Chapter 4:
What intentions might an extraterrestrial have when he's plying you with drinks? And is it really wise to take him up on them?

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Widdlesham, England
The Sherlock Arms
near closing time
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Mulder watched in awe as the pint-sized man downed pint after pint of dark ale, each chug preceded by a handful of salted peanuts. The younger man was more busy trying to get the fish out of his ear than in keeping pace with Ford's consumption.

"Excuse me, sir...do you have a Q-Tip?" Mulder called hopefully to the fat man tending bar.

The man looked with disdain at the American college student and shook his head. "Leave your strange grooming 'abits out the door, lad. This place is fer drinking, not fer gettin' the wax out'n your ears."

Ford took a break from pouring beer down his throat to grab onto Mulder's elbow, which continually threatened to jab Ford in the eye as the young man was desperately mining his aural canal with a pinkie finger. "Mulder, my man, leave it alone. You'll be glad you have that fish there when we get to where we're going."

The pull on his arm got his attention, and Mulder looked deeply into Ford's close-set, colorless eyes. Something in that vaguely vacant stare convinced Mulder that the other man was serious.

"Where are we going? And who are you?" Mulder asked, breaking the sudden silence between them. He was almost certain by now, despite Ford's apparently great fondness for inebriation, that this man was not a school official.

"I told you, I'm Ford Prefect, and I've come to take you to 1998. And a few other places along the way." The Betelgeusian knew he had only confused the poor boy more; that's mainly why he said it the way he did. "The fish acts as a kind of intergalactic linguistic translator; the ale and nuts are to buffer your system for when we get a lift off this planet." Ford pushed the bowl of peanuts in front of Mulder. "So, here...you'll appreciate having some of these in you, as well."

Mulder shook his head and pulled a bag of sunflower seeds out of his jeans pocket, holding them up for Ford to see before he took the first one out to toss into his mouth. "Will these do, sir?" he asked with a grin as he cracked open the shell; he'd decided to humor the older man.

"It's the salt you'll need, so those will do," Ford answered, apparently not getting the hint that he was being humored. "Drink up, too; that matter transference process can really wipe you out." Ford motioned to the bartender to refill their pint glasses and noticed Mulder pull out his wallet. "Don't worry," the Betelgeusian said, waving a 10-pound note in the air. "I'm buying."

The young man obeyed gladly, taking a long swallow on the freshened pint glass. He knew he wasn't going to be getting laid tonight, so he figured he might as well take advantage of the older man's generosity.

Mulder choked and sputtered on the beer he still had in his mouth as a sudden suspicion hit him. He looked over at Ford warily and began to get up from the stool. "Uh, Mister, I'd better get back to the college now," he said, almost tripping on the stool as he backed away from the bar. "Thanks for the beer and...uh...good luck in catching your ride to...whatever planet you said you're from."

Ford peered at his watch again and tossed the note toward the bartender, apparently unwilling to let the young man take his leave gracefully. "It's almost time, anyway; we'd better get outside, or Zaphod and Trillian won't be able to find us."

A *four*some, Mulder thought, paralyzed where he stood in the middle of the pub. He'd only imagined such things. Can this really be happening to me? he wondered, staring pale-faced as he watched Ford approach him and take him by the sleeve.

"Come on, Mulder, we need to get out of town, so no one can see us; Zaphod and Trillian said they'd meet us in that pasture a half mile down the road," Ford said, dragging Mulder out the door, as if such propositions were made every day in the middle of pubs in sleepy South Country villages.

Chapter 5:
Getting picked up in a pasture

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In a different pasture than
the first one with the
trod-on cow droppings
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Ford had held on to Mulder's sleeve and half-pulled, half-led the young man all the way to the meeting place. Mulder was still pinching himself as they stood waiting for their ride, sure he must be dreaming this whole experience, but unable to figure out why he wouldn't wake up.

"Mulder, you're going to bruise yourself if you keep doing that," Ford advised, taking a break from looking up at the sky to peer over at his perplexed companion. He decided it was time to begin explaining a few things.

"Listen, mate, I know this all sounds very strange," he began, trying to sound sympathetic. His impatience with earthlings' naivete about such simple things as time-and-space travel nudged its way past his sympathetic tone. "What this is all about is...you're a very special young fellow."

Having said that, Ford looked long and hard at Mulder. Such professions, he had learned from his previous years on Earth, usually did wonders for making humans feel better. Ford knew that Earthlings, if anything, were amazingly egotistical. However, it only made Mulder look more nervous. Ford decided to give it another try.

"You see, Mulder, you're the key element in the future of the Universe...I'm here to take you to places that will convince you of this..."

At that, Ford looked up as a vibrating hum resounded in the air. "They're here!" Ford said, pulling out his Electronic Thumb to signal the Heart of Gold's transporter beam to activate. Just in case Trillian had stepped away from the controls and left Zaphod to pick them up...he never was very good at the technical stuff, Ford well knew.

"Are, are you saying..." Mulder began, following Ford's eyes to the dark sky above them. He could dimly see a large form hovering a few hundred yards above them.

"That's my cousin's space ship, yes," Ford replied, taking Mulder's arm again.

"No," Mulder said, shaking his head and trying to back away from the reality in front of him. "No...you are never going to convince me that there are such things as little green men..."

"There are green men, yes, but they're not little," Ford explained. "They're called Vogons, and we sure as Hell don't want to run into any of them, thank you very much."

"Oh, shiii..." was all Mulder said as the Heart of Gold took him and Ford aboard.

Chapter 6:
Leave it to Marvin
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Aboard the Heart of Gold
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His head was throbbing and his stomach must have been turned inside out. Either that, or his intestines had gotten together with his colon to form a Reggae group, and were beating on his brain because they still couldn't afford a real set of steel drums.

Mulder raised his pummelled head two inches off the mattress he was laying on and regretted it immediately. "Phoebe?" he called, not remembering how he got here, or even where "here" was. Still, whenever he woke up as sore as this, Phoebe was usually not far.

Fighting off the pressure in his skull, Mulder looked around bleary-eyed, rubbing his face to help remove the aftereffects of whatever it was he had just survived.

"Hey there, Handsome, you're lookin' reeeeeal good; want to come over here with those luscious lips of yours and suck my..."

"What?" Mulder called out, not seeing anyone in the small room with him. Still, the voice seemed like it was coming from inside the cubicle, and it was definitely addressing him.

"I was just saying, Beautiful," the disembodied, sultry, gender indeterminable voice continued, "that I love that tousled, right-out-of-a-long-romp-between-the-sheets look you're going for there with your hair, and..."

"Who are you? Where are you? Where am I?" Mulder interrupted, not allowing a single breath between each sentence. He sat up and self-consciously dragged his fingers through his hair to make it stop looking the way he knew it looked in the morning. He didn't want to encourage whomever was the possessor of this voice.

"Ooooh, Baby," the voice went on, "You've got a lot of questions, you baaad boy! Let me give you something to keep that loooovely mouth of yours busy....You like candy, don't you, little boy?"

"Eddie, leave him alone!" another disembodied voice echoed. This one Mulder recognized immediately, and the memory of last night flooded his brain. It was the voice of that strange little man who had shown up in the cemetery, and had propositioned him in the pub. The one who had dragged him out to the pasture to meet up with his two "friends"; the one who said they were coming in a space ship...

"Oh, God, that didn't happen!" he muttered to himself, putting his elbows on his knees as a brace for his throbbing and troubled brain.

"Mulder, this is Ford," the voice stated the obvious. "I'm sending Marvin down to collect you. Just sit tight, mate."

A female voice broke in. "And Eddie, stop flirting with our guest! We need your circuits concentrated on running the ship!"

Mulder thought the last voice sounded disturbingly like Cyndi Lauper's. Had Cyndi Lauper come in a spaceship to kidnap him in the middle of having sex in a cemetery with Phoebe? "This must be a very weird dream," Mulder said to himself. He considered trying the pinch test again, but his arms were too bruised from doing that the night before.

Just then, a door flew open with a whisper. A low groan followed it.

"Oh, joy, Ford has brought *another* Earth man for me to babysit," a new voice said with practiced sarcasm. The voice rolled in, and Mulder could see that it belonged to a rather heavy-looking piece of metal - reminding him vaguely of the robot in the old TV series, Lost in Space. However, the ominous aura of depression and cynicism given off by this one made that one look like the life of the party.

Mulder stood up. "Are you Marvin?" he asked, trying to make the best of his situation and go with the flow.

"Oh, you *are* a bright one," the robot replied, still sarcastically. "They tell you Marvin will collect you, and here I am collecting you. Amazing that you figured it all out on your own! Yes, I'm Marvin. I'd say I'm delighted to meet you, but...that would be a stretch. I don't *like* to stretch; it gives me a headache." Marvin pivoted around and began rolling toward the still-open door. "Now, follow me."

"Hands off him, Marvy," Eddie warned lustily as Mulder followed the robot out of the room. "I saw him first."

Mulder could swear he heard Eddie's voice give him a suggestive wink.

"Intense pain in all the diodes down my left side, and he thinks I'd want to have sex with a human. Hah!" Marvin responded. "Bloody self-contained integrated circuit boards."

Mulder followed Marvin down a hallway leading to what looked like another closed door. Trained by his mother to be polite when he was a guest in someone's house, Mulder tried to not take Marvin's rejection of him to heart. Not that he would have wanted the robot to start coming on to him like Eddie had.

"That Eddie...is he another robot?" Mulder asked.

"A robot?" Marvin sighed his answer long-sufferingly. "No, he's not a robot." The mumbling began again. "Bloody humans, can't tell a complex robot from a glorified microchip."

Marvin seemed to take everything as an insult, Mulder thought, deciding it might be best to say as little as possible to him.

"Eddie," Marvin said with mock affection, "Is a Genuine People Personality. A truly *artificial* intelligence. 'Intelligence' - what a degradation of the word!"

"So...you don't like Eddie much, huh?" Mulder interjected, breaking his own "shut up, you idiot" rule.

"Don't like him? Now *why* would you ever *remotely* even *begin* to think that about *me*?" Marvin said. "I like *everybody*, can't you tell?" Sarcasm was evidently and integral part of this robot's programming, Mulder surmised.

"Units like Eddie are an insult to the term 'artificial intelligence',' Marvin went on. "Oh, but they have the life! All *they* have to do is 'set the mood' and do some maths figures now and again. I, on the other hand, have been cursed with mobility, so they make me run their bloody errands. Brain the size of a planet, aches coursing through all my wiring, and do they care? No. It's 'Marvin, go make me some toast,' and 'Marvin, go wake up the human we picked up...' "

"Set the mood?" Mulder questioned, having already learned to tune out most of the robot's ramblings. Marvin slowed down so he could turn around and face his human charge; the robot did an amazing simulation of long-suffering annoyance. "Yes, set the mood. Cheer up the humanoids around them. Don't *I* do that well enough?"

"Well, I..." Mulder began.

"Never mind; we're here." They had arrived at the door. "I've done my job and brought you from one part of the space ship to another. Now maybe they'll give me something really challenging to do, like mix them up some gin and tonics, or alphabetize the condiments in the galley.' Marvin sighed again, apparently finding some guilt in his less-than-cheery reception of the new Earthman. "I'm not bringing you down, am I? Because I'd hate it if I were bringing you down."

With that, the door shooshed open. Mulder, glad for the distraction, watched Marvin grind a path through the doorway. He himself only peered around the edge of the portal. He saw Ford standing in the middle of a roundish room, bookended by an attractive blond woman and a taller man. A man, Mulder noticed almost immediately, who was graced with two heads and three arms.

Ford bared his dingy whites at him. "Mulder, good morning. How are you feeling?"

Although he suspected Ford was trying to put him at ease with his new environment, Mulder doubted being at ease was a good thing to be when your environment suddenly includes a sexual-innuendo-filled voice on a computer-run intercom, a seriously depressive robot, and a man with two heads and three arms.

Ford motioned encouragingly for Mulder to come out from behind the door. "C'mon, mate, I know you're confused, but we're going to explain everything."

"You mean you haven't explained anything to him?" the blond said in exasperation.

Mulder realized that she must have been the possessor of the Cyndi-Lauper-like voice - and now he could see that she also owned a Cyndi-Lauper-like body. Not really his type, he thought, but still interesting.

"Well, I did tell him I was from another planet, and I told him about you two...a little...and that we were going to take him to his future. I didn't have much time, you know!" Ford explained defensively.

"Mister Mulder, please excuse Ford's oversights. I know what a strange experience this must be for you," she said, more convincingly reassuring than Ford had been. "Please, come in and we'll get you oriented."

Mulder wasn't sure about what she had in mind with "oriented", but he took the risk and came through the door. Looking around, he was reminded of the bridge areas on 'Star Trek' and 'Mr. Who' - an open, streamlined area filled with lots of consoles, each of which had a great variety of buttons and flashing lights. He somehow doubted that this trio could possibly know the purpose and meaning of all the buttons and lights. Although maybe the guy with two heads...

"Hey, dude, so you're the new Apeman, huh?" his two-headed host said in a vaguely California surfer accent. "Way to go; now, just don't give us any trouble, and we'll do just fine, man."

Mulder decided this all must be a joke. Maybe an elaborate fraternity prank. Maybe he was the prank's target because he had spent four years at Oxford, been sought out by several of the Greek organizations on campus, and had shunned them all. If he had learned anything at Oxford, it was that English snobs didn't take to Americans turning down the opportunity to become a fellow snob.

"Uh, you guys are from Sigma Chi, right?"

All three of his hosts turned their four heads to look at each other in perplexity.

Ford broke the silence, walking around the central console to stand next to the confused young man. "Look, Mulder, I'll bet you could use a drink after what you've been through. I think your first trip through a transference beam must have really wiped you out. Marvin," he called, looking over to where the robot had stationed himself, "Why don't you take our new friend over to the beverages fabricator?" He looked back over at Mulder, as if speaking to a possible escapee from an insane asylum and trying his best to be very polite about it. "A good, stiff drink would be nice, wouldn't it, mate?"

Mulder thought a moment, and realized he was extremely thirsty. Maybe he would wake up from this dream to find that he was really just very parched and needed a drink of water. "Yes, an iced tea would be great, if you have it," Mulder responded timidly.

"Tea?" the two-headed man, whom Mulder figured to be the Zaphod Ford had mentioned, exclaimed in disgust. "All the drinks available in the universe, and these apemen always want boiled leaves!"

Ford ignored Zaphod and continued to speak more than a bit patronizingly to Mulder. "The fabricator is still set to brew up some tea, I believe. Ever since Arthur made his adjustments. Marvin will take you there, you have a nice drink, and then we'll meet up with you later, okay?" Ford gave Mulder a buddy-like slap on the shoulder as the robot wheeled its way to the thirsty Earthling.

"Oh, I'll have to remember to make note of this in my diary," Marvin said in a tone so close to enthusiasm that Mulder momentarily believed the robot had snapped out of his depression. " 'Today I got to wake him up, and then I got to show him where the drinks are kept!'" Marvin quoted his planned journal entry. "What a pinnacle I have reached!"

Marvin went through the door again. "Follow me," he called back to Mulder in the most world-weary voice Mulder had yet heard from him.

Still hoping this was just a very strange dream, Mulder dutifully followed the robot in what would be the beginning of a long quest for a decent glass of tea.

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Continued in part 3 - coming soon!

This is a work-in-progress; comments are particularly welcome by this particular author! E-mail with particulars to Griffin.

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