashed into the seat next to him and
said,
" What is going on, eh?"
" I have no idea. How did you get here?" asked Joe.
" Well, I had just got up and dressed and I did my teeth and then -
wham, I am a-here!" Joe shook his head. Whatever was going on here, it
smelt bad. Or maybe that was just Peppy's breath.
The carrot waddled its way up to the front. Joe felt like he was about
to be subjected to a motivational morning. He'd had one at his job a
few weeks back and the only thing it did was make him bored and
lethargic.
" First slide please," he called to the back, where a little man was
stood with his finger trembling on the button.
The screen was suddenly filled with a picture of a planet, offset by a
thousand stars. The audience would have been inclined to say a few
'Oooh's or at the very least, some 'Aaah's.
" Realify," barked Mr. Ruckleberry. Suddenly, the room started to melt
around Joe's head. The walls slid down on themselves, Mr. Ruckleberry
dissolved like dust and the screen flew towards him.
" Aaargghh!" he screamed, sure that the screen would kill him as it
fell towards his face. Then there was silence. Joe was no longer in the
room. He was in the picture, looking about him at all the stars, down
at the orange/green planet and at himself, who, he realised to his
horror, was just floating there. He felt like he was still sat on his
comfortable, cinema-style seat, but the seat was nowhere to be seen. He
was just&;#8230;bobbing.
Astonished and extremely frightened, he looked all about himself, but
could see no-one. What was going on?
Then he heard a voice, booming like there were massive speakers
attached to both his ears.
" What you are looking at is the planet of Rogueferry." It was Mr.
Ruckleberry. With a huge sigh of relief, Joe realised that this was
just a slide with some futuristic technology. He let it wash over
him.
" It is a small planet, rather like our own. Its surface is mainly
rough and desert-like. Next!" Joe's surroundings melted away again and
then he was some where else, on the planet's surface. He felt like he
should be extremely hot and bothered as the sun shone fervently onto
his head, but he felt nothing.
" What you see in the distance," continued Ruckleberry, and Joe
noticed a large metal building on the horizon, " Is one of their many
military stations." Joe heard a few gasps from what was presumably the
rest of the audience, but Joe couldn't see anyone around him.
" Now, this is where you come in. Next!" As the scenery fluttered away
again, Joe re-emerged in a small room. It was fairly dull, as there
were no windows, and the oak-walls and large leather seats did nothing
to brighten the place up. Around a large table sat
many&;#8230;aliens. There was no other word for them. Joe would
dearly have liked them to be anything else, but they were aliens.
Granted, they were aliens in suits and military uniform, but they were
still aliens.
They all had eyes and mouths - some had a few of each - and they all
looked vaguely human but there was no doubting it. If this was a sci-fi
movie, this would be the bit where you shrink back into your seat.
Unfortunately for Joe, he seemed to be sat in the room with them.
Fortunately though, they didn't appear to know he was there.
" This is Roguan Council. What they are planning will ultimately have
a terrible consequence for our planet. They are planning to wage war."
More gasps. " But this is why we have recruited you fine people.
Approximately 500 years ago, a threatening message was sent out by our
planet, a planet you ten alone were a part of. You will no doubt have
information as to why these messages were sent. Therefore, you will
travel to Rogueferry tomorrow morning to begin peace talks. You alone
stand between them and the destruction of our planet. Because, in ten
days time, the planet Earth is destroyed by the biggest fleet of
battleships the universe has ever known. End." The room dissolved
before Joe's very eyes. The aliens all submerged into one another, like
a fresh painting left in the rain. He himself started to fray at the
edges, but then he was back in the briefing room, all his edges neat.
He looked round at everyone else, who all seemed to have been on the
same journey that he had. They were all startled and afraid, and the
news of inter-stellar war hadn't softened the blow.
" Any questions?" asked Mr. Ruckleberry, whose voice was now coming
out of a carrot again. Joe tentatively raised his arm.
" Yes?" said Mr. Ruckleberry, pointing at Joe. Bugsy beamed like his
child was the most attentive in class.
" Can I leave?" Joe asked. Bugsy's smile vanished.
" No, no," Mr. Ruckleberry laughed. " Good one, though."
" I wasn't joking," said Joe, but no one was listening because someone
else was asking a question.
" What were these threatening messages?" a voice asked from the
back.
" Good question. Slide, please." Joe secured himself in his seat at
these words, but it turned out to be a normal slide. It was a picture
of some kind of mathematical working.
" As you will know, there was a large interest in the existence of
extra-terrestrial life. People called Scientists sent out mathematical
equations and binary quadratics into the universe, hoping against hope
that their sums would reach some kind of life form.
As you will also know, there was never any reply. In actual fact, the
messages were received by approximately twenty five million different
species of extra-terrestrial life within one week. Twenty four million,
nine-hundred thousand and ninety-seven of them discarded the message as
junk mail and went about their ordinary lives. Out of the other three
species, one of them gave the message to the secretary to put in the
in-box but which was inadvertently put in the out-box and eventually
thrown away by a grumpy caretaker; another decided not to reply because
the sender had not included a stamped addressed envelope and the last
species, the Roguans, were happy to receive the mail because all they
get these days are bills. They deciphered the message and.
Unfortunately for us, in their language the equations mean 'You're
Mother was a Chain-Smoking Goldfish' which didn't go down too well with
the locals. Eventually, they decided to wage war on us and searched the
universe looking for the senders of the offending message.
Unfortunately, the looked every where but on the other side of their
planet, where the Earth is quite visible and they invented the saying
'Isn't It Always in the Last Place You Look?'"
A heavy silence fell on the briefing room. The only noise was Peppy
snoring to the side of Joe and that ended abruptly as Joe whispered
something to the effect of 'Twenty margaritas and a can of coke,
please', which soon woke him up.

Chapter 10

Joe sat on his bunk bed, staring at his hands. It wasn't that his
hands were interesting - they weren't. But they seemed like a really
good idea at the moment. While everything else in his universe was
rapidly becoming like a plot in a Mission Impossible episode, i.e. hard
to understand, his hands remained normal and comforting. You may not
find your hands comforting, but just you wait till you're zapped
centuries into the future, only to find that the world is still barmy
and perhaps even a smidgen barmier.
The only other thing which was keeping him sane right now was at this
moment lying on the bunk above, his snoring louder than certain
industrial factories. Peppy was an alright guy. To Joe, he was a sight
for sore eyes (or at least hungry ones) on Mondays and alternate
Fridays. And finding him earlier had been the happiest moment of his
(as yet) brief spell in Earth's future.
And then he'd learned why he was there. It had suddenly become very
clear to him that he actually wasn't on a two week jolly to the future
- he was going to some stupid planet to make stupid peace talks with
stupid aliens who were about to launch stupid war on stupid Earth.
That's a lot of stupidness to deal with in one morning.
After the briefing, everyone had been given a partner and sent to
these rooms and luckily Joe had been given Peppy. Unluckily though,
Peppy's snoring was louder than certain industrial factories.
The door handle clicked open, which was a disappointment. It wasn't a
disappointment the door was opening, he was very glad to have visitors,
but it was a disappointment to him that in the future they didn't have
those doors that whooshed aside when you approached, like in all those
sci-fi movies.
But the door opened with an almost nostalgic creak and Bugsy walked in
and sat down.
" How are you feeling?" he asked.
" Oh fine."
" Really?"
" Yeah, considering that I'm insane."
" You're not insane."
" Really?"
" 'Fraid not."
" Not even a little bit?"
" Not even a little bit."
" Shucks. Then the answer to your question," said Joe, " Would be that
I feel like the whole world has come crashing down around my ears. In
short, I feel dazed, confused, angry, confused, hungry, surprisingly
confused and a little worse for wear. Does that answer your
question?"
" That one and so many more," said Bugsy, taking off his cap and
scratching his scalp. Joe sank back onto the bed and heaved a huge
sigh. There was silence in the room, except of course for the snoring
which would not only have raised the dead, it would have resurrected
them and sent them on their way with a cheeky ruffle of the hair.
" He's loud, isn't he?" said Bugsy.
" Pardon? I can't hear you with all this racket."
" I said - Oh, never mind." Joe nodded. That seemed like a good life
lesson at the moment. Joe sat back up and said,
" Why is Mr. Ruckleberry a carrot?"
" I was wondering when you were coming to that. Actually it's quite
simple. You see, as Head of the Institute for Space and Time, Mr.
Ruckleberry was one of the founders of Inter-Momentary travel and as
such as travelled through time more than you've had hot&;#8230;"
Bugsy took in Joe's bachelor pallor, " Food. And so, because
Inter-Momentary travel does have its effects, Mr. Ruckleberry is now a
vegetable. Some times he's an onion, some times a pepper, a pea, a
mange-tous. It really depends on what kind of mood he's in. A tomato,
some days."
" But a tomato is a fruit," said Joe, frowning.
" Not any more it's not. Everybody got rather narked at all the smart
alecs going around and saying that because Tomato's have seeds it's
actually a fruit. So scientists did away with the seeds so now it's
officially a vegetable." Joe nodded. This made sense. And as it did, it
was like a mule at a Mensa meeting.
" Why us?" asked Joe.
" How do you mean?" replied Bugsy, who thought that the only way that
this question could be made more vague was if the 'us' part was taken
away.
" Why do we have to go?" said Joe, nodding towards the top bunk, where
Peppy's snoring was like someone explaining to you exactly how their
new digital camera could take pictures and edit them into a slide show
at the same time - it just went on and on and on and on. And, just for
good measure, on.
" Well, Mr. Ruckleberry thought that because you were all around when
these messages were first sent out and that you will be of the same
disposition as these men who sent them, that would be best placed to
deal with it."
" But I thought that in the future," said Joe, " Robots would be
created to do all the dangerous jobs."
" Well, they are at times. But this isn't a dangerous job."
" Really?"
" Well&;#8230;not if you don't mess it up."
" Comforting." Bugsy sighed.
" Look, I'll be coming with you. As will each Agent who found someone
suitable to do this job." Joe nodded. He needed some sleep. But
first&;#8230;
" What were the requirements?" he asked. Bugsy smiled.
" I'd better get some rest." He stood and made for the door.
" What were the requirements?" insisted Joe.
" You need some too. See you later," said Bugsy, opening the door with
all the effort that it used to take back in the twentieth century, and
leaving. Joe sighed. Letting it wash over him, well, at least the
little bits, he snuggled down and got some sleep.

Chapter 11

During his sleep, Joe dreamed that he was in the future, he dreamed
that carrots talked and that, get this, he was going to go to some
stupid planet to make peace talks with an alien race!
Then he woke up.
" Typical. I have a great dream and it turns out to be flippin' well
real." He got up and left the room, and met Bugsy in the
corridor.
" Where are we going?" he asked.
" Breakfast. You did have that in the 21st century, didn't you?"
" Oh yes." The last time Joe had had some breakfast, he'd been
speaking to himself. He didn't have fond memories of it.
As they went down the corridor, others from it's own time left their
rooms and fell into line behind them. Finally, they arrived in a large
hall where a huge table was set for breakfast. Joe sat down next to
Bugsy and waited.
" What would you like then?" said a voice behind him.
" Excuse me?" said Joe, turning round to see a large woman with a huge
basket of cereals.
" Would you like Rice Toasties, Sugar Oats, Flakes o' Bran, Malt-O's,
Grey Flakes, Orange Flakes, Flakes with Sugar-"
" What do you suggest?" asked Joe impatiently.
" Toast." And she strode off to get him some. Joe resignedly poured
himself some orange juice and began to sip.
" Are you sure you want that?" asked Bugsy.
" Why not? I like orange juice."
" I'm not doubting that you do, as you say, like orange juice and
indeed if there was some orange juice at this table I'm sure you would,
as you say, like it. But that's not orange juice."
" What is it, then?" asked Joe reluctantly. Half of him really needed
to know and the other half said, 'Shut up unless you want to see
breakfast come back a few times&;#8230;'
" It is Reconstituted Badger Urine." A mouthful of Reconstituted
Badger Urine flashed across the table and hit an old man who was about
to attempt his first bite of Malt-O's.
" Sorry about that!" said Joe, rushing around to the other side of the
table, which took approximately two minutes, and then he started to
wipe away the urine from the man's face. But in his haste, he knocked a
mug of boiling hot coffee into the old man's lap.
" Aaargghhh!" screamed the old man. The old man then ran off to the
toilets. Joe went and sat back down. Bugsy gave him an apologetic
shrug.
" It is a high source of energy. You might feel some&;#8230;adverse
effects," he whispered as Mr. Ruckleberry entered the room. The old man
ran hurriedly back to his seat just as everyone stood to attention. The
old man attempted to stand, but, what with having his lap scolded, he
found this rather hard and just sort of bent double as a mark of
respect.
" Please, sit down," said Mr. Ruckleberry, who today, appeared to be a
cucumber. " Enjoy your breakfasts."
A plate of toast was placed in front of Joe.
" Oh thanks a lot, thankyou for the toast, it is much appreciated I
haven't had anything to eat you see for about oh must be a day or two
who can tell eh I can't What a morning it is isn't it a nice morning
very sunny great day for making peace talks with homicidal aliens isn't
eh?" He took a breath and the oxygen overload nearly killed him. The
woman with the breakfasts just shrugged. She'd seen this behaviour by
drinkers of the RBU on many occasions. Once, she'd just absorbed
everything the over-active little man had said and just waited
patiently for him to talk himself asleep. Which he did.
" What's going on Bugsy I can't stop talking see? I just keep talking
and talking and talking and my mouth keeps saying stuff and I know this
is really bad grammar and everything but I can't stop my mouth I just
keep talking and talking and talking and-" Bugsy punched Joe about the
side of the head. It was the humane thing to do.

When he awoke a few hours later, he found he was quite full up. Bugsy
was sat over him with an empty plate full of crumbs. Obviously, it
wasn't an empty plate if it was full of crumbs, but it was devoid of
any real food stuff.
" What happened?" he asked dazedly.
" I hit you," replied Bugsy.
" What?!"
" Don't worry, it was humane."
" Oh good," said Joe, feeling the swelling on the side of his head, "
As long as it was humane." There was a long silence in which Joe
groaned a little bit, but rather non-commitedly.
" You've got a RBU hangover. The effects last for&;#8230;about ten
more seconds," said Bugsy, checking his watch. In about ten seconds,
the effects wore off. Joe sat upright.
" I feel nicely full," he said, patting his stomach.
" Yes - I fed you you're toast while you talked in your sleep." Bugsy
got up, stretched and said, " Right, come on then. Let's go and talk
some sense into these Roguans." Bugsy left and the door made a pointed
attempt at not being opened.
Joe shivered. Bugsy had sounded like they were going to get a paper.
Joe wasn't an alcoholic, but it was at times like this when he wished
he'd taken it up as a hobby.

Chapter 12

Joe was walking. No, he was striding. He was striding forward, long
strides, arms swinging slowly backwards and forwards. He was walking in
slow motion, as were the rest of the crew of the HM1. They were
striding in slow motion through the hangar, as a hundred people stood
to applaud. It was the possibly the proudest moment of Joe's life. Just
ahead of winning the egg and spoon race at his school sports day when
he was five.
He was kitted out, as was the rest of the crew, in an orange spacesuit
and he held his big, bubble-like helmet under his arm. He saluted the
crowds.
He had decided, rather reluctantly that people did have worse jobs.
There were&;#8230;live TV presenters, for example. The people who
write those jokes that go in crackers. The man whose job it is to place
the second blade on a Mach 3.
And so he'd agreed. Actually, he had no choice and so everyone was
rather relieved that they didn't have to open a case of 'LaidBack 3000'
syringes. And now he was walking, as I said, in slow motion. Joe
thought he could hear a trumpet blowing slowly in the distance and see
a big American flag flying some where. He forgot about this and kept on
smiling.
After a while of walking in slow motion, they all got rather bored and
decided to get on with it. Climbing into the shuttle, Joe asked
Bugsy,
" Don't you have to go through years of strenuous training to be fit
enough for space travel?"
" No," said Bugsy, like Joe had just asked whether someone turns the
moon out at night. " Space travel in now as easy as&;#8230;well, I
think in your time they'd put it 'Easy as Riding a Humpback
Whale'."
" Bike," said Joe.
" Ah yes - that rolls off the tongue easier." Each group was taken to
an individual chamber and Joe, Peppy and Bugsy had a rather poky one.
Bugsy fastened the other two into their seats and then sat down
himself. He picked up a rather rare copy of the modern classic, The
Beano and began to read.
Peppy, who Joe sensed was rather nervous about their immanent
departure into outer space, was fiddling with his fingers and sweating
until his forehead had the effect of Niagara Falls relocated.
" My Mum always used to tell me," said Joe, " That if you're afraid,
it's good to sing yourself a little comforting song." This was just one
of the many, ludicrously intelligent things that Joe's Mum had told
him. Among these, the highlights were: " Don't look at me like that"
"You'll never amount to anything if you don't speak proper" "Clean your
mouth you look like you've been attacked by a Mars bar" and the seminal
"Take that out of your mouth". She was a very wise woman.
" Try it," continued Joe. " It's always worked for me." Peppy nodded a
little nervous nod and began to sing very quietly.
" When I'm delivering pizzas,
I know where I've got to go,
I look the address up on the map,
Then I wait till the pizzas get cold.

Singing: I'm just a pizza - deliverer,
And I'm just singing this song,
I'm setting out with an address in my hand,
But I know I'll get it wrong."

There was a long silence after this melodic travesty and one that let
everybody forget it entirely. By the way, if you want to hear the rest
of this song, contact this number: 4738 5779922-00117. The Asylum
attendant will be happy to help.

Chapter 13

About three days into their ascent, Joe realised he was flying in
space and he fainted. When he came round, he found that he was still
flying in space and was sick. When he recovered, he found that,
amazingly, he was still flying in space and promptly was sick and
fainted at the same time, which was bad because it caused a mess, but
it was good because Joe didn't have to clear it up.
He was now sat in a small medical bay. It was an odd place in many
respects, but the biggest and oddest of these respects was the fact
that instructions were constantly being piped through a sound system
which reverberated above Joe's head. They were the kind of instructions
that you read on the back of medical boxes, you know, those really
obvious ones. Joe couldn't figure out whether it was there to cheer him
up or give him sound medical advice.
" If you are taking Homogenous BCD Tablets with a dose of 24cc to the
gallon," said the soothing voice, " Do not operate any heavy machinery
whilst eating beans on toast. Also, it is not recommended to be a
child. If you are on a dose of 12cc's to the gallon, however, it is
acceptable to be a frog whilst eating beans on toast, but never if
you're a bean on a piece of toast, eating a frog." The problem with
having a soothing voice say all this was that, in Joe's opinion,
soothing voices should only be used to say really relaxing things, like
'Smooth Classics at seven', or 'Just relax and let it all wash over
you'. He didn't feel it worked saying things like '400 strong
Krangressants make you feel slightly woozy but only for a short time.'
Equally, it wouldn't work on Mechanic FM, a radio show that Joe hated
listening to. The soothing voice would be wasted on a catchphrase like
'Just tighten the right nut 73 degrees to the left with your Calibre
spanner and make sure the washer is in place. Then wait another hour so
that the bill is 'More like it' and then tell the customer that the car
is ready.' It just wouldn't work.
" How are you?" said a soothing voice behind him. It was Bugsy. Joe
was about to ask Bugsy why his voice was like that, but before he could
get past the word 'Why', he found his own voice was soothing.
" What's going on?" he asked in a soothing voice, holding his voicebox
tenderly.
" It's the SootheySynthesizer," said Bugsy soothingly. Joe felt lie he
was in a debt advert.
" The what?"
" The SootheySynthesizer." Despite the fact that Bugsy said it again,
it amazingly didn't make any difference to Joe's ignorance. " It's set
into the walls of the medical room to make every voice sound
soothing."
" Wow," said Joe softly. " The future is full of useless
inventions."
" Tell that to the inventor of the solar powered torch," said Bugsy,
looking at a small black tube disgustedly and throwing it into the bin.
" I had shares in that. Who'd have thought they would have
flopped?"
" Who'd have thought?" said Joe, lying back on the bed. " Can I ask
you something?" he asked as the soothing voice above his head proceeded
to explain how, if you were a medium sized gerbil, it was not wise to
play basketball while on a course of Humoas BG.
" What?" asked Bugsy, perching on a box that was attached to the wall.
All over the galaxy, there are places on walls on which one can perch.
It is a bizarre, but necessary component of life that, contrary to
common belief, which states that it's love, makes the world go
round.
" Why did I see lots of version of myself this morning?"
" Ah, that'll be a Time Tear."
" A time tear?"
" Yes. It happens all the time when we come back and get participants.
When there is a lot of Inter-Momentary activity going on, Time Tears
happen in the area. We've had reports before of a man two houses away
who finished his breakfast before he'd woken up. It's nothing to worry
about."
" Oh, good," said Joe, with all the sincerity of a gecko. " How do you
do it? Travel through time, I mean?"
" It's all about toothbrushes," said Bugsy, getting comfortable on his
perch.
" Toothbrushes?" repeated Joe, who felt something of a particularly
soothing parrot.
" Yes. We in the future got kind of bored of waiting for you lot to
move from manual toothbrushes to automatic ones, because they are the
time machines. When you brushed your teeth this morning, you opened
your end of the portal. My end was open and so I was transported. I was
actually waiting for you out in the garden."
" Why?" asked Joe as the soothing voice stated that being a tree was a
not a good idea if taking 2 Plassimya tablets a day.
" Because time after time, after people see themselves a few times,
they always jump out of their windows. When you fell, we went into
Inter-momentary nothingness, on the way here."
" Ah." Joe wasn't sure where 'here' was. The only thing he was sure
about was that it was a recommended to swim fifty lengths through honey
every week if you were prescribed 50 capfuls of FRONTRAS.
" Get some rest," said Bugsy. " We'll be there soon." And he left. Joe
wasn't sure where 'there' was. 'Here', 'There'. There didn't seem to be
any difference.
" Also," said the soothing voice, " It is not a good idea to be a
teenager. Full stop."

Chapter 14

Joe guessed that when Bugsy said 'We'll be there soon,' he actually
meant 'We won't get there for another five days at least'. He was
getting bored. After picking up a copy of 'Things to do in a space
shuttle when you're bored', he'd run through activities 1-114 and found
that one or two were repeats.
He'd already pretended he could fly in the anti-gravity chamber at
least twice and the novelty wore after a while, when you discovered
that you could fly. Some how, flying just wasn't as fun as pretending
you could fly.
He'd washed the little windows several times and he still couldn't
find out the surprise that this was meant to hold. The surprise, in
case you wanted to know, is that washing the windows is un-necessary,
as the space outside is just dark anyway. This entry was a little
controversial, as it had been proven to raise suicide rates in 33\% of
the galaxies that the book was published in.
He'd exhausted entry 43, which went 'Tell your crew that the Oxygen
tanks have been irreparably damaged and that you all will certainly
die'. After the first time, this one also lost its effect and Joe found
that he didn't really like it anyway. The idea of Oxygen tanks being
irreparably damaged was not one he wanted to consider for a very long
time.
And so, the seminal 'Things to do on a space shuttle when you're
bored' was thrown aside and Joe went in search of a bit of excitement.
He found that 'Reading the Beano' should be added to the book, as
should, in alphabetical order 'Ask the Pizza place to deliver to 42,
Space Shuttle Place, The Galaxy, The Universe', 'Talk crew members into
having a race through the anti-gravity chamber' and 'Listing things in
wrong alphabetical order'.
And so he was fairly chirpy when he accidentally teleported the whole
ship to the other side of the galaxy and landing them on a planet
called 'Haloolawoola'.
The ship crashed onto the sandy surface, sending small particles
flying in every direction, causing a near tidal wave of sandy
proportions. It turned and rolled as it slid along the beach and
finally came to a stop as it crashed into a huge boulder, crushing the
front end of the shuttle.
The occupants of the ship were thrown all over the place, hitting
control panels and bouncing off fortunately placed Bouncy Castles.
Peppy was woken, because the noise of searing metal was just a bit
louder than his alarm, which completely failed to wake him up each day.
Why he actually kept this alarm was a subject of no debate in his small
town - it was because he didn't want to get up, so an alarm which aided
him in this was quite welcome.
When finally everything stopped moving, the lights went out and things
went 'Oooom' in a rather 'losing power' sort of way, Joe found he was
sitting on himself. After climbing through the 4th chamber into the
living quarters, he found Bugsy hanging from the light fitting in the
ceiling.
" What are doing up there?" he asked.
" Pull ups, what does it look like?" replied Bugsy, leaping down. "
What did you do?"
" Nothing," replied Joe, because he found this a good reply to most
things, apart from the question 'How much did you steal?' when there
are fifty-pound notes emerging from your bursting coat lining.
Bugsy jumped down from the light and squared up to Joe.
" What did you do?" he asked slowly and deliberately.
" I pressed a button," said Joe.
" What button did you press, Joe?"
" One that said 'Please do not push this button', Bugsy."
" Right. So you pressed a button that said do not push this button, is
that correct?"
" Yes."
" So what you're saying is, that despite the fact that you were
explicitly told not to push the button, you did, in actual fact, push
it?"
" That's about it."
" Great." He scrambled out of the living quarters and met up with some
others who were rather startled at the whole being thrown around thing.
Joe felt he was going to be about as popular as de-hydration in a
Marathon.
Bugsy pushed past them, telling them it was going to be all right,
which of course, when you've pushed a button that says 'Do Not Push',
there is no chance of.
He made his way to the hatch and pushed it open.
" Wow," he said. He was looking out on the biggest beach ever seen by
human eyes and some alien ones. It was huge. Miles and miles into the
distance it stretched, not caring for the laws of physics or penny
arcade commercial value.
" Wow," he said again. The sea which roared away fairly quietly to his
left glistened like a thousand crystals under the noonday sun. But it
was completely empty. There were no sandcastles, no umbrellas, no
red-scorched tourist backs and definitely no surfers. It was just
peaceful.
" What's that?" asked Joe, who had arrived a minute ago and was
pointing over Bugsy's shoulder to a wooden sign that was standing in
the sand. Bugsy peered.
" Its says, 'Life's a Beach' and is covered with various Hawaiian
images," replied Bugsy, who couldn't take his eyes off the scene.
" Can we have a look?" asked Joe.
" I don't see how it would hurt," said Bugsy and, stepping out of the
shuttle and onto the beach, keeled over as the hot sand burnt his
feet.
" Ow," he said.

Chapter 15

" What did you have to go and do that for?" complained Bugsy, who was
strolling along the beach with Joe, who were both now wearing shoes.
Bugsy's mouth was betraying him slightly. As much as he was annoyed by
the inconvenience of being involuntarily transported to the other side
of the galaxy, he was enjoying this immensely. The views alone were
enough to make a grown man cry and the sand already had had that effect
on Bugsy.
" How did I know you weren't supposed to press a button that said 'Do
Not Push'?" asked Joe.
" Yeah," said Bugsy, with a sideways look, " If only there was some
kind of clue." Joe looked out at the horizon.
" Do you know, we used to think that there was an edge to the world,"
he said.
" Really. How depressingly stupid," replied Bugsy. Inside, he was
waging a personal war. On one hand, he felt that Joe really needed some
kind of abrasive punishment, preferably featuring stocks and juicy,
ripe tomatoes but that ignoring and being rude to him would have to do
at the moment. But on the other hand, he wanted to shake the guys'
hand. Not only had he had the gall to the push the button he'd been
dying to press for ages, but he'd also transported them to this
amazingly beautiful planet. Right now, the sun was dipping down past
the sea and he could imagine that there really was an edge to this
world, where the sun could just fall off the edge.
" It's beautiful, isn't it?" he said quietly, because the beach gave
that feeling that everything, including shouting should be done with
the least amount of noise.
" Yes," said Joe, was truly captivated by the sunset. It was actually,
officially, one of the most beautiful sights in the universe, listed in
Geyfrum's Top 10 of Everything (Including Numbers), along with, 'The
Great Glaciers of Portungolia', 'The Towers of Cyriap' and 'Buses
Getting Covered in Water from a Huge Puddle'.
" Hello there," said a croaky voice to their right. They both span to
their right, saw nothing, span left and saw an old man sat in a deck
chair. They looked to their right again but no one was there.
" It's all right," said the old man and Joe felt like everyone had
been saying that to him since he'd left the year 2002, " I'm good at
throwing my voice." Bugsy and Joe just nodded, staring at the old man
who was complete with string vest and a hanky over his head, which was,
of course, knotted at the edges.
" See?" he said and his voice seemed to yell from a distance.
" Impressive," said Bugsy. " How does that help you?"
" Oh, it doesn't help me," said the old man, who held a can of lager.
" It just gives me something to do during the day."
" What do you do at nights?" asked Joe, who thought, sensibly, that if
a man spent his days learning how to throw his voice, at nights he must
do something else really amazing.
" Sleep," said the old man. " What do you do?" He took his glasses
off, wiped his eyes and replaced them.
" I sleep too," replied Joe. " Although when I can't sleep, some times
I go to the toilet, or have a drink or maybe even watch some
tele-"
" Joe," hissed Bugsy, " It was a rhetorical question." Joe nodded and
just continued to stare.
" Why are you here?" asked Bugsy in what he hoped wasn't a 'Why are
you here?' tone. Which was difficult.
" Well, I don't know really," said the man, taking onboard some more
fluids.
" So you just sit here all day and watch the sea?" Bugsy said.
" Pretty much."
" Why?" asked Joe.
" Why not? Have you looked at it? It is officially one f the most
beautiful sights in the universe. And something as beautiful as this
needs someone to watch it and ogle at it." Joe pondered this and looked
around. Every where was empty.
" Are you the only one around here?" he asked. The man nodded his
hanky-covered head.
" Yes - the only one on the whole planet and the whole planet is a
beach."
" So why are you here?"
" Well, if something as beautiful as this has been created, someone
should watch it or else it might not exist. Haven't you ever heard of
the tree in the forest theory?" Joe checked his memory banks for trees
in forests and only came out with the answer 'Obviously'. He shook his
head.
" It is said that if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one
there to hear it fall, does it actually make a noise?" He stared at the
two men for a good while after this because they were just staring at
him.
" Well, obviously," said Joe after a while, breaking the stunned
silence at what was a particularly stunned point, " Because it fell. So
it made a noise."
" Ah, but did it?"
" Yes, because it fell. Things that fall, particularly big things like
trees, make noises. Didn't you ever learn that at school?" The little
old man seemed crestfallen and just looked down.
" I mean," continued Joe, " You don't see milk bottles blowing over in
the wind but you can hear that, can't you?"
" I think he means out of ear-range," said Bugsy and the little man
grabbed on to this like a life-boat. But Joe wasn't going to be
perturbed.
" Yes but you can hear milk bottles blowing over at the top of the
street, so you'd have to be a blooming long way away from a
tree-"
" Joe!" said Bugsy quietly but rather forcefully.
" No, it's all right," said the old man, croakier than ever. " He's
right. It's a stupid theory." Joe nodded at Bugsy in a way that
suggested a point had been scored and that there was no doubt who had
just scored it.
" But my job, as far as I know," said the old man, " Is to watch the
sea to make sure it exists." Totally and completely confused by this
whole bizarre conversation, Bugsy and Joe said goodbye and went on in
search of a Better Time.
They walked on through the sand as the sun completely disappeared from
view and it was night time. Stars began, as they do, to shine in the
dark sky and rain began to fall. It was the light rain that might grace
a rain forest and it was the particular type that irritated gardeners
no end. You'd just be planting your seeds when the rain would come.
You'd go indoors, thoroughly miserable and muttering something about
Alan Titchmarsh never having to go through all this, when the sky would
clear and the sun would come out. So out you'd go again, getting all
your gloves on and your tools ready. The first seed wouldn't be in the
ground by the time the rain would start again.
It was known as Sod's Law but was more commonly referred to as
'Blooming annoying'.
Bugsy and Joe dived for cover under a huge tree and sat down at the
base of it.
" Don't you think we should be getting back?" asked Joe, looking at
the beached shuttled in the distance. " The others will be wondering
where we are."
" Probably," replied Bugsy, still captivated by the sea, which now
shimmered under the starlight.
" What time is?" asked Joe.
" What time isn't it?" replied Bugsy. Joe didn't know what this meant
and was too tired to try and find out if it made any sense or not. He
put his head back against the soft trunk of the tree and relaxed.
Then, in the distance came a roaring sound. It didn't just roar, it
went past roaring and came through the other side, into a world of
broken ear-drums and shattered nerves. It enveloped the whole area with
its whining screech and then, a second a two later, when it all
stopped, there was a quiet hissing noise.
" What was that?" said Joe, although he couldn't hear himself say it
because his ears were ringing and he just had to trust his mouth, which
was never trustworthy at the best of times. He'd once asked a man who
had just revealed that he had ten days to live if he wanted to kick
off. Granted, it was at a Sunday morning football game for the team he
used to play for, but the man still ran off the pitch crying.
" I don't know," said Bugsy. There was the dampened sound of hurrying
feet, squelching in the rain. There was that patter-patter-patter sound
with really heavy rain hitting the ground and falling through the
leaves of the trees.
Then the footsteps suddenly became louder. A hundred men ran past
them, unable to see them in the dark. They wore space suits like they
were dealing with radiation and had visors that covered their faces.
The men held a huge hose under their right arms and the long line just
seemed to keep on going. Finally, the last man passed them and Joe and
Bugsy were able to sneak off after them.
Arriving on the fringes of the beach again, they watched from a safe
distance (about 20 metres, which is considered safe when facing giant
hose-wielding madmen) as the men sunk the end of the hose in the sea
and began running frantically backwards and forwards across the beach,
past where they hid behind a bush, to where the hose seemed to be fixed
in whatever they had arrived in.
Joe, who had got used to the sensation recently, couldn't believe his
eyes. He told them that they were lying to him, lying but they'd just
said 'Meh - take it or leave it'. The sea was being
drained&;#8230;
" Is that really happening?" he asked.
" It must be."
" Why?"
" Because I have a strange feeling that I've seen this some where
before," said Bugsy. This was making no sense.
" Let's get out of here," whined Joe like a little kid who's just been
denied the purchase of an ice cream and therefore sees no other reason
why he should be at the seaside.
" Wait," whispered Bugsy. The night was beginning to get cold and the
rain wasn't letting up. " What happened to that man?"
" What man?" asked Joe.
" The guy on the beach who said he had to watch it to make sure it
existed."
" Oh - that guy. I don't know."
The men continued to run to and fro until - unbelievably - the sea was
entirely drained.
" I can't believe this," said Joe.
" Well, it doesn't really matter if you do or not. If it's happening,
it's going to happen whatever you do. If it's not happening, then we
have nothing to worry about," replied Bugsy, surprisingly succinctly
for one of his scientific answers. He has been known to talk for
approximately seven days and nights on the subject of jam. And just the
strawberry kind.
" Right. Let's get out of here," said Joe and he stood up and ran
towards the shuttle. He thought he might be spotted but the workers,
no, the thieves didn't seem to notice him at all. In fact, they
probably wouldn't have noticed him if he was running naked with a sign
hung round his neck that said 'Notice me', because they were blind. It
made TV nights a bit of a damp squib, but no tea towels were necessary
on Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey nights.
Bugsy ran after Joe and reached him just as he boarded the shuttle.
They shut the door and began panting like big dogs with small
tongues.
" What happened?" asked Peppy, who looked greasy despite the fact he
hadn't been in a kitchen for what was in reality approximately 512
years but what was in fact four days.
" We ran into a bit of&;#8230;trouble," said Joe.
" You were gone for a-two hours!"
" It was&;#8230;long trouble." Joe and Bugsy pushed past Peppy and
sat down in the living quarters, where they were joined by the rest of
the crew. They were a motley looking bunch from Joe's time and so they
all looked vaguely like him - unshaven, unwashed, unsane.
Bugsy explained the whole thing and a woman called 'Mother Earth',
which Joe was later to find out was only a nickname and who was an
eco-warrior, said,
" We should get the sea back, man!" She was wearing a green outfit and
one that obviously hadn't been changed for a few hundred years, or, in
reality, about a few hundred years. But it only looked that why because
she had been crawling through tunnels for a few years, stopping people
building bypasses. She'd once stormed into a hospital to demand that
the bypass she'd heard about be stopped at once. When the surgeon had
explained, she'd left politely.
" It's not that simple," said Bugsy.
" Why not, polluting pig?" Bugsy looked stunned at this
criticism.
" All right, first of all, I'm not a polluting pig," he said. " I put
my bottles in bottle banks. I may not get them in the right ones some
times, but who can?" The people in the room murmured in a way that
suggested that they couldn't.
" And the problems are: a) we have a job to do. We shouldn't delay our
journey to Roguan any longer than is strictly necessary. And b) we
haven't the foggiest idea where they're taking it. And for all we know
they may be the local council come to clean it up or something." The
people in the room murmured something to the effect that they didn't
think this was very likely and Bugsy wasn't certain. Mother Nature felt
that this was about as likely as the man who's come to fix your fridge
actually managing to fix your fridge within the hour.
Mother Nature looked oddly familiar to Joe. He couldn't quite remember
where he'd seen her before but at the moment that wasn't the most
pertinent thing on his mind. What was included rashes of crispy bacon
and two fried eggs, but we won't go into that.
" We have to save the ocean, man," said Mother N.
" Ok," said Bugsy. " But will you please stop calling me man?"
" You are a man, aren't you?"
" Yes," replied Bugsy and then he replied it again, but this time with
a far deeper voice.
And so it was that after Peppy made some repairs to the outside of the
ship (for some reason he was used to vehicles breaking down and not
getting to their destination on time), that they hurtled off the planet
of Haloolawoola. They were in search of the huge spacecraft that a man,
who was called Data for some reason, just because he had an IQ higher
than 12 and carried glasses and a telescope, saw out of the starboard
porthole. He was another of the crew brought forward from the year
2002. He was rather squat, wore a little white coat and had a balding
head. He looked vaguely like one of those mad professors, with a ring
of hair round his head that made it look like Saturn.
" What did that button do?" asked Joe, when he and Bugsy were alone in
the bridge. It is a common belief that a bridge is a powerful place,
where brave men captain their huge ships across the galaxy and into
unimaginable danger. The truth was that after the first ship had been
built, it was pointed out that there'd have to be some where to drive
the thing and the space at the front was the only real space where it
would fit. In short, the first bridge was only designed because of
everything else in the ship. It was, in effect, an absence of space
that needed filling. Not a great story, I'll admit, but an interesting
piece of trivia.
" It 4th dimensionally spliced us," said Bugsy, flipping through the
pages of his Beano copy, that he was actually lucky enough to get
signed by Dennis the Menace himself. His Dad had hoped that he would
never found out what you can do with a big marker pen and a black
frizzy wig and thankfully, Bugsy was too stupid to.
" It did what?"
" At the moment that you pressed that button, we were spliced. One
version of us continued on to Roguan and another version, this one, I
think, went to Haloolawoola."
" So," said Joe, who felt like he was grappling with a Rubix Cube of
Incomprehension, " We are actually having those peace talks with the
Roguans?"
" Yes, I suppose we are," replied Bugsy, who then laughed because Ivy
the Terrible had just stolen a packet of sweets from a dolphin.

To Be Continued...