CHAPTER 4

The GSS Suicidal Insanity finished its journey through time. And suddenly Fenchurch felt her body temperature begin to regulate itself back to normal once again. She was amazed to find that she had forgotten how unusual time travel had originally felt. Everyone on the flight deck took a moment or two to reacquaint themselves with feeling normal again as well. And then they all went back to work.

"We're not quite there, sir," First Officer Flop reported.

Captain Forrestra was sure that somebody somewhere had screwed up. And his solution was to attempt to appear large and menacing so as to keep all his underlings in line. "Why the swut not!" And then he slammed his fist against the panel for good measure.

"The problem," Flop reported, "is we're as close to the Big Bang as we can manage. We simply cannot get any closer."

Science Officer Fark Bostleburger added, "And we have detected the restaurant on our scanners. It's already here." There was a general air of disappointment on the flight deck, seeing as they wanted to be the ones to build the restaurant and were therefore trying to arrive at a time before the restaurant existed.

"Well, just take us back even further," ordered the captain, aware that Alaric Badgerbull was standing behind him, fuming.

The temporal drive revved up and squealed. The pilot pushed down on the drive pedal as hard as he could. Unfortunately that only served to rev the temporal engines without actually taking them backwards in time.

"What's the problem!" Alaric demanded.

"The problem," explained science officer Fark Bostleburger, "is that we're trying to travel backwards through time. But time, you understand, was created by the Big Bang along with space. It's what we call spacetime. We cannot travel back in time to a time before there was time because we need the time to travel through if we want to time travel."

"Say that one more time?" the captain asked.

The science officer ignored this question and continued with his scans. "It looks like," he went on, "we are in a small pocket of spacetime that is somehow structurally different from the spacetime with which we are all familiar."

"What do you mean?" asked the captain, who never understood technical matters, but always demanded an in-depth explanation to make it look as though he was on top of things. In fact he had perfected (to his own satisfaction) a look of deep understanding and concern which he contorted his face into whenever technical explanations found themselves being thrown in his direction.

Science officer Bostleburger pointed to a display monitor, "This is the background, um, fingerprint of our universe, our spacetime point of the Whole Sort of General Mishmash. As you can see, the pattern is quite distinctive," said the science officer, over-simplifying things since he was aware of his captain's failings on the technical side of things. "And here," he pointed to another display monitor next to the first, "is the pattern, the fingerprint, of the point of the Mishmash where we find ourselves now. As you can see, it's quite different."

The captain added his nod-of-understanding to his look-of-understanding. "I see." He tried to phrase his next question in such a way that didn't make him look like a complete idiot. "So... what does that mean?"

The science officer wasn't afraid of looking like he didn't know what he was talking about. He knew that the beginning of all true wisdom was, "I do not know." So he turned to the captain and simply said, "Hell, I dunno."

"Okay... so what does this have to do with going back in time?"

"As you know," officer Bostleburger said with exactly the right amount of patronization in his voice, "Space and time are in fact part of the same thing. You cannot understand time without understanding space. And since we are trying to go back in time, it would help if we understood something of this part of space. And this part of space seems to be different from our own."

The captain lost his patience with trying to understand things that were clearly beyond the understanding of living beings, even that of his bluffing science officer, "Just don't worry about that! I want you to take us back in time to before the restaurant existed!"

Alaric Badgerbull blustered his way into the conversation, "I'd advise you to do what your captain tells you. Because if you don't, I may consider having you executed!"

"I'm afraid you don't have the authority to have me executed."

Badgerbull wasn't going to let that get in the way of a satisfying idea, "I meant symbolically!"

But the science officer wasn't going to let this tyrant have any sort of satisfaction of any kind, "I'm afraid you don't even have the authority to have me symbolically executed."

Badgerbull and Forrestra both glared at Bostleburger. So he turned to the pilot, held out his hands in a gesture of resignation, "Hell, give it a try, man."

The pilot gunned the engine again. A small vibration began in the engines, and then spread throughout the ship. And soon the entire ship was shaking violently. The entire crew worried. Alaric Badgerbull however seemed to be excited by what was going on. "More power!" he shouted.

"It's already at maximum," the pilot shouted over the noise.

Fenchurch thought this was all very exciting; it was just like an episode of Star Trek.

And then the ship lurched and the shaking died down. Everything was quite again. "What happened!" Badgerbull demanded.

The pilot sighed. He tried the controls a few more times before announcing, "The engines have burnt out."

Again, it had been so obvious that this was what was going to happen that Fenchurch was certain she had even seen exactly this in Star Trek.

Badgerbull glared over at Slartibartfast as though it was something he had done. Slartibartfast merely shrugged back.

From her station on the lower level, Fenchurch watched the officers confer with the captain, who then explained to Alaric Badgerbull that they had to dock somewhere to fix the ship. And the only place available to them was of course the restaurant.

"But it's already there!" Badgerbull complained.

"I know! And that's a good thing, too," the captain said. "Because if it wasn't, then we'd have nowhere to stop and make repairs."