The Continuous Story

[Peter Graham]

Captain Vermin grabbed his telescope and peered at the lobster.

"Sink me! It's a dem talking crustacean! Are we sure we didn't all die when the window went through? Perhaps this is some bally strange dem final moments whatsitsnamethingummyjig?"

The lobster chuckled and gave Bondjamesbond a slightly homoerotic sideways glance.

"Not at all, Captain. Poor Old Runcible has been something of a patsy in all this. It is very much in my..or should I say, our... interests to have you join us on Jupiter's third moon. Indeed, my colleagues and I went to great lengths to ensure that this house became spacebound. Have you any idea how difficult it is to achieve enough thrust to launch an aerodynamically poor Georgian brick, stone and tile country mansion into orbit without waking anyone up or disturbing your rubber of bridge? Or how tricky it is to build and maintain an external atmospheric shell with the contents of the garden shed? Especially when one and one's colleagues have claws rather than opposable thumbs."

"No" said the Anaconda. "Do enlighten us."

***HARD SCI FI FAN SPOD WARNING: ZUBIONDOVISION PLC REGRET THAT AS THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, THE FOLLOWING SPEECH MAY CONTAIN SOME SCIENTIFIC INACCURACIES OR INADVERTENT MISSTATEMENTS***

"Well," said the lobster. "First we had to find a suitable power source which could give us 8 megablibs of vertical thrust and which had enough kinetic condensers, ergium suspension sprockets and flopwiddle calibrated fluckles to keep the structure steady. We used a lawnmower engine souped up with DDT and two cans of paint thinners. Then we created the atmosphere by tying a gigantic, translucent milium coated balloon around the house. We gave it a sprinkling of pixie dust to combat the radioactive pressures of the Van Halen belt. Then, by extracting the waste oxygen produced by Old Runcible's collections of geraniums, we used the house's chimney syatem to pump the gas around the balloon, thus ensuring that when the window broke, no-one died!"

"Thank the Lord" squeaked Gerbil Head, who was so relieved at his miraculous escape that he accidentally half filled the fish tank with a sea of rusty water and malformed rodent chods.

The lobster jumped out of the tank and, taking Bondjamesbond by the hand, motioned the Captain towards the door.

"Shall we?"

 

[Interference]

The band struck up the theme from Shaft and they all danced for a while. All but proud Captain Vermin, who felt a sudden need to check his log. When he returned he opened his diary and began to read it. His fondest hope was that he might avoid a continuity error any significant magnitude, but as he turned page after page he came to realise that it was already too late.

Several continuity lapses had already occurred. Names had been inaccurately attributed, accents had wandered wildly form event to cataclysmic event - even cataclysmic events had had to be de-cataclysmatised and something approaching a Deus ex Machina had appeared to take a had at several key junctures.

"Odd," he conjectured at one juncture. "Most odd," he concluded rather conclusively in his opinion.

Then the music stopped.

"A band, eh?" Captain Vermin murmured as he handed his book to a waiting waiter, who demurred, saying:

"Sorry, sir, you have to keep going with the diary a while longer."

"Why?" the captain asked, rounding his lips and squaring his shoulders.

"There is a tradition of milking the diary to be thought of," lost no time the waiter in reposting before finding himself surplus once more to the requirements of the story and, thus noting, waited no more.

"Rum," said the captain.

 

[Peter Graham]

"Rum what?" asked the Anaconda.

"Rum is a small island off the western coast of Scotland, populated entirely by red deer, smurfs and midges....."

But before an already cumbersome story could add yet another twist, there was a blare of trumpets. Everyone looked up to see Eustace, wrapped up in a bedsheet and clutching Old Runcible's ear-horn as though it were an angel's clarion, being lowered down by a series of creaking pulleys.

"Lo!" said Eustace. "I am Zeus the All-Father. I am here in my role as a card-carrying deus ex machina. I hereby decree that I and my godly chums in Olympus are mightily displeased with this story and I therefore give the assembled company of unworthy mortals, incontinent rodents and Old Runcibles three options. Firstly, we can arrange for a big black dog to eat everyone up. Secondly, it can all be a dream. Thirdly, we can crash on and hope for the best. What's it to be?"

 

[Interference]

"Hmmmm," mused Captain Vermin. "So it's an island, eh?"

"Was an island," Eustace corrected, quite correctly. "But that's not the point. What about the options I just offered?"

 

[Peter Graham]

"That reminds me of a little ditty" said Captain Vermin. "She offered her honour, he honoured her offer. All night long, it was on 'er and off 'er."

"WHAT ABOUT THE OPTIONS!" shrieked Eustace.

 

[Zubi-Ondo]

"Options, Smoptions!" retorted the Lobster. I'm gettin' on the transport to Amalthea, I heard there's warm di-hydrogen oxide there. And tall grass, and moss. Lots of moss.
"I must be dreaming!" Eustace Bustard The Third muttered, although quite audible by all the weary inaccurately attributed, de-cataclysmatised travellers.
"Shut yer blithering spit-hole, boy!" The Captain shouted toward his worthless , waste of molecules and atoms of a son's direction. "If Dar's a bloomin way outta har, wael dem well fand it."

"How dare you speak at me in such manner, father? I am a card-carrying deus ex machina, sent by Zues to save you all!!"

"If yer deh deus ex machina boy, den ahm deh lord Neptune, and you'll dem well answer to me anywaey. Now shut yer dem grease portal bufor ah does it faer yah."

"Hrmpph!" Said Eustace, and got in line to board the escape craft.

As every last one, The Captain, the Lobster, Eustace, Anaconda, Old Runcible, the parlour maids, butlers, waiters, the band, and anyone else the current writer has been too lazy too look back through the pages to find, crowded into the replica of the deceased Ernst Bloefeld's escape pod. They began to hear a hissing sound.

Not amoment too soon, Mr. Bondjamesbond pulled the hatch of the escape pod closed. Through the portal windows, they watched the Georgian brick, stone and tile country mansion that had been eveloped in a patchwork baloon from the garden shed materials disintergrate into pieces as it traversed a very random spiral course out towards Io several thingykilomajobs away.

"Rather like watchin' a balloon spin around what's had it's inlet opened, woudn't cha say?" asked Anaconda, as she sipped the last few remnant of her gin sling from her martini glass.

"Is everyone well enough to make the rest of the trip?" asked Bondjamesbond.

"I'd say they's been shaken, but not stirred." Captain Vermin stated, grinning a homeopathic grin at the lobster.

"We'll be touching down on Amalthea in 30, 20, 10, 9, 8 , 8, 8..." Ah, the blasted download meter's all screwed up again. I think it's the prediction algorithm." Bondjamesbond said, shaking, but not stirring his head.

"POOF!" Well, I guess that means we're here. They all looked out the window in amazement. "What ahm sea-en out dar's a spittin image of the Island of Rum. Replete wit dem red deer, smurfs and midges... and uh... lads, lasses, me may 'ave ouselves a might of a problum out dar." Captain Vermin said in a rather gramatically incorrect yert understandable manner.

Old Runcnible pressed her face against the glass of a portal. "Grcsratitca kenidhin laven gruserbaun, Wis%&^, duff de mehk." She said.

"Exactly." said Anaconda, looking out the portal next to Old Runcibles', she said, "A Large Black Poodle - and those smurf and midges are ridin' on 'is back!"

"Help me with this Buzz Lightyear gear." said Bondjamesbond to old Runcible. I'm Goin out for a look-see.

After Bondjamesbond has successfully wresteld himself into the cheap plastic replica of a space environment suit, he said, "Stand back everyone, I'm opening the door. "To Infinity and Below!" he began to open the hatch and the cabin began to depressurize.

 

[Interference]

The pressure was now off, at last, everyone thought, including many who had yet to appear in this tale, notably Marcus Tarkus, a valuable and valued member of the Writers' Guild. But his story is so dull, we needn't go into it.

Being the first to step out onto a new world is an exhilarating experience, as Neil Armstrong was the fifty-eighth person to note, others including various vikings, a celt or two and Christopher Columbus. However, today it would be the third person who actually noticed the awesome strangeness and later noted in his diary, "Wow. It's like --- just so wow! I don't know how else to describe wow, other than ... Wow!!!"

He (or possibly she) wrote these words (maybe even "it", now I come to think of it) because as they emerged from their vessel onto this planet, they were greeted by a sign saying, "Welcome Oh Wanderer" with, in parentheses beneath, the acronym, W.O.W.

"How the devildy deuce does ya s'ppose that got here?" the person most associated with this speech pattern enquired of his (or her) fellow travellers (maybe even "its", now I come to think of it) before opening his/her/or its lungs to the first deep draught of alien air.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a him)

 

[Zubi-Ondo]

Just as the crew were taking this all in, they realized the pressure was back on. In fact, once the cabin de-pressurized, it re-pressurized to an astounding level. It seems as if there was more hot air outside the cabin than in it. The scientific reason for this would soon become clear.

Being the little brat that he was, Eustace went up to Bondjamesbond and pushed a button on his "space environment suit", which instantly flipped open the transparent plastic bubble that had enveloped Bondjamesbond's head.

Bondjamesbond proceeded to grasp his neck and start choking enthusiastically. He gasped a few times, and then realized he was not only gasping for air, but there was more of it than he was used to. He turned to see Eustace giggling like a child and shouted at him "How dare you release the airlock of a space ranger's suit on an uncharted moon! I could've been killed!"
This brought on snickers, chuckles, cavortions, cartwheels, and a number of other unseemly actions by the rest of the crew who were already outside the escape pod, an apparently unharmed. What they didn't seem to realize was that they had actually landed in a very dangerous environment. It was the world affairs thread of I-Brian's infamous "SFF Chronicles". There was more hot air in this place than humans could withstand for more than a few minutes. The sign had been a ploy to suck people in, and once assimilated, they would become cynical un-godly creatures, hell bent on spreading bad news.

This intricately devised trap was exposed by none other than the lobster who had been threatened of being thrown into hot boiling water before by these types of creatures, and therfore was able to recognize their scent in the air.

He turned tail, or what would be a tail if he had one, and quickly returned to the escape pod. He stood at the hatch of the pod and yelled "Anyone who want's to escape with their sanity and diginity, follow me!"

But not one followed except one, who slipped in through the door while the lobster was pre-occupied with reading the fine print on the "WOW" sign with the captain's telescope.