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.