The Really Wild and Exciting Adventures of the Peacenik Vogon, Part Five
Created | Updated Jul 13, 2005
Dedication: Kathryn helped.
Disclaimer: DO NOT DRINK. IF YOU MUST, DO NOT DRIVE. AND NEVER, EVER, EVER TRY TO IMITATE THE ATOMANSPLITZER, A POTENT SUBSTANCE THAT SHOULD NOT BE DUPLICATED WITHOUT VOGON SUPERVISION.
THE STORY SO FAR
Since crash-landing on Earth, I have achieved the following:
Escape from a sinking ship with my crewmates Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect, and Zig/Zag Beeblebrox (Zaphod's Siamese twin sons).
Acquaintence of a plump young Earthling named Alice Gray.
Grand theft auto (actually, Alice was largely responsible for the theft of her stepmother's RV, but I helped).
Severe endangerment of a hitchhiker named Arthur Dent, who thereafter joined our half-baked search for a spaceship repairman in Roswell.
The nastiest brawl a hamburger joint has ever seen.
Evasion of a screaming mob.
Utter destruction of an AM/PM gas station in Oakdale, California.
As this chapter begins, our party is gathered outside the RV, recovering from the gas station incident.
"A dog?!"
This was Zaphod, who for some reason believed those two words could build a coherent picture of... well, whatever he was trying to make into a picture.
We were camped by the side of the road, someplace between a crummy town called Escalon and a slightly less crummy town called Manteca. ("Manteca", by the way, means "lard" in Spanish.) A mind-numbing stretch of alfalfa fields surrounded us, reaching as far as the eye could see. Three corrugated metal shacks were the sole interuption of this consistently boring landscape until an irregular grey streak rose faintly in the distance. I had at first imagined the vague landmark to be a bank of clouds, but was corrected by Alice. She told me they were actually a range of unattractive and inhospitable mountains, behind which the sun was disappearing. We'd turned the porch light on, but the light did us no good; it was completely blocked by the hundreds of moths jockeying for position around it. Apparently, fifteen hours of daylight didn't satisfy their sunbathing requirements.
I was squatting in front of a small fire, absently roasting seven hot links for dinner while staring intently down the road to make sure no police had followed us. Alice, sprawled on a rough blue blanket, was studiously reading a United States road map. Ford was parked on the edge of the blanket, drinking a can of cola and watching a small television that he'd found in the RV storage space. Arthur was sitting in an extremely rackety lawn chair, staring at the darkening sky and muttering nervously. Every now and then, he would twitch, and I would threaten to smack him for it. He would say, "Good idea," and go back to muttering. (Gradually, his reactions to external stimuli had segued from absolute hysteria to furtive paranoia to impenetrable despondency. At least he had gotten past the stage of screaming every odd second.) Zig and Zag were sitting cross-legged in the dirt, holding a furry, wiggling object in thier arms. Standing over them was Zaphod, glaring at them with all three arms crossed.
"What possessed you to adopt a dog?" he demanded.
Zig looked sharply at his brother, who shrugged. "We were just hanging around behind the gas station, waiting in line for the bathroom..."
"Why didn't you use the bathroom in the RV?" Zaphod interrupted.
"Alice told us to use public toilets whenever we could so she wouldn't have to empty the sewage tank," Zig offered.
Zaphod shot a look at Alice, which was totally disregarded. She was too busy referencing a Triple-A tourist guide.
"As I was saying," Zag resumed, "we were standing there when we saw some guy sneaking around, hiding a box under a bush. Naturally, we thought the box was a stash of girlie magazines and booze, so we went to check it out."
"'Girlie magazines'?" Arthur parroted, obviously requesting further information.
Zig clarified. "Sometimes we see our dad sneaking around when he thinks we aren't looking, and that's usually what he's trying to hide."
"I see," Arthur said, abdicating any further discussion of the subject.
"So, we opened the box-" Zag continued.
"What if it had been a bomb?" I interjected, feeling I should do something to completely destroy the flow of conversation.
"Who asked you?" Zaphod barked.
"I asked me," I muttered, turning my attentions back to the franks.
"So, we opened the box-" Zag repeated.
Zaphod stopped him. "She has a point there. What if it HAD been a bomb?" (I smirked.)
"It wasn't," Zag persisted. "So, we opened the box-"
"You would have been blown to bloody smitheroons, is what," Arthur declared flatly.
"It wasn't, and we weren't," Zig snapped. "Now, Zag left off where we opened the box-"
"You mean smithereens, Arthur," Ford corrected, never looking away from the TV.
"No, I meant smitheroons," Arthur countered as Zig/Zag gritted their teeth. "Smithereens are merely very very tiny, while smitheroons are small on a subatomic level. You see, to be utterly destroyed is technically impossible, but getting blown to smitheroons is about as close to utter destruction as you can get--"
Zig/Zag finally snapped. "SO WE OPENED THE BOX!!!"
Zaphod waved a Fatherly Finger at them. "Don't you know it's not nice to interrupt?"
Zag wanted to tell him in no uncertain terms that he DID know, but Zig got his word in first. "We were disappointed to find this fuzzy thing in the box instead of booze, but it seemed to like us. So we kept it. We didn't figure you'd mind."
Zaphod snorted. "Maybe I wouldn't have minded, except you picked up this flea bus just before we began a high-speed RV chase with the police!"
"Which is on the news right now, by the way," Ford interjected.
I dropped the hot dog skewers and joined Ford in front of the telly.
Some girl with a penchant for hairspray and lipstick appeared onscreen, cheerfully describing the havoc we had unleashed upon the unsuspecting Oakdale business district. "Late this afternoon, a devastating chain of events was triggered by an accident at the Oakdale AM/PM gas station." Images of an erupting fireball, captured by a shaky camcorder, underscored the girl's narration. "Emergency units summoned to the scene spotted a stolen RV, which recklessly fled the city limits. Though no injuries have been reported, damages in excess of $35,000 were caused by the rampage." Footage of our flight was jerky and clumsy. One could easily percieve that it had been haphazardly collected, barely in time for the evening news slot. I had seen better compositions on the Slug Channel.
Zaphod tapped my shoulder. "Pythia, the hot dogs are... Hey, look there!" Zaphod pushed me aside and pointed at the screen. "I'm on TV!"
"Not an appearance to brag about," Ford grumbled, swatting Zaphod out of the way. "Both your heads are screaming in panic and you're clinging so tightly to that armrest that I'm surprised it didn't break."
"Quiet," I insisted, turning the set's volume knob.
The hairspray addict had reappeared by this time to conclude her report over Ford and Zaphod's bickering. "...total destruction of seven shop fronts, six parked cars, five parking meters, four streetlights, three telephone poles, two bicycle racks..."
"And a partridge in a pear tree," Zig/Zag's voices sang in perfect two-part harmony.
Arthur's head lolled over towards me. "The hot dogs are burning," he observed.
I glanced at them and started. The franks were not simply scalded or charred; they had caught fire. I groaned as yet another chance for a decent meal slipped through my chubby fingers. Hardly able to see the point of fixing another batch, I got a jug of water and dashed it over the fire, irretrievably scalded links and all.
Alice looked up from her map for the first time in half an hour and proceeded to describe our route. She said there was supposed to be an onramp for Interstate 205 in Manteca, which would in turn connect with Interstate 5, which was meant to take us hundreds of miles south before we took Interstate 10 to Interstate 25 for the turn-off on Something-whatever 70... or something like that.
Zig/Zag gaped. "Does it worry you that nobody here understands what you're saying?"
Alice shrugged. "The United States freeway system is the second most unnatural thing on Earth," she explained.
"What," I asked for the sake of sheer morbid curiosity, "is the first most unnatural thing on Earth?"
In perfect unison, everyone replied, "The automobile."
Everyone, that is, but Ford. He was vainly coaxing some incomprehensible object to do something it obviously had no intention of doing. Upon closer inspection, I discovered the thing was a battered, square console with an insanely complicated array of buttons on it. "Whatever that is, it seems to vy for the automobile's lead," I told him.
Ford gave me the dull look of someone who has just been told his vision of Paradise was in reality an outrageous mind trip induced by too many allergy pills. "This is -or was- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he sighed. "It used to be the greatest accumulation of wit, wisom, and plain old-fashioned gibber in the known Universe. Thought maybe I could use it look up information on dogs and show the kids what they were getting themselves into. But something..." He was struggling to finish, I could tell. Bravely, he set his jaw and went on. "Something happened to the Guide. Now..." It was beyond him to continue. But Zaphod was too intrigued to let the topic lay.
He squatted on the blanket. "Ford? What happened to the Guide?" He asked this as if he didn't want to know, although he was dying to find out.
Ford nearly choked up. "InfiniDim took it over."
Zaphod's four eyes went wide. Arthur collapsed in his chair, stunned. Ford, hiccuping back his emotion, worked desperately at the Guide like a man giving his best friend CPR. "Come on, you accursed hunk of nanotechnolgical idiocy!"
The fight was noble, but futile. Everyone has struggled in the name of a lost cause before, and occasionally we give up when some ultimate blow tells us, "Kid, if at first you don't succeed, do something else." More frequently, though, we just keep slaving away blindly until it occurs to us that we have been slaving for some time now and even if we slave for the rest of eternity, success will remain infuriatingly beyond reach. The latter conclusion closed in on Ford, but he held on to hope with the fervor of a true zealot as afternoon faded to twilight.
Without warning, Ford gave up. He stood, cradling the expired relic, and began humming "The Betelgeuse Death Anthem". Somehow, we all knew that we were about to witness something significant, so we all shut up and watched as he walked towards the street. Alice muted the TV, which was showing some noisy footage of a raving madman on Alcatraz Island. Ford walked with slow, shuffling strides to the center of the oncoming traffic lane. He spotted a pair of headlights coming into focus on the obscure horizon. Solemnly, he placed his Guide slightly to the right of the center line. Wiping a tear, he walked back to the RV.
Zaphod realized too late what Ford had on his mind. "Hey! What the zark do you think you're doing?!"
Ford ignored him. He needed to grieve. "Zaglabor astragard..."
The car, a chunky grey Astrovan, roared past. The poor Guide never had a chance. "Hootramansion Bambriar..."
CRUNCH!
Ford winced. It had been, as Arthur would say, crushed to smitheroons.
"We have witnessed today the death of a great book," Ford moaned. He went moping back into the RV. "Zaglabor astragard..."
One by one, we followed him.
Arthur found his box of Lipton tea bags by sitting on it. For several moments, he stared at the crushed yet viable tea bags and wondered if fixing himself a cup might improve matters. Indecision passed and he almost made for the kitchette area, but in the end couldn't convince himself it was worth the effort. I eyed the box ravenously, but Arthur was clearly not willing to share (he growled at me) so I buggered off.
Alice was the very last to come inside. She dusted and methodically folded the blanket. She turned off the TV. She paid so much attention to folding the map that for once it came together right side out the first time. She gathered these items and the Triple-A book into her arms.
For a few minutes, she just stood outside with her hand on the doorknob. When she finally came in, I asked what had kept her so long.
"I was watching the gold of merry sunset give way to deep, despairing gloom," she breathed, slumping.
It was then that I realized we were all going to need something much, MUCH stronger than Lipton.
********************(okay, funeral's over, people!)
I hustled everyone right back outside again. Never mind that pitch black night had descended. Never mind that giant mosquitoes were out in force, armed with infrared goggles and stun guns.
Work space is vital for the birth of an Atomansplitzer.
First, I gathered lots and lots of evil liquids that happened to be lying around. (First rule of an Atomansplitzer: Never use the exact same ingredients twice.) These I poured into the sink. I found it would probably help if I plugged the sink first, so I started over. Then I got a brand-new plunger and proceeded to mix said liquids thoroughly therewith. When the rubber part of the plunger began to bubble, I tasted a drop of the volatile compound.
As a direct result of this taste-test, I passed out. When I came to five minutes later, I had a whomping headache and a successful mixture. I siphoned the drink into some glasses and added little umbrellas, which promptly dissolved for a nice mellow overtone. Then I let the guys, who were annoyed and covered with nasty mosquito welts, come in for their share. I was slightly curious as to how they would react- I had never served an Atomansplizer to a carbon-based lifeform before.
Ford was at once suspicious. "Is this safe?"
"Not by any means," I replied evenly.
He relaxed. "Oh, good. Give it up and I'll gulp it down." He leaned over the table and sniffed his glass. "Very-"
An Atomansplitzer is like gasoline in that it is more dangerous as a gas than as a liquid. Ford passed out and came to five minutes later. "-nice," he concluded. "Do I detect molten umbrellas?" He sat on his face and went incommunicado until a future point in the story at which he will snarl, "Infininininin...JERKS!"
Zaphod took a pair of tongs from the silverware drawer and cautiously picked up his glass with them. "What's in this stuff?"
I cuffed him. "Whoops," I said sheepishly. "Reflex. I do that whenever people ask."
"Secret recipe, eh?"
"If you replace 'secret' with 'illegal in most of the Galaxy', then yeah, kind of."
"Sounds like a party to me," Zaphod yapped before tossing down the whole contents of the glass- half via one throat, half via the other. When the two halves reunited at the junction, a faint boom was heard, and something caused Zaphod's faces to rearrange in various ugly patterns. A moment later one head lost consciousness. The other took time to say, "Wow, I really needed that," before joining its partner in blissful oblivion. The temptation to write "LOSER" across Zaphod's foreheads was a strong one, but I nobly resisted- until he began snoring, that is. My impulse satisfied, I noticed he still had not revived and took that as an invitation for an encore. Ergo, I put something incredibly nasty in his shirt, which he will not discover until Chapter Six.
"What's that smell?" Zig/Zag queried, sniffing the air bemusedly.
"Never mind," I said. "Drink."
Zig/Zag looked at the menacing beverage: Zig eagerly, Zag warily. "What's the legal drinking age on this planet?"
"Older than you," I retorted. "Drink anyway."
They stared hard at each other to see who would chicken out. I left them to this and turned on Alice.
She had drunk already and was staring at Zig/Zag. "Whoa," she murmured, striking strange and unnatural poses on the couch. "I thought you only had TWO heads..." Her eyes crossed. "STOP!" she screeched.
"Stop what?" The twins wanted to procrastinate long as possible.
Alice leaped from the couch and was unable to march towards them in a straight line. "Stop growing extra heads! It's annoying! Especially when I'm drunk off my-"
Arthur stood absolutely still but got in her way nevertheless. "Hey you!" she yelled, wavering. "Watch where you're not going!" She then weaved about a little. "Beware of the magic bullet! An elephant can hang by a daisy from a cliff, ouch!" She said this after tripping over her Triple-A tourist guide. She wobbled her to her feet, cursing. "You know what!" Alice began waving a finger at Arthur's face, and it was a particular finger. "I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit down before I fall down," she finished, walking backwards. Sit down she did, but much faster than she had intended, and mainly because she tripped a second time over the Triple-A book. She looked at Arthur, smiling. "Duuuuude," she giggled drowsily, curling herself around his ankles.
Arthur was so scared by Alice that he forgot to be scared of the Atomansplitzer. He downed it, and nothing whatsoever happened to him. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. No change, apparently.
He looked around accusingly. "Is this..." he sputtered. Unexpectedly, he cut off to just stand there, not unlike a pink, clothes-wearing pillar.
Zig/Zag tired of watching each other do nothing. "Five, four, three, two, one..." they counted in concert. On "zero," both drank at the same time.
So did I. I'd been so busy getting everyone else drunk that I'd forgotten to take care of my own inebriation. "Salud," I said around the dangerous chemicals cascading down my throat.
That's when all whiz-bang broke loose.
Everyone who had been unconscious suddenly awoke, and made a big deal out of it. Everyone who had been awake suddenly went unconscious, and made a big deal out of that on their way down. The world faded out of view, and I spent the next fifteen minutes dreaming that a huge, singing bat was throwing rocks at me. By the time I came to, Alice was playing Electric Light Orchestra on the radio, Zig/Zag was dancing with himself, Zaphod was kissing the dog's paw, Ford was trying to bang his head on the ceiling, and Arthur was kneeling before a pillow, pushing money at it and bawling, "I won't call the cops! I won't call the cops!" None of this bothered me at the time because I for some reason had been seized by a bizarre urge to pull out the hideaway bed, which was under the couch, which was under Ford.
An inconvenience, to be sure, but one easily dealt with. I picked Ford up and tucked him under my arm. He snarled, "Infininininin...JERKS!"
I just laughed. "So ya like da ruff stuff?" I teased.
He snarled some more. To reprimand his rudeness, I put him back on the couch and sat next to him. "You're hot, you know that?" I said sweetly.
He ran screaming into the bathroom and locked himself in while I guffawed my big Vogon butt off.
Alice climbed onto the table and started doing air guitar, wearing a bra on her head. "Get ready! Yeah yeah yeah, get ready!" she cried along with the CD.
Arthur had gone to the floor in pursuit of his lost currency and was happily learning how much he really liked it down there. He watched Alice's act in awe. "Duuuuude," he agreed. He wrote his telephone number on a fiver and threw it at her.
Zaphod picked up the dog and started hopping on one foot. "B-I-M-B-O! B-I-N-B-A! B-I-B-B-C! And Bingo was his name-o!" he howled. He howled with vastly greater passion when Zig/Zag stepped on his foot.
"What's that smell?" Alice wondered blurrily.
"You know that one?!" Arthur shouted, dropping his cash. "OOOOOH, THAT SMELL!" he sang, snapping his fingers in 13/8 time. "CANTCHA SMELL THAT SMELL!"
Alice jumped off the table. "We have a winner!" she announced. "The winner is the first person who won! Let's give it up for Arthur!"
Arthur threw his arms skyward in victory, even though he hadn't the slightest idea of what he had won. With unholy joy, Alice shot forward and tickled him. This precipitate shock made Arthur fall over backwards, crash into Zig/Zag, and collide with Zaphod. "TIMMMMBERRRR!!!" Zaphod hollered as the four collapsed in a dogpile. I brightened with the light of a pleasing revelation: dogpiles are meant to be jumped on. I launched myself into middle space.
"UUUGGGHHH!!!"
Ford emerged from the bathroom and found a real live mosh pit writhing before him.
He was no more sober than any one of us, but having spent more time drunk than any one of us, he knew better how to handle it. So he tried to pull us apart. Unfortunately, I was on top of the pile. He hooked his elbows under my armpits and dragged me to a vacant patch of linoleum. I swiped at him, but kept hitting the wrong head. Finally, he put me down and turned his back on me- a big, big mistake on Ford's part. I kicked his legs out from under him and pinned him to the floor.
First he squawked. Then he screamed. Then he sniffed. "What's that smell?" he asked cautiously.
"Not me, I swear," I reassured him.
Alice fell off the table and leered at me. "So you know this boogie is for reeeaaallllll..." she sang in an eerie slur. Abruptly, she shoved two fingers into my face. "VOTE FOR PEDRO!"
While I was off-guard, Ford wriggled out from under me and hid behind the driver's seat, gasping for breath. Lucky for him, my attention was diverted as Alice crawled under the table to build a fragile structure of pillows and napkins. No longer deprived of oxygen, Ford hefted Arthur from the floor while I wasn't looking. But, as I mentioned earlier, Arthur liked the floor quite a bit, so he immediately went back to it. Ford pulled him up again and this time propped him over a dinette bench.
Meanwhile, Alice peeked over the edge of the table to give Arthur a Real Evil look. "Enter my Cathedral of DOOOOOOMMM!!!" she invited him, uninvitingly.
Arthur woozily swung around to peer at her, his eyes glazed over. "No."
Alice sounded hurt. "Why not?"
"I've been doomed most of my life," he demurred. "I'd like to avoid doom for a while now."
"But this is some real good, genuine doom here, man!" Alice argued in apopleptic fury.
Arthur, attempting to put a healthy amount of distance between Alice and himself, made his long-awaited return to the floor by tripping over the Triple-A book. He landed next to Zaphod and wrinkled his nose. "What's that smell?" he asked.
My memories from that bit onward are distorted and mostly concern free-floating underwear, so I'd better skip to the part where I woke up the next morning with my tongue pressed against the windshield.
All was silent; no one aside from me had stirred since the night before.
I ran a quick self check.
Where am I?
Earth.
What am I?
Hung over.
Who am I?
That depends. Who wants to know?
How did I get here?
Good question.
Why am I here?
42.
Three out of five ain't bad.
I examined my environment. Zaphod had barracaded himself into the doorless bedroom behind a wall of Tupperware, and the dog was cowering in the end of the room farthest from him. Arthur was under the table beneath a pile of pillows and napkins. In the driver's seat lay Ford, a stack of DVDs under his arm. A badly bruised and scratched Zig/Zag was peacefully sawing logs on the couch, wearing the bra over his shirt. I found Alice in a cupboard, clutching a butterknife and twitching in her sleep.
I looked at the stack of DVDs under Ford's arm. He had Platoon, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Tom and Viv, and finally Star Wars: Episode One.
"Time for a wake-up call," I whispered.
I took Mississippi Burning out of the DVD player. I replaced it with the only movie that had "Wars" in the title and turned the volume to absolute max.
When the intro music blared out of the surround speakers, everyone resurrected at once.
I heard a shout from the back. Zaphod was begging Darth Vader to not kidnap his dog.
I shook my head. "You people have got to learn how to hold your liquor."
To Be Continued...
Disclaimer: DO NOT DRINK. IF YOU MUST, DO NOT DRIVE. AND NEVER, EVER, EVER TRY TO IMITATE THE ATOMANSPLITZER, A POTENT SUBSTANCE THAT SHOULD NOT BE DUPLICATED WITHOUT VOGON SUPERVISION.
THE STORY SO FAR
Since crash-landing on Earth, I have achieved the following:
Escape from a sinking ship with my crewmates Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect, and Zig/Zag Beeblebrox (Zaphod's Siamese twin sons).
Acquaintence of a plump young Earthling named Alice Gray.
Grand theft auto (actually, Alice was largely responsible for the theft of her stepmother's RV, but I helped).
Severe endangerment of a hitchhiker named Arthur Dent, who thereafter joined our half-baked search for a spaceship repairman in Roswell.
The nastiest brawl a hamburger joint has ever seen.
Evasion of a screaming mob.
Utter destruction of an AM/PM gas station in Oakdale, California.
As this chapter begins, our party is gathered outside the RV, recovering from the gas station incident.
"A dog?!"
This was Zaphod, who for some reason believed those two words could build a coherent picture of... well, whatever he was trying to make into a picture.
We were camped by the side of the road, someplace between a crummy town called Escalon and a slightly less crummy town called Manteca. ("Manteca", by the way, means "lard" in Spanish.) A mind-numbing stretch of alfalfa fields surrounded us, reaching as far as the eye could see. Three corrugated metal shacks were the sole interuption of this consistently boring landscape until an irregular grey streak rose faintly in the distance. I had at first imagined the vague landmark to be a bank of clouds, but was corrected by Alice. She told me they were actually a range of unattractive and inhospitable mountains, behind which the sun was disappearing. We'd turned the porch light on, but the light did us no good; it was completely blocked by the hundreds of moths jockeying for position around it. Apparently, fifteen hours of daylight didn't satisfy their sunbathing requirements.
I was squatting in front of a small fire, absently roasting seven hot links for dinner while staring intently down the road to make sure no police had followed us. Alice, sprawled on a rough blue blanket, was studiously reading a United States road map. Ford was parked on the edge of the blanket, drinking a can of cola and watching a small television that he'd found in the RV storage space. Arthur was sitting in an extremely rackety lawn chair, staring at the darkening sky and muttering nervously. Every now and then, he would twitch, and I would threaten to smack him for it. He would say, "Good idea," and go back to muttering. (Gradually, his reactions to external stimuli had segued from absolute hysteria to furtive paranoia to impenetrable despondency. At least he had gotten past the stage of screaming every odd second.) Zig and Zag were sitting cross-legged in the dirt, holding a furry, wiggling object in thier arms. Standing over them was Zaphod, glaring at them with all three arms crossed.
"What possessed you to adopt a dog?" he demanded.
Zig looked sharply at his brother, who shrugged. "We were just hanging around behind the gas station, waiting in line for the bathroom..."
"Why didn't you use the bathroom in the RV?" Zaphod interrupted.
"Alice told us to use public toilets whenever we could so she wouldn't have to empty the sewage tank," Zig offered.
Zaphod shot a look at Alice, which was totally disregarded. She was too busy referencing a Triple-A tourist guide.
"As I was saying," Zag resumed, "we were standing there when we saw some guy sneaking around, hiding a box under a bush. Naturally, we thought the box was a stash of girlie magazines and booze, so we went to check it out."
"'Girlie magazines'?" Arthur parroted, obviously requesting further information.
Zig clarified. "Sometimes we see our dad sneaking around when he thinks we aren't looking, and that's usually what he's trying to hide."
"I see," Arthur said, abdicating any further discussion of the subject.
"So, we opened the box-" Zag continued.
"What if it had been a bomb?" I interjected, feeling I should do something to completely destroy the flow of conversation.
"Who asked you?" Zaphod barked.
"I asked me," I muttered, turning my attentions back to the franks.
"So, we opened the box-" Zag repeated.
Zaphod stopped him. "She has a point there. What if it HAD been a bomb?" (I smirked.)
"It wasn't," Zag persisted. "So, we opened the box-"
"You would have been blown to bloody smitheroons, is what," Arthur declared flatly.
"It wasn't, and we weren't," Zig snapped. "Now, Zag left off where we opened the box-"
"You mean smithereens, Arthur," Ford corrected, never looking away from the TV.
"No, I meant smitheroons," Arthur countered as Zig/Zag gritted their teeth. "Smithereens are merely very very tiny, while smitheroons are small on a subatomic level. You see, to be utterly destroyed is technically impossible, but getting blown to smitheroons is about as close to utter destruction as you can get--"
Zig/Zag finally snapped. "SO WE OPENED THE BOX!!!"
Zaphod waved a Fatherly Finger at them. "Don't you know it's not nice to interrupt?"
Zag wanted to tell him in no uncertain terms that he DID know, but Zig got his word in first. "We were disappointed to find this fuzzy thing in the box instead of booze, but it seemed to like us. So we kept it. We didn't figure you'd mind."
Zaphod snorted. "Maybe I wouldn't have minded, except you picked up this flea bus just before we began a high-speed RV chase with the police!"
"Which is on the news right now, by the way," Ford interjected.
I dropped the hot dog skewers and joined Ford in front of the telly.
Some girl with a penchant for hairspray and lipstick appeared onscreen, cheerfully describing the havoc we had unleashed upon the unsuspecting Oakdale business district. "Late this afternoon, a devastating chain of events was triggered by an accident at the Oakdale AM/PM gas station." Images of an erupting fireball, captured by a shaky camcorder, underscored the girl's narration. "Emergency units summoned to the scene spotted a stolen RV, which recklessly fled the city limits. Though no injuries have been reported, damages in excess of $35,000 were caused by the rampage." Footage of our flight was jerky and clumsy. One could easily percieve that it had been haphazardly collected, barely in time for the evening news slot. I had seen better compositions on the Slug Channel.
Zaphod tapped my shoulder. "Pythia, the hot dogs are... Hey, look there!" Zaphod pushed me aside and pointed at the screen. "I'm on TV!"
"Not an appearance to brag about," Ford grumbled, swatting Zaphod out of the way. "Both your heads are screaming in panic and you're clinging so tightly to that armrest that I'm surprised it didn't break."
"Quiet," I insisted, turning the set's volume knob.
The hairspray addict had reappeared by this time to conclude her report over Ford and Zaphod's bickering. "...total destruction of seven shop fronts, six parked cars, five parking meters, four streetlights, three telephone poles, two bicycle racks..."
"And a partridge in a pear tree," Zig/Zag's voices sang in perfect two-part harmony.
Arthur's head lolled over towards me. "The hot dogs are burning," he observed.
I glanced at them and started. The franks were not simply scalded or charred; they had caught fire. I groaned as yet another chance for a decent meal slipped through my chubby fingers. Hardly able to see the point of fixing another batch, I got a jug of water and dashed it over the fire, irretrievably scalded links and all.
Alice looked up from her map for the first time in half an hour and proceeded to describe our route. She said there was supposed to be an onramp for Interstate 205 in Manteca, which would in turn connect with Interstate 5, which was meant to take us hundreds of miles south before we took Interstate 10 to Interstate 25 for the turn-off on Something-whatever 70... or something like that.
Zig/Zag gaped. "Does it worry you that nobody here understands what you're saying?"
Alice shrugged. "The United States freeway system is the second most unnatural thing on Earth," she explained.
"What," I asked for the sake of sheer morbid curiosity, "is the first most unnatural thing on Earth?"
In perfect unison, everyone replied, "The automobile."
Everyone, that is, but Ford. He was vainly coaxing some incomprehensible object to do something it obviously had no intention of doing. Upon closer inspection, I discovered the thing was a battered, square console with an insanely complicated array of buttons on it. "Whatever that is, it seems to vy for the automobile's lead," I told him.
Ford gave me the dull look of someone who has just been told his vision of Paradise was in reality an outrageous mind trip induced by too many allergy pills. "This is -or was- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he sighed. "It used to be the greatest accumulation of wit, wisom, and plain old-fashioned gibber in the known Universe. Thought maybe I could use it look up information on dogs and show the kids what they were getting themselves into. But something..." He was struggling to finish, I could tell. Bravely, he set his jaw and went on. "Something happened to the Guide. Now..." It was beyond him to continue. But Zaphod was too intrigued to let the topic lay.
He squatted on the blanket. "Ford? What happened to the Guide?" He asked this as if he didn't want to know, although he was dying to find out.
Ford nearly choked up. "InfiniDim took it over."
Zaphod's four eyes went wide. Arthur collapsed in his chair, stunned. Ford, hiccuping back his emotion, worked desperately at the Guide like a man giving his best friend CPR. "Come on, you accursed hunk of nanotechnolgical idiocy!"
The fight was noble, but futile. Everyone has struggled in the name of a lost cause before, and occasionally we give up when some ultimate blow tells us, "Kid, if at first you don't succeed, do something else." More frequently, though, we just keep slaving away blindly until it occurs to us that we have been slaving for some time now and even if we slave for the rest of eternity, success will remain infuriatingly beyond reach. The latter conclusion closed in on Ford, but he held on to hope with the fervor of a true zealot as afternoon faded to twilight.
Without warning, Ford gave up. He stood, cradling the expired relic, and began humming "The Betelgeuse Death Anthem". Somehow, we all knew that we were about to witness something significant, so we all shut up and watched as he walked towards the street. Alice muted the TV, which was showing some noisy footage of a raving madman on Alcatraz Island. Ford walked with slow, shuffling strides to the center of the oncoming traffic lane. He spotted a pair of headlights coming into focus on the obscure horizon. Solemnly, he placed his Guide slightly to the right of the center line. Wiping a tear, he walked back to the RV.
Zaphod realized too late what Ford had on his mind. "Hey! What the zark do you think you're doing?!"
Ford ignored him. He needed to grieve. "Zaglabor astragard..."
The car, a chunky grey Astrovan, roared past. The poor Guide never had a chance. "Hootramansion Bambriar..."
CRUNCH!
Ford winced. It had been, as Arthur would say, crushed to smitheroons.
"We have witnessed today the death of a great book," Ford moaned. He went moping back into the RV. "Zaglabor astragard..."
One by one, we followed him.
Arthur found his box of Lipton tea bags by sitting on it. For several moments, he stared at the crushed yet viable tea bags and wondered if fixing himself a cup might improve matters. Indecision passed and he almost made for the kitchette area, but in the end couldn't convince himself it was worth the effort. I eyed the box ravenously, but Arthur was clearly not willing to share (he growled at me) so I buggered off.
Alice was the very last to come inside. She dusted and methodically folded the blanket. She turned off the TV. She paid so much attention to folding the map that for once it came together right side out the first time. She gathered these items and the Triple-A book into her arms.
For a few minutes, she just stood outside with her hand on the doorknob. When she finally came in, I asked what had kept her so long.
"I was watching the gold of merry sunset give way to deep, despairing gloom," she breathed, slumping.
It was then that I realized we were all going to need something much, MUCH stronger than Lipton.
********************(okay, funeral's over, people!)
I hustled everyone right back outside again. Never mind that pitch black night had descended. Never mind that giant mosquitoes were out in force, armed with infrared goggles and stun guns.
Work space is vital for the birth of an Atomansplitzer.
First, I gathered lots and lots of evil liquids that happened to be lying around. (First rule of an Atomansplitzer: Never use the exact same ingredients twice.) These I poured into the sink. I found it would probably help if I plugged the sink first, so I started over. Then I got a brand-new plunger and proceeded to mix said liquids thoroughly therewith. When the rubber part of the plunger began to bubble, I tasted a drop of the volatile compound.
As a direct result of this taste-test, I passed out. When I came to five minutes later, I had a whomping headache and a successful mixture. I siphoned the drink into some glasses and added little umbrellas, which promptly dissolved for a nice mellow overtone. Then I let the guys, who were annoyed and covered with nasty mosquito welts, come in for their share. I was slightly curious as to how they would react- I had never served an Atomansplizer to a carbon-based lifeform before.
Ford was at once suspicious. "Is this safe?"
"Not by any means," I replied evenly.
He relaxed. "Oh, good. Give it up and I'll gulp it down." He leaned over the table and sniffed his glass. "Very-"
An Atomansplitzer is like gasoline in that it is more dangerous as a gas than as a liquid. Ford passed out and came to five minutes later. "-nice," he concluded. "Do I detect molten umbrellas?" He sat on his face and went incommunicado until a future point in the story at which he will snarl, "Infininininin...JERKS!"
Zaphod took a pair of tongs from the silverware drawer and cautiously picked up his glass with them. "What's in this stuff?"
I cuffed him. "Whoops," I said sheepishly. "Reflex. I do that whenever people ask."
"Secret recipe, eh?"
"If you replace 'secret' with 'illegal in most of the Galaxy', then yeah, kind of."
"Sounds like a party to me," Zaphod yapped before tossing down the whole contents of the glass- half via one throat, half via the other. When the two halves reunited at the junction, a faint boom was heard, and something caused Zaphod's faces to rearrange in various ugly patterns. A moment later one head lost consciousness. The other took time to say, "Wow, I really needed that," before joining its partner in blissful oblivion. The temptation to write "LOSER" across Zaphod's foreheads was a strong one, but I nobly resisted- until he began snoring, that is. My impulse satisfied, I noticed he still had not revived and took that as an invitation for an encore. Ergo, I put something incredibly nasty in his shirt, which he will not discover until Chapter Six.
"What's that smell?" Zig/Zag queried, sniffing the air bemusedly.
"Never mind," I said. "Drink."
Zig/Zag looked at the menacing beverage: Zig eagerly, Zag warily. "What's the legal drinking age on this planet?"
"Older than you," I retorted. "Drink anyway."
They stared hard at each other to see who would chicken out. I left them to this and turned on Alice.
She had drunk already and was staring at Zig/Zag. "Whoa," she murmured, striking strange and unnatural poses on the couch. "I thought you only had TWO heads..." Her eyes crossed. "STOP!" she screeched.
"Stop what?" The twins wanted to procrastinate long as possible.
Alice leaped from the couch and was unable to march towards them in a straight line. "Stop growing extra heads! It's annoying! Especially when I'm drunk off my-"
Arthur stood absolutely still but got in her way nevertheless. "Hey you!" she yelled, wavering. "Watch where you're not going!" She then weaved about a little. "Beware of the magic bullet! An elephant can hang by a daisy from a cliff, ouch!" She said this after tripping over her Triple-A tourist guide. She wobbled her to her feet, cursing. "You know what!" Alice began waving a finger at Arthur's face, and it was a particular finger. "I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit down before I fall down," she finished, walking backwards. Sit down she did, but much faster than she had intended, and mainly because she tripped a second time over the Triple-A book. She looked at Arthur, smiling. "Duuuuude," she giggled drowsily, curling herself around his ankles.
Arthur was so scared by Alice that he forgot to be scared of the Atomansplitzer. He downed it, and nothing whatsoever happened to him. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. No change, apparently.
He looked around accusingly. "Is this..." he sputtered. Unexpectedly, he cut off to just stand there, not unlike a pink, clothes-wearing pillar.
Zig/Zag tired of watching each other do nothing. "Five, four, three, two, one..." they counted in concert. On "zero," both drank at the same time.
So did I. I'd been so busy getting everyone else drunk that I'd forgotten to take care of my own inebriation. "Salud," I said around the dangerous chemicals cascading down my throat.
That's when all whiz-bang broke loose.
Everyone who had been unconscious suddenly awoke, and made a big deal out of it. Everyone who had been awake suddenly went unconscious, and made a big deal out of that on their way down. The world faded out of view, and I spent the next fifteen minutes dreaming that a huge, singing bat was throwing rocks at me. By the time I came to, Alice was playing Electric Light Orchestra on the radio, Zig/Zag was dancing with himself, Zaphod was kissing the dog's paw, Ford was trying to bang his head on the ceiling, and Arthur was kneeling before a pillow, pushing money at it and bawling, "I won't call the cops! I won't call the cops!" None of this bothered me at the time because I for some reason had been seized by a bizarre urge to pull out the hideaway bed, which was under the couch, which was under Ford.
An inconvenience, to be sure, but one easily dealt with. I picked Ford up and tucked him under my arm. He snarled, "Infininininin...JERKS!"
I just laughed. "So ya like da ruff stuff?" I teased.
He snarled some more. To reprimand his rudeness, I put him back on the couch and sat next to him. "You're hot, you know that?" I said sweetly.
He ran screaming into the bathroom and locked himself in while I guffawed my big Vogon butt off.
Alice climbed onto the table and started doing air guitar, wearing a bra on her head. "Get ready! Yeah yeah yeah, get ready!" she cried along with the CD.
Arthur had gone to the floor in pursuit of his lost currency and was happily learning how much he really liked it down there. He watched Alice's act in awe. "Duuuuude," he agreed. He wrote his telephone number on a fiver and threw it at her.
Zaphod picked up the dog and started hopping on one foot. "B-I-M-B-O! B-I-N-B-A! B-I-B-B-C! And Bingo was his name-o!" he howled. He howled with vastly greater passion when Zig/Zag stepped on his foot.
"What's that smell?" Alice wondered blurrily.
"You know that one?!" Arthur shouted, dropping his cash. "OOOOOH, THAT SMELL!" he sang, snapping his fingers in 13/8 time. "CANTCHA SMELL THAT SMELL!"
Alice jumped off the table. "We have a winner!" she announced. "The winner is the first person who won! Let's give it up for Arthur!"
Arthur threw his arms skyward in victory, even though he hadn't the slightest idea of what he had won. With unholy joy, Alice shot forward and tickled him. This precipitate shock made Arthur fall over backwards, crash into Zig/Zag, and collide with Zaphod. "TIMMMMBERRRR!!!" Zaphod hollered as the four collapsed in a dogpile. I brightened with the light of a pleasing revelation: dogpiles are meant to be jumped on. I launched myself into middle space.
"UUUGGGHHH!!!"
Ford emerged from the bathroom and found a real live mosh pit writhing before him.
He was no more sober than any one of us, but having spent more time drunk than any one of us, he knew better how to handle it. So he tried to pull us apart. Unfortunately, I was on top of the pile. He hooked his elbows under my armpits and dragged me to a vacant patch of linoleum. I swiped at him, but kept hitting the wrong head. Finally, he put me down and turned his back on me- a big, big mistake on Ford's part. I kicked his legs out from under him and pinned him to the floor.
First he squawked. Then he screamed. Then he sniffed. "What's that smell?" he asked cautiously.
"Not me, I swear," I reassured him.
Alice fell off the table and leered at me. "So you know this boogie is for reeeaaallllll..." she sang in an eerie slur. Abruptly, she shoved two fingers into my face. "VOTE FOR PEDRO!"
While I was off-guard, Ford wriggled out from under me and hid behind the driver's seat, gasping for breath. Lucky for him, my attention was diverted as Alice crawled under the table to build a fragile structure of pillows and napkins. No longer deprived of oxygen, Ford hefted Arthur from the floor while I wasn't looking. But, as I mentioned earlier, Arthur liked the floor quite a bit, so he immediately went back to it. Ford pulled him up again and this time propped him over a dinette bench.
Meanwhile, Alice peeked over the edge of the table to give Arthur a Real Evil look. "Enter my Cathedral of DOOOOOOMMM!!!" she invited him, uninvitingly.
Arthur woozily swung around to peer at her, his eyes glazed over. "No."
Alice sounded hurt. "Why not?"
"I've been doomed most of my life," he demurred. "I'd like to avoid doom for a while now."
"But this is some real good, genuine doom here, man!" Alice argued in apopleptic fury.
Arthur, attempting to put a healthy amount of distance between Alice and himself, made his long-awaited return to the floor by tripping over the Triple-A book. He landed next to Zaphod and wrinkled his nose. "What's that smell?" he asked.
My memories from that bit onward are distorted and mostly concern free-floating underwear, so I'd better skip to the part where I woke up the next morning with my tongue pressed against the windshield.
All was silent; no one aside from me had stirred since the night before.
I ran a quick self check.
Where am I?
Earth.
What am I?
Hung over.
Who am I?
That depends. Who wants to know?
How did I get here?
Good question.
Why am I here?
42.
Three out of five ain't bad.
I examined my environment. Zaphod had barracaded himself into the doorless bedroom behind a wall of Tupperware, and the dog was cowering in the end of the room farthest from him. Arthur was under the table beneath a pile of pillows and napkins. In the driver's seat lay Ford, a stack of DVDs under his arm. A badly bruised and scratched Zig/Zag was peacefully sawing logs on the couch, wearing the bra over his shirt. I found Alice in a cupboard, clutching a butterknife and twitching in her sleep.
I looked at the stack of DVDs under Ford's arm. He had Platoon, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Tom and Viv, and finally Star Wars: Episode One.
"Time for a wake-up call," I whispered.
I took Mississippi Burning out of the DVD player. I replaced it with the only movie that had "Wars" in the title and turned the volume to absolute max.
When the intro music blared out of the surround speakers, everyone resurrected at once.
I heard a shout from the back. Zaphod was begging Darth Vader to not kidnap his dog.
I shook my head. "You people have got to learn how to hold your liquor."
To Be Continued...
