Chapter 3

"...and that's how Tim and I ended up in this Future, to us, time-period," finally finished Uncle Martin to Dick Solomon. Which, deep down below their fake physical exteriors, was a meeting of the minds 'twixt, quite literally, the little green "man" to the quivering purple tube.

"And," Dick began to ask of the red-haired Martian seated in one of two overstuffed chairs in the cramped and crowded little living room, whilst pointing at the device held so daintily in the lap of this visitor from not only Mars, but from a point in the Past some thirty-to-forty years removed. "That's the, uh, Centrifuge Cathode..."

"The Cathode-ray Centrifugal Time BreakaScope," quickly corrected Martin with more than a little air of aloofness that bordered on blatantly insulting a certain Solomon that was, in truth, the pompously self-proclaimed High Commander of this crazy quartet of space-spanning simpletons.

Three of whom had trotted out to their equally-cramped kitchen, leaving Tim O'Hara to sit, stupidly spellbound!, and stare somewhat comically at someone he'd called "Uncle" for around three years. Yet whom he now knew to be a "Martin-bot" with a three-inch tall, truly alien green-skinned being from Mars literally seated inside a fake faced, red-haired head.

Just like a recently, three years earlier for the Solomons, yet still in the near-distant Future for Tim and Martin, movie named "Men In Black".

Causing the still stupidly stupefied Tim to wonder if, somehow, 'twixt the Sixties and Nineties, Uncle Martin had been the fake flesh-and-fake bone inspiration for one specific scene described to Tim by Tommy, immediately prior to popping into the kitchen.

Along with that unbelievably beautiful, especially sexy, in any decade!, Sally Solomon.

While Martin and Dick continued talking about the CCTBS, Tim was much more concerned with other aspects of his telepathic/telekinetic Uncle...

"H-how d-do you, uh, m-make things m-move by p-pointing your, uh, finger?"

Whilst still trying to hold a semi-intelligent conversation with a fellow alien, only one that happened to come from a far-flung galaxy rather than a nearby, cosmically speaking!, red world, Martin managed to answer each silly little question posed by his pseudo-nephew...

"There is an electrostatic magnetron macro-accelerator assembly with directional micro-opening in the tip of my android carrier's right forefinger."

"A-and wh-when you r-read m-minds?"

"Tactile contact to either side of my, uh, 'head' engages an omni-directional psycho-scanner nano-transistor system that allows whatever within-range lower life-form entities are thinking to print out across a heads-up...inside this head...set of screens."

Screwing an already comical mask into something even more amusingly addled, Tim tried to understand one single aspect of that perplexing statement...

"Uh, 'l-lower life-form entities'?"

"He means you, Mr. O'Hara," tensely sighed Dick Solomon, while rolling his eyes in exasperated expression of just how jealous, deep down in his purple tubed being beneath that borrowed Human body!, the High Commander happened to be. "All the little green guys on Mars think like that. That's why I'd rather roast in the oppressive heat of the sulfur dioxide-carbonyl sulfide-isothermal-sulfuric acid raining surface of Venus for a hundred years than spend one lousy day on Mars!"

Also rolling his eyes, at least so with the ones used for providing visual information to the little green "man" seated inside said red-haired head!, and sighing very heavily, Martin bemoaned, "Dick, are you still pissed off over losing that game of Martian-Hold 'em just before you were officially assigned to this system? Because that was three hundred-and-forty-two years ago!"

"Dammit, man, I had a high straight hand," bellyached the boisterous as usual gray-haired Dick, "and should've taken that last pot!"

"It's not my fault I happened to have a straight flush."

"Not unless you were cheating, you little green-skinned, big-eyed..."

"Wait a minute!" interrupted Tim as he suddenly seemed interested in something other than the decidedly discomforting fact that the Real Martin wasn't at all Human-like. Or even remotely Tim's size! "M-Martian-Hold 'em?"

"Yes, it's exactly the same as the game called Texas-Hold 'em here on your Earth, Tim. Only Martian cards are prettier."

"B-b-but..."

"Get a clue, kid," exclaimed a less-than-patient-with-Past-time intruders Dick Solomon, "your 'Uncle' probably introduced some sap from Texas to the game about a hundred years ago!"

"Well, the early-1900s, in Robstown, Texas, to be more precise," quaintly corrected Martin with as much solemn-faced superiority as Tim O'Hara had come to actually love in a pseudo-family member. "But from the point of view of your time-period, Dick, that's almost accurate."

"Great", Tim said with a self-deprecatory snicker. "Next you'll be saying that you inspired the game of Monopoly."

"He/I did!" Dick and Martin said simultaneously, so as to sound like a dual-voiced set of Siamese twins.

"I, uh, n-need a d-drink of w-water. E-excuse me."

Feeling lightheaded and faint, from learning far more about Martin in minutes than he'd learned in the three years the two had shared the same above-garage apartment...

Tim made his way into a kitchen no larger than his own some three-to-four decades earlier and many hundreds of miles to the left of any wall-map of the continental United States...

Wherein sat, somewhat stiffly it seemed, three of the four purple tubes-in-Human bodies aliens around a table that was, itself, a throwback to the Sixties. Which made Tim feel at least a little better.

But it was the sight of the exceedingly lovely, at least on the outside!, Sally Solomon that more than melted away any worries regarding what his pseudo-Uncle actually turned out to be.

"Uh, hi...Sally."

"Hi...Tim."

As the tall and leggy Sally slowly stood, her expression a silly exaggeration of what might dominate the beautiful face of an eighteen-year-old high school senior whilst speaking with a handsome sophomore in college.

Only a little more over-the-top than any normal Human...

Which prompted a groan-in-unison from Tommy and Harry, both still seated to either side of the kitchen table at which, in Dick's stead, Sally sat at its head.

"Shut it!" harshly hissed Sally just loud enough for Harry and Tommy to hear and react with eye-rolling, or, in the case of Harry, rolling, maybe!, behind barely opened little slits through which one could hardly detect eyes at all!, expressions of exaggerated disrespect for the beauteously blond Lieutenant.

Although Harry's squeezed-together, as though tasting a super-sour lemon for the first time every time!, features, quite like those of a true-to-form Village Idiot!, showed such disrespect a lot less expressively.

"What can I get for you, Tim?" Sally said with as sexy a voice and facial affectation as Tim had ever viewed with the lovely ladies he'd dated in his time-period. Which, when he thought about it, meant those self-same beauty's of the Sixties were now wrinkled grandmothers...eech!

"Oh, uh," Tim said, whilst shaking his head to clear it of such sickening images in regards to now old-as-hell females he may have Frenched in some Lover's Lane-like setting. "I, uh, thought I could get a glass of water."

"Sure thing, cutie," Sally said via intense sensuality, especially so since the Big Giant Head had thankfully switched her from Dick's body back into her own! "Here you go."

"What's this?" asked a stupefied Tim as he was handed, from the fridge, a sealed plastic bottle containing crystal clear water. "People of the Future drink water...from bottles? Wouldn't it be easer to just get it straight out of the tap?"

"Drinking water out of the tap?" slightly laughed Tommy, as if Tim had just asked the most incredibly ludicrous thing any Human might utter. Followed, in Village Idiot demeanor!, by Harry...

"Even quivering purple tubes wouldn't dare drink water from a tap. Especially on Earth."

As it seemed Tommy and Harry were enjoying making light of Tim, as well as significantly cramping Sally's style!...

"Why don't you two go out and feed the squirrels?" she snappishly, yet a little too animatedly!, ordered with a sharp head snap toward the secondary exterior door leading out of their apartment via the kitchen.

Even as Tommy and Harry stood to stride past their Amazonian aunt/sister, a squint-eyed Harry ignorantly remarked, "But we don't have any nuts to feed to the squirrels?"

"Yes," suggestively snarled Sally, whilst sinisterly glancing down in the direction of Harry's, er, uh, pants-protected privates. "You do."

Even a Village Idiot-type, like Harry, needed no extra explanation prior to clumsily covering up, via consistently scrunched-up clown-like countenance, before following the Information Officer straight through the rear screen door.

"Now, Tim," Sally said after resuming her previous expression of clumsy sexuality, even as she pressed ever closer to Mr. O'Hara. Who definitely didn't mind! "Where were we?"

Having just arrived via police patrol car, Don Orville, that overweight dweeb of a Human who'd so captivated the lovely Sally Solomon, so long as he stayed in his police uniform with leather holster-held police-issue Glock!...

"Hi, guys, is Sally home?"

"Yeah," Harry moronically bemoaned like a little kid of a divorced Soccer Mom on the prowl for a paternal replacement. "But she's busy trying to make it with some Human from..."

"What Harry means," Tommy interjected with a slightly malevolent smirk, "is that she's upstairs just waiting for Officer Don to come rescue her from another boring afternoon."

"Well," Don said whilst straightening his tie about a bullfrog-chinned throat, and adjusting his I'm-a-Big-Loser glasses. "Guess I'd better not keep the lady waiting. See ya!"

Even as Sally's supposed Dreamboat clumsily climbed the exterior stairs in two-to-three step leaps, a lot like a warthog in heat!...

"But," pointed out a still-too-stupid-to-grasp-the-all-too-obvious Harry, "she's up there with that Tim guy from the Past."

"That's right, Harry," Tommy said, still smirking somewhat devilishly, whilst planting an elbow a little harder than needed into Harry's ribs. "She is."

After what would seem, to anyone with a nominal intellect, an inordinately long time, Harry's squint-eyed expression at long last displayed sudden understanding...

"Ohhhhh. Good one."

END OF CHAPTER 3