He stood there in shock, with his clothes inside out, for several minutes. At first it was because he had just been evicted.

Twice.

In as many minutes.

Just as he was learning to accept this and face the horror of the rest of his life, Jacob Sydney then began to hear his transistor radio amidst the trash that had just been thrown out of his apartment. It must have accidently been turned on after being thrown out of the window. He was surprised to find it still working.

Jacob dropped his suitcase and picked up the radio. It was talking about the entire planet being evicted. It took him a moment to realize the voice was being serious.

The entire planet. Evicted? He couldn't believe!

And when he was done responding to this new shocker, and somehow rationalized that it must be some sort of joke, he looked around to realize that the large burly men now in the employ of that short little b*****d had completed their job by picking up all of his other belongings and carting them into their moving truck. He chased after them as they drove away, until his pants began to fall down. He then used his free hand to hold up his pants and stared in horror at the radio.

"Start the teleportation devices!" It roared, or words to that effect. Jacob looked up to see several large green objects floating in the air the same way that ...well, to be honest he'd never seen anything float like that before.

He heard someone down the block scream something about their mum disappearing. Having just lost his, that slowed his reaction time a bit, just long enough to be splashed by a passing Saturn which drove through a nearby puddle.

Jacob turned around. Wet and very unseemly looking, he picked up his feet and ran in the same direction he saw the short little man go. He needed some answers and he wasn't getting them here.

"No! You can't do this! You're too early! This isn't supposed to happen for another two bleems! You idiots!"

The short man had somehow climbed up onto the counter, or perhaps he jumped, or perhaps he floated. Jacob was completely uncertain as to how the short man got up there, but as Jacob opened the front door to the apartment's main offices, there he was sitting on the counter. He held in his hand something that vaguely looked like a phone but it also looked a bit like one of those ray guns Jacob had seen in the movies. The employees who usually populated the front office were presently all huddled in a corner, staring horrifically at the short man.

"No, you don't understand you pathetic little quartzhobble! It's very simple! You are temporally damaging my accountancy books! I'll have to recalculate everything and who's going to pay for that? You?"

Jacob cautiously approached the strange little man. As he did so, he noticed something he hadn't paid attention to before. The man was somehow... different. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he almost didn't seem... human.

Unbeknownst to Jacob, Accountant Nob was most certaintly not human, but this was something Jacob was just going to have to get used to, as this was something Jacob was soon to experience a lot.

"Uhm... sir? Excuse me sir?"

"I already told you!" The short man roared into the device he held to his face. "I'm with QUADBEE! QuadBee! What you mean you've never heard of it? I'll have you know we've served over two hundred thousand of your race! Or at least we will! We sort of already have! I can't believe you've never heard of us!"

Accountant Nob shot a steel gaze over in the corner as one of the employees attempted to step out of the corner. Jacob had no idea what had transpired prior to his arrival in the office, but he was sure he didn't want to know.

"Please, sir?"

Nob raised a polite but firm hand towards Jacob, indicating he wait patiently. He looked up at Jacob with a sudden emotion of calm and practiced deliberate cordialness, if in fact that is a word. Then he turned away and roared into the phone again.

"You put those people back now! You can't come to this planet and take everyone away! I haven't had a chance to fleece- er I mean balance my books yet! There's one hundred and eighty seven thousand Earthlings who will eventually find their way to my employer's business, and most of them have very high bills that they will have to pay for, and I'm - I'm not behind schedule! You are ahead of schedule by two bleems! You put those humans back now! Don't you DARE hang up on me!"

His head fell into his chest and the device as well as the hand that held it fell into his lap.

"They hung up on me. The b******s."

One of the employees in the corner disappeared. This caused the other employees in that corner to scatter away from that corner and scream. Nob laughed and they looked at him with fear.

"S-sir?"

"Get away from him! He's disintegrating everybody!"

Jacob knew he was not clear on what was going on but he knew enough to know everyone else in the office besides this short creature was more at a loss than he, "HE's not doing it! Haven't you been listening to the radio?" He raised his transistor radio in the air and this naturally produced confused looks of fear on everyone in the room, save the short creature.

Accountant Nob dropped from the counter and walked towards the door, "I've got to get up there!"

Jacob followed Nob out the door, "up where?"

"Those ships! The Goothsbanians! They're ruining everything! I'm supposed to be able to get my employer's property off this blasted thing before they confiscate the planet!"

"Confiscate the planet?"

"Yes of course what, were you born last week?" The short man turned to Jacob, put his hand up in the air and poked repeatedly into Jacob's belly button for emphasis, "You humans didn'tpay your rent!" He turned away and continued walking down the sidewalk as he poked into his communication device repeatedly. "Your entire race has been here as freeloaders, for about what you call millenia. Fortunately for you the company that owned this place at the time was bogged down in red tape and the deed changed hands several times, but eventually the Goothsbanians were to aquire ownership of Earth and in a couple bleems they would arrive to collect what was rightfully theirs. By that time your race was going to be extinct anyway." Nob put the communication device to his face.

"Extinct?"

"Yes. Extinct." Nob talked into the device, "No no dear hon not you. Have you heard? Yes I'm a bit upset about it myself. Look, be a dear and see if you can get me one of our drivers to the apartment complex, will you? I need to get up to those ships. There's a bonus in it if you can do it in five Earth minutes. ..Yes, I love those things too. I'll see you soon." He put the device into his inside jacket pocket. "I just love those things."

"Extinct?" Jacob was still rather stunned.

"No, minutes. Minutes! We don't have those things where I come from. Quite novel idea, to break the measurement of time to such small things. And seconds as well! Goodness me! Nothing can be accomplished in a second I don't see why you humans are so occupied with such small increments of time. It probably explains why you never achieve spaceflight capability." Nob stopped and looked around. Then he looked at his watch, "and these things! ADORABLE! They're quite habit forming this watching time TICK by! Quite adorable!"

"You were saying we were extinct?" The fact Nob claimed Jacob's 'people' hadn't aquired spaceflight was just now beginning to register in Jacob's perplexed brain.

"No. You're not extinct now you silly thing. You will be. Or rather, you would have willen be provided the Goothsbanians didn't disturb time. I must get to the bottom of this. Earthlings were going to eventually put themselves out of their misery and everyone else's in just a few of your years anyway. You were going to have what you call a full-scale nuclear war, and then a couple bleems later your planet would be just right for the Goothsbanians to take over. At least until your solar system's star went supernova. Ah, here we are!"

In less than five Earth minutes, a black limosine exactly like the one which drove Taggart away only Earth moments ago pulled up to greet the two of them. A chauffeur looking person (who actually looked less humanoid than the last one) walked around the limo and opened the passenger seat for Accountant Nob.

"Would you like to join me, Jacob Sydney? Provided you don't get teleported into the cargo hold, you might be entertaining company, and I'm sure you still have questions."

Jacob attempted to word a response but his best efforts evolved into a nodding of the head, which Nob took to mean yes and before he knew it, Jacob was sitting in the most comfortable and luxurious small space he had ever had the luxury of experiencing.

Once the chauffeur was back in the driver's seat, Nob knocked on the see-thru privacy partition, "Dhajonas? Be a dear and take us up? Don't worry about the camoflage. The humans already know we're here."

"Nyes, miluhd," was what Jacob heard in response, and he noticed out the window that the apartment complex was rapidly getting smaller and smaller..

"Would you like a drink?" Nob asked Jacob. Jacob looked at the strange blue concoction which Nob had just whipped up using a complex wetbar. It was steaming. He shook his head, "suit yourself! I make the best pan galactic gargle blasters this side of Omicron Theta!"

"We're flying!"

"Oh you humans are adorable. Shame you get extinct. Or rather, shame you were haven will bein extinct." He looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular, "I believe I have that tense right. It's hard to tell."

"You said you thought we never achieve space travel."

"Correct."

"But we did! We reached the moon! We have space shuttles and satelites!"

Nob laughed, and though his laugh seemed good-natured, it also made Jacob feel very small and insignificant. He began to wish he hadn't agreed to take this journey.

"My dear Jacob Sydney. Simple jaunts to your moon or unmanned flights to your red planet back there are not actually space travel. Really, that is an amusing thought though. No, your kind were simply too busy beating up on one another to bother with-"

"You keep talking about my kind as if we're already dead!"

"Well you might as well be. No offense but prior to this temporal distortion we've always assumed.."

"How do you know anyway? You talk as if history has already happened."

"Well it hasn't but my employer has the inside track on a lot of things."

"Oh really? Well if my race kill themselves in a few years.." his voice trailed off. This was really hurting his head.

"I'm sorry, Jacob. I'm being very impolite. It's generally not customary to discuss the plight of another individual's race. Everyone does it all the time anyway but it's really just not proper." He reached his hand out to Jacob, "I believe this is handshaking?" Jacob took his hand and shook it. "Let's start on the right foot. I'm Accountant Nob of Big Bang Burger Bar Enterprises Incorporated. We're a posh and rather expensive restaurant that is very popular, has been popular and will become very popular."

"And I'm supposed to go there."

"Well the restaurant exists at the beginning of time, so you've already been there. You just haven't experienced it yet. Which is why I said you're late." Nob glanced at his recently aquired Rolex and looked out the windows surrounding them. The large green cargo ships were looming ever closer as the chauffeur drove them up out of the atmosphere towards it, but they weren't arriving fast enough for Nob's liking.

"And you came to rob us before these guys in the bigger ships evicted us?"

"I'm not here to rob anyone. At the beginning of time you spent some time at the Big Bang Burger Bar but you didn't have any money on you, so I am simply collecting now upon your bill."

"But I haven't been there yet!"

"Oh but you will."

"What if I promise never to show up there ever in my life? Can I get my stuff back?"

"Our records show you already have been there, Jacob." Nob was enjoying the conversation but he also kept looking out the window. He tapped on the privacy partition, "Dhajonas? Can you step on it please?"

"Nyes, miluhd." They failed to accelerate any faster.

"Look, Nob. Your records also show that these things" and at that Jacob pointed out the window to the large green cargo ships which were slowly getting larger, "aren't supposed to be here for -what did you call them?"

"Bleems."

"Yeah. What's a bleem anyway?"

"Well let me put it this way. Human beings have been on this planet for less than one bleem."

"Oh. Well. What I mean is, is it possible that- "

"Our books can't be wrong?"

"Why not?"

"Because QuadBee hires the finest accountants in the Galaxy. We have several thousand of the best minds crunching the numbers. Several thousand minds can't possibly be wrong!"

"There are several thousand people on my planet who believe Elvis is still alive!" Jacob said incredulously.

"And they're right!"

"You mean?"

"We have him scheduled to play every other Tuesday."

"And that's another thing, how can I be understanding what you're saying if you're an alien?"

"Very simple."

"How?"

"Because you're an alien, Jacob Sydney. Everyone on your planet is. Dhajonas! Step on it!"

"Nyes, miluhd."

And just when Jacob looked out the window with the assumption they were close enough to get ready to disembark, he realized these cargo ships were much larger than he thought they must be. And they continued to inch closer to the most massive structure Jacob had ever and probably would ever see floating motionless in space.