The guy looked nervous. "Yeah. I guess maybe I could use a stiff drink."
"A stiff's drink — that's like formaldehyde, right?" barked Uncle Nancy sarcastically. "I think that's a good idea, bud. Too bad I only have good liquor here."
Bill, who had indeed imbibed formaldehyde before and seriously felt that even the dead shouldn't have to take it, shook his head. "Ah, Uncle Nancy. Let's keep things pleasant here." He was relaxing into a glowing alcoholic stupor and wanted everyone to enjoy it. "I'm having a good time, let's all have a good time. Why don't you just give my hairy friend here the most alcoholic brew you got on tap or inna bottle!"
"Comin' up in a jiffy!" The bartender pulled open a drawer, and pulled up a small bottle with a red wrapper. On the wrapper were the words, in Olde English Calligraphy, Olde Mortality, and in very small print Ye be informed no person hath ever lived to finish ye whole bottle.
"I want one too," Bill intoned with alcoholic greed.
"Me three," Elliot said in the same voice.
"Last one," Uncle Nancy told them. "But I got three bottles of fermented yak's milk I will gladly share with you. A favorite tipple of mine this time of day." He quickly opened the bottles, seized one by the neck and passed the others over. "Here's to a good yak," he said, almost draining his.
The drink tasted like nothing Bill had experienced before, settling to the pit of his stomach and exploding there. But good!
Bill's eyes watered with joy. He tried to express his joy, but when he tried to speak all he could say was "Mooo!"
"Yep," said Uncle Nancy, wiping away tears of his own. "This stuff is the real stuff — Moo!"
Elliot Methadrine could only sip his. But the hippie sneered at this abstemiousness and drained his own drink all the way down in a single gulp. Plumes of steam seemed to rise from his ears. But instead of being more relaxed — or dead — the guy's eyes just looked a little wilder. Apparently, not for the first time, the commercial had lied.
"So anyway," said Uncle Nancy, folding his arms together on his chest with disapproval. "What exactly brings a thing like you into my joint?"
"Hey, man, don't rag me," muttered the hippie. "I'm tryin' to remember. I'm so spaced out, man. Must have been something I smoked. Or drank. Or shot up. Or something."
Bill drained his bottle and banged his empty pint down onto, the counter. "Better fill me up with regular. Draft. Lasts a little longer." Bill was feeling positively buoyant. Usually alcohol hammered closed the lid on the loose stuff slogging around in his head. This dark, delicious stuff was actually exhilarating him.
"Gee," said Elliot. "None of that sounds very good."
"It ain't man, it ain't. I think I downed, like, a blotter of acid, man."
"That must have burned."
"Not too bad," said Bill. "Can be tasty if properly diluted. Still, I'll never be able to touch it now. This stuff is spoiling me."
A big frown wrapped around Uncle Nancy's face. "I think the guy's talking about the lysergic dyethelamine variety."
"Huh?"
"A psychotropic substance that alters one's perception of reality," said Elliot, hazarding another sip of his potent drink.
"Hmmm. Sounds interesting," said Bill. "What proof is it?"
"Oh, man. This dude is bumming me out!" said the hippie. His eyes seemed to bug from his head, as though pulsing with angst from within. "Man ... those books up there ... they're bumming me out too. No good, no good."
Uncle Nancy snarled in annoyance and, fed up, was reaching under the bar for his leather-bound club when the hippie suddenly stood up straight, raising his hands up into the air with an attitude reeking of 'Eureka!'
"I remember! I remember now! I remember what I'm supposed to do here!" he cried joyfully.
"What?" said Uncle Nancy, still clutching the club. "Pray tell, what's that?"
"Gimme a shot of Old Overcoat!"
Clearly unnerved by the man's fierce insistence, Uncle Nancy obeyed, pouring the amber stuff into a double shot glass. The wild-eyed man belted it back with an enthusiasm truly unbridled. He reached over the bar, grabbed the bartender by bodice and bra and pulled him toward him. The club was torn from Uncle Nancy's grasp before he could use it.
"You got a little boy's room, man? I gotta go!"
Stunned, Uncle Nancy pointed to the rear of the establishment. Before anyone could do anything, the hippie grabbed the almost-full bottle of Old Overcoat and bolted for the toilet like a man truly obsessed.
"Geronimo!" he cried.
And he was gone.
"Don't know why," said Uncle Nancy. "But I got a really bad feeling about that guy!"
"Gee —" Elliot supplicated. "So do I."
Bill spilled and dribbled beer with happy incontinence. "Sounds like that guy had a good idea," he muttered. He took another long sip of his beer. He happily let the alcoholic stuff run down his throat, gurgling like an unfettered stream of Bacchus. He knew now that when he died, he wanted to die choking to death on this wonderful brew.
When he brought his smacking lips away from the rim of the mug, he noticed that things seemed ... well, mighty different.
At first, Bill ascribed the difference to a state of extreme inebriation on his part. But then he realized that usually when things got this strange, he was usually flat on his face staring at the floor. Now, however, he was sitting in a perfectly upright position, if not sober then fully in control of his capacities.
The whole bar had changed.
Gone was the dusky, comfortable wood, the dark, smoky mood. In its place were bright lights, the sheen of metal, plastic and glass, the flash of mirrors. The air smelled not of beer and chintz and tobacco, but of sweat and talc and spandex.
Bill blinked at how bright it was. His astonishment turned to alarm. In any situation of panic, and if there is alcohol close by, a good Trooper knows what to do. Finish your drink.
Bill grabbed the glass in front of him and drank liberally of its contents....
And spit it out, gasping.
It was some strange combination of fruit and yogurt and the Devil knew what else. Bill had heard of this kind of nonalcoholic and disgusting libation before — but he'd never let it close to his lips.
He wiped his mouth free of it on a sleeve. He'd just drunk (gasp!) a health shake!
What had happened to his beer?
He looked to Uncle Nancy for explanation, and was startled to see that the bartender no longer wore a dress. Rather, he was wearing a dark blue sweat suit, open at the neck to let part of his plethora of salt-and-pepper chest hair out. Bill looked down and saw that he was no longer wearing a dress, nor was Elliot Methadrine. They both sported bright green and red gym shorts and T-shirts.
Grunts brought Bill's attention over to the far side of the room, where mammothly muscled males were in the process of lifting weights.
"This isn't Barworld anymore," said Elliot, without a shred of his previous tentativeness. "It's turned to Barbellworld!"
"My dress!" a man cried. And another plaint: "What happened to my lovely dress!"
"The hippie!" said Elliot, snapping his fingers. He pointed toward the Men's Room. "That bathroom wouldn't happen to be the location of the Time/Space Resonation Nexus?"
Uncle Nancy blinked. "Well, yeah, maybe — I mean, all the bars use Time/Space Plumbing system — I don't know about no nexus."
"That's it, Bill! That must be it!" Elliot intoned loudly. He pulled off his bright purple bandana and threw it onto the floor in disgust. "What we were looking for was right under our noses, and we didn't even notice. You were so insistent upon getting your stupid booze!"
"What's wrong with that?" Bill whined defensively. "It is Barworld. Or it was, anyway." He cast a doubtful and blurry eye toward the men working out with weights. On the far wall were posters depicting Mr. Planetary and Mr. Nebula and Mr. Light-speed, flexing muscles like mutated melons.
"My books!" cried Uncle Nancy.
"What — are they gone?"
"No — bu
t look, they've ... they've changed."
Bill looked down. Sure enough, they had changed. At first he didn't see it, but when he looked more closely, he saw exactly how they had altered.
What had once been DAVID COPPERFIELD by Charles Dickens was now PECS GALORE by I. Liftem, while WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy had become BICEPS AND TRICEPS by Bod Builder.
"My books. My great literature!" cried Uncle Nancy, even more disturbed over this than the loss of his dress. "It's all been changed into muscled moron crapola!"
"I smell a time-changer at work!" intoned Elliot Methadrine. "Definitely the work of that crazed hippie who just left — but how did he do it? I haven't got the faintest idea."
Bill didn't have the faintest idea, either. He was too busy undergoing, first, shock, then the distinct beginnings of an anxiety attack. Imagine — a lifelong search for the Fountain of Youth (well, the Fountain of Vermouth, anyway) only to have that luscious flow yanked untimely from one's mouth. Horrors! He'd found Barworld and yet all that there was to drink was — he shuddered at the thought — health shakes?
"What.... What could that bowbhead hippie possibly have done?" he queried incoherently, his jaw flapping like a bar door in the wind.
"I'll tell you what he did!" Elliot intoned grotesquely. "I mean, really, are you that dense? He's gone back to the past and, changed history."
Uncle Nancy looked despairingly at his books, tearing out handfuls of hair from his rapidly balding head.
"Does this mean — we've failed?" Bill mumbled, losing track of things.
"I don't know. Let's find out." Elliot strode over to a hunk manfully gulping Evian water, dabbing at a sweating forehead between sets. "A question, sir. Is there still a war going on with the Chingers?"
"Chingers," said the man with a definite Austrian accent. "Oh! Ja, ja. I remember them from my school lessons. Ja! Dey vere viped out like the wermin dey vere. A hundert years ago!"
"Well," said Bill, "that's good news anyway."
"Ja, unt dat vas by der Fourth Reich, too. Sieg heil!" said the Austrian, saluting a picture of a man with a very tiny mustache on the wall. "Der Glorious Fourth Reich, who also abolished alcohol unt tobacco. Und put der barbell on the map of history."
"No more alcohol!" wailed Bill, dumbstruck. His personal universe had just ended.
"This calls for radical action," said Elliot. He pulled out an ID badge. "My name is Elliot Methadrine and I'm with the Interdimensional Time Crime Enforcement."
"The Time Cops!" said Uncle Nancy, clearly impressed. "Hey, you guys used to stop in all the time for free drinks and bribes.
"I thought you were with the GBI," said Bill.
"No need for that cover now, Bill," said Elliot, suddenly all business. "I was following a lead but it has just gone south. Too late to stop it now." He turned back to the bodybuilder. "I need to requisition street clothing and weapons."
"Ja. Sure," said the muscle-bound fellow. "Vee got dat real love for der Police. Vee respect der Authority on Barbellworld. It vas der vish of our founder, St. Arnold, that ve be good, clean, reverent, sadistic muscle pumpers!"
"Fine, fine," said Elliot. "Uncle Nancy — how does the Time/Space Plumbing work? Clearly the hairy guy did something in there. Where are the guts, the controls to the thing?"
"Well, hell if I know," said Uncle Nancy, his big beefy face growing red. "I'm not a Time Sanitation Plumber. We use Chronos Sewage ourselves, and they take forever to get out here. We'll just have to go take a look, won't we?"
"Come on, Bill," said Elliot Methadrine. "Let's get a change of clothes and then go have a look."
Bill grimaced and shook his head woefully.
Talk about things going down the tubes!
CHAPTER 7
Uncle Nancy showed Bill and Elliot to the bathroom.
"Revolting! Just look how this thing has changed!" groused the bartender, gazing around in horror at the colorful tile, the new light fixtures, the bidets, the vitamin and cologne vending machines. "Used to be just a trough and a thundermug. Oh yeah — and a rubber dispenser that was always broken or empty. Real homey and friendly with lots of grafitti. And I mean graphic grafitti."
Bill, a little woozy, looked at the three bright white porcelain urinals. "Gotta go," he mumbled.
"Not there, you idiot!" said Elliot. "Didn't you hear the man? That's the Time Vortex!"
Bill blinked. Funny, looked like a urinal to him. True, an unusually fancy, unusually clean urinal. "Sorry — I guess I can wait...."
The bartender and Bill stared, transfixed, as Elliot reached out a tremulous hand, touched the handle on the urinal, sucked in a deep breath — and flushed.
The results were far more dramatic than usual. It even beat the cheap vacuum potties on quickly assembled starships where chances were you finished your trip with a high squeaky voice.
"Wow!" Bill susurrated.
"Absolutely," Elliot agreed. From somewhere, a small device with knobs and switches and an oscilloscope had appeared in his hands. "According to my Time Ticker — all we Time Police are equipped with these things — what we have here is a crack in Time far larger than anticipated. Yes — I can see how it was possible for that weirdo hippie to jump back through time and wreak havoc. This aperture you could fit an elephant through!"
Bill stepped back two paces and grabbed hold of the door latch of the bathroom stall for security. He felt like he was losing his sense of balance. He had the distinct sensation of being sucked into a mammoth Time Maw.
The Portal had replaced the porcelain facility completely. A scintillating light swirled and revolved and gave off sparks, whirling and growing. Dimly seen within this display was a control console, not unlike a multidialed TV set. As the Time-Wind pulsed, the screen flickered and displayed some highly interesting scenes.
Bill sniffed loudly. "It stinks," he said nasally, because he was pinching his nostrils shut as he spoke.
"Of course. That is because the Time-Nexus is routed through Garbageworld on its way to linkup to Barworld. Depends on what part of the past you tune into," said Elliot. "This particular era, for instance, is particularly offensive to members of our era." He tapped his nose. "Which is why Time Authority knocks out its agents' sense of smell before we Time Dump."
"And just what era would that be? That you're from I mean," Uncle Nancy wanted to know.
"Classified information," stated Elliot unequivocally. Hair waving, he looked down at his device. Its needles were swinging wildly. A hot red light flashed. And the oscilloscope was being particularly scilly. "Yikes!" intoned Elliot, looking alarmed and rather uncharacteristically out of control. "This time portal —"
"Don't tell me," cried Uncle Nancy. "Something terrible is going to happen and we'll all be killed!"
"No. Well, possibly maybe yes. Anything could happen — because this thing, this Time Portal, and I find this difficult to comprehend, is sentient!"
"That's kind of a long word," Bill explained. "It means, I guess — sentiment without the 'M' because it's not quite as emotional?"
"No, moron. It means alive! Alive and intelligent! Which is more than I can say for you sometimes!" Elliot Methadrine shook his head with alarm and amazement. "In all my eras as a Time Agent, I've never seen such a thing!"
"Alas, I encounter your deplorable type all too often," a rich baritone bass said. British accent, deep-dipped with culture, heavily dripping irony and other metallic forms of humor. "Good day, you wretched deplorable excuses for biological self-propagation. In the words of my esteemed ancestors, Alexander Graham Time-Phone Machine, you rang?"
The Time Portal glowed ethereally, a fascinating sight. Its interior was imbedded with alien crystalline assemblages and jewellike appendages emanating rainbowed glow and pixillating auras, light arias and perhaps even light operas, Haydn perhaps, or Delius — or was that THE MIKADO by Gilbert and Sullivan in the background? Upon those aforementioned screens flashed candid scenes from intergalactic history. The signing of the Declaration of Inde
pendence. The Emperor's Annual Public Constitutional. Napoleon the Fifth's Battle of Watercloset.
"You.... You're a Time Portal?" intimated Bill, gasping gawkily with awe.
"Well, I'm certainly not a Time Potable, so please refrain from drinking me, you obvious lush! Nor am I a Time Portable. I am the full-scale, full-priced model — an Eton- and Oxford-educated Time Portal. And dear chap it is a pitiable shame that as worthy an intelligence as I am, I must respond to anyone who yanks my chain, so to speak. Especially noisome and illiterate obnoxious primates such as yourself."
"Well, be that as it may," intoned Elliot, rearing up to his full if meager height. "As you have just told us, in far too much detail, you have been summoned and you must help us!" Elliot flashed his Time Cop identification and then showed the Portal his Captain Cosmic Secret Decoder ring.
"Yeah, right!" said Uncle Nancy. "And first off we want to know where the hell did that hairy guy who zipped in here get to?"
"What's that, dear boy? Hirsute chappy, you say? Ah! Of course! You must mean that horrible hippie from Hellworld. Yes, quite! Why, I believe he went back into the past, and with the rather laudable ambition to change history. Either that or I plugged a few too many bloody nanodes into my quazoid last night."
"Just take a look," said Bill. "He must have changed something. This dump used to be a nice dump of a bar! Now it's a sweaty gym, run by goose-stepping weightlifters with German accents."
"Hmm. Oh, my, yes. Well, that sort of thing does happen occasionally. You can't have Time Portals in this Universe and not get a few minor changes from time to time."
"Minor changes!" expostulated Elliot Methadrine. "We're talking about a vast sweeping cataclysm! Why, I'm not even sure there's a Galactic Bureau of Investigation anymore!"
An amber light pulsed quizzically. "Oh?" said the Time Portal. "Well, then. Let's have a look into my Crystal Bowl." From the bottom of the Portal's floor emerged a round bowl filled with scintillating liquid. In this liquid swam a goldfish. Pictures began to flash. Bill saw images of Panzer-tanks and Spandau propeller planes. Jackboots kicking galactic butt. Beer halls and pretzels everywhere. Hmm, he thought. Maybe this change isn't really bad. He loved beer halls and pretzels!
On The Planet Of The Hippies From Hell Page 6