Chapter Five

The Quillifaxians, being the no-nonsense sort of chaps they are, long ago developed a way to solve the argument once and for all about how the Universe came to be. This, they reasoned, would allow them to get on to more interesting things: They invented a way to travel in time, then popped back to the Beginning of the Universe to take a look.

They discovered that it wasn't so much a big bang as a little speck that said, “Oh!” and then expanded rapidly in an effusion of color and faraway tinkling sounds.

The seven Quillifaxians who first traveled to the Beginning of the Universe were quite speechless, after which one of them spent several minutes blinking quietly to himself before asking, “It said, 'Oh,' didn't it?” To this, his colleagues mumbled something that sounded like, “Um...hrmph...yes...I think...could be...” To which he replied, “Right. We'll get on with things, now, I suppose,” and they adjourned.

It was quite a philosophical let down for them, you know. They reasoned that such a great philosophical let down is just what every aspiring time-traveler needs and resolved that the trip to the Beginning of the Universe was to be part of the curriculum for the Academy of Time Agents that would form a thousand years after their deaths.

Then they got on with pretending it never happened. Except for dubbing it “The Little Oh Event,” they never spoke of it again. As they were getting on in years and had discovered long ago what the important things in life were, they set about inventing several types of mixed drinks and a little thing called The Veil.

The Veil was a device that would cause the inhabitants of certain worlds, once they had invented devices to look into space, to see, basically, space. It wasn't very difficult to do because people like to believe in omnipotent beings who are for some reason preoccupied with them. As though omnipotent beings wouldn't rather go to the Omnipotent Being Ball or have mindbogglingly mindboggling discussions about philosophical issues far more advanced than non-omnipotent brains could handle. Something a little more taxing, for example, than whether the Universe is the result of a giant explosion.

These seven, who were to be known simply as the Founders, spent the last years of their lives traveling the space-time continuum searching for civilizations who would not be able to handle the knowledge that the Universe was teeming with life, much of it with bad fashion sense. Earth was one of these civilizations. Except for a brief period called the 1970s, Earth managed to exist showing little evidence that it had had any contact with the inhabitants of the teeming metropolis just outside its borders – except, of course, for a brief period known as the 1970s.

Chapter Four

“Intergalactic Playboy Fails To Deny Impregnating Yet Another Earth Woman.”

That was the headline on the front cover of Otis Dembley's copy of the Galactic Gazette. It wasn't the most interesting part of the story by any stretch of the imagination, although the editors at the Gazette certainly seemed to think it was. Otis himself was partial to the last sentence, which read, “Mr. Sargosian also revealed an intent to win the Games using his own master race of sentient reptiles from the Zonoid constellation, as seen from Mellius Five, and warns all interested parties that it is too late to stop him as his plan went into action tomorrow.”

Otis had found that particular sentence so significant, as a matter of fact, that he had sprayed a mouthful of multicolored liquid through his nose and onto his copy of the Gazette. He then spent several moments shaking his head and mumbling incoherently to himself. It was a very, very strong drink.

Judging by the somewhat odd structure of that particular sentence, Jelinek Sargosian had acquired the ability to travel in time.

From Mellius Five, the Zonoid constellation resembled a Zonopod, which was a sort of one-legged hopping duck creature, smoking a giant hookah. Otis didn't know of any master race of sentient reptiles from that constellation. The only thing of interest that he knew about Zonoid was a little blue planet called Earth and the squirming hoards of life that existed just outside its stratosphere, which was where he was sitting now, wearing the long flowing robes of the Time Agency. His were powder blue, which made his eyes quite dazzling as far as he knew.

Otis was eight hundred and ninety-nine years old. He was due, as he saw it, for retirement, a little point on which the Quillifaxian Time Agency enthusiastically disagreed with him. It had now been a sore spot between them for half a decade. His mission, as they saw it, was to guard Earth from Sargosian.

It wasn't that the Quillifaxian Time Agency cared that Sargosian was fathering children on Earth at an appalling rate. In fact, they didn't care if he managed to single-handedly influence the path of genetic evolution and create a pink-haired subspecies of hominids. If the women of Earth wanted to mate with him, that was their business, and they were perfectly free to choose their own evolutionary path. What the Agency did care about, however, was preventing Sargosian from destroying the entire human race as a side project, which is exactly what he had in mind.

The fact that Sargosian had now acquired time travel and had put his plan into action, meant that things were either about to go very well or very poorly for Otis. He only wished he knew which it was going to be so he could order the appropriate drinks. To his way of thinking, the Orgasmalade sort of presupposed a positive outcome.

As far as the Time Agency was concerned, as long as Sargosian was still planning to carry out the deed, Earth needed its own agent on the case. As long as Otis had no idea when the deed was to be done, there was nothing he could actually do about it. And as long as Otis was the only Quillifaxian with “special knowledge of Earth,” he was doomed to spend his time sitting in near-Earth pubs.

What the Agency hadn't considered, however, was how Otis had come about that special knowledge in the first place. They had failed to consider that, thirty-two years ago, he had gone to Earth to find a home for a young Quillifaxian boy whose parents, fellow Time Agents and good friends to Otis, had no choice but to go undercover on an even more daunting mission. The fate of the entire galaxy hung in the balance on that one. He often wondered if they had been successful.

If any Quillifaxian had knowledge of Earth comparable to Otis's, it was certainly that young boy. And so, between guarding the planet from the dastardly pink-haired playboy and keeping an eye on Tom, Otis rarely left Earth's immediate vicinity.

Lucky for him, Earth's immediate vicinity was home to the Pleasure Mall, a place where a colorful, orgasm-inducing drink called the Orgasmalade could be had for a reasonable price. As Tom Collins walked along the dark streets of Bucharest getting over his beer and practicing what to say to the girl he was planning to meet, Otis sat in a pub called Saturn Nine sipping one of these reasonably priced brain-smashers. He had long ago discovered that sipping ever so slightly produced a pleasant tingling sensation in out-of-the-way places and helped him avoid unnecessary embarrassment. That is, except when unsettling news items caused him to spray the drink through his nasal cavity. Having an unexpected orgasm in his sinuses in a public place was not the most un-embarrassing thing that had happened to him that day. Not by a long shot.

It was also quite possibly the strangest sensation that Otis Dembley had ever experienced, and he was a bit of a collector of strange sensations. He wanted to go on collecting them. In fact, he wanted to significantly speed up the collecting of strange and wonderful sensations and do so in a hurry. Retirement would help a great deal, he reasoned.

Therefore, in Otis Dembly's humble opinion, his mission was to present the Quillifaxian Time Agency with a suitable replacement before his nine hundredth birthday, at which time he planned to begin doing all sorts of things unbefitting a Time Agent. Tom Collins, as he saw it, was his last chance.

He hazarded a peek at the Gazette's front cover. Sargosian smiled back at him with a look that suggested he knew very well he was keeping an annoyed old man from his fun.

“Old man indeed,” Otis mumbled, and checked his watch. Four minutes until Tom was due to stumble through those arches. Otis had chosen to have his Orgasmalade at Saturn Nine because it was near a structure that appeared to be a magnificent yet completely useless golden arch, but was in reality a quite useful space portal. One could reach it from several starting points, including the Arc de Triunf in the middle of Bucharest, Romania. They had all been conceptualized by the Quillifaxians, meaning that the Quillifaxians had used their charm and wit to talk the people of Earth into building them. Later, and under cover of darkness, after using some high-tech juju to keep the natives away, had their own engineers add the technology that would link it to the Golden Arch of the Pleasure Mall.

To be fair to the Quillifaxians, the Earth arches really were only useless monuments most of the time. You see, Earthpeople have a peculiar habit of walking through anything that looks like a doorway simply because it's possible, as if they are expecting something interesting to happen. Therefore, in their infinite wisdom, the Quillifaxians decided to allow the people of Earth to explore them to their hearts' content most of the time. The rest of the time, a powerful repellent kept the Earthpeople away. There are only two ways to resist this repellent: The first is to be so utterly confused and frustrated by the fact that no one has ever managed to walk through a simple arch, that you vow to carve out a niche for yourself in history (or at least in the Guinness Book of World Records) by being the first. The second is to have previous knowledge about the Quillifaxian technological juju and its effects.

For someone who wasn't prepared for them, the effects of the repellent can actually cause one to go stark raving mad. This is because it gives the unfortunate person an unshakable sense that, if they actually dare to walk through the portal, various terrible things will, beyond the shadow of a doubt, happen to him. This means that walking through the portal anyway would be to most people like stepping out in front of an oncoming train even though they are aware it will turn them into a pancake with a side of mush.

Otis had passed through the Arc just last week to be sure that it was working and had been filled with the unshakable certainty that, should he foolishly insist on walking through, various organs in his body would turn into chickens and fly away.

Otis had strolled, run and hopped through so many of these portals on so many planets filled with people who weren't meant to go through them, that he quite looked forward to discovering what new horror was in store with each trip. He thought it was all quite silly. Organs turning into chickens indeed. But it took surprisingly little to keep most people from discovering what really was going on around them.

Otis checked his watch again. Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds.

He had spent many of his Earth-guarding hours in the Pleasure Mall, which was simply a cluster of bars, dance halls, music palaces, restaurants and trinket shops in orbit around Earth, held together in a sort of loose belt just beyond the orbit of Earth's only visible moon. It was quite a colorful place. The buildings, which ranged in size from quite large to barely large enough for ten people to squeeze into, tended to be silver, as they were all made of metal. Some, however, were various and sundry other shades of “metallic.” Saturn Nine, for instance, was a nice shade of green. In fact, on Otis Dembley's only trip to Augusta, Georgia in Earth's United States, he had seen a large beetle of such a compelling shade of iridescent emerald, that he'd had to stop at the nearest Earth pub and have the closest thing to his beloved Orgasmalade that he could find — a Tequila Sunrise. The server looked at him strangely when he insisted on having it in a martini glass, and it didn't have quite the same taste or physical effects, but it did help him stave off the strange bout of homesickness he was feeling.

He'd often wondered how people of planets like Earth could stand life in such a limited setting. It had hit him especially hard since he had just dropped off a nine-year-old Quillifaxian lad to spend his life on this backwater planet.

Being a time-traveler, however, had its own advantages. Otis had simply gone to check up on Tom every time he'd found himself near Earth at the proper period in the future. He'd observed, for instance, fifteen-year-old Tom learning to drive his Earth father's pickuptruck, twenty two-year-old Tom stealing a kiss under a tree at his university and thirty three-year-old Tom getting arrested for annoying a police officer.

That particular adventure would have caused Otis a coronary breakdown had Quillifaxians been able to have coronary breakdowns in the first place. He followed the situation long enough to ascertain that, while jaywalking downtown one evening, Tom had met a rather dour-looking police officer who was also jaywalking, in the opposite direction. Tom, being the sort of fellow that he is, simply couldn't resist pointing out that jaywalking was against the law as the two passed in the middle of the crosswalk. The officer arrested him, since arresting someone for jaywalking was rather silly, added the charge of, “Annoying an officer” which, for some reason, he didn't see as silly at all.

In the end, the judge let Tom go and fined the officer $150 for setting a bad example while in uniform.

A couple of years later, Otis had met seventy five-year-old Tom quite by accident on one of the moons of Faros. He didn't look a day over thirty-nine. Otis had Tom explain how he had gotten off Earth. He told Otis he'd been taking a walk in Romania one Friday night and happened upon a portal.

One minute, seven seconds.

Otis knew that most Earth space portals emptied at the Golden Arch. He also knew tonight was the night. He also knew that Saturn Nine will have been the first place Tom stopped in after his journey into the Cosmos. He did not know, however, that a chain of Krispy Kritter fast food restaurants had suddenly and inexplicably popped up in seventeen different countries, including Bulgaria, and featuring cricket burgers, which was much better than all the other fast food restaurants, which only had fried crickets as a side order.

As far as the people of Earth knew, life had always been like this. Spas had always offered sunning rocks and people with slightly green skin and the hint of scales had always been considered far more attractive than their plain old non-scaly counterparts. Otis had no idea that any of this had happened. He did know, however, that humans would cease to exist in very short order if whatever Sargosian will had done the following day was allowed to complete its ripple effect through time. He also knew that, if Tom was going to take it all in as quickly as he would have to in order to save the human race and Otis' retirement, he was going to need a very stiff drink.

“Excuse me,” Otis said to a passing server. “Could I have another of these? I'm expecting a friend.”

Nineteen seconds.

“And make it to go,” Otis said. “The fate of the human race is at stake.”

The waitress rolled the eyes of one head while the other smiled and said, “Sure thing, doll. I think I have a canceled one here, actually,” she said and zipped away.

Otis opened his mouth to thank her, but she had already zipped away. Otis checked his watch and wished the other man would hurry up.

Eight seconds.

Though Tom Collins was wholly unaware of any of it, he was about to have the most interesting time of his life.

Chapter Three

Thirty million years in the future, it was the previous day. While Jelinek Sargosian sat languidly in a corner of his red plush couch on the planet of Beljib in the Galaxy of Andromeda, something that should have been unnerving happened. Suddenly and without warning, a grinning head appeared on every television screen within broadcasting range from the Orion Constellation. It wasn't a human head, although it did bear a passing resemblance to one if the light was just right and one was in a fairly open-minded mood. It had a square jaw, a cleft chin and what looked like a plastic mold of wavy dark hair on its crown. The only thing that distinguished it from a real, live television journalist was its rather conspicuous lack of shoulders.

First, there was the usual expression of sheer bliss. Then it began to speak.

“Hello, people of the Universe, this is your favorite talking head with the fabulous show Good Morning Galaxy, here to give you the scoop on everyone who is anyone in the Milky Way, Andromeda...and beyond.” The head pretended to take a loud, deep breath. “Today, we have one Mr. Jelinek Sargosian with us.

“Actually, he isn't literally with us here in the studio,” the head continued in a whisper, as if Jelinek Sargosian didn't actually realize he hadn't traveled light years to sit in an abandoned television studio and was, in fact, lounging comfortably on his own couch.

“He's in his groo-o-ovy bachelor pad somewhere in Andromeda, the Galaxy that Really Gets You Going, and I'm...well I'm nowhere, aren't I? And everywhere. It's great to be me. Oh the irony. Now where was I? Oh yes,” it said with a delighted laugh and then a sigh. “Mi-i-i-ster Sargosian, is it?”

Station NTWT in the Orion Constellation had been around longer than anyone could remember and Mr. Head had been presenting the odd announcement as long as most people had been alive. In fact, Mr. Head had been presenting the odd announcement as long as most people's grandparents had been alive. That's because Mr. Head wasn't, in fact, alive. He had been designed by Herman, the nephew of the original NTWT station manager and owner, Slubwick Nathbottom XXVIII of the Orion Nathbottoms.

One morning, while enjoying his sardine sandwich in the only bathrobe he seemed able to find, on the rotating deck of the family's floating mansion, Slubwick Nathbottom XXVIII of the Orion Nathbottoms came to the somewhat startling realization that people of all species were prone to make a great deal of errors. He came to this realization while watching NTWT's news program Good Morning Galaxy, and had been quite startled when the news announcer had told everyone that the Mayor of Orion had a fetish for silly hats. Silly women's hats, for the most part, with pink flamingoes perched right on top.

Slubwick Nathbottom XXVIII had fallen right off his chair and nearly choked on his sardines. He'd figured that the only reason he hadn't died that day was a deep and abiding fear that his own newspeople would then tell the Cosmos that their station manager, the owner of NTWT, had died of a sardine sandwich while wearing a yellow bathrobe covered in delicate purple begonias. Slubwick Nathbottom XXVIII detested begonias.

He'd determined that he had to do something and do it quick, so he went with the very first plan that presented itself, and the very next second was screaming young Herman's name as if life and all that is sacred depended on it. The result of that few seconds of panic was Mr. Head.

“Hello everyone,” a silky voice said just as screens split all over the Galaxy, and in certain demographically sound areas of nearby galaxies, to reveal Mr. Head on one side and Jelinek Sargosian on the other.

Jelinek wore his trademark Anya Preznik silver suit, makeup and pink spikey hair. He sat with his legs crossed and one arm resting on his silver-clad thigh, with a very colorful, complicated-looking drink in his other hand. He was tall and thin and had the look of a very attractive spider.

On the bottom of Jelinek Sargosian's half of the screen appeared the words, BELJIB, ANDROMEDA.

Mr. Head's head turned slightly to its left and appeared to be looking at Sargosian. “Let's talk, Mr. Sargosian, about...” And here he sighed deeply. “...Alabama.”

Sargosian laughed. “What can I say, baby?” he said, gesturing with his long, graceful hands. “The girls love me there. But I can't honestly answer about the wee party-crashers, you know, babe. I never got buzzed about it.”

In order to “buzz” someone, or place an offworld call, one must own a Cosmobuzz 350 or later model. It is a nifty little device with a reach so far, that the occasional time traveler has used it to play a trick on a past self by calling his own phone, with the call scheduled to arrive on the day he purchased the Cosmobuzz.

“And did you give them your buzzcode? Hmm?” Mr. Head smiled innocently and batted his eyelids.

“Really, baby, what would be the point? Anyway, I told them I was from London.” Sargosian held out his hand to study his fingernails. “I really think it's time for a manicure.”

Mr. Head sighed. “It must be so lovely to have fingernails,” he said. “At this point though, I'd settle for a torso. Having only a head isn't the most fashionable thing after all. Makes it re-e-ally hard to get to first base.” Again, the forlorn sigh. Then he perked up suddenly. “Speaking of first base, what about the pink spaceship you're always in? Do you think you'll ever upgrade?”

“Oh there is no upgrade when you have Love Among the Stars, baby. She was my first ship and she'll be my last. She's the best flying bachelor pad in the Cosmos.”

Mr. Head turned to the camera and wiggled his digital eyebrows at the audience while making conspiratorial clicking noises with his tongue, then turned back, smiling innocently, as though Sargosian hadn't seen him on his own screen. “But why Alabama? Why the Southern United States? Is it part of a...greater plan?”

For a moment, Jelinek looked as though he had just found something interesting and slightly disturbing in his drink. Then he smiled and gave his characteristic eyelid flutter. “My spaceship just seems to like landing in Alabama, baby. Something about it reminds me of home.”

He sighed and gazed off into the distance, allowing his hand to travel delicately to his chest. Jelinek Sargosian was many things – intergalactic playboy, celebrity, technophile, sports fan. He was the sort of person who appeared on the covers of magazines when he did something and about whom magazines speculated when he didn't do anything. Most of all, however, he was simply a bored celebrity, which was one of the reasons he had decided to destroy the human race. Or rather, unmake the human race.

It wasn't that Sargosian had anything in particular against Earthpeople. In fact, he was quite fond of several and would be quite sorry for them to cease to ever have existed. It's just that they weren't very good at Tailball, mostly because they hadn't got any tails.

You see, Jelinek Sargosian had a lot of money riding on the next Tailball game of the season, which wasn't to take place for another five Earth years or so. His current team was made up of Trilfinars, which weren't half bad. But he wanted more of a sure thing. He wanted homo-reptilians, a species that could have been born if only someone had been there in the Carboniferous Period of the Paleozoic Era to prevent what became the mammalian and reptilian lines ever splitting apart.

He had come up with the idea quite by accident one afternoon while fiddling with his Exponential Event Horizon Calculator. It is a device that allows a user to type in a particular set of circimstances, and read every possible outcome for as far into the future as he would like. A man could type in, for example, “Have two more drinks at the Saturn Nine on July 17. Next two days,” and get startling results like, “You stumble into your spaceship, set it to 'automatic' and circle home world for two days with the worst hangover you've ever had, 20-percent probability.

“You start a conversation with a pretty girl and annoy her until she decides to make a run for it, then stumble into your spaceship, set it to 'automatic' and circle your home world for two days with the worst hangover you've ever had, then wake up with the unshakeable impression you've been a complete idiot, 30-percent probability.

“You start a conversation with a different pretty girl, who finds you irresistably attractive and you both circle your home world for the next two days, 45-percent probability.

“You stumble into someone else's spaceship and wind up slaving in a fish-packing plant on a remote moon on the edge of Andromeda, remembering the worst hangover of your life as the last good time you ever had, 5-percent probability.”

The Exponential Event Horizon Calculator is purchased mainly by people who enjoy having exotic new things to worry about and saying, “I told you so” a lot. Jelinek Sargosian, on the other hand, had purchased one so he could see what might happen if he failed to somehow spawn a championship Tailball team. He didn't like the sound of, “You are replaced by younger, prettier celebrities and die in anonymity, 92-percent probability.”

Interestingly enough, the Exponential Event Horizon Calculator was the device that gave him the idea to take drastic measures to create a winning team so that he would be remembered for something more than just having had a pretty face. However, he wasn't exactly operating in secret. The Quillifaxian Time Agency had known for some years that he had made much more frequent trips to Earth than even the tabloid news broadcasts had suspected, and not merely because he thought the girls were pretty. The Time Agents had known for some time that he was searching for the exact moment in Earth's evolution when he could step in and nudge the homo-reptilians into existence, thereby preventing the birth of the human race.

After all this time, he had finally found his event horizon. He had made it back in time. He had completed his mission. He only had to sit back and wait until the temporal ripple had caught up with the present.

Without warning, Jelinek Sargosian leaned forward and looked at Mr. Head's audience, and therefore Mr. Head, right in the eye. For a moment, Mr. Head's expression became decidedly less smug as Jelinek Sargosian's voice became much lower.

“I've got something much more interesting than Alabama Earth babies if your audience wants a real story,” he said. “Something exciting. Something that will alter the course of history. Of course, they'll have only about a day and a half to appreciate the humor of it all before they cease to exist.”

Chapter Two

Thirty million years in the past, Jelinek Sargosian landed on the mucky, muddy ball of rock that was to become Planet Earth. Specifically, he landed in what was to become Paris, in a marsh a quarter-mile away from the spot where the Eiffel Tower would have one day stood. It was the spot where an unassuming amphibian with droopy eyes was to crawl lazily out of his hole, yawn, blink at the sun and scratch himself. He would then wander away from his hole toward a rather interesting aroma, and eventually find the burrow of a female amphibian of his species. They would share a passionate few days after which he would wander away for a snack bucket of insects and be subsequently eaten by a larger amphibian of a slightly different species, leaving the female to spend the rest of her days attempting to invent language just so she could think of something terrible to call him.

Specifically, she would try to invent French, because terrible words sound so wonderful and definite in French, even though she would be completely unaware that she was in Paris, and that she was the grandmother of the human race.

You see, one of the spawn she would now carry was meant to continue a line that would evolve into a fascinating creature called a mammal, which would grow hair and sprout toes and lead into a race that would invent the cell phone. The grandmother of the human race had no idea that she was to be responsible for a whole new life form, or that her descendents would give speeches about world unity, find a way to go to the moon and invent the fart joke.

If she had known, she probably would have done things differently. She probably would have lived a better, more productive life. She probably would have made sure she was not at home the day the strange male with the droopy eyes came to call. “C'est la vie,” she might have said.

Earth scientists spend a great many nights wide awake inventing ways to keep the fact that all human life began in Paris a secret, especially from the Parisians. They would have done better to keep that secret away from Jelinek Sargosian, an alien from Andromeda with high cheekbones and pale, baby-soft skin.

From his hot-pink spaceship, simply called, “Love,” Jelinek Sargosian gazed out at the muddy marshes of Precambrian (???) Earth. He looked at his silver Ulik Zggthwp boots, fashioned from the irridescent hide of the Milmian Moonsnake, the poison of which was the main ingredient of a drink known as the Orgasmalade. The bite of the animal was always lethal, as no one had ever been successful in getting any of its victims to take the antedote.

“Open the door, Love,” he said resignedly.

A voice came from everywhere and nowhere all at once as the door opened. “I was rather hoping we could dock at the space ports of –”

“Not now, Love,” Jelinek said. “I'm contemplating mud.”

The mud below bubbled at him. Jelinek Sargosian sighed. He could not get over how unspeakably dull creating a master race had proved to be. Traveling light years do discover the exact moment in time when the fateful combination of genes was to take place and pave the way for the birth of the human race, then finding a way to turn Love into a timeship, so that he could come back here and glomp through the mud to turn around a lizard...it was maddening.

Jelinek Sargosian, the hottest lover in seven solar systems, did not glomp. He sighed. The mud squmped at him as if to say, “Well what did you expect? You can't just create a master race with no muss or fuss, you know.”

Jelinek glared at the mud. He absolutely did not want to go out there, not even to get his name firmly etched in the oh-so-sparkly tablets of history. There was a tickle somewhere inside his brain, just a little wiggle of electricity that gradually morphed into the spark of an actual idea. Jelinek grinned the sort of grin that only the truly visionary or the truly insane can grin. The trouble with telling them apart is how the corporations respond to the results of their troubles.

“Ra-da-arf!” he called, and whirled around to find a rather gangly looking robotic dog staring at him with great expectation, mouth open and lights flashing happily. The Radaarf Seventy Thousand was to be the latest in AAI – Anticipatory Artificial Intelligence. Not only could man's best friend help him out of a jam, it could do so without that pesky step of having to be given a command. Or even a suggestion. Jelinek found it wildly unnerving and had been trying for several months now to trick the artificial dog into staying on various worlds. It had never worked, of course, because its telepathic circuitry had always enabled it to beat him to the punch, so he had given up the idea entirely. As it turned out, it was a good thing the positronic pooch was still with him.

Jelinek bent down eye level to the dog and tried to appear as warm and friendly as possible. The dog tilted its head and made a confused beeping noise. “Radaarf,” Jelinek began warmly. “I want you to do something for me. All right, boy?”

The dog's lights blinked hesitantly.

“Good boy. Now, I want you to go out there in the mud and travel to these coordinates,” he said. “Love,” he said to the ship, standing again. “Give Radaarf those special coordinates we talked about.”

“Yes,” the ship said. “We talked. I thought maybe we could talk about something stimulating, something appropriate to my vast – ”

“Not now, Love. It's time to alter the course of Earth history.” He twisted a dial on one of his rings. A pink holographic digital display indicated it was nearing lunchtime. He had to undo the human race and leave in time to make it to an interview with Good Morning Galaxy the day before he left.

Chapter One

On his last evening as an Earthman, Tom Collins sat in a gloomy pub in Bucharest, Romania, blissfully unaware that several million years in the past, an alien with hot pink hair was undoing the evolution of humankind so that a master race of reptiles could be born instead.

In truth, blissful was not an entirely accurate description of Tom's mood that evening, even if he didn't suspect the human race was in danger. He was actually feeling a bit grumpy. He was also staring at the bottom of his beer mug. He wasn't overly fond of the bottom of his beer mug, because the fact that he could see it meant that his beer was gone.

It hadn't been a particularly good beer, but he missed it just the same. He had considered the possibility of ordering another to help himself get over it, but worried a bit whether it would get along with the three pints already in his stomach, and he had to take the metro to a local hostel where he was meeting a nice English girl he had run into quite by accident the day before.

Being even slightly inebriated on the metro wasn't at all a pleasant state to be in. It was a bit like being an insect trapped inside a kaleidoscope in the hands of a gleefully sadistic child, and since Tom also had a tendency to forget he was in Romania when he overdrank and became paranoid he might have had a stroke and forgotten English, the whole experience was a complete downer.

He reflected that it probably wasn't a good thing that he knew this.

So he decided against a fourth pint of beer and opted instead to stare dejectedly into his empty glass. It was only 9 o'clock. He still had two hours before it was time to be at the hostel. He wondered how a nice crunchy handful of crickets would taste. Then he decided not to wonder why he had wondered that. He decided that leaving it alone would be the best thing to do.

Tom decided to stop staring at the bottom of his empty beer mug and instead glance furtively at the television screen overhead, on which two soccer teams went at it in the mud. Two old men sitting next to him talked alternately to the screen and to each other, in Romanian.

One of the old men gesticulated at the television and said something that Tom suspected he would not have repeated to his mother. Tom sighed and reflected how seriously some people took their sports.

He had gone to the pub partly to improve his mood in preparation for his date. Had he not been sitting in a pub in Bucharest, it would have been apparent to anyone looking that it had not worked. In fact, it was safe to say that Tom was in absolutely the worst mood of his entire life—at least the parts he could remember, as there was nothing before the age of eight that he could recall except for snippets of the most outlandish dreams. Like the one in which he was gazing languidly over a purple marsh or the one in which a strange, three-legged creature was apparently attacking a man with a series of violent, eardrum-shattering burps.

Since Tom was, in fact, sitting in a pub in Bucharest, people simply assumed he was busy wondering whether to have a late dinner of cabbage rolls. That is what was usually going on in the mind of a Romanian whose eyebrows appeared to be considering what life nearer his nose would be like. Tom was not, however, even entertaining the possibility of thinking about dinner or cabbage rolls. Aside from a sudden preoccupation with where he might find a nice little hole in which to sleep away the winter, safe from predators, he was simply bored.

Tom's boredom wasn't a normal sort of boredom. It was not the sort that visits on a lazy afternoon, and causes one to wonder what life would have been like had one become an entomologist. It was more the sort that moves in with all its luggage and its parakeet and changes the television channel just when you're interested. He'd felt that way since August, when he'd said goodbye to his family and the high school where he worked as a science teacher, and boarded an airplane for a year-long sabbatical in Europe. He had hoped he could rely on his ability to hide in pubs to get him through. As it turned out, his boredom had been to Europe and already knew where all the good pubs were, and the bad ones as well.

As a result, Tom made like a streak of lightning across the continent in an attempt to shake it, and ended up in Bucharest, where boredom had surprised him around a corner, clocked him on the head and sat on him.

Tom had boarded that airplane on his 39th birthday. The plan had been to find himself before his 40th birthday, to return home a changed man, a man with a purpose and a mission. A man who knew without a doubt what it was all for, and who could talk nonsense about European beer with some authority.

It would have cheered him up considerably to know that those strange dreams from his childhood weren't dreams after all, and that a man from the Galaxy of Andromeda was somehow involved.

It wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed his life in Georgia. His family had loved him, and he'd loved them, although they had a strange preoccupation with nailing the heads of animals to walls. He'd always had a difficult time sitting alone in his parents' living room, surrounded by the majestic antlered crowns of stags with eyes that seemed large enough to encompass the entire cosmos. Even though he'd never shot anything in his life, he'd almost been compelled to become a vegetarian on the spot. He was prevented, however, by his love of fried tripe which, he had long since suspected, wasn't genetic.

Even without being told, Tom had always known he'd been adopted. He would have been positively sure that even a Trafalgarian Megosaur would have been able to see he wasn't actually related to the people he called his family, had he ever actually seen a Trafalgarian Megosaur, or knew that they existed. They were short and heavy, with copious freckles and a predilection for spitting and using tobacco in any way it could be conceivably used, even as a salve for insect stings. In fact, they closely resembled the people Tom called his family. At the age of eleven, Tom had stood five and a half feet tall. Before he was through growing, he had gained another nine inches. He had always been thin—pleasantly so, he thought—with a mass of curls that could make a girl weep with envy.

It had made his father, Earl, weep on occasion. The English accent Tom seemed stuck with didn't do much for his dad's cheerfulness at those times either. Earl was a man who drove a pickup truck held together by duct tape and drank Budweiser, except when Tom's mother Laureen was going through a phase when she liked to watch Spiderman movies, put her hand over her heart and say, “Oh, that Toby Macguire.” At those times, Earl drank Bud Light.

Tom preferred to drive into town and drink at one of the downtown pubs with his buddies from the local college. If one of his strange moods hit him during a drink sessions, he would begin to babble about being destined for something more, and one of his buddies would tell him to quit the high school and put in an application at the college, since he'd had his doctorate since his thirtieth birthday anyway.

“That's not what I mean,” Tom would invariably say. Then his friend, whichever one had made the suggestion this time, would shrug and suggest they take a couple of canoes out on the canal that weekend, or have a cookout, or go to the local strip bar.

The local strip bar was called the Discotheque and featured a woman with a giant constrictor of some sort. She was, predictably, called The Snake Lady. Tom thought how nice it would be if she'd had a name like Serpentina, worn a veil and played exotic music. His friends thought that was a weird idea.

Tom had always felt a bit out of place, but had gone through life with a dull certainty that he'd find out what the heck he was supposed to be doing at some point before his 40th birthday. Forty had always seemed like a reasonable demarcation line. That certainty had always made him frighteningly cheerful, as though he were waiting for something simply wonderful to happen, except when strange periods of melancholy took him. During those times, he would climb on top of his trailer and look at the stars as though he was trying to see through something. At times he became preoccupied with the color pink and thoughts of David Bowie, and wondered if someone were whispering to him.

He decided not to mention that last part to anyone, being fairly certain it wasn't a good sign to think someone might be whispering to you, especially when you couldn't actually hear anything.

Sometimes his cousin Buddy would come over from his trailer and ask, “What'cha doin'?” It was a question Buddy had probably asked him dozens of times by now, to which he always replied, “Scanning for intelligent life. It seems the only direction left to look.”

“Huh?” Buddy would invariably say.

“My point exactly,” Tom would invariably answer.

Then Buddy would climb up and the two of them would lay on the roof and gaze at the stars, their reverie interrupted only by the random hooting of owls in the woods surrounding the family property and Buddy's occasional hawking into his spitcan.
If Tom had known that those dreams from his childhood were actually memories, he would have spent many happy hours searching for a way off the planet and into that glittering world of silver suits with ridiculously large, pointed shoulders.

As it was, he simply found it by accident one Friday night in Romania while walking off his beer.