It was a hot day, and so humid you couldn't walk more than a few feet before being completely drenched from head to foot. It was like this every day in the jungle. Parrots squawked from the treetops, pythons rustled surreptitiously through the undergrowth. Plants grew. And Indiana Jones, in the middle of it all, hacked his way through nature with a big machete.
He'd come a long way for this particular item. He'd found the first mention of it in a long-forgotten text, somewhere in the university library. Finally, he was close. He moved carefully through some low ferns, ignoring the clouds of mosquitoes circling him and everything else that moved.
Suddenly, he was in a clearing, and the object he'd been searching for was ahead of him.
The fabled Spider Jewel. Supposedly it could be used to alter people's minds. To Indiana Jones, of course, that didn't matter. All he knew was that it belonged in a museum, and he was going to get it there, no matter how many scantily clad women or evil men with mysterious European accents interfered along the way.
He moved forward. Unusually for the type of thing Indiana Jones generally went after, there didn't appear to be any guards or booby traps around. The gem itself was on a small stone pedestal in the centre of the clearing. The pedestal was wrapped in vines and crumbling after long exposure to the elements. The Spider Jewel, however, was shining as brightly as the day it had first been placed there.
By now, Indiana was so close he could see why the gem had been so highly prized throughout history. It was a dark, clear, green, with a strange white pattern inside it, almost like a mist. It was said that men (and women) who had looked into the depths of the stone had gone slightly mad. Not very mad; this wasn't that kind of stone. But Indiana was still wary as he reached out for his prize . . .
And stopped, as a soft noise – much like the sound made by a half-hearted vacuum cleaner trying to suck up a baby elephant, but in a slightly lower key – made him look up.
Where there had previously been only blue sky, colourful birds, and the tops of tropical trees, there was now a gap, filled with stars. And from the gap, a strange ship was approaching.
It was like nothing Indiana had ever seen before. Far more advanced than any aeroplane. He wondered if it was a Nazi craft. It was said the Germans had been working on new methods of sky exploration.
Indiana had to think all of this in the space of a second, because that was how long the ship took to move forward, hover gently over the Spider Jewel, and send down a beam of light. And – this was what astonished Indiana – the gem appeared to travel up the light, until it reached the spaceship and disappeared. As soon as the jewel was presumably safely inside, the ship turned around elegantly and sped back into the mysterious gap in the sky, which closed with a snap! as soon as it was safely through.
Indiana stopped still in amazement. Barely five seconds ago, his prize had been within his grasp. And now it was gone. But nothing was gone forever to Indiana Jones.
He squinted up towards where the gap had been. If he looked carefully, he was certain he could see a faint black line remaining. Carefully ignoring the part of his mind screaming the impossibility of what had just happened at him (it wasn't much harder than ignoring the hysterical women who were usually screaming at him), he thrust his machete through his belt – nearly giving himself a painful leg injury, but it was nonetheless very dashing – and shimmied up the nearest tree.
As he got near the top, he spotted a branch that would take him right out to where the crack had been. He edged along this branch, pausing only occasionally to check for snakes. Finally, he got to the end.
Looking around, the faint black crack in the sky was far more obvious than it had been from ground level. Indiana considered his options. He could, of course, let the gem go. Just walk away.
But Indiana Jones didn't walk away. Except from things like poisonous snake pits, stable relationships, or cliff edges. Even then, it was hard. That was just the kind of man he was.
Also, it would have been considerably hard to walk away, being on a tree branch.
This left Indiana with only one more option: to follow the mysterious ship, and rescue the gem, from wherever it had ended up. He carefully reached out towards the crack. It shouldn't have been possible, but where one bit of sky ended and the next began, he could feel something. Or rather, a lack of something. Ignoring his own safety, Indiana put both hands inside the crack and began pushing the edges apart as hard as he could. Even then, it wasn't giving. He pulled his machete out of his belt and stuck that into the crack, trying to prise it open. He was slightly worried his machete would break, and he would fall. However, he was also assured that the machete would serve as a warning to any dangerous creatures in whatever place this gap led to.
The edges of the crack suddenly gave way, leaving an opening in the sky. Indiana looked through – it didn't look like the place the mysterious flying craft had disappeared to earlier – but by then it was too late, and he was falling through the gap, right through into whatever dimension was waiting on the other side.
It closed behind him with another snap! and for some time afterwards, the jungle was quiet.
The ship's owner – and Evil Overlord of most of the known universe – was feeling pleased. The new technology had worked perfectly. He'd recently stolen the transporter beam from a Scotsman he'd met, in a ship called the Enterprise parked in one of the smaller galaxies. And, of course, the new power source – the one that allowed him to open holes between universes, and travel wherever and whenever he liked – worked like a dream. He picked up the Spider Jewel and looked at it pensively. Such a small object! he thought. And able to do so much.
At that moment, his most faithful lieutenant came into the control room and saluted.
'Item retrieved, sir. And those new devices worked like a charm.'
'I know they did, lieutenant,' said the ship's owner with some irritation. 'I saw them. And I've got the gem right here.'
'Right you are, sir,' said the lieutenant, saluting again. When in doubt, salute, he thought. Just a few more months and I'll be able to get off this ship. Still, better make the most of it while I'm here. 'Will you be plugging it into the machine now, sir?'
His master sighed. He spent a lot of his time sighing. Well, breathing heavily, anyway.
'I was just about to do as much, lieutenant.' With that, he turned and carefully placed the gem inside a small, clear box, attached by several wires to a headset held above a chair. It didn't look very comfortable, especially as the chair had various unpleasant straps and chains on it, designed to prevent the chair's occupant from moving while the process was taking place.
'Was something supposed to happen just then, sir?' asked the lieutenant brightly.
'No. There's no one in the chair. But when there is, this gem will send energy right into the centre of their brain, converting their every thought, motive, and ethical standard into pure, unbridled evil. The perfect weapon. Incidentally,' added the ship's owner thoughtfully, 'how many times have I had to explain that to you so far?'
The lieutenant shifted uncomfortably. One doesn't need brains to succeed on a ship like the one he was on. The lieutenant was a perfect example of this. 'Well, you keep using such long words, sir . . .'
'Of course. How foolish of me,' remarked his master. 'Anyway, let us move on from this sordid matter. Set the course, will you?'
'Um . . . the course to where, exactly?'
His master narrowed his eyes. Well, you couldn't actually see him narrowing his eyes, behind the mask he always wore. But you could tell he wasn't pleased.
'How many times must I explain this, lieutenant? My son has always been a disappointment to me. Here I am, setting a fine evil example, and yet he is constantly rebelling against me, complaining of the right of good over evil, etcetera. Typical teenager, of course, but a father does grow rather tired of it. He is the first person I intend to evillify. Therefore, set a course for the Resistance Headquarters. Don't go straight there, of course,' he added as an afterthought. 'They'll shoot us out of the sky. Make another hole in the space/time continuum. We can go through that.'
The lieutenant was still staring blankly ahead. He hadn't signed up for this. The ship's owner swallowed his annoyance. 'All right. Which part didn't you understand?'
'Etcetera?'
'Merely an indication of further, similar items to follow.'
'Space/time continuum?'
'The thing we create openings in to travel through. Really, we went into this stuff thoroughly when we acquired the technology not long ago.'
'OK. What about evillify?'
'That was one I made up,' said his master. 'I felt the situation called for it. Are you ready to set the course now?'
The lieutenant nodded vigorously. 'Of course, sir. Doing it immediately, sir.'
'And don't forget, don't go straight there!' called the ship's owner hastily. Then, deciding that his work for the moment was done, he reclined in a chair (not the one the Spider Jewel was attached to) and watched the universe whizzing past the windows of his ship. He sighed.
'It shouldn't be this hard just to make somebody evil,' he mused to himself, watching his machine's reflection in the window. Then he sighed. So many good people in the world, so many people left to – yes – evillify. Sometimes, life wasn't easy for Darth Vader.