h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Beneath the waves, stuck on a rock just off the coast of the island, remained the submarine 'The Beaver'. Inside, Arthur, Jill, Agent XX and captain of 'The Beaver' were sitting around in the cockpit, trying not to think about a similar situation that had been in the news recently, and more importantly the outcome of that situation. The captain's name was Reginald Darby and while he was considered by most to be rather sage-like, because of his bristly white beard, no one could deny that he had infact crashed his vessel into a big rock and that that was not the action of a sage at all.
They had dispatched a radio buoy to the surface earlier to listen for reports from Billy-Bob, who had gone up to look at how things were. He had not radioed in.
All was silent for some time, but for Arthur talking into the transmitter, "Come in Bob, come in Bob, this is the Beaver, ...over."
There was no reply for hours. Then the radio sprang into life with a burst of static.
"Come in Beaver, Come in Beaver, ..."
In the corner, Agent XX sniggered, but it was hardly the time for inuendo.
Arthur grabbed the microphone, "This is Beaver, receiving over, ...Bob, you're alive."
"No, ... this is Boutros. Erm. Sorry to use the emergency frequency," came the reply, "Spot of bother, chaps, ...over."
"Really, sir?" said Arthur as the static echoed around the cabin.
"Yes, I've been captured by a Russian agent. I should have known that cheese-smuggling operation was too silly to be anything other than a cover-story. I don't suppose you could come and, sort of rescue us, eh?"
Arthur looked around at each of the faces in the cabin.
"Might be a bit of a while, actually, sir," he said into the microphone, "We've got a couple of things to do first. Where are you?"
"I don't know. We were in Paris, then we were taken on an monorail underground. But you'll be able to locate me, I'm wearing my tracking device, ...have to go, there's someone coming, ...."
The voice broke up.
He turned back to the others, "Where is Billy-Bob?!"

Bob awoke in a bath. The water was pleasantly warm and he leant back to ease his tired muscles. All of that secret agenting can take it out of a guy. He watched idely as a fine dust several bath salts were sprinkled over him - this deity business wasn't as bad a that tribesman had made out. Something was stirring in the lower levels of his subconscious. It said "this isn't right, why only a few chapters ago I was being set up to be horribly maimed and tortured. Talk about sloppy narrative. Then, as these things do, the mists of delusion cleared and Bob was left staring at the nightmare approach of the juggernaught called Reality.

"Hang about!" he said in sudden alarm. "These aren't bath salts. This is real salt. - I'm being seasoned!!"

"yes" intoned a sombre tribesman stirring the cauldren with a ladel,it is an aid to mastication."

"YOU'RE GOING TO EAT ME!?"

"No, we are just softening you up for the evil and viscious creature that lives in the caves in the cove just around the beach head. The elders have decided that you should suffer the most painful and prolonged death immaginable."

"Nrrk! said Bob."

"What is it?" asked the tribesman

"I just swallowed a slice of carrot."


Meanwhile down inside the beaver....


"We've combed all areas, Cap."

"I said to quit it with that inneuendo."

"Sorry Capin'. said the ensign. "We have salvaged all of the scuba gear, maybe Bob has fallen or something but is not able to get to his communicator?"
(In actual fact the brighter ones among the group had turned the thing on and were for the first time in the history of their culture listening to the cricket scores.)

Arthur appeared from out of a hatch

"We just received a message from Boutros, he has been kidnapped. We are going to rescue him. Still no word from Bob though. First, we shall all need to regroup. Is that scuba gear?

"Yes." said Reginald Derby

"Right in that case I'll take Agent X, Jill and Tim and we'll swim up to the surface and bring back Bob. You prep the ship for immediate re-launch on our return."


"Yo-ho-ho Arthur." saluted the U-Boats crew...

Okay this is weird. Half of my last post is missing, and all those little red dots showing the previous pages of postings have dissapeared. Is this happening on anyone else's P.C?

The end bit of the story was supposed to be this:

==================================================
"Nrrk! said Bob."

"What is it?" asked the tribesman

"I just swallowed a slice of carrot."


Meanwhile down inside the beaver....


"We've combed all areas, Cap."

"I said to quit it with that innuendo."

"Sorry Capin'. said the ensign. "We have salvaged all of the scuba gear, maybe Bob has fallen or something but is not able to get to his communicator?"
(In actual fact the brighter ones among the group had turned the thing on and were for the first time in the history of their culture listening to the cricket scores.)

Arthur appeared from out of a hatch

"We just received a message from Boutros, he has been kidnapped. We are going to rescue him. Still no word from Bob though. First, we shall all need to regroup. Is that scuba gear?

"Yes." said Reginald Darby

"Right in that case I'll take Agent X, Jill and Tim and we'll swim up to the surface and bring back Bob. You prep the ship for immediate re-launch on our return."

"Yo-ho-ho Arthur." saluted the U-boat's crew...

================================================

???? ????

Oh fantastic! Now it's all come back and I look like a fool.

Grrrrr.

Meanwhile....

On another plane of existance altogether, Bobs alternate self, boB, was having quite a problem.

A very strange problem. You see, ever since the events of last tuesday, boB had been unable to...

get hold of Jill on his mobile phone. In fact he hadn't been able to get hold of his mobile phone, because he left it in the warehouse in Leamington Spa. He chewed on a bit of leek and tried to think what Jill would have done in this situation. He decided she would have put on her apron and stirred him round a bit.

He dreamed of how he would escape this cauldron before it got too hot. The day would be commemorated. They could call it Slee day (that was his surname) "The time will come when Slee day'll be a household word across the globe" he thought to himself.

A flash of inspiration caused him to start staring to a point in the distance and put on a horrified face. "The creature's coming for its dinner! Look! " He yelled.

The natives all looked in the same direction and so persuasive was his acting that they were convinced they could see it. They all ran off in that direction and Bob managed to jump out of the cauldron just as the water was starting to get too hot for comfort.

He ran in the other direction and nearly bumped into.....




PS Has no one noticed yet - I've been smuggling cheese into my last postings.

Arthur, X, Jill and Tim. Bob, in fact tripped over a rock and went rolling down the hill, straight past his friends who were ascending the rockface.

"Where's he going?" said Arthur.

"Look he's landed in that privet bush."

I wonder what could have got him so spooked" asked X, looking over the crest of the hill. The others looked as well. What they saw looking back at them were all of the tribes from across the island some were still frantically searching for this mysterious vanishing monster, others had caught on that the God had escaped from his cauldren.

"Oh." said X
"Indeed." said Arthur.
"Run away?"said Jill.
"Yes."said Tim emphatically
"okay." said X
"Right." said Jill"

The quickly loosened the rope and used the slack to absail down to were Bob was perched on the privet.

The collective tribes people were now all involved in busily seearching for their God so that they could kill him. One of them looked down the hill and saw the others man-handling Bob out of the bush.

"Alarm! Alarm!", he shouted.

One of the elders came to the hill and looked down.
"More Gods. He noted solemnly. Come my brothers. We must worship them also...

===============================

P.S Not to mention winter playthings. Bobsleigh? That was a good one.

Having freed Bob, and tied his damp, lightly seasoned body on to one of their ropes, the agents could begin to descend the rock face once more, towards the sea. However, they had only dropped a few feet when Jill became aware of vibrations in her line. Looking up, she could see a muscular man in a feathered head-dress leaning over the edge of the cliff and sawing through the rope with a flint implement, just below the grappling hook that held it there. Another appeared and attacked Arthur's line also. With craggy rocks two hundred feet below them things looked bad. Then, from above the agents heard a deafening roar and the screaming of frightened people, and thunderous stomping sent shocks through the cliff face.

They looked up at the cliff in astinshment, and, just along from the tribespersons, saw...

The UPS Guy ran down the ramp from the DropShip that had just flattened half the jungle. He was leading on a leash a Tyranosaurus Rex.

"Where did you get THAT from!?" called Arthur.

"Oh, we've had this little baby in cold storage for some time now. It's on loan from Universal Studios. Boutros contacted us at HQ on the emergency frequency. He said to get on over to Arthur and the others, see if you can lend them a hand and to take Flopsy with you."

"Flopsy?" said Jill.

"Yeah she's just a big sissy really, if she's any bother to you just bop her on the nose - come on girl go get them." He undid the catch on the tether and the Dinosaur stomped off into the crowd of villagers
"Oh Yeah seeing all of this terror and violence (thankfully taking place behind the hill and out of view of the narrator.) reminds me Boutros also said: 'Will SOMEBODY please come and rescue me? The Russians keep playing Shove Ha' Penny with my head.' Get back in the sub, take Bob with you. Boutros is somewhere is Siberia. Go, quickly. I'll take care of this lot." Then, with a Viking-like war-yodel and ran off down the far side of the Hill to gte back his dinosaur.

"Well, that was...er..um....interesting, wasn't it." said X

Bob, who had regained consciousness just in time to to see the UPS Guy holding a dinosaur on a length of rope had decided that being conscious was far to much hard work and that there were obviously things going on around him that he was probably far better of not knowing about, was consequently mummering quietly to himself as he drifted, quite pleasantly.

"lets get him back to the sub, check him over." said Arthur.

"Good idea." said X


It was at this precise moment that the frayed end of the rope, finally gave way....

.. and the muscular tribal chief grabbed at it and pulled Jill up.

He took hold of her gently and firmly - definitely not in a non-sexual way - and carried her along the top of the ridge. Jill was scared stiff at this treatment, although inexplicably aroused by this demonstration of animal passion.

(Good job Bob was still unconscious - he'd have been jealous again)

But X saw her plight and climbed up his rope at a rate of knots. He scrambled back over the top and ran towards the couple, fighting off the tribesmen who had been surprised by their chief's actions but who were now defending him as their code of behaviour dictated.
Meanwhile, Jill had been staring into the eyes of her kidnapper and was already convincing herself that he wasn't so bad after all, and being treated like this couldn't be worse than what would have befallen her if she'd dropped when the rope broke. "He's just like a Teddy Bear" she thought to herself, strong and protective and doesn't talk overmuch. The ´Tribal Chief lay her down gently in a mossy clearing and his feathers tickled her forehead as he took a closer look. "Come on Bear" - Jill thought to herself, just as......



(cheese still being smuggled in)

X pinned the Chief to the floor with a diving tackle...

"OI!!, why did you do that yelled Jill" as X punched the chief and laid him out cold. X looked up at her " Look around you Jill, large mossy clearing, ceramonial stones all around, strange mounds in the ground, and what did you think he was going to do with this??" X pulled out the cheifs very large scary looking knife. "Oh, I see. Well how wrong can you be about a guy?"

X shook his head and rolled his eyes, in a 'what are you like, you silly girl' way. "come on lets get back to the others before he wakes up"

Jill and X jogged back to the cliff, where they noticed that there rope was at the bottom all cut up, and they were at the top, looking at there rope all the way down there. "Now how are we ever going to get down now??"

X signaled the UPS guy who brought Flopsy over.

"oozagudgirl den? Yezuarr, yezuarr," he said stroking her affectionately on the nose.

"Um...you may want to do something about that." Jill gestured to the dinosaur.

"What?" said the UPS Guy.

"The...Um...spear sticking out from between her teeth." pointed X, feeling faintly nautious.

"Aww that's nothing, for this little lady, that counts as roughage. Yezziddoz, yezziddoz dudden it? Oozagudgirl den?

"So anyway, you couldn't give us a hand in getting down to the beach could you?" said X

"Yeah sure, I've got a couple of experimental jetpacks on the ship. Hang about here I'll just go and get them." he said. Thrusting into Jill's unsuspecting hand the reins for Flopsy, he ducked inside the craft.

Flopsy looked around forlonly glance down at X and Jill and spread back her lips and revealed what UPS Guy would probably have described as her 'ickkle-wickkle toothie-wossies.' Briefly X's eyes met Flopsy's, and despite his holding the Chief's rather impressive blade and being a blackbelt in several ancient fighting disciplines, several million years of evolution did not erase the sensation in the back of X's head that in this thing's world-view he constituted
Hor's deurve.

Flopsy yawned.

And something inside of X screamed.

UPS Guy appeaered again, gave X and Jill the jetpacks. They quickly said there goodbyes and floated serenly down to the beach to join up again with Arthur, Tim and Bob. Once agin on solid ground they saw a figure come running hurridly towards them.

"Jill, X, come quick!" shouted Arthur

"What is it Arthur?" said Jill

"It's...

the Captain!" Arthur flung out his arm and pointed wildly out to sea. "The Beaver's got to head off now, or it will be caught on the tidal reef! Swim everybody!"

Arthur, Tim, Billy-Bob and X threw themselves into the water and thrashed towards where the conning-tower could be seen in the distance. Guy (the UPS man) jumped on Flopsy's back, and she churned out into the shallows like Godzilla. Only Jill was left, standing forlornly on the shore.

"Wait!" she cried "Please wait - I can't swim!"

Jill was just powering up the jet-pack that she's used previously to get down from the cliff, intending to use it to get out to the submarine, but then a thought occured to her; -she first assumed that they were in the Pacific. This has not been expicitly stated yet, but the island does seem to have been pseudo-Polynesian in nature, so Jill assumed that they were somewhere to the west of Australia, perhaps one of the French Polynesian atolls. This said, and bearing in mind that their stated destination was Siberia, submarine would perhaps not be the best way to get there anyway. Had they thought about this, of course, they could have used that aircraft that the UPS guy arrived on, but by now that had long disappeared from the narrative. It further occured to Jill that it would be a logistical nightmare to take a tyrannosaurus rex aboard a submarine, not to mention very unwise. That was not the sort of boat she wanted to be on.

In the distance, she saw The Beaver sink beneath the waves.

She found a way back up onto the headland and found the villagers, who were on their way back from where ever they had hidden from the dinosaur. She spent several hours having amazing sex with that muscular tribal warrior, who turned out to be a teddy bear after all. Afterwards she explained to him about atheism and how by making people gods and then killing them, they were entirely missing the point. He promised to tell the other islanders and that they would mend their ways.
It did not take long for a respectable, modern, secular society to evolve. Indeed, within a couple of hours there appeared a Starbuck's coffee house in the middle of the village and, a little while later, one of the huts was converted into an Irish-theme pub. Jill sold her jet-pack to the local pawn-broker and used the money to buy a new Dec alpha and set up an online shoe-repair business called cobblers.com. It was so successful that the following afternoon she floated it on the stockmarket and was instantly made a millionaire. Jill used some of the money to buy a Lear jet and hire her own personal pilot. She spent the next couple of days building a landing strip across the flattened part of the forest and by the weekend, she was ready to leave.
She packed her bags and after one last fabulous shag with the tribal warrior guy, whose name she still did not know, she climbed aboard her Lear jet and sat back as it took off. Jill's plane circled over the island as she reminisced about the week she had spent there and then struck out in the direction of Siberia.

Jill was well on her way to Siberia when fate intervened. (well, actually it was a very good looking man with a mystreious message.) Jill had been forced to travel the last several hundered miles to Siberia by dogsled, on account of the snow, and just as she was getting ready to set up camp for the evening, he popped out of a snowbank.

This seemed like a strange way to make an enterance to Jill, but she was openminded and simply asked him in for tea.
"Oh, I can't stay," He replied regretfully. "I've just got to pass this mysterious message along, and then I've got an appointment with a snowbank in Finland."

Jill sighed, because she had been thinking about nice warm sleeping bags with two people in them, and said, "All right then, I won't keep you. What is this mysterious message?"

"The dying pilchard bleeds under a turquoise moon. Do not be influenced by the decisions of others. A friend is important to you. Your lucky bun-cake today is: Blueberry Muffin."

Jill pondered these revelations. What could they mean? "Say, who are you?" she asked.
The mysterious man's face was hidden amongst the dense fur of his Parka. However, his ski-suit traced the outline of his muscles.
"I am a friend." he said simply in a strong, spicy voice.
He left the tent and was lost in the snow.
Jill thought warm thoughts for the rest of the day, after that.

Still she had to wonder; where had he gotten her horroscope from?

Meanwhile somewhere in Finland...

"Look, I'm telling you for the last time, your 'Perfect Sense of Direction' be damned. THIS, is NOT Siberia.", said Arthur furiously.

"Well, if SOMEONE could actually READ a map or USE a compas, we wouldn't have got lost in the first place would we? said X tersely.

"Listen, lads." said Tim. "There really is no point blaming each -!"

"SHUTUP!" said X and Arthur in Unison.

A man suddenly appeared from behind a snow bank. "I bring news of Jill and a mysterious message."

"How is she?" said Arthur Quickly. "The Beaver submerged before she got on-board. What did those savages do to her?"

"They tended to her every need." said the Parka-man without elaboration.

"Really?" said X

"Several times, I gather." he said with far too much elaboration. (He drew diagrams in the snow.)

"This message, what is it? demanded Tim.

"...." said the Parka-man

"What did he say?" said X, confused.
"He just said 'H' in morse code," replied Tim, "Whatever could that mean?"

Tim pulled a tatty code book out of his natty suit.
"It means" he said, thumbing through the pages "Proceed East(ish) at once to Siberia where Jill is about to be attacked by a nmysterious creature in the next posting, and there await further instructions."
"Coo" said Arthur much impressed
"Let's go!" said X and started slogging towards the rising sun...