CHAPTER 20

Bill stood up.

"Out of the way, motherbowber!" said the man who had inadvertently freed him. "I gotta get off this tub!"

Bill tried to speak, but he'd done so little of it in the last two years that he delivered this: "Slowly I turn," he rumbled deeply. "Step by step ... inch by inch...."

"You got a problem, bozo? I sure do! I'm outta here!"

Bill lifted his leg, from which the old broken chain depended. Sure, enough, it was true! "I'm free!" he said. "I don't believe it! You've freed me! I've been in this starship, forgotten, for years. And you've freed me. How ever can I thank you?"

"You can just move it! I've gotta get down this ladder!"

A loudspeaker rattled. "Two minutes till closing of hatch. Next stop: Some Godforsaken Planet!"

"Oh no! That's Deathworld 69! There is death, only death there!" Bill fell to his knees, blubbering miserably before the man.

"Get outta my way!"

"Please, sir! I'll give you the Secret to the Universe! I know the meaning of Life itself!"

"Look, butt-head, I don't care if you've got the keys to the captain's liquor cabinet. This boat's gonna blow soon, and I'm not going to be on it!"

"I'm not lying!"

"You can get out of the way, buddy. I got to get down this ladder."

A loudspeaker rattled. "One minute till closing of hatch. Next stop: Some Godforsaken Planet!"

Terror shot through the strange Trooper.

"I'm not lying!"

"Thirty seconds to hatch closing," the speaker voice said. "Last chance for flight insurance. A mere ten million credits per head. Twenty-nine seconds...."

This, thought Bill, was getting awfully familiar.

And so was this guy here!

"I said, bowb-for-brains, get out of my way!"

Bill received a quick, hard shove. He fell back and back — and then the floor seemed to open up beneath him. He scrabbled for purchase, seized the rungs of a ladder — and the thing buckled and fell down with him.

He hit the floor hard, but he knew exactly what he had to do. Without hesitation, despite the pain coursing through his body, he pulled himself up and headed for what, instinctively, he knew was the way out.

Sure enough, soon he saw the outline of the door to freedom. It was a hatch, and daylight shone through, smelly and smoggy but daylight nonetheless. Almost blinded by the light, Bill staggered down the gangplank.

Free, he thought. Free!

But free — where?

"Hey, Trooper. Where the hell do you think you're going?" demanded a guard.

"Where am I?" asked Bill.

"You're really out of it, aren't you! You're at the Happy Trails Spaceport on Jinx Ether Force Base. You're trying to get off this Starship BEELZEBUB. So who the hell are you?"

It all came back to him, all of it. With his new intelligence, he was able to see exactly what had happened.

He'd gone back in time, gone back the hard way —

And bumped into himself.

He knew immediately what he had to say.

"I'm Lieutenant Brandox. That's who I am!"

"Great. That means that the Trooper found who he's looking for, huh? Where the hell is he?"

"He's on his way. He should be out any moment now."

The guard examined his watch. "He'd better shake it! This thing's about ready to go."

"Don't worry," said Bill. "He'll make it. Just...."

Sure enough, at exactly three seconds before it was too late, he saw himself barreling and rolling down the gangplank. The Trooper that was his past self rolled to a halt at the bottom of the ramp.

"Hey, guy," said the guard. "This guy Brandox?"

Bill stared down at his past self, with all the beseeching he could muster from his reddened eyeballs. He met his own gaze, and something strange clicked.

"Yeah. That's him. He's coming with me."

"Well, I suggest you get in your grav-car and get the hell outta here because these things go off in an explosion that cinders living things for yards around." The guard immediately started running away, leaving them alone.

Bill looked around. Sure enough, there was the grav-car he remembered. He jumped into the back seat.

Grumpily, the before-Bill leaped into the driver's seat and gunned the anti-grav repulsors. "I don't know why I'm doing this. I just don't know," he said as they raced away.

"You won't be sorry, Bill," said Bill. "I promise you."

Bill heard the BEELZEBUB behind them, starting to blast off. Then he felt something tugging at his wrist.

The bracelet ... it was activating. Behind the impervium shielding of the BEELZEBUB it wouldn't work. But out here, it had shot off a signal through time and space —

A signal to Sir Dudley and Elliot-Bgr.

Sure enough, before he even had a moment to extrapolate mentally from this thought, the two of them materialized. They hung suspended in the air, Elliot waving him toward the time gate.

Bill didn't even wait for an invitation. Long hair flapping, he hurled himself from the speeding grav-car directly into Sir Dudley the Time Portal. Elliot-Bgr and a much-changed Bill disappeared, leaping back into the future.

And to Hellworld.

"Where are we?" Bill gasped, coughing as he inhaled the smoky, polluted air. Lightning shot from dark clouds, fetid warm rain fell on the decayed, crumbling city that surrounded them. Murky figures shuffled through the gloom as distant thunder rumbled.

"You might very well ask," Sir Dudley sniffed. "While you were doing whatever you were doing — and judging by the way you look it was surely an interesting experience — Elliot and I decided enough was enough. Even restoring the Bloomsbury group to their boring epistles did not remove the Nazi menace completely. So Hellworld must still exist. Using the most sophisticated tracking and computational techniques, I located this undescended testicle of time. A recursive loop that was originating all the trouble in time. We are here now to eliminate it forever."

"Sounds reasonable," Bill observed. "Investigate, elucidate, cogitate, eliminate."

"Gee, Bill, all of a sudden you are talking funny," Elliot-Bgr said. "What did happen to you while you were away?"

"I will be happy to elucidate after we terminate the present operation."

"Yeah — gee — wow," Elliot-Bgr muttered, shaking his head in mystification as he turned to Sir Dudley. "What facts do you have on this place?"

"Very little. Planet of doom and despair. I get Nazi readings and a strong smell of hippies. Also, I must add, a sonic boom of horny-porny. Yes, there it is — we are there at last — the home of horny-pony and horny-porny fandom! And I must say, Bill, indeed I must, that you certainly look the part!"

Bill caught a glimpse of himself in the cracked window of a decaying building. He could not help but gasp. He looked a great deal like the guy who had tried to murder him on board the starship to Barworld!

Shaggy, uncombed hair hung down from the top of his head. He had a long beard and mustache. His clothes were ragged and tattered.

"Disgusting — but an excellent disguise for this operation, is it not?" he commented.

Elliot-Bgr turned up his nose in disgust. "Yeah, fine, Bill. You better get yourself a bath though, huh Trooper? I always said from the beginning that all bowby humans have B.O. Chingers can't sweat. Chingers forever! — but you're particularly offensive today, Bill!"

"I'll agree completely," said Sir Dudley.

"I do apologize, gentlemen. Dreadfully sorry, but I have been lying in a prison ship for two years, so I would appreciate a bit more understanding."

Elliot-Bgr shook his head sorrowfully. Or was the shaking of the head a Chinger expression of sarcastic mirth? "That must have been rough, Bill. Glad you got out, though. Gee — we were combing the time-ways for you, guy. Just what did you do to while away the time?"

"Well, I'm sober," said Bill. "I'm sober and I don't want a drink. And with the help of that implant J. Edgar Insufledor gave me, I am now educated!"

"No!" said Sir Dudley.

"Yes, and I have come up with the Meaning of Life!"

"You're pulling my tail!" said the Chinger.

"Of course, to do so I had to develop my own mathematical language. And to understand the Meaning of Life, you have to understand the equations," Bill said.

"Gee — why don't we get you a bath before our first lesson?"

"Yes, and then let's deal with these hippies and Time Nazis!"

"It's really worth it. It will solve all the problems of the universe — you'll join me in this great understanding."

The trio hurried along to find a hotel room. The Time Nazis and the hippies from Hellworld could wait a while longer; Bill needed a bath!

As they strode along, Bill noticed that all of the natives, women and men alike, looked much like him. Shaggy hair, ratty clothes. However, they all had something that Bill did not: a propeller beanie perched atop their heads.

"Ah ha!" he said. "Yes! The emblem of the hardcore aficionado of horny-porny! So this must be the planet that they migrated to in hopes of fleeing persecution!"

"Gee, Bill, we just said all that!"

"Ah!" said Bill, taking in the sights. "Ah ha!" After such a long time in a dank, dark hole it was incredibly invigorating and intriguing to have this wide array of sensory input. And what fascinating stuff as well! This entire city seems built like a gigantic convention center! And the indigenous population seems to be involved in one long never-ending horny-porny convention, an overripe tradition established somewhere in the lost mists of time."

"Let's get that hotel room and that bath!" said Elliot-Bgr. "You can make the intelligent observations later!"

They wended their way past huckster rooms jammed with books, cheap jewelry, horny-porny magazines and the oddest effluvia that Bill had ever seen. Long-haired Hellworld hippies marched around in barbarian outfits, half-naked slave girl disguises, sadomasochistic bordello madams with whips and other interesting outfits. They walked past rooms filled with hippies listening to horny-porny personages prattle on about buggering, battering, wanking, pranking and other colorful concepts the mind cannot stomach. They walked past great halls filled with art shows, filled with pictures that looked as though ripped straight from Bill's Three-Dee collection of horny-porny comix.

The pre-educated Bill might have been quite impressed, but the present, superacademic Bill, equipped with the equivalent of ten PhDs from Oxford, three from Harvard and a honorary kiss on the forehead from the president of Berkeley, was appalled.

"My goodness. What perverted taste! I can only imagine the horrors perpetrated by their fiction!"

For Bill, in his relaxing hours from all his learning, had also read all the great classics — from BEOWULF through Shakespeare to ABDUCTION: THE UFO CONSPIRACY. So he well knew the difference between Quality and Sleazy Popular Trash. Bill's fondest hope now, after imparting the Meaning of Life to the inept incompetents of the universe, was to write his memoirs — if only to attempt to remember what had actually happened to him. Clearly, it was the Sleazy Popular Trash these horny-porny hippies on Hellworld consumed.

"Come on Bill," said Elliot-Bgr. "This stuff may stink all right. But right now, you stink worse!"

The trio obtained a room with a bath and there immersed Bill in a bathtub. It took five separate bathtubs full of hot water to scrub the grime from Bill's body. It was decided, however, to keep his hair and beard, since that way the group could be much better disguised as they sought out the source of the horny-porny infection.

To aid their disguise, Sir Dudley no longer looked like a Time Portal but was disguised as a torture master complete with whips and molten lead pot. Elliot-Bgr was most fetching as a half-naked Babylonian harlot.

"Shall we proceed, gentlemen?" Bill asked. For, indeed, he was very proud of his newly acquired intelligence. He had, finally, a purpose to his existence.

He was not only going to save the universe, he was going to give to it the meaning that had enriched his own soul so much!