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Our hero for today is Bob. Bob is just, well, your everyday bloke. He enjoys vast quantities of Guinness and obsesses over hot dwarfs. Just as I say, a regular bloke. Or at least he thought he was. But today his famed ordinariness has been attacked by forces as yet unknown. It is with surprise and a fair amount of consternation that he awakes on a private jet, his arms bound and the torpor of a drug-induced sleep fogging his mind. Many wise and possibly important ideas have swept through Bob’s brain as he lay there readjusting to his surroundings. It is usually the case. You always get the good ideas when you’re busy and don’t notice them.
As Bob lay there he worked out a viable solution to global warming, reorganised the trade agreements of the world to allow for universal equality and profit for the good of all. As he was staring at the curved ceiling of the jet he figured out a safe and energy efficient method of splitting the atom.
But then he forgot all these things as the internal alarms kicked in to tell him that this wasn’t the cosy north east of England, all rain, poorly made snow and depressing regional broadcasting. This was an executive jet and he was tied to a trolley inside it. He experimented with the thrashing of limbs and the wild screaming of a man who wants to be somewhere else in a hurry and doesn’t much care if you get in his way.
From outside his field of vision a white coated figure moved to his side and injected him in the neck.
Through years of concentrated and careful self-abuse Bob had managed to build up a resistance to drugs, however even his fabled horse-tranquiliser sessions were nothing compared to the strength of solution now flowing into his bloodstream and the darkness began to descend, vision tunnelling to black.
Bob isn’t important. Some people even say he is less than that. But one thing Bob does have that is coveted by the world is a singular ability to talk his way out of anything. He can also talk his way into anything, if that be his wish. This skill only ever fails when he talks to women. For some reason his remarkable gift of the gab abandons him and he usually just ends up shouting abuse and saying things like “I’d really like to bone you”. Romantic and poignant stuff like that.
But his skills have not gone unnoticed by the governments of the world and for this reason the Americans, with usually subtlety and consideration for the feelings of others, have kidnapped him. They have a ‘situation’ that needs working out and apparently Bob is the only person in the known world able to solve it. That there should be anything so bad that Bob is the one to solve it is a sad lookout for the globe.
“Wake up,” shouts a voice. It’s an American voice full of gravel and old car parts. Bob refuses pointedly to awaken until he chooses to do so himself. For a start there is a good binding of eye-crust keeping his eyelids from parting. If he refuses to cooperate then they will have to change tactics. He knows that the next change of tactic will tell him the nature of this situation. Is he in serious trouble or do they need him too much?
“Please Mr Fleming, get up. We have to brief you.”
This sounded promising, he thought. He reasoned that at the very least there was a fair chance that he was not going to spend the next few days having rodents attached to his genitals. He opened his eyes.
He found himself staring at the rheumy eyes of an old man. White hair haloed his face and a mild smile teased at his lips.
“Ah! Bob,” he said, “Nice of you to awaken!” Whoever this is it wasn’t an American. The voice was that of an educated man, and a well to do man with a possible estate somewhere in Norfolk. Bob used his full faculties to formulate a concise and thoughtful response.
“Dwarf,” he said. The octogenarian moved back and began talking to a man in fatigues who stood by the door as if he was making certain it wasn’t going anywhere. The soldier looked at Bob and then left the room sharply and with the snap of a military obsessive. The old man returned to Bob’s bedside.
“That’s right,” he soothed “You may sit up, young man.”. He sounded reasonable enough, but Bob had also thought that Rudolph Hess ‘seemed a nice man’ and, ‘you can’t tell’ was his response upon the discovery that the nice man in the photo was ‘a bit of a monster’. He sat up. He appeared to be in a hospital. This he confirmed by the mild smell of disinfectant and the ridiculous amount of strip lighting. It reminded Bob that had once had an abscess on his bottom so large it had a real chance of having its own gravity well. That abscess had been lanced in a procedure that still made him fearful of anything medical.
“I hate hospitals,” he stated. The old man shrugged.
“You will not be here long. Just enough for you to recover enough for the next leg of the journey.” Bob didn’t like the sound of this, although some other more excitement-pursuing part of him thought it a fine idea. Better than being in hospital anyway.
“Journey?”
The old man smiled again. “Someone will come to answer any questions you may have shortly.” With that the old man left. Bob was none the wiser, which was not in the least ironic as he spent much of his existence in a state of perpetual confusion anyway. A moment later a uniformed man walked through the door.
This man was obviously some sort of war hero or super-general judging by the huge array of medals attached to his severely cut uniform. This man was tall, well built and with gun-metal grey hair cropped so short it was in danger of disappearing entirely. This man’s eyes were blue, but not the sort of blue that lulls you to sleep, more the kind of blue that sneaks into your house and slaughters you while you sit on the toilet reading the sports section. Bob thought he looked like a cross between Action Man and your first girlfriend’s father.
“Mr Fleming,” he began with a voice made from rusted razor-wire wrapped around something very, very sharp, “Please would you accompany me to the briefing room where we will brief you on the situation.” Bob certainly didn’t fancy staying here and Captain Hero was standing so erect that Bob’s back was making worrying twinges in sympathy.
He considered his options. “Okay then. Do you have any Guinness?”
General Psychopath gave him a withering stare and opened the door for him.
The briefing room was so large it confused people who weren’t ready for it. A stranger who had the misfortune to wander in one day was found a week later curled up in the corner begging the bad men to stop. In the middle of the room was a rosewood table so unfeasibly large…well, you get the picture. There were no windows but there was a whole lot of strip lighting.
Bob’s obsession and perpetual disgust with strip lighting came from him being perhaps the palest man to have walked the earth unhindered by freak show bosses. Under a good old fashion bulb he looked positively normal (note - statement currently under review by lawyers), but under a single strip bulb Bob would almost become translucent (note – statement verified by lawyers) - so much so once a doctor diagnosed Bob as suffering a cruciate injury from fully ten metres away. “Dammit I could see his insides!” said the doctor who later had to report for psychiatric invasive therapy as a result of the shock.
The uber-generale strode to the head of the room, Bob following in his wake. At the head of the table was a chair. It was facing away from the table as if there was someone sitting in it hiding until the last possible moment before revealing himself dramatically, possibly with associated lighting and radiophonic effects. As they approached the chair it spun around and the occupant dramatically revealed himself, and Bob sighed with undisguised disgust at the lack of any accompanying laser shows. Then he realised who the occupant was and felt vaguely queasy.
“Hello Bob!” said George W Bush, president and mascot for the goddam United States of the US of fricken’ A. The general became, for all intents and purposes, utterly immobile, possibly on the molecular level. Bob became still a little more surprised when a chirpy, public school-boy voice emerged from behind the president’s high executive chair, “Hello Bob!” it said. Then from behind the chair arose the toothy face and inexorable smugness of Tony Blair himself. What Mr Blair was doing crouched in front of the president before they entered the room does not bear thinking about….but it was possibly fellatio. Bob’s speech and cognitive functions were seriously impaired, but he rallied admirably.
“Hi guys!” he said. If it worked for Zaphod Beeblebrox then it could work for Bob. The general gave him a sideways glance without actually moving his eyes which was a neat trick but a bit scary too. George Bush zipped up his fly before standing.
“Bob Fleming. Your country needs you,” he said. Panic arose and Bob decided to forego the rest of the evening and escape via the use of his legs and some adrenaline but as he turned the old man was behind him and, tutting, stopped him in his tracks. He leaned close and whispered to Bob that it would be okay. For some reason Bob reckoned the old man didn’t have a clue and so punched him in the face before sprinting for the door. The old man collapsed in surprise and unconsciousness. Bob got about three yards when the general’s hand closed on his neck and found his legs losing their connection to the ground. Bob was turned towards the president, hanging like a giant ginger puppet. Bush laughed gently and said, “Don’t worry sonny, we’re on your side. How about we park ourselves around this table here and we’ll tell you what’s going on.” Bob was unceremoniously placed into a chair and then the two world leaders sat opposite. The smiles were gone and their faces were suddenly deadly serious.
“We have a problem that only you can sort out, Bob,” said Tony. There was a pause before he continued, ruefully looking at the prone figure of the old man on the floor, “But I wish you hadn’t punched the leader of the UN so hard though.”
On reflex Bob replied, “It was the Guinness.”
XXX
“So let me get this straight. You need me to persuade a mad, arthritic alien with chronic oldness that it would be, and let me get this right, it would be wrong to blow up the world and that - in order to really save the human race - it should simply hand over the keys to the spaceship and retire to a nearby rest home run by, and I want confirmation of this, the Catholics. Is that about right?” Tony and George glanced at each other and then back at Bob.
“Yep,” they said in unison, before Tony added, “And yes. Roman Catholics actually. Only they have the right level of avid, blindingly uptight disregard for the facts.”
Bob had been in some situations in his life. Only a year or two ago he had been caught trying to insert his penis into a Guinness bottle under the drunken and misguided thought that this would ‘…feed the little fella. Get him big ‘n strong’. This would not normally have been an issue, but the ladies of the rotary club annual gala meet did not find it overly endearing. He barely escaped with his life that day. His dignity had been savagely stripped away many years before.
Bob gave it as much thought as he could manage.
“Alright,” he said.
“Slam dunkin’!” exclaimed the president offering Tony a high-five which Blair somehow managed to turn into an uncomfortable handshake despite Bush’s attempted avoidance.
XXX
For the next few days Bob relaxed in the sumptuous pleasure of Camp David before, finally, a helicopter arrived. Not once in this time did Bob wonder about what in the HELL was going on. For some reason Bob’s brain had developed a scab over the festering wound of knowledge. This was the case as it had been for almost his entire existence. Bob simply assumed he was the only one that could help because of his own fabulousness.
That he was a pawn in some evil twisted plan was beyond his belief system’s capabilities. He simply thought that he really was the only person that could help because of his innate charm. But twixt cup and lip be many a spill, apparently, and it was just as he was boarding the helicopter that he finally realised that he shouldn’t really be here and that there were possibly 3.2 billion people in the globe with more charisma than himself (including the elderly), and altogether 6 billion with more wit.
“Hey…” he said, but he was bundled aboard and it was too loud to think. The helicopter took off and he found himself sharing a loud, windy shelf with three military types. But as time went on Bob began to think about what was going on, which was itself something of a breakthrough. He just about came to the conclusion that he was a pawn in some evil twisted plan when he suddenly smelled something that turned those thoughts to mush.
“Guinness?” he said. The military man next to him gave him a look before reaching under his seat to a bag and taking out a can of the creamy black stuff.
“Help yourself,” he offered. That marine officer would forever wonder how Bob had smelled the Guinness when it was still inside its sealed tin. He eventually wrote a book about it entitled ‘Smells and their way of making you scared’ and made no money whatsoever.
Bob’s relationship with Guinness was akin to religion. He worshipped and prayed to it. It, meanwhile, made his shit black and messed about with his head. That in itself is probably as fair a definition of religion as you’re ever going to read. Remember it well. He drank the can dry and threw it out of the window.
“Can I have another?” he asked. The marine shrugged.
“Sure, what harm can it do?”
It was dark when the helicopter swung over the lip of the volcano and plummeted to the landing area below. Everywhere green tents abounded and military people hustled to and fro. Arc lights made the bowl of the crater eerie and almost like daylight. At the centre of this veritable shanty town of action was a large and very boxy looking space ship. The ship was covered in the dust of mid-America and was singed in various places. Immediately around it the ground was scorched and bits of the ship were hanging off. The helicopter came to rest about a hundred yards from the wreck. Bob disembarked.
The term ‘disembarked’ is not really good enough to explain the way Bob half rolled and fell out of the helicopter into a pile on the floor. He popped up instantly, of course, insisting it was nothing really and that the pain in his head was natural and God’s way of telling him to drink more. He was greeted by a Jeep and a colonel who saluted him. Bob giggled.
“Got any more beer?” he asked. The colonel looked at the man before him and wondered what it would be like when the world was suddenly plunged into an ice age at the whim of an alien in a spaceship - an alien suddenly and irreparably insulted by a drunken northerner with a dwarf fixation. The colonel shuddered and opened the door for Bob, thus trusting to blind luck the future of his planet. They drove to the space ship perimeter where a group of soldiers escorted the mildly sleeping Bob into a tent. Our hero found himself surrounded by the cream of the British and US armed forces. He burped and then produced what is likely to be the world’s most wet fart. It was so wet it was in danger of clinging to the windows as condensation. Somewhere behind him the Director of Operations for the US defence department gagged.
A man approached. This man wore a white lab-coat and his face seemed to have been designed with crags and valleys in mind.
“Right, Bob, all you have to do is go into that spaceship and persuade the alien not to do anything bad and to give up before we nuke the whole goddamn region.” He smiled enthusiastically. Bob thought that sounded do-able, yet there was this nagging sensation that things were running a little beyond him at the moment.
“Why me?” asked Bob. For the first time. The lab-man smiled again.
“We did all the studies. We searched the globe. We went out there and used the most powerful computers known to mankind to help us. Then the alien told us it wanted to speak to someone normal. No military types. No diplomats or senators. Someone normal. If he had to speak to anyone not normal he would dematerialise the world.” The lab-man looked a little sheepish before he admitted they didn’t really know what that meant but it was unlikely to be much fun.
“So you mean I’m normal?” said Bob. The lab-man laughed. Even one of the guards sniggered.
“Normal? Well superficially you are, Bob. Entirely normal and as dull as waiting for dried paint to get wet again. Yes that is you”
“But surely I’m not the most normal person. I mean I have even considered going with a she-male.”
“Well you are going to seem the most normal to a psychotic, obsessive, degenerate alien with a penchant for global domination and self-absorption.” The lab-man smiled again, reassuringly.
The room went silent.
“Yeah, ok.” Bob got to his feet and walked out towards the spaceship.
There really was, thought Bob, no compensation for having the sheer balls to do something ludicrous and suicidal. Actually he thought about a dwarf, but the intent was the same. Bob strode manfully through the crowds of scientists and gob-smacked military men who had suddenly hushed as they realised what was happening. There before him was a spaceship. He had only ever seen three spaceships and those had existed one hundred percent inside Bob’s fertile yet bizarre imagination. And this example looked like each of them. It looked like a squatting box on struts. The first really salient point to Bob was that it didn’t actually have a door and the main part of it was thirty feet off the ground. As he stood under it he noticed that a small piece above him moved and a red light came on. He felt like he was being watched, so he smiled his most alien-endearing smile.
Then the most amazing feeling came over Bob and he found himself suddenly materialised inside the spaceship.
The whole place was empty apart from two chairs and some inventive lighting. It seems to be some sort of room, thought Bob, but he was more impressed by the materialisation thing.
“Hmm,” he said to himself, “Nice move.” Behind him came a whooshing noise and then a voice that could only be described as metallic and, possibly, alien spoke.
“Thank you. I could have blasted you, I suppose.”
Bob turned around and became the first person to meet an alien while drunk and not be in fear of his life. Bob had issues of self-delusion so unfeasibly large that he wasn’t quite certain whether they really existed or not. This alien wasn’t going to hurt him as he was Bob, the greatest and the most normal person in the known world. He was faced by a large green man made all the more unreal by the three heads and the thirty or so tentacles waving eerily in the reddish light of the spaceship interior. Not so bad, thought Bob, at least it isn’t a multi-headed be-tentacled alien. Then he screamed, a sound not unlike the scraping of nails across a seventies blackboard.
The alien shrugged (possibly) and said, “I could change into an image more suited if you prefer? I shall examine your preferences and change.” Bob screamed for a little while longer while nodding enthusiastically. The air shimmered and the alien was suddenly a hot dwarf wearing red suspenders and a peep-hole bra. Bob screamed again, this time in delight, but the alien misread and switched personas again, the air shimmering to reveal a regular person in their mid-twenties dressed in a white toga. Bob stopped screaming.
“Aww,” he said, “Where’s the dwarf?” The alien ignored him.
“I suppose you want to know what’s going on,” said the person in front of him. Bob nodded, not quite sure that his voice had returned to normal following some intense but enjoyable screaming. The alien man moved to one of the chairs and tacitly invited Bob to sit opposite him. He did so.
“Welcome to my ship,” said the alien, a smile tugging at its lips, “And please feel free to ask any questions that arise. I will briefly explain that you have been involved in an evil and twisted plot to take over the world.” Bob nodded. Seemed pretty kosher, he decided. The alien continued.
“We are aliens, and there are three of us. We have taken over your world.” The alien stopped, apparently assuming Bob might just have a question. He looked at Bob’s vacant expression of drunken disorder and figured he may as well forge on and hope some stuff sunk in through the Guinness fog.
“My brethren have assumed the identities of Mr Bush and Mr Blair.” Again there was a pause. This alien was going to be pretty upset if he expected Bob to say anything poignant and reflective. It sighed.
“They persuaded these people to search the world for the one person that fitted the right criteria. That person was you. I made the threats I did because I knew the result would be you boarding this ship and fulfilling your destiny.”
For a moment within the nodes and nodalities of Bob’s brain was a flicker of intelligence. A question was rising to the surface.
“Er,” said Bob, “So I am important in some way then, to your plans for world domination?” The alien laughed.
“No! They have already taken your world. Right now they work to exploit your resources. You are important because you, Bob, are the only person that can allow me to leave this festering, awful planet.” The alien bowed its head. “My brethren have abandoned me because I fail to accept their policy of rampant pillaging. I must remain earth-bound and in pain constantly….unless….”
Now was his chance to shine. Bob knew just what to say and eagerly blurted it out. “Yes?!” he asked. The alien leaned forward in some attempt at drama.
“My brothers think they have found you to persuade me to leave the ship and surrender, but that is not the case. You actually do have a special talent that my brothers don’t know about.”
The pause ensued. Bob was becoming worryingly sober. Then the alien spoke.
“You are a time traveller.”
Bob thought for a moment but there was nothing coming. Then, eventually, he figured out what to say. “What?”
“Its part of you, and only I know it. I searched the annals of your world and finally found a way to escape this world. You are the last known descendent of the time traveller that found his way into your star system and was trapped on earth for his life. You have time travel embedded in your genes.”
“Hurrah!” said Bob. He felt he could really do with a Guinness. The alien had leaned back as if the story was over.
Bob felt deep inside him for something to say.
“How exactly can I help?” The alien smiled at this honest, friendly and helpful earthling/time traveller.
“I need you to transport me back in time some 5 billion years.”
“Fair enough,” said Bob, “Although I warn you have a terrible sense of timing. What do I need to do?”
An hour later (after a shower and a meal of kebabs) Bob had been taken to the control room of the spaceship. The alien had explained the where’s and whys but this had all been filtered out by Bob with the final image only remaining. He had to stick his finger in a socket that said “Time traveller ignition” and twist the dial to minus five billion. He could do that.
“You sure this is going to work,” said Bob, “I am not really used to this sort of spaceship.” The alien, busy working at other controls, ignored him. Eventually he turned to Bob.
“Right. You must do it now. There will be some transferance fluctuations, but you are naturally immune to that, considering your ancestors.”
Outside the scientists had got bored waiting and were now playing softball, so when the spaceship suddenly blinked out of existence they nearly missed it.
Bob felt as if his insides had been attacked by a plague of honey-coated monkeys. But that soon wore off and the spaceship was suddenly and definitely in space. He could tell by all the blackness and sparkly lights outside the control room window. The alien whooped in happiness. Bob felt pretty damn impressed with himself.
“There. We have traversed time. Well done. Now I must move the ship into a space without a planet beneath it. For when we return the earth will again exist.” The spaceship blasted without gravity to hold it down and before long the alien turned to Bob. “Now you must turn the dial forward five billion years. To earthmen it will seem as if we have just disappeared and reappeared in orbit.”
Bob was about to comply when a mild concern strode through the impassive blankness of his mind and poked its way to his consciousness.
“But what happens to me?” The alien looked surprised.
“I hadn’t thought of that. Do you fancy coming with me on a journey of discovery, to search and fly through the skies of the universe, flirt with super nova and flip the bird at the event horizon of black holes?”
Somewhere inside himself Bob rejoiced. He had finally found something that he was good at and also found what it was he had been searching for his entire life. He had always known he was special, but now it was confirmed. He could now go where his dreams took him. Then another thought beat the hell out of the first one.
“Do you have any Guinness?” he asked. The answer would formulate his entire future. The alien pointed to a hole in the wall, smiling.
“If it exists, we can create it!”
Bob nearly died at the orgasmic thrill that went through him. One final thought squeezed out all the rest.
“I don’t suppose you’d, er, like to change into that hot dwarf again. We have a lot of time on our hands…”
The alien fluttered its eye lids and smiled shyly. Suddenly, behind a shimmer in the air, the dwarf appeared wearing fish-net stockings and a cheeky grin. Bob growled in lust.
“Why, Bob, I thought you’d never ask…”
The End
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