A/N: Okay, after the usual long long wait, here's the next chapter updated. A couple of notes, though. I haven't gotten any feedback from other people, so I don't yet have an objective sense of what works and what doesn't for this installment. Specifically, I've experimented with breaking the fourth wall and some moves where the structure is very self-conscious, and I want to know if it works. Also the God stuff at the end, which I wouldn't include if I didn't think it were true to the characters. I've always wondered why Ross, as a scientist, insisted on telling Ben the story of the Hannukah miracle, while elsewhere he displays a very rationalist outlook and remains skeptical of Phoebe's kooky mysticism. I think how I've characterized him here sheds some light on that.

But does it work, my friends? Does it work? Feedback of any sort is appreciated.

Chapter 9: Angst in Space

"So where did you say that ship with the Impossibility Drive was headed?" Chandler asked. They were walking through the ship's corridors, finishing up Lorz's official tour of the ship.

"Milliways," replied Lorz, ignoring the error in appellation. "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

"Which end?"

"The end." Lorz looked at the three of them significantly. "Like, that's it. No more time, no more space. The grand egress. The end of the universe."

"Ohh," Joey said, nodding slowly.

"Well, that's kind of a disappointment," Rachel said. "I guess it had to end sometime. I never really thought much about it."

"Will have had to end sometime," Lorz corrected. "And hey, at least now you'll get to see it for yourself! Oh, hey, here we are: the kitchen."

The kitchen looked much like an earth kitchen, but with most of the cabinets replaced with appliances of uncertain function, and all of the tables and chairs integrated into the surfaces of the room. "There's the auto-steamer and the broiling gun over there, and if you need help operating any of this, just ask the shipboard computer. That's the Nutri-matic on the counter, and the meat converter, and we've got a UCD right there if you want any salts or seasonings."

"Got a question," Joey said. "How come you need a kitchen if your ship is a restaurant?"

"Luigi's doesn't serve breakfast," explained Lorz. "You don't want to wear out the transmission."

"Gotcha," said Joey, even though he didn't.

"Anyway, my quarters are just down that first hall and to the left, and if you need Marvin for anything, just ask the ship's computer to get him."

"I think I'll call for Marvin right now," Chandler chimed in, "I was just thinking I was feeling a little too happy."

"So I guess that's it," Lorz finished up as he took them back through the ship's corridors. "Only thing left to do is the sleeping arrangements. Come on, we'll head back to the restaurant and I'll introduce you to Antonio."

"Who's Antonio?" Joey asked.

"Part of this balanced breakfast," Chandler quipped. He sang, "The one and only…Antoni-o's!"

"No, no," Lorz corrected, as they took a flight of concrete stairs up to a brown-painted wooden door. "He's the little old Italian man who rents space above the restaurant. I'm sure he'll be able to put up a few friends of mine."

"Does he have, um…" Rachel asked. "Indoor plumbing?"

"Of course."

The door opened, and there was a man with brown pants and a brown-and-green wool vest over a burgundy shirt. He had a tiny white moustache and messy white hair that would probably look kind of like Einstein's if it weren't kept short. He was wrinkly.

"Buona sera, Antonio," Lorz said.

Antonio embraced him with one arm and kissed him on the cheek, and Lorz's face contorted in extreme discomfort, like a man getting a shot, until the hug was over. "A very good evening it is, Signor Lorz," he replied. Joey and Chandler heard the words just like that, but to Rachel, the little old man was emitting exactly the sounds you'd expect to emanate from a little old Italian man.

"How are you? How are the grandchildren?" Antonio continued. The two of them began discussing, in detail, the lives of their grandkids, moving on to assorted small talk.

"Man, this reminds me of family reunions," Joey remarked quietly to Chandler. "I just hope Mrs. Antonio isn't like my aunt Norma! I swear, that woman does not know the meaning of 'No thanks, I'm full!'"

"What, is her cooking that bad?" Rachel asked. "I'd think you'd like being encouraged to eat."

"Don't get me wrong, the woman makes the best damn sausage lasagna I've ever had." Joey's eyes grew wide. "But you just try enjoying the stuff when you filled up on it thirty minutes ago!"

"So what are they saying now?" Rachel asked. "Are they discussing the rent?"

"No, they're discussing the grandkids," Chandler answered.

Joey's brow furrowed in perplexity. "You mean you can't understand them?" he asked Rachel.

But now Lorz was turning toward the three of them. "Antonio, I was wondering if you could do me a favor. Allow me to introduce my new friends. This is Chandler…"

"Nice to meet you," Chandler said, shaking the old man's hand and tolerating the cheek-kiss with a grimace on his face.

"It's a pleasure," said Antonio, in Italian.

"He doesn't have a Babel fish," Lorz explained. And then, in Italian, "And this is Joey…"

Joey figured he'd show off his Italian. He leaned into the one-armed hug and returned the cheek kiss, then said to Antonio, "Pleezi to meetzio!"

"And Rachel," Lorz said finally.

Chivalrously, Antonio took her hand in his own old wrinkly one and kissed it. Charmed, Rachel smiled politely.

"Now," Lorz explained to Antonio, "My friends are from out of town, and they need a place to stay for a few nights. I was wondering if you could help them out."

After the sleeping arrangements had been made, and Antonio had shown his guests the facilities and invited them wordlessly to make themselves at home, Chandler remarked to Lorz," Let me guess, not actually a real person—just part of the computer interface matrix?"

"Right you are," said Lorz. "It's a little bit fiddly, but it's an easy way of consolidating sleeping quarters with CPU hardware space. Also increases processing speed astronomically—basically, it does a better job of fooling the universe into thinking that this really is an Italian pizza place. Makes the drive almost as fast as an improbability drive, and a lot more predictable."

The room, Chandler observed, was piled high with broken electronics, ranging from plastic casing to circuit boards and fluorescent tubes to oh good Lord is that a fax machine powered by a cow heart. There was also a pair of utilitarian tables, similarly piled with junk, and a few cardboard boxes half-buried in dismantled appliances. He stepped into the room, scanning the patches of open floor for a path to the door on the opposite wall.

"Thank you for making a simple door very happy," said the door behind him.

Chandler was just about to start making progress in crossing the room when he heard a voice through the closing door. "Chandler?" The voice got closer as it called. "Hey, Chandler!"

"One right after the other," said the door blissfully as it whooshed open again. "It's almost too good to be true."

Joey stuck his head through the door. "Dude, I thought that was you out in the hallway!" He looked around at the scrap piles. "Whoa. It looks like Optimus Prime threw up in here."

"Given the volume of scrap, I'd say this is where he does the 'purge' part of his after-meals binge-and-purge drill."

"Dude, Optimus Prime with bulimia is totally not funny," said Joey. "You shouldn't make fun of the Transformers. What are you doing in here anyway?"

"I just figured I'd explore the ship a little. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I was having breakfast with Rachel…"

Then there was a flashback. It took place in the kitchen.

"Look at this," Joey said. "Have you seen this thing yet?"

It was a microwave-esque box with transparent window on the front and a single blue button right underneath the door. Rachel came over to look as he pushed the button. Instantly, a tiny tree began growing as if from nowhere, and it sprouted a single perfect orange. A laser shot from the side and disintegrated the tree, leaving only the orange; the tree's ashes were sucked out through tiny holes in the bottom of the microwave chamber.

"I hope they don't have one of those for if you want bacon," Rachel remarked.

"Yeah, tell me about it," Joey said. "It's the weirdest thing."

Rachel interrupted, placing her hand on his. "Joey, honey, we're flying through outer space in an Italian bistro. We're already living the weirdest thing."

She smiled up at him warmly, and he grinned back, brow furrowed, heart tying itself in knots under every square inch of skin on his body. She patted his hand and withdrew hers. The flashback ended.

"…it was just really awkward and uncomfortable, so I said I was going to go see what you were up to."

"Awkward and uncomfortable around women. I know what that's like. Well, if you want to look around the ship, you're free to join me."

The door on the opposite side of the room sighed as they passed through it. In the space of the flashback, they had crossed the room of junk.

"Well, it's not just that," said Joey, as they set out to examine the next room, which seemed to be some sort of all-purpose sports court. "I mean, stuff with Ross has been bugging me too."

"Oh yeah?" Chandler asked.

"I just feel real sorry for the guy. He was real bummed that he didn't get to feel the baby kicking for the first time, he told her to page him if any pregnancy stuff happened…he was wishing he could be in on the baby stuff like any other dad."

"And now he can't be there at all, huh."

"Yeah. I was seriously thinking maybe Rachel ought to move in with Ross, if it's that important to him. And if she's okay with that, too, I mean. And I thought it might even help me deal with my feelings for her, with her not being in the apartment all the time…" He threw up his hands in frustration. "But now I can't even do that!"

"Well, that really sucks." Chandler frowned sympathetically.

"Tell me about it! Now I'm always around Rachel, and Ross is missing out on everything! It's, it's like…it's like the opposite of good!"

"Bad," Chandler supplied.

"And I feel so terrible about it—like if only I hadn't let her go through the dimensional portal in the closet, none of this would have happened!"

"Joey, listen." Chandler put a hand on his shoulder. "It's not your fault. You had no way of knowing we'd get stranded over here, but now we have to make the best of it. I know it's hard with your feelings for Rachel, but I think you're doing as good as you can, in spite of this whole mess. And you know, I think your concern about Ross and his being the dad is really admirable."

"He must be worried as anything about Rachel," Joey said, frowning.

"Well, we know she's all right." Insofar as we guys know anything about pregnancy at all, which we don't, Chandler thought but didn't add. "And when we get back, Ross will know she's all right too."

"Right," said Joey anxiously. "Just gotta tell all that to all the things going on inside of me. Man, it sucks having feelings!"

Once there was a man thoroughly uncreative in all respects except for one: he possessed a natural aptitude for scientific innovation and discovery. He contributed greatly to the advancement of the field of quantum physics and developed a theory that, if correct, might well lay the groundwork for time travel on Earth. However, his talent meant nothing to him. His secret all-consuming dream, his most heartfelt desire, was to write the Great American Novel.

Despite his dearth of literary genius, this man had a plan to realize his dream. Given determination and a sufficiently large amount of time, he supposed, a man could accomplish anything. If an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters could randomly produce the entire works of Shakespeare over an adequate span of time, then surely a man working not at random but deliberately could produce a work of literary genius, if he only had the time!

So, he spent long nights researching, looking for a way to halt time for himself while he wrote the Great American Novel in temporal isolation. Eventually he finished work on an invention that generated a time acceleration field. He set aside an evening, turned the machine on, and watched as everything outside—from his vantage point—ground to a virtual halt.

Initially, typing away at his laptop, he was enthusiastic and optimistic about his chances of success. However, there was one obstacle he had not foreseen: the psychological effect of writing a large amount of serious literary fiction in an infinitely small amount of time. The world waited for him to emerge from his field while he struck key after key, struggled against his own ineptitude to carry a coherent plot and invent characters with even a semblance of three-dimensionality.

Everyone knows that literary invention demands a price. "Nothing good comes easy," as the saying goes, and quality writing is no exception. Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath—their literary genius devastated and sapped their personal lives with the force of a train wreck. And if genius exacted so fiercely from Hemingway, imagine what it did to the psyche of this poor untalented hack!

After countless days of writing, he lost track of the flow of time, drank ten beers in the course of a relative hour, became suicidally depressed, turned off the field, and went for his gun. He would almost certainly have blown his brains out if he could have found his head.

But the reason why I bring all that up is that, as they traveled through the void of space, the three friends were like that man inside his time bubble, and we, the readers, are like the outside world, looking in on innumerable hours all compressed into what is for us a single moment: as long as it takes to read a single sentence.

Even at hyperspeed, time dragged by.

But you don't have to be in a parallel universe to have time crawl, either.

Monica walked into Ross's apartment, where he sat on the couch watching a National Geographic special on the fishes of the Amazon River. "Well, I've filed the missing persons report," she said, as Ross looked up from his spot on the couch. "I've asked everyone I know to ask—I've called both his parents and anyone else I can think of that he might be staying with. Same for the others. I've officially done all I can do."

Ross thumped an empty couch cushion. "Have a seat, Mon."

She obliged. "What's this you're watching?"

"It's a National Geographic special on the fishes of the Amazon River."

"Yes," she demanded of the TV. "Bore me, o slow-paced intellectual program, and take my mind off my troubles."

"Do you want to watch something else?" Ross inquired.

"No," said Mon, "the crazy thing is I'm serious." She sighed and leaned back into the couch. "Oh, Ross, it's hard. I just feel so empty without him. And it's not even a grieving kind of empty—it's just so restless." She stared up at the ceiling. "He stabilizes me."

"I'm sure they'll all show up," Ross said. "I'm just concerned about Rachel and the baby. I mean, she's pretty far along."

"I know. I can't imagine that they'd go off on some crazy, spontaneous…random fun thing…with her in that condition! But then something must have happened to them…"

"It is a little strange that all three of them should disappear, and not one of them gives us a call to let us know what's going on," Ross agreed. He wasn't using the Confident Man Voice. "Probably something unexpected has come up, and they just haven't had time to contact us about it yet. If there's any trouble, they're all capable people—Chandler's a resourceful guy, and none of them are going to do anything stupid." He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a one-armed big-brotherly couch-hug. "Don't worry, Mon. They're all going to get back all right."

"I hope so." Monica bit her lip on one side, then released it. "I actually prayed about it. Have you prayed about it?" Almost accusingly.

Almost.

Ross shook his head.

"Well, why not?"

"Come on, Mon, you know how I am with these things. On a cosmic scale, yes, I do think that the universe is designed and ordered through scientific laws, but I don't expect God to miraculously intervene in human affairs. In the grand scheme of things, we're very small, you know? Prayer is a fine way for people to deal with anxiety about events beyond their control, and if you feel better for it, then I'm glad."

"But it wouldn't hurt to ask, right?" Monica said. "Just in case God would do something, right?"

"Logically," Ross pointed out, "if there is a God who hears and answers our prayers through mysterious divine interventions, he wants people to ask in faith, not as a back-up plan."

Monica frowned and shook her fist at Ross's ceiling. "You drive a hard bargain, Big Guy!"

"Look, Mon, if you've officially done all you can do, I think that's all God expects of you. And He may not do anything to make sure we find Chandler and the others immediately, but He's not going to conspire to put roadblocks in the way of someone who really cares about her friends."

"Well, would you pray about it anyway, for me? Even if you don't expect—would you just, I don't know, say this is important to your sister, and, oh, I don't know…"

"All right," Ross agreed. "If it means that much to you."

In silence, the two of them sat and watched the rest of the show. That night Ross dreamed that he was searching the subway for his friends with the Holiday Armadillo.