The Third Fist

Part 1

©1988 Rev. Ivan Stang

As Li Li-jing stood knee-deep in dinosaur manure, facing certain death in the jaws of a slavering Tyrannosaurus Rex, he seriously regreted leaving China and joining the SubGeniuses. Had he foreseen this eventuality, he certainly would have declined Stang's invitation to the Church campout.

As the fetid typhoon of saurian's breath roiled over him, his mind raced at top speed, perhaps compensating for the lack of time remaining to it. At least he would die honorably; being devoured in defense of all humanity, eighty million years before his own birth, by the most efficient killing machine nature had ever produced, until humankind anyway, wasn't really a bad way to cap off a life. Maybe someday, he speculated senselessly, the fossil of his skeleton might be found. That would certainly confound the historians. Perhaps, he mused in detached hysteria, the fossil of Peking Man in the museum was his own skull !

Probably not, he realized. His half-digested bones would more likely dissolve, scattered among those of lesser animals in the droppings of this beast.

Was there anything he wanted to do before he died? Yes. He wanted to go to sleep. As the rows of gore-encrusted teeth drew nearer, he closed his eyes and thought back -- ahead, technically -- to his arrival at Dokstok in the early 1980s... the early years of the Church...

He really shouldn't have felt so insecure about meeting Ivan's friends. He was a proud and intelligent Han Chinese, and he'd managed to achieve something only one in five million of his countrymen had done: he had quit his job as sound recordist at Beijing Film Studios and travelled to America.

In 1984, assigned to a Chinese-American documentary co-production, he had become fast friends with the Texan film editor, Ivan Stang. Despite language barriers, each recognized a kindred spirit shared an almost telepathic rapport. Both were kindly but driven family men who had developed ornery, acutely sardonic senses of humor as buffers against their frustrations. Li had taken the culture-shocked Stang under his wing in Beijing, and in return Stang had offered to sponsor Li's American education. After three years of paperwork, Li had finally made it to the U.S. But... either both his English and jet-lag were much worse than he'd imagined, or these people really were crazy.

In his Dallas home (a mansion by Li's standards, a hovel by its owner's), Stang was an entirely different man than he'd been in China. Li had quickly realized that Stang actually made his living not by editing film, but by administrating his strange Church of the SubGenius. The "Church" had almost made sense to Li, the way Stang had explained it three years earlier in China; but Li now knew Stang had been holding something back.

Li still liked Stang, though; the bespectacled Caucasian behaved honorably, worked hard, and had been sensitive to Li's loneliness and confusion in adjusting to the States. He'd struggled -- vainly, of course -- to help Li find work as a soundman.

But something was being left unsaid. Li was fairly certain Stang hadn't really wanted to take him to the big SubGenius party and wilderness campout called Dokstok, that the invitation had been extended painfully, purely out of a sense of politeness. Stang kept stressing that this "SubGenius thing" wasn't "typically American," but would in the same breath almost shout that it embodied everything the Spirit of America stood for. Stang's mysterious ambiguity made Li all the more anxious to attend.

From Dallas, they'd driven a whole day to reach the island encampment on a remote Arkansas lake. Li thought he'd prepared himself for the unearthly American propensity for obstreperous individuality; he was far wrong. The uneasy feeling began when Li first saw the Dokstok site.

An open-sided pavillon stood at the center of several rough cabins, with many vehicles parked randomly nearby. All else was clear lake and dense, breathtaking forest landscape. Li couldn't imagine more than a city park's worth of such rich land going uncultivated in China. Nor had he ever seen, not even on TV, such a crazy-quilt variety of white men as peopled Dokstok.

Here a man was totally bald, but sported an enormous handlebar mustache, tweaked and curled fantastically. There a black man had shoulder-length hair in Rastafarian style and a beard uncut for years. And there was a woman without a shirt on, kissing a man with a full head of hair on his neck and dozens of mustaches on his otherwise shaven scalp. Altogether there must have been a hundred guests, few of them fitting Li's idea of a normal American.

Stang leaped from his Japanese car and began excitedly talking with a large man wearing an extravagant goatee. Li understood only a few words of the high-speed stream they spewed at each other simultaneously. He recognized several grossly indecent invectives, but, instead of coming to blows over the vulgar insults, the two men embraced. The big man was Doctor Sterno, one of the hosts of Dokstok. Li was then introduced to co-host Doctor Snavely, who looked twenty but who was, Li learned, well into his forties. This strangely childlike man was possessed of not only a crazed, manic friendliness, but also a 'wandering eye' which seemed to look off towards distant horizons while his other was focused straight at Li.

Li had just begun to feel hypnotized by Snavely's weird eye when the fellow abruptly hopped into Li's arms, clinging to him like a lemur, causing him to stumble backwards in confusion. Just as suddenly, Snavely let go and jumped back to the ground, reverting to ordinary behavior as if this stunt had never occured, offering Li food and drink from the nearby pavilion. He now seemed quite sincere and gentlemanly. Li hoped that Snavely's startling, overly familiar shenanigans had been meant as some sort of inscrutable friendship gesture; maybe Arkansas customs were as different from those of Dallas as were Beijing's from Shanghai's.

Li was rescued from his helpless befuddlement by the impersonal, merely physical task of helping Stang carry his gear -- sleeping bags, a tent, and many recording decks -- down to the pavilion area where crouched other little tents.

"Li," warned Stang under his breath, "These guys all act crazy. I will too. But, just remember, it's all okay. It's all just...." he looked off at the lake, sighing, "...it's all just SubGenius." He shook his head as if in resignation.

As they reached a clear spot and plunked down their burdens, at least a dozen aberrant people, apparently old friends, came to greet Stang and meet Li. Li was once again reminded that he hadn't thoroughly adjusted to these huge, heaving, loud, round-eyed, big-snouted Caucasians. Moreover, these particular Caucasians seemed somehow larger (or else much smaller), louder, more round-eyed, more big-snouted than most. And bigger-breasted. Everything about each person was extreme. Only one thing was obviously held in common: all bore, somewhere on their persons, a picture of "Bob". And they all seemed to be laughing, perpetually, some to the point of tears, but always at rapidly spoken words that meant nothing to Li. He was seized with an irrationally acute sense of his own incongruity. He was very Oriental, his English was rudimentary, his clothing shabby, and he had no money of his own to speak of.

Li was unanimously regarded as one of the funniest, hippest young fellows at Beijing Film Studios. But here, his skills were useless. Not that any of these "doctors" -- as the SubGenius oldtimers ranked themselves -- were hostile; in fact, they were friendly to a degree that seemed to Li uncalled for and even undignified.

Li mulled over this as he surveyed the open-air pavilion. Several musicians had started setting up electric guitars, synthesizers and amplifiers on a crude stage made of planks. A huge sheet of plywood bearing "Bob's" image hung behind the stage. It must have been crafted by an extremely devoted artist, Li thought, for every one of the ten thousand dots of that grinning halftone face was perfectly hand-painted on the flimsy sheet of wood.

Striving to overcome his shyness, Li joined a group sitting on the ground in a big circle, laughing. He sat between Stang and a shirtless, bearded man in a straw hat who was by far the hairiest human being Li had ever seen outside of a circus. The hirsute man introduced himself as "Reverend Buck Naked" and happily engaged Li in conversation of a sort; Buck did most of the talking.

Much to Li's embarrassment, Buck immediately mentioned his own hairiness. "Bet you don't see many people like me in China, huh, Li?" he asked proudly, displaying his furred pelt. "It's because I'm part Yeti. You know what a Yeti is? Sure you do. You know, in Tibet -- Himalayas -- big hairy ape-man. We call 'em Abominable Snowman, too. And Bigfoot. I know you have them in China."

"Oh yes," laughed Li, hoping that laughter was the correct response. "We call them Wild Mans. But... I think maybe he is just big story. For children. Or just big monkey."

"Oh no, Li," said Buck quite seriously, now rocking rapidly back and forth on his heels like a hyperactive child. "My great-grandfather was a fullblood Yeti, I'm sure. You're probably part Yeti, too..." He eyed Li up and down. "Yep. Long arms. Short legs. You're one of us, brother!" He chortled idiotically.

Li nervously lit up one of his treasured Seven Heavens cigarets. Then he noticed that several pipefuls of a foul-smelling, unidentifiable white vegetable were being passed from person to person. Li was startled to see that some, rather than smoking it, packed the leafy substance under their eyelids, into their ears, even beneath their eyelids and down the backs of their pants and -- he had to avert his eyes when he saw what one man was doing with it. Soon the talk became louder, more seemingly disjointed, finally reverting into a kind of ritualistic chanting peppered with strange hoots, ululations, vulgar farting noises, and bouts of hysterical laughter. Li laughed too at first, but it kept going on and on until, he realized, they sounded frighteningly like deranged savages in the Cambodian jungles. With a start, he wondered if this "'Frop" might not actually be the opium-like American drug, marijuana. He didn't want to believe that; it smelled more like K'wang-Ji, a harmless herb smoked by many old Mongolian and Tibetan gentlemen of the lower classes. His good friend Ivan couldn't possibly be a drug user! That would be heart-breaking. He steeled himself to ask.

"Ivan -- is this bad drug?"

"Oh, hell no!" Stang assured Li in a hideous new croaking voice. "That stuff's for sissies. This is 'Frop. Grows in Tibet." Then he coughed out the gigantic lungful he'd been holding in, tears welling in his eyes, which now seemed to glow ever so slightly with an inner light. Li thought it was a freak reflection, until he realized that all eyes in the group now displayed the same preternatural glow.

Li was most uncomfortable. This seemed dangerous. He politely excused himself and hurriedly made his way back towards the pavillion.

Dozens of people were eagerly crowding into one of the little cabins; others staggered out, clutching tightly inflated balloons and sucking on them. Curious, Li stood on tiptoe at the doorway to peer in. Over the crowd's shoulders, he spied a large metal cannister boldly labeled "BOBBIE SOULS". A tall Englishman with a gratingly loud, authoritative voice, Stang's friend G. Gordon Gordon, was filling balloons with gas from the cannister and doling them out selectively to clutching hands. "Church Air, one soul per breath!" he growled repeatedly. People were so anxious for balloons that Gordon threateningly waved what Li hoped was one of the many replica toy handguns that littered Dokstok.

Outside, those with balloons were inhaling the gas from them and holding their breaths until they turned half blue; they would finally exhale, uttering cryptic statements in unnaturally deep voices. Others were rushing around tape-recording these odd, seemingly random statements. Conversations took on a dreamlike, surreal quality, disconnected from each other. Braying laughter echoed to the lake and back.

Li gawked in absolute bewilderment. This was a party? He looked down at a scrawny, swarthy, rather ratlike man sitting cross-legged on the ground, wearing an Egyptian-style goatee, with his kinky salt-and-pepper hair cut only on the sides so that its top rose like a pencil eraser. The man, "Palmer Vreedees," had just managed to inhale an entire balloon's worth of this "Church Air," and the white streaks in his hair appeared to become visibly whiter, spreading further across his hairdo. Then, to Li's utter astonishment, the man literally levitated two or three feet off the ground, his eyes rolled back. He hovered briefly and then, as he slowly descended, exhaling, he looked at Li and solemnly intoned in a supernatural baritone, "Hi, Li. Your relatives in China are fine. Lao Wang honored your bribe. "Bob's" looking for you. He'll pick you up tonight. But it's all Stang-and-Drummond's fault, you know. Call... my... lawyer..." and then the man crashed over onto the ground, flat on his back, unconscious.

Li bent to the man's aid, his heart pounding. No one else seemed to even take notice! But suddenly the rodentlike man was again conscious, and forcing himself upright. A trembling wracked his bony, starved-looking form, and he dashed past Li holding out his balloon, shoving into line again as near the Air-tank as possible. His emaciated claws clutched convulsively towards the cannister.

Both frightened and disgusted, Li turned away from the Church Air cabin and strode back to the pavilion. What a sad display, he thought. But at least they weren't throwing up. And... he halted in his tracks. How did that man know about Lao Wang and the bribe?? He started back to question Vreedees when a man wearing a military jacket, sporting one continuous and very black eyebrow across the top of his otherwise handsome features, accosted him and held a cassette recorder up between their faces. He expectorated several sentences so fast that he sounded like a tape recorder in fast-forward mode. Then he made a sound with his mouth that mimiced exactly a high-speed rewinding, followed by a quiet chuckle. He then walked on, talking to himself or his recorder, ignoring Li completely.

That must be Puzzling Evidence, Stang's military friend, Li thought. Maybe he thinks I'm North Vietnamese. This was getting downright insulting. He quietly edged off towards the pavilion where a tall, skeletal man stood on the makeshift stage, shouting rhythmically into a microphone that wasn't plugged in, to an audience that wasn't there. He gestured frantically at the huge picture of "Bob" behind him. "You can't run from your own legs. How you gonna run from your own legs? 'Cause they're what you're using to run from 'em with! You can't run from your own legs, you can't hide from "Bob". 'Cause he's dumber than you. He packs more 'Frop up his exit wound than you do. His face has been mimeographed and stuck up in more places than yours has. You can't hide from J.R. "Bob" Dobbs! Heunh! Help me somebody! She ain't got no legs! Preacher, my legs are on fire! Pull the lever, down ya go." The man did a little dance to unheard music.

Nothing made sense. These people seemed harmless enough, but definitely crazy. Crazier even than any Japanese Li'd met, and that was saying a lot. Li's opinion of Stang had plummeted far.

It was getting dark and storm clouds were rolling in overhead. Making for the privacy of the lakeshore, Li noted a long line of men waiting before a filthy tent. One man emerged from it, zipping up his pants and grinning broadly, as another man ducked down to enter eagerly.

Li was appalled. There must be a woman in there -- a prostitute! No wonder all Americans had AIDS!

Gordon Gordon, the loud Englishman from South America, accosted Li from behind, startling him. "Mr. Li! I'll bet it's been a while since you had yourself some good healthy prairie squid!"

"What? Sorry, I don't understand."

"Prairie squid." He leaned over towards Li, winking conspiratorially. "C'mon, I know you aren't one of these sissy guys who never heard of prairie squid."

"Squid? Squid is... is fish, with arms, right?"

"Yeah. But I'm talking about the prairie squid. That mighty land mollusk which is every country boy's delight. And girls', too."

"Pray-ree squid," repeated Li. "What you do with it? Go in tent... play with animal?" He was profoundly puzzled.

"No, no, Li!" growled Gordon merrily. "You fuck it."

"What! No! You make, like, make love to animal??"

"You got it, sir. And never could a man ask for a more generous and tender helpmeet."

He laughed at Li's shocked expression.

"Go ahead, try that cephalopod out. I'm surprised you don't have those in China. But I'll bet some of your peasants in the Hubei countryside could tell you a thing or two about the Yellow River prairie squid."

Li looked towards the tent, aghast, as the another man stepped in and the last came out, this one also lashing together his pants and grinning sheepishly.

Li made an immediate decision to return to China as soon as possible. He'd always thought the Mao-inspired anti-American propaganda of his childhood was grossly exaggerrated. But if this was America, it was far worse, morally, than his government had even begun to suspect!

He wasn't sure what to do. Perhaps hitchike back to Dallas, where he'd left his passport, and then go to the Chinese Embassy. He could never live in a place like this. These people... now he noticed how bad they all smelled: that unfortunate doglike odor common to white people seemed amplified here. Everything smelled, looked, sounded and tasted funny. He absolutely hated all the food these people ate, the raw vegetables, big, ugly chunks of meat, and unidentifiable synthesized junk foods.

And then the music started.

It was, beyond question, the most horrible and physically painful sound Li had ever heard. Normal American rock and roll was bad enough to his ears; he'd expected perhaps some weird jazz from these "doctors." But what now came crashing from the over-amped speakers, pealing monstrously across the lake, was a wall of the most noxious and ear-splitting noises he'd ever imagined. And yet the audience seemed to enjoy it! Indeed, many were tapping their feet in time to a rhythm Li could'nt hear, and a few were up and dancing. Then he noticed that all were dancing or tapping to a different beat. It wasn't just his ignorance; there was no beat. These drug-and-religion-addled people were simply imagining one!

Clamping his hands over his ears, Li grimaced and looked down at his feet where several bugs lay unsquashed yet dead on their backs. As he stared, a fat mosquito halted in flight and plunged to the floor to join the other dead insects.

This music was literally killing small animals by sheer sonic ugliness alone!

Filth. Vulgarity. Immorality. Sloth. Drugs of some heretofore unknown kind. What next? Violence? Enough was enough. He would bend like a reed in the wind -- and leave. He strode rapidly away from the pavilion, unnoticed by the audience of Caucasian fools who sat entranced by the inhuman display.

The night bristled with lightning, and a downpour started. Li hurried towards a short causeway bridge that led back to the main highway. Drenching rain or not, he wasn't going to rot in an American jail with mentally ill people.

Lightning writhed overhead as Li toiled on through the pelting sheets of rain. Once off Dokstok Mountain and back on the mainland, he kept to the side of the road, hugging the treeline.

Soaked to the bone, shivering, Li finally spied ahead a lighted tavern, surrounded by pickups. He approached cautiously, suspecting that a soaked, penniless Chinaman might bring out the worst in some of the more backward natives.

As he approached the ramshackle honkytonk, he saw that his worries were entirely justified. A hand-lettered sign on the door read:

DO NOt INteR WeTHOuT WHIT SKEN AN a gUNN

Li hurried away, clinging to the woods along the roadside. The rain grew colder and his teeth chattered in the cold. So this was America.

Headlights were approaching. Fearing for his health, he resolved to throw himself upon the mercy of the natives and pray for some shared sense of common humanity. As the car approached, he thrust out his thumb as he'd seen in American movies. He decided to say he was from Taiwan, not the communist mainland.

He had worked up a whole story about escaping from the evil communists when the large, powerful roadster -- of an ancient make, at least 20 years old -- pulled to a stop beside him. He yanked open the door and begged of the driver, whose face was swathed in dark, "Can you give me ride to nearer to city?"

"Ya got me," intoned a deep but amused voice, chuckling. "Me, I'm just as lost as can be! Maybe we can help each other!" As Li climbed into the front seat, thanking his benefactor, he began to distinguish the man's features.

The face was startling. It might have been molded of solid plastic! Li half expected to see a seam down the side. The head was almost too perfectly proportioned to be human. A remarkably high forehead, lantern jaw and strong smile denoted either a rare power of character, or severe mutation from inbreeding. His hair lay straight and smooth, as if molded from the same plastic as his skin but painted black and shellaced. A long, straight pipe jutted from his grinning mouth.

But most striking of all were his eyes -- like pools of fine flake jade, swirling in depthless blue. These eyes possessed an almost hypnotic quality, a strange suggestion of being able to give orders at a glance, without speaking them.

Of course the personage was none other than J. R. "Bob" Dobbs.

Li stared, thunderstruck, as Dobbs pulled back onto the highway.

"Stang lie to me," uttered Li. "He say you dead man."

"Hmph," grunted Dobbs. "Is that so?" He looked thoughtful, drumming his fingers on the wheel. "Stang." Many cloying smoke clouds issued rapidly from the pipe clenched in his teeth. "Name seems familiar," he allowed, finally. He cocked an eyebrow at Li, as if expecting an explanation.

Li had trouble answering, as he'd realized that Dobbs was driving back towards Dokstok, and, in fact, already crossing the causeway. Even with the car windows up, they could already hear the awful "music" pulsating from the island.

"Hmm," mused "Bob." "Listen to that horrible noise. I could swear it sounds just like a Dokstok. Now, wouldn't that be a coincidence!"

Li gaped at Dobbs in dumbfoundment. Could this be happening?

"Well, might as well stop in and see the boys," announced Dobbs happily as he pulled his enormous old car into the parking area.

"But, "Bob"! These people... There will be police! Big trouble! I don't know... I think maybe they crazy criminals!"

"Tell me something new," quipped Dobbs, quitting the car and striding purposefully towards the pavilion. In his business suit and tidy haircut, he looked as out-of-place as an FBI agent.

Stang, Sterno, and many others were clustered together, jabbering excitely. The band, which had dwindled to three guitar players, thumped out slow, tired blues. Dozens of people had retired to tents or had fallen asleep right on the ground around the pavilion.

No one noticed Dobbs as he stepped gingerly over the prostrate bodies and stood on the outskirts of the chattering group. He tried repeatedly to interrupt the conversation -- "Hey, boys -- ahem... hey, uh... " But, so absorbed were they in re-recounting past anti-establishment exploits, none noticed him.

Finally, Dobbs became bored. He wandered over to the stage and watched the musicians, none of whom looked up from their instruments. He stood next to a young man with a balloon taped over his face so that he could breath and rebreath his "Church Air" without interruption. The young man looked up at "Bob," did a surprised doubletake, then shrugged his shoulders and turned his attention back to the band, shaking his head as if amazed at the concrete realness of this "Church Air hallucination".

Dobbs walked back to Li, who had waited by the car.

"Those fucked-up hop-heads can't see past their own 'Fropsticks," chuckled Dobbs without a trace of resentment. "Should've known." He clamped a broad hand on Li's shoulder. "Li Li-jing, you're probably the only one here innocent enough to believe in me," he said absentmindedly, gazing off into the distance. Then he turned and looked directly into Li's eyes. Li found he could not turn away... nor did he want to. Dobbs exuded a friendliness of almost seductive purity.

"Say, you're a Chinese fellow, or something, aren't you? You speak Chinese?"

"Well, yes, "Bob,"" answered Li, puzzled. "Of course. Three dialects. But is many kind Chinese..."

"Great!" interrupted Dobbs. "How about kung fu? Can you do kung fu fighting? Like a ninja, or whatever, you know, HYAH! HAH!" Dobbs playfully executed a clumsy imitation of karate against imaginary foes.

"I am good boxer," admitted Li. He saw no use in false modesty with Dobbs, who seemed as sincere and direct as he was simple-minded.

"Ah, what luck!" He suddenly became quite serious. "Listen, I need your help, Li. But don't feel you have to join me in this noble quest. It could be very dangerous. We'll be facing madmen, mudmen and dinosaurs."

Li leaned in closer, suspecting he hadn't understood "Bob" correctly. Dinosaurs? Mudmen? Madmen, he'd already faced.

"I'm on a quest to save the human race," continued the inappropriately grinning white man. "Other than that, it isn't really your concern. But I need a SubGenius boxer who can fight like a son-of-a-bitch, and I need someone to translate Chinese, because the Chinese "Bob" doesn't speak English. It hasn't been invented in his time. Do you have a minute?" he suddenly asked, rather belatedly. "I'd like to tell you about this once-in-a-lifetime chance."

Despite the feeling that he was being sold something, Li felt an irresistible urge to do trust this odd man. This holy man, he realized. For there was no question now in Li's mind, despite Dobbs' manipulative air and lack of miraculous performances, that this man Dobbs was all that legend claimed him to be. Proof wasn't required; in the actual presence of "Bob," rationality was as nothing compared to the charisma veritably oozing from his dot-like pores. That Dobbs had chosen Li over his supposed Hierarchites -- most of whom were now snoring drunkenly -- had much to be said for it, as well.

"Please. I want to help you, "Bob,"" said Li awkwardly.

"Alright, Li. Now this is all going to sound crazy, and I won't blame you if you don't believe me. But it could be the most crucial mission of my life. JHVH-1 Itself bespoke to me what I must do." Dobbs pronounced "JHVH-1" almost nonverbally, yet in a manner which grated on Li's nerves. "The very fate of the universe hinges on the success or failure of this mission, the outcome of which will dictate whether all mankind shall crumple under the jackboot of history, or scale the heights of his rightful destiny as decreed in our genetic inheritance!"

Dobbs regarded Li gravely for a second, then burst into laughter.

"Ha! Had you going for a minute there, didn't I?" Then his laughter was stifled as suddenly as it had begun. "But seriously now, JHVH-1 has told me in a mystic vision that the AntiBob is gaining power in our Past-That-Might've-Happened. The Beforelife, I like to call it. If he isn't stopped, he will -- or did -- taint and pervert all humanity, and all SubGeniuskind, even worse then they already are. Eventually this evil will culminate in his literally fucking the earth... And Li, I don't mean that figuratively. This won't be just acid rain and volcanoes and plagues and monsters and nuclear war. I mean he will actually take out a gigantic Antibob dick, and fuck this planet with it." To Li's shock, Dobbs held up his hands and made a grossly obscene, childish 'fuck' gesture, pumping away at a 'hole' formed by circled fingers on one hand with one straight finger of another hand. "He will do this, or has possibly already done this, by manipulating the past... indeed, his villainous actions may just be what has made our present, all this world around us, the way it is!"

For some reason, when "Bob" uttered such statements, they didn't sound at all ridiculous.

"And worse than that," continued "Bob," his eyes starting to water with tears, his grin changing almost imperceptibly into a grimace of agony, "... even worse than that -- the Antibob has kidnapped my wife and taken her somewhere back in time!"

"Let me show you a picture of my beloved," sniffed "Bob". "Check this out..." He unfolded his wallet and slid out a snapshot of a lovely woman in her thirties, wearing her hair in an old-fashioned "beehive" hairdo. "Connie!" snurfled "Bob" to the picture, his hands trembling. "I would do anything to get you back." Li then noticed another picture which remained in the wallet, a crude Polaroid that had been revealed when Dobbs removed the snapshot. It showed the same woman, grinning lasciviously, stark naked, her legs spread wide open...

Li averted his eyes in shame, and Dobbs, noticing, coughed with embarrassment and shoved the snapshot back into his wallet.

"Anyway, " he continued, granite-voiced now, "The only way I can rescue my beloved, and smite the AntiBob for the sake of humanity's Slack, is to journey back in time via..."

He paused portentiously.

"...The Vortex. You see, the AntiBob's anti-luck powers shield him from even my 4-D Vision. To learn his identity, I must travel back in time and consult with all the Other "Bobs"!"

As Dobbs spoke, lightning crackled dramatically in the sky behind him. Li shuffled uneasily.

Dobbs solemnly intoned, "As I'm sure you know, I am merely the Caucasian "Bob." Even though I'm half Mayan. " He halted, inwardly emotional. "I must travel through the Dream Time to meet in days of yore with the Oriental "Bob," the African "Bob" and the American Indian "Bob"... for they will help me reach the most ancient "Bob" of all, the First "Bob," the King of Atlantis called the Yeti "Bob". You follow me so far?"

Li blinked in a sort of semi-comprehension that smacked of schizophrenia. "Yes, "Bob." I think so. But what about... Aborigine "Bob"? Australia-men?"

"Oh yeah, him too," exclaimed Dobbs, slapping himself on the forehead. "That's right! I always forget those guys! Anyway, I have to cross the backside of reality, and I will need help -- translating and fighting."

Li stood, staring blankly. There seemed little to say. His exhaustion had hit him viscerally. He hadn't slept well since leaving China; in this dreamlike condition, rational decisions seemed irrelevant. But this was Dobbs, the Dobbs, asking him to risk his life for what would be either an authentic magical quest, or a stupid drug-induced wild goose chase.

Why not?

"Okay. I go," said Li Li-jing.

"Well," said Dobbs, "nothing left to do now but summon the Vortex."

Dobbs put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Then he stood expectantly, striking a noble pose. He held this overly self-conscious pose for a full minute.

But nothing happened.

"Hmm," he reconsidered. "Musta changed the frequency. Oh well. I'll try it the old fashioned way."

He held his arms up to the sky, his pipe jutting skywards. It occured to Li that he had seen Dobbs neither refill nor light the pipe, yet it had incessantly smouldered, relentlessly productive of abundant, cloying fumes.

Dobbs chanted, "From the Land Beyond Beyond, from the World Past Hope and Fear, I bid you, Vortex, now appear!" He winked at Li. "I got that from a movie!"

The brightest bolt of lightning in Li's experience rent the sky -- but no thunder followed. A vast glow began at the distant horizon and swelled, as if a great curtain of darkeness and stars were being rolled up across the sky. Revealed behind this curtain of reality was a psychedelic, ever-metamorphosing fountain of spiraling shapes in colors too intense for names. The swirling light-show swallowed more and more of the sky until it passed over and behind them. It reminded Li of computer animation from Japan that he'd seen at the Studios. When it had almost reached the far horizon behind them, also somehow obliterating most of the ground around them, Dobbs suddenly shouted, "Oh, golly-gosh-darn-it! Wait a minute! I forgot, we need something to ride on!"

He dashed off into the colored fog of the Vortex momentarily, but reappeared carrying a huge sheet of plywood with his face painted on one side. It was the backdrop that had been mounted above the stage in the pavilion. A few bent nails protruded from its edge.

He threw the plywood to the ground -- Dobbsface down, Li noted -- and led Li onto it with him.

Li instantly felt the board lurching forward like a Disneyland ride. The ground itself vanished, leaving only the quasi-material sworls of light around and below them. There were two layers to the vista of color-light-waves, however -- one moving beneath the plywood, carrying them, while another field of cloudlike light flowed more gradually overhead as they passed beneath it. Li and "Bob" were riding the plywood through a 'sea' of light, Dobbs standing at the front and holding his arms outward exactly as if he were surfing. And now Li felt it -- a heaving up-and-down motion combined with a sense of zooming forward at high speed against a strong wind. They were surfing on light waves!

"Hey, there's a curl starting up!" yowled Dobbs. "Let's hang ten into Indian territory!"

The sense of velocity increased. They were speeding headlong into some new whorl in the Vortex, a spinning tunnel of light that had forked away from the main, sweeping stream of energy. As they banked into it, they accelerated so fast that they spiraled end over end along the tube of the Vortex as if riding the screw of a great whirlpool into the bowels of Inner Reality. Up and down were nonexistent. All was Vortex.

Li could see nothing but the tunnels of light, the board beneath his feet, and "Bob."

"Fun, huh?" quizzed Dobbs, winking. Then, as they gained even more speed, he howled, "KOWABUNGAAAAAA!"

Dobbs was enjoying this immensely, somehow using his inborn sense of cosmic balance to guide the board in its headlong careening. His movements had a flowing smoothness, like great springs uncoiling in oil. Though his necktie flapped in the solar winds, his perfect hair was unruffled.

"But... how you do this?" queried Li, only now becoming less stunned than incredulous with admiration at Dobbs' surfing skills.

"Bob" returned a startled look, as if he'd never before considered that detail. "Huh! Good question! I dunno... path of least resistance, I suppose. Hmmm..." He looked thoughtful. "Hell, ya got me!"

"But..." stammered Li. "How you know where we going?"

"I'll be honest with ya, Li. I don't really know where the hell I'm going. But what the heck, I always seem to get there! Just kind of follow my nose, you know? It always seems to work out..." Again, Dobbs gazed off into the distance, the center of the Vortex. "But, you know, this reminds me of those nights... with Connie..." He sniffed piteously, his grin now an ironic one. "Whoa -- this is where we get off! Hang on!"

"Bob" suddenly gave the board a downward push with his feet, and the Vortex skinned itself back from around them, revealing a dismal, smoky landscape. They were now skidding wildly over grass and mud, the Vortex gone.

The board went into a spin as they decelerated, throwing both Li and Dobbs off. Li bumped to a stop on his behind, but "Bob" managed to maintain his footing. His fine, straight hair remained undisturbed.

The duo took in their surroundings. It was cold, daytime, and a light fog covered an endless vista of ruined, bombed-out, European-style buildings. Clouds of smoke wafting through smelled of gunpowder.

"Hmmm," pondered Dobbs. "This was supposed to be the American West of one hundred years ago. But I could swear this looks like wartime Germany. And if I remember my war days right, we're just outside Berlin."

Strange lights came into his azure eyes as he evidently arrived at some conclusion. "I would deduce from our surroundings, Li," he intoned distractedly, "that I either took a wrong turn at that last Mutron, or else the AntiBob himself is aware of my movements and has saboutaged our Vortex journey with his insidious tricks, trying to distract us with such trivialities as World War Two. He knows full well how I hate Nazis." "Bob" smirked grimly.

They were standing on a muddy road, with not a soul in sight. But a deep rumbling captured their attention.

Emerging from the fog was an army tank, sporting a Swastika on its tattered flag!

"Panzer!" shouted "Bob." "Yep, this is Germany alright. Well, while we're here, might as well strike a blow for freedom, truth, and Jews. Some of my best friends are Jewish," he added.

Li stood agog as Dobbs broke into a full-speed sprint, charging the massive tank head-on. The turret swiveled menacingly and the barrel came to bore on "Bob." Li was thunderstruck. Did this fool "Bob" think he could destroy a German tank by himself??

It looked like curtains for Dobbs and Li!

But, within a few dozen yards of the juggernaut, Dobbs lost his footing and tripped spectacularly over a long, bent piece of gas pipe exposed by some previous explosion. He fell flat on his face in the mud. But, in the process of tripping on the pipe, he'd caused it to swivel sideways towards the treads of the tank now bearing down on him. Just before the machine could crush Dobbs beneath it, the broken pipe slammed into the gears at its side upon which the treads rolled. Caught in the machinery, the pipe was drawn into the works of the relentless Juggernaut. It must have then impaled some crucial mechanism, for the tank suddenly slammed to a halt.

Nazi soldiers threw open the hatch, about to spray Dobbs and Li with machine guns, when a hideous scraping noise erupted from the bowels of the tank. The entire machine shuddered like a wet dog, groaning horribly, and suddenly exploded in a ball of hot gas. Machine and bloody Nazi parts sprayed into the air.

"Bob!" You saved us! Are you alright?" demanded Li as he rushed to help extricate Dobbs from the mud that had shielded him from the explosion.

"I'm fine, Li. Thanks," muttered Dobbs as he stood up, scraping mud off his suit, his composure again perfect. "Those god damn Nazis. Boy, I hate Nazis. In fact, I don't hate anybody BUT Nazis. And the AntiBob!"

They continued down the destroyed road, approaching a deserted, bombed-out German village.

"You know," mused "Bob," "Nazis are like Commies. No offense if you're a poor misguided Commie, Li." Li shook his head in the negative. Dobbs continued. "They cannot understand the eternal verities of Patriopsychotic Anarchomaterialism -- you know, 'every yard a kingdom.' It is beyond their beaten-down emotional grasp. They perceive Slack only for other Nazis. Why, I remember the time I killed Hitler. Now that was a blast, I tell you."

Li, dazed, barely listened to Dobbs' insane reminiscing.

"Yep, that one time when I killed Hitler. I'd been prepping him all along, you know, waiting for the right moment. I'd infiltrated the Reich for the Allies... Churchill said it was our only hope. All I had to do was put on a devil mask and a blanket, like a Dracula cape... that dumb Kraut never suspected I wasn't really the New Man of the Age of Thule from Atlantis, or whatever! First I drove him crazy, showing up when he least expected, telling him just what he wanted to hear in bad German and Latin I got from notes I wrote on my hand. That dumb-shit fell for it," Dobbs chuckled. "I'd give him these completely fucked-up suggestions, then he'd go and force these suicidal strategies on his generals... finally, I throttled the nasty son-of-a-bitch with my own bare hands, in his bunker. Took my own sweet time doing, it, too. Played cat-and-mouse with the un-American bastard. Just when he thought Death had come, I'd allow him just enough air to prolong his terror. Yep," he chuckled with undisguised cruelty, "I taught that fuck-head a lesson. Not that it did him much good in the end! Pardon my language... In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't also in downtown Berlin right now, strangling him even as we speak!"

"Bob" stooped to pick up trash as they toiled down the cratered road, conscientiously pocketing the shreds of paper. "People shouldn't litter," he muttered disapprovingly.

They discovered an old woman begging by the roadside -- almost blind, judging by her pitiful movements. Her clothing was shabby and she looked to be starving. "Bob" gazed upon her pityingly.

He dug in his pocket for loose change. "Darn, I left my wallet in the car!" Then, to Li's dismay, he retrieved from his pocket two random pieces of trash he had collected, one a slip of paper, the other a ruined paperback book. He gave them to the pathetic hag, a look of grand benevolence on his face, and walked on. At first, neither the old women nor Li could believe "Bob" had done such a callous, mocking thing.

But the old woman held the piece of paper close to her face, scanning it. Then she blinked in astonishment. For the ragged piece of paper was the business card of the top German eye specialist of that century. And from between the pages of the tattered paperback fell a 100,000 mark bill.

The old woman burst into tears. It was enough money to cure her blindness, and put her grandchildren through Harvard as well.

This seemed a strange thing for a man to do who had just dealt cold and terrible justice to a tankful of soldiers. But, thought Li, "Bob" Dobbs was indeed a strange man, at least when judged by the look-out-for-yourself code of civilization.

"Well, gosh," exclaimed Dobbs suddenly. "Enough of Nazi-killing. We have to find the Indian "Bob" a.s.a.p., or it's curtains for Connie. And humanity," he added, rather parenthetically. "Let's scram back to the Vortex."

Dobbs again summoned the Vortex, and it rose from the horizon with a great wind -- which, with uncanny synchronicity, just happened to blow the piece of Dobbshead-stenciled plywood from the road far behind them to a spot right under their feet.

"Lucky break," mused Dobbs, as they borarded the plywood and were swept up once again into the whirlpool-like whorls of Vortex-light.

This time, the trip was much shorter. Riding the plywood back into the main Vortex tunnel, and then down another smaller one, they came sliding to a stop in the middle of a Western prairie on a bright sunny day. A light breeze ruffled the prairie grass like waves on an ocean as the Vortex rolled back. But the breeze also bore the unmistakeable stench of death.

Just behind them was a flaming, overturned American stagecoach. Its two drivers, obviously dead of gunshot wounds, sprawled nearby, their own gore pooling in the dust. Four horses lay dead on the ground, still bridled to the coach, their throats cut.

Two people in turn-of-the-century suits, evidently passengers, were tied to a nearby tree stump, likewise dead -- but also scalped, their raw heads buzzing with flies in the hot sun. That, and the profusion of wounds on their bodies, bespoke that they had been waylaid and tortured into revealing how to open their box of money.

Gagging, Li whispered, "Indians?"

"No, Li, only white outlaws could have perpetrated this heinous act! They scalped these poor innocent monopoly bankers to make it look like the work of Indians. The Sioux around these parts don't do that kind of thing." He gazed disapprovingly at the bloody spectacle. "No, they usually cut the balls off their enemies. And they'd never kill the horses. White bandits, or corrupt cavalry soldiers, did this. We must warn the Indians!"

Before they could act, a hue and cry of distant battle wafted to them on the wind. They climbed a bluff and ascertained the source of the increasingly dreadful sounds of cries and gunshots: a valley nestled just below amid the rolling amber hills.

A regiment of well-armed U.S. Cavalry had surrounded a small Sioux encampment. Most of the warriors must have been occupied elsewhere, for only helpless women, children, and oldsters were visible dashing back and forth among the teepees in a futile attempt to repel the mounted soldiers gaily firing rifles and Gatling guns into their midst.

"Why, those dirty bastards," shouted "Bob," enraged. "It was never like this in the movies!" To Li's horror, Dobbs dashed to one of the prone corpses and scavenged from it a white cowboy hat and gunbelt. "I need a horse," he muttered as he hurriedly donned them.

As if at Dobbs' command, an entire herd of Indian ponies thundered up onto the bluff, apparently fleeing the horror below. Without time for thought, Dobbs leaped upon one of the horses as it passed. The animal immediately came to a halt, and, as if according to orders whispered by Dobbs into its ear, spun around and carried Dobbs, riding bareback and firing his new six-guns into the air, back down towards the battle. Li could hear Dobbs hollering, "Yeeeee-HAW!" as he vanished over the bluff's peak.

Li, without a mount, and unfamiliar with horses on any account, could but watch helplessly as the mighty Dobbs rode straight into the heat of battle. The evil Cavalry rednecks were routed in confusion upon seeing this white man in a white hat blasting six-guns in all directions, each shot somehow finding its target. Cavalrymen plunged from their horses all around Dobbs.

Finally, one rifleman downed the horse upon which Dobbs rode. Even before the luckless steed hit the ground, Dobbs was airborne in a flying leap, landing amidst the blue-clad bullies. His guns now emptied, Dobbs waded into the fray barehanded, lashing out with what looked to Li like a peculiar form of martial arts. Without even really even seeing his victims, Dobbs became a blurred tornado of whirling and jabbing fists. In scant seconds, the area around him was peppered with dead or injured cavalrymen. Hundreds of shots had been fired at him, but, miraculously, none had hit their mark. Most had, in fact, struck other soldiers.

Within the space of ten seconds, Dobbs had rubbed out some forty men. Li was staggered by the Pipe-Bearer's amazing luck powers. "Bob" had merely closed his eyes and struck blindly at his attackers -- and with far more ease, seemingly, than an average man would exert in zipping up his pants. It showed how little "Bob" needed of either strength or agility.

With the tides turned, the embattled Indians surged from their camp and overpowered the few remaining soldiers. Before Li reached the Sioux camp, the battle was won. Surviving soldiers were already being bound and hauled into the camp to be slowly castrated by joyous Sioux women.

Li felt dizzy as he entered the Indian camp, so long had it been since he'd slept. The unfamilar stench of the Indian camp -- composed entirely of skin and bone, sewed together with sinew -- hardly affected him. He had seen, heard and smelled too much in the last two hours; he was truly "freaked out."

Indian women knelt over their slain loved ones, wailing piteously. Dobbs strode through the center of the camp, supporting a limping but particularly attractive young Sioux woman who'd been grazed by a bullet. None took notice of Li; being Chinese, he simply looked much like another Indian despite his bluejeans and plaid shirt.

A group of Sioux warriors on horseback belatedly topped the nearby hills and sped into camp trailing a cloud of dust. A tall, noble-looking Indian at the head of the group dismounted and strode straight to Dobbs.

Dobbs whirled around, dropping the injured young woman rather abruptly, so that she landed on her behind, squalling.

"Crazy Horse! You nutty bastard! Good to see you!"

"Hau, Dobbs," intoned the tall, severe Native American warrior in awkwardly pronounced English. "Once again you come to aid of our people."

Even Li had read of the exploits of Crazy Horse, mystic warrior hero of the doomed Sioux. Had he not already endured hours of equal impossibilities, he'd have doubted his own sanity.

"Crazy Horse," said Dobbs as Li sidled up to them, "Let me introduce my faithful Chinese companion, Li Li-jing. Li, this is Crazy Horse. Oh, I'm sorry... his real name is Shunka Wakan Itomni." Dobbs grinned sheepishly. "My Injun is a bit rustier than his English, I'm afraid."

Li ignored Dobbs' racist remark about a "faithful Chinese companion." It was, after all, true.

"We hear of your mighty deeds even in my land, Mr. Itomni," said Li, bowing.

"You resemble the people of the old land whence came our forefathers," replied Crazy Horse, his brow furrowed. "We are honored by your presence. I have conversed with others of your kind held in slavery by the Washeechu, the pale boogie men who keep them slaves, making them work on the evil railroads which distract the buffalo and make them sick."

"Hey, Crazy," interrupted Dobbs, somewhat rudely. He leaned close to the proud warrior, whispering confidentially.

"Listen, man, we need to do some business with the Indian "Bob" and the two Pipes." He pronounced 'Indian' as 'inden.'

He pulled his own pipe from his mouth and tamped it with his finger suggestively. "Pipes, you know? Savvy, Kimosabe? If I can get the two Pipes together, maybe I can get to the Yeti "Bob" -- you know, the ChiChi Man, hairy guy. Me have-um big business with him. Dig?"

A scornful expression darkened the proud face of Crazy Horse momentarily, but he chuckled and said, "Yes, "Bob," I understand. You are in luck, as always. In His wisdom, Wakan Tanka, the Grandfather of all things, has seen that the Great Pipe of the Lakota is in my possession now. We may combine the two powers of your Pipe and ours, and you will be taken to the Indian "Bob" who lives in the Dream Time."

"Wow, that's cool!" exclaimed Dobbs excitedly, jumping up and down like a child.

Crazy Horse disappeared into a teepee and emerged carrying, most gingerly, a package wrapped in smelly buffalo hide. From it he carefully withdrew a 'peace pipe' -- a soapstone bowl attached to a long wooden stem hung with eagle feathers.

To Li's surprise, Dobbs gasped and fell prostrate before the revealed Peace Pipe. "My God," he mumbled into the dirt, "More juju than I remembered from last time! Well, let's not waste a minute. God only knows what the AntiBob is trying to get my wife to do... on him..."

He leaped to his feet and brandished his own Pipe. Crazy Horse held his Indian Pipe in the air facing Dobbs'. They pointed both Pipes towards the Spirits of the Four Winds, then touched the two together, stem to bowl, forming a magic rectangle. The other Indians drew back in fearful suspense.

A great flash of white light enveloped the two Pipes. Through the glow, Li discerned Dobbs and Crazy Horse grunting and heaving them back and forth with an almost sexual movement. Li thought he saw a great bulge rippling on Dobbs' pants near his groin. Suddenly, as if from the clear blue sky overhead, there dropped to the ground between the two men a third Pipe -- strangely carved, of unidentifiable metallic composition, illuminated with intricate scrollwork.

"Hoooo-eee!" shouted "Bob," lifting it reverentially from the ground. "It's the god-damned real thing! The Third Pipe! A god damn Xist artifact! From outer space! What else could I need?"

""Bob,"" glowered Crazy Horse, "You are truly a Sacred Fool, a heyoka. It is a true thing that this is a Pipe from beyond the stars, from the Thunder Beings themselves. But you cannot smoke of it without the protection of the yuwipi washeechu, the White Stone of Strangeness, kept by the Indian "Bob" in his Dreamtime lair."

"Yeah... right... MWOWM..." mumbled Dobbs, dejectedly. "The only one on earth until 1998. They'll be a dime a dozen then... but I need one now and I doubt the Indian "Bob" is gonna let his go cheap."

"Being a chief, I can accompany you and bargain the price down... for a percentage," said Crazy Horse, "but before we enter Dreamtime, I insist that you honor us by making jig-jig with our sacred virgin."

"Hey -- no prob!" exclaimed Dobbs. Doffing his white cowboy hat and eagerly shucking the shirt from his back so that he stood bare-chested, he darted to the teepee indicated by his host. His tongue hung out grossly, like a dog's, and he panted uninhibitedly.

Li noted that "Bob"'s frame, stripped, was an amazing piece of organic machinery. While his muscles were not those of an Atlas, far less grossly knotted than a bodybuilder's, they yet resembled haphazardly bundled piano wire lacquered under deep plastic. He looked not unlike the 'Popeye' character from American cartoons. The assymetry of that great form was such as to stun an onlooker. Indian maidens swooned right and left.

Crazy Horse turned to Li. "Son of my forefathers, " he spoke, "I suggest we now leave our friend "Bob" to pleasure himself with this unsullied woman and lend his strange but mighty Washeechu Itomni seed to our tribe."

Li and Crazy Horse sat outside the teepee, sipping from bowls of dog soup. Neither spoke for a time, prefering to listen to the almost laugh-provoking grunts and hollers from inside the teepee. Li nearly nodded into sleep.

Eventually, Dobbs emerged.

"Ahhh... I feel like a new man," he gloated, expansively. And then, to Li's embarrassment, Dobbs unzipped his slacks and exposed his inhumanly large, Moray Eel-like organ, urinating profusely on the grass. He accompanied the splashing sounds with indecently loud groans of pleasure.

Agog, Li witnessed bright yellow and blue prairie flowers springing up magically along the line of "Bob's" holy pee spray. However, as bladderial pressure disippated, the flowers were replaced by thorns and thistles.

"Ouch," grumbled "Bob," addressing Li while tucking his prodigiously large self back into his pants. "It kinda burns at the end, ya know?"

Turning to Crazy Horse, he said, "Hey, thanks man, thanks a million. No, really! I mean it! But Li here, and me, we gotta move on and meet up with the Indian "Bob", what's his name, uh... Smoking Butt or whatever?"

"He is our greatest Weechasha Wakan, "Bob," and I remind you that his name is Smokes-While-Trading. Do not insult this great medicine man. I suggest you approach him most cautiously, for he is now plagued with boils on his backside, and is possessed of a foul temper, making him almost as crazy as you," warned Crazy Horse.

"Ah, hell, it runs in the family. Well, HEUNH," hooted Dobbs, stepping onto the magically-decorated buffalo hide which Crazy Horse had laid out before them. Li and Crazy Horse followed. "You almost forgot this," Crazy Horse reminded Dobbs, holding out the Third Pipe.

"Oh, gosh," exclaimed Dobbs, exasperated. "What am I gonna do with myself??"

Almost immediately, they were enwrapped by the Vortex.

Scant seconds of light-surfing later, the three found themselves standing astride the same hide rug, but now inside a vast cavern. Flickering torchlight dimly illuminated an altar-like rock throne. The walls swarmed with ritual carvings and hieroglyphs.

An incredibly ancient-looking Indian -- remotely resembling "Bob", if in grin only -- sat cross-legged on the natural rock throne (naked but for a pillow under his afflicted backside), surrounded by beautiful naked maidens. Li's groin heaved urgently.

"Hau, hau," the holyman muttered. "Of course, I saw in the spirit your coming, "Bob" Dobbs."

"Well, HOW, Chief!" exclaimed Dobbs loudly, stepping off the hide and proffering his hand. "Smokes-And-Sells, if I'm not mistaken? Have I got a deal for you!"

Smokes-While-Trading cast a baleful eye on "Bob." "Truly, you are the essence of your kind," he grumbled. "But no problem. Though the patterns of your smoke and the presence of Crazy Horse prove you are chosen by the Wakinyan, the thunder beings from the twin stars, this nevertheless warns the wise man to be most careful in trading with you. What deal? You talking firewater?" The medicine man sighed resignedly, shifting on his throne with the extreme caution befitting a severe hemmorhoidal condition.

"No, no!" exclaimed "Bob." "Not booze! I mean MONEY! You know, the mean green! Cabbage and gravel!" Winking, he rubbed his two forefingers and thumb together in the pan-cultural sign-language gesture for 'greed.' Li cringed.

But the wizened medicine man's eyes lit up.

"Oh! You mean money! Hau, hau... MONEY! Yes, this is surely the Unknowing Clown-Man of the prophecy. With money, we can buy firearms... lawyers... senators..." He gazed with a mad, vengeful, rapacious grin into unseen futures. "Not even the Mormons can seduce us, if we possess this 'money' of which you speak."

"Yeah!" shouted "Bob." "Right, Chief! Let's talk turkey." Extracting from his pocket a sheaf of Confederate bank notes, "Bob" suggested greasily, "Me give you bucks, you give me White Stone, tell me place to find Wildman. Then me talk to First "Bob"! Savvy?"

The medicine man snorted derisively. "Not only do you speak down to me like a condescending White Pink Man, Caucasian "Bob", but you take me for a fool. These notes are worth nothing; the Southern White Men will lose their war. You must offer a better thing. Give me... give me your ring."

The old man was eyeing, with barely-concealed lust, a cheap plastic toy ring on Dobbs' left pinky. It sported the image of Ronald McDonald.

"This?" asked Dobbs, cautiously.

"Yes. It bears the image of the One Truly White Man, the Man of Pinkness. By possessing and gradually defacing his stupid image, I would attain new power over him and all he represents. Secret rites performed over this trinket, known only to me, will win many lawsuits over the next one hundred years for what's left of our tribe. The hexes empowered by this Future Object will be almost as sweet a revenge on your people as was tobacco."

"Fine! Great!" exclaimed Dobbs, wrenching the cheesy ring from his finger. "Take it! All yours! Now gimme the White Stone and tell me how to find a Yeti somewhere hereabouts!"

Shifting his buttocks with great care, the old man fetched from his loincloth what looked, to Li, to be a simple white river rock, its edges worn smooth by erosion.

""Bob," you ask for a passkey to the Indian "Bob" and the Other "Bobs." This may be that which you seek. To me, this is nothing but a stupid piece of rock, useless to our tribe. But our legends say that this rock was once owned by the First "Bob" himself."

"Hot damn," muttered "Bob," reaching eagerly for the rock. "This motherfucker is a god damn Xist computer and time radio!" Suddenly he covered his mouth. "Oops... language!"

"But even with this Stone and the Pipe, your luck is gone."

Dobbs looked stricken, grimacing.

"Yes. Wild Chi-Chi Man is no longer friend to Indians on this land. Too many white mans with guns, shoot at poor Chi-Chi. Too many Indians betray the Wild People for payment of firewater. You must go to the Next-to-First "Bob" in the land from whence came your companion." The man indicated Li.

"Chinese "Bob" has the Bigfoot connection, eh, Chief?" said Dobbs. A crafty edge then came into his voice. "Okay, no prob. But one thing before we go, Chief. I just gave you a lot of money's worth of magic plastic." (He winked at Li.) "The rock's great, whatever the hell I'm supposed to use it for, but, well, since you can't give me the Yeti... don't you think I'm entitled to... oh, I dunno, a magic word or something?"

"White men... always finding something more to snatch up." The Indian snorted disgustedly, but from his medicine bag he extracted for Dobbs an ancient glass vial. Its faded label read faintly: "Rev. Dr. McNutt's Holy Snake Oil Tonic. Cures All Ailments Or Money Back."

"Is great medicine," said the Native American holy man. "Makes old men young, weak men strong, limp men hard. Oil of snake. Given to me by a great holy man as a gift for my services. Take it for magic protection against all curses but one -- sores on backside." Only Li noticed the old man winking to Crazy Horse, just as Dobbs had winked to Li over the worthless Ronald McDonald ring.

Dobbs took the vial gratefully and pocketed it, gushing with complete sincerity, "Hey, thanks, Chief. I dunno how to repay you."

The old man took a long draw on his peace pipe. "Just vanquish the AntiBob, and in so doing, strain the shit from the bowels of the soul-less Washeechus who wreck our land. That is enough. Be always itomni -- crazy, happy, drunken... slackful. But I warn you, bad spirits lay in wait for you. They serve AntiBob and know you are here to hurt them and aid the wise spirits, who meddle not in the silly affairs of men."

"Uh... right," nodded Dobbs enthusiastically. "Me kick ass on bad demons. No prob! ME BAD MOTHUHFUCKAH!!!!"

"Truly, your mouth is as great as your mind is simple," grunted the Indian "Bob", looking skeptical. "For this reason, and also to show good manners, I strongly urge you to consult the two remaining major "Bobs" along the way." Chuckling at some private joke, he added, "Give my regards to the African "Bob" especially!"

"Yes! How! Me comprendee, Chief! African "Bob!" Abo "Bob!" Me get big medicine from blackfellows!"

"One thing last, Dobbs," sighed the shaman, ignoring Dobbs' stubborn and transparent attempts to play Indian. "Tell me. What will happen to our people, in their battles against your relatives, the white-faced monsters?"

"Oh, you get mostly wiped out," replied Dobbs, grinning with insensitive joviality. "But the ones that are left, hell, they get free tract houses and canned food."

"Figures," muttered Smokes-While-Trading, shaking his head. "But enough talk. You must reenter the Vortex. Despite your stupid ways, I bless you. May you never be afflicted with incurable backside-sores."

Li, Crazy Horse and "Bob" boarded a large beech canoe furnished by Smokes-While-Trading.

"Next stop: Africa!" "Bob" shouted above the airless rush and noiseless roar of the Vortex, as they were engulfed by the metamorphosing lights of that whirlpooling cosmic time-subway.

Continued in Part 2

Part 2

©1988 Rev. Ivan Stang

part 2

The canoe "landed" on dry ground... but rather than a tropical jungle, it was a cold Northern forest. Li was further surprised when a crude arrow abruptly appeared fromm nowhere, lodged in Dobbs' cowboy hat.

Spears and arrows suddenly rained upon them, pincushioning the canoe as Li and Crazy Horse ducked down into the bowels of the vessel.

"Hellfire -- wrong god-damn spearchuckers!" shouted "Bob" to his confused companions, remaining carelessly upright. "Must be more AntiBob saboutage! Backpaddle! Stern ho! Let's get our butts outa here!"

Dobbs' senseless paddling was ludicrously ineffectual, of course; the canoe was far from any lake or stream. Yet, though he was a nonsensically easy target, not one of the countless missiles touched him. Human figures were increasingly visible as they darted closer and closer between the trees: pale-faced individuals with beards and furry clothing.

"We been screwed again," shouted Dobbs. "This ain't Africa! The AntiBob must've plunked us down right in pre-Roman England or somesuch place, in the middle of these fuckin' Druids! Let's haul ass!"

While Dobbs had been shouting, Crazy Horse and Li Li-jing had already crept from the too-vulnerable canoe into a nearby creekbed. Dobbs ran to join them, but so heedlessly did he expose himself that when he reached the ditch his backside was almost comically pincushioned with arrows.

Dobbs suddenly howled in pain -- but not from the arrows, which he scarcely seemed to notice. "Wait a minute! I... I have to... take a shit... right NOW!" "Bob" grimaced piteously, tears streaming down his face, his hands tearing his belt buckle loose. He was facing away from the Druids -- and, as he bent over to yank down his pants, the arrows spontaneously flew backwards out of his butt, pelting their unseen attackers like quills shot from a porcupine.

Still doubled over behind the creek ridge, Dobbs strained with a fearsome effort, his whitened knuckles clutching his knees. He groaned loudly. Dobbs looked as if he were about to explode. Li backed away from him instinctively, noting strange markings on Dobbs' buttocks.

"Must... break... wind..." grunted Dobbs, sweat breaking out upon his brow. "Too... much ... pressure..."

To Li's surprise, Dobbs suddenly thrust his buttocks over the edge of the protecting ridge. It was then that Li clearly saw two huge, reptilian eyeballs tatooed on Dobbs' rump. To the attacking druids, it must have resembled some hideous beast rising up out of the creek.

"Must... pyroflatulate..." gasped Dobbs through his clenched teeth. "Our... only... chance..." Grimacing in agony, Dobbs fetched a plastic lighter from his pocket, and held it just under his bare, exposed rectum, past which arrows were still flying.

"It... comes... NOW!" Dobbs shouted, and with that he flicked the lighter. An impossible burst of firey blue gassy flame sprayed like a flame-thrower from his nether regions for at least a full minute, sweeping the woods as the Slackmaster wriggled his sacred booty back and forth in pain. From the now-burning woods came ear-splitting screams loud enough to drown out the farting noise of Dobbs' 'seizure.'

Suddenly, the Druids across the clearing let out an even louder series of panicky yelps and babbling, independent of those of the burn victims mutilated by Dobbs' pyroflatulation. Arrows from some third party were now zinging overhead, from the opposite side of the woods! Many were reaching their marks, Li estimated, judging from the cries of pain and the death gurgles emanating from the Druids. Soon it became evident that the Druids had fled. (And they carried with them the seed of all future Celtic legends of dragons. Their leader, Beowulf, would later brag about this episode interminably, in bad rhyme.) Of their benefactor, there was no visible sign.

"Well," Dobbs slurred to Li and Crazy Horse, pulling up his pants. "I hate doing that in front of you guys, but at least we're safe from those damn Limey cavemen."

"But who are the others that aided us?" wondered Li.

In answer, an unearthly, witchy voice squeaked from the forest, "Your enemies flee not only from your magic, but also mine."

Out of the woods strode a two-headed black man at least seven feet in height, armed with a gigantic bow. Of his two heads, one was dusky and handsome, and the other palid and wrinkled, with straggly white hair.

Li, Crazy Horse and even Dobbs froze in astonishment.

"Fear not; for we are friends," bleated the pale head in modern English, as the monster bowed to them. It was then that Li discerned that this was no two-headed giant, but a one-headed ebony giant with a tiny, deformed Caucasian dwarf strapped to his back, riding him 'papoose'-style and peering over his shoulder. The wizened face of the dwarf lolled, and drool dribbled from its toothless mouth, but it spoke again quite clearly.

"I speak for the giant who carries me. He is Usuthu, son of an Ethiopian slave, who has nevertheless become a great warrior and magician. I am Janiti, an unfortunate cripple and Wiccan priestess gifted by the Moon Goddess with the magic of Speaking All Tongues."

"Holy shit! What the fuck is this?" griped Dobbs, bravely maintaining a false grin in the face of knuckle-gnawing fear.

"Hold your tongue, and earn our aid," snapped the dwarf. "My friend Usuthu and I are not demons, but mortals like yourselves. Our presence together, in this time and place, is no evil magic -- only a product of whims of Fate so utterly improbable as to make the most inane religious superstitions seem logical by comparison. Until recently, Usuthu was the companion of the great Viking explorer, Halberd. As they were returning home from a quest in the Unknown World -- the land from whence you come, as I judge from my visions -- they stopped for provisions on this Isle of the Picts and were separated. It so happened that I, due to my hideous appearance and witching skills, had been cast out of my tribe to die in the forest. As I neared death, I experienced a vision of you and your quest. It was then that Usuthu found me, and recognized in me the magical abilities for which my own people had sentenced me to death, even though I was a harmless woman who wished only to heal the sick."

"That retard is a woman?" gasped Dobbs, insensitively.

Usuthu again muttered in the dwarf's ear.

"My goal is to accompany you on your Quest so that the First "Bob" is not disgusted that only males have approached him. Usuthu determined to join me, for he is curious but not inexperienced regarding matters of the Dream Time."

Dobbs stood slack-jawed. "Well, I'll be god damned," he muttered. "This is like something out of a really bad movie."

"Usuthu wishes to know," continued the dwarf, "whether you truly intend to meet with the great god of his mother's tribe, the fearsome and tyrannical Bahaab Dahaabs, who he imagines has aided him magically many times in the past. If this be so, he will gladly join you and, moreover, continue to carry my pitiful physical vessel so that my gifts of speech might aid you in your infinite clumsiness... and that he may pay personal homage to his god. I would suggest," the dwarf croaked with a hint of sarcasm, "that you accept our offer to join you, as our skills are gifts granted by the gods only once in a thousand generations, and the likelihood of our meeting this way by chance alone are so astronomical as to further suggest either divine or demonic intervention."

"Well...gosh," said Dobbs, after a short pause. "I can't hardly refuse that, now can I! You're both too weird to be agents of the AntiBob. One thing bothers me, though. Are you sure you're a woman?"

Li cringed in shame. Truly, Dobbs was an uncouth man. But the dwarf seemed happy to answer.

Scrunching up higher on Usuthu's back, she exposed her chest and flopped a droopy, stretch-marked teat over the black giant's shoulder.

Dobbs emitted a wolf-whistle and nudged Li rudely with his elbow, winking lasciviously.

"I am indeed a woman, though not of the same mundane design as those of your world, nor of most others, " she cackled, ignoring Dobbs' crudeness.

"Say," Dobbs uttered sleazily. "Are you married, by any chance?"

"I am married to the spirits of the mind, through whom all could communicate, could they but hear truly," answered the crippled hag.

"Oh... yeah," said Dobbs, obviously not understanding. "Well.. then... look, I'm supposed to be saving my wife and the universe, and the next stop is Bahaab's pad, dig? So what're we waiting for?"

The hag whispered once more into the ears of the warrior Uhuthu. He nodded and she said, "You are impetuous, Caucasian "Bob," but right. We must all hurry to meet and vanquish the forces of evil, lest they gain more strength by making your wife perform sexual acts upon them."

Smoke blew copiously from "Bob's" pipe and every orifice of his head, even the corners by his eyes.

"Then we go! Now! Everybody get in the canoe! I MEAN FUCKING RIGHT GOD DAMN NOW!!"

Because the canoe was scarcely large enough to hold even Usuthu alone, Crazy Horse, Li and Dobbs snuggled tightly together into it, while Usuthu tightened the strapped holding Janiti to him, and clung with a vise-like grip to the top sides of the vessel.

"Here goes!" shouted Dobbs, and once again they sped through the majestic Vortex.

Their canoe exited the Vortex, sliding and careening on water before slammming into a riverbank in what was certainly Darkest Africa. Dobbs immediately quit the boat and motioned for the others to follow him. Jungle drums echoed in the humid distance. Li slapped at gigantic mosquitos which buzzed his face as he and the others followed Dobbs.

The Great Beatnik Salesman seemed to be drawn by instinct, for he evinced no doubt as to his destination. By the way he sniffed the air, his eyes furtively scanning the woods before them, Li guessed that he was following an invisible trail.

Dobbs' form seemed to flow through the leaves and branches and snakes. Not a leaf fluttered, not a hair was ruffled out of place. "Bob" did it as instinctively as a great jungle cat. He had seemingly acquired the skill from the jungle itself, for his going was as silent as a breeze-swept puff of pipe smoke.

They broke from the rain forest into a clearing filled with grass huts. Towering over the primitive structures was a palace -- an imposing edifice bearing countless domed towers and architecturally fantastical cones. Yet no living being was to be seen. From the volume of the chanting voices inside the palace, it was apparent that all the tribe was gathered therein.

As they approached the Cyclopean palace, Li observed that every bit and piece of the amazing structure was carved of wood... much of it as intricately rendered as any Buddhist temple. It occured to him that structures like this might have existed all over Africa, but, due to their wooden construction, would leave neither fossil nor ruin, being instead swallowed by the jungle which encroached constantly.

The palace was humid with the sweat of naked dancing girls and chanting singers. Immediately, armed guards challenged them with spears. But Usuthu, who spoke a rough form of their dialect, commanded them swiftly and authoritatively. The adventurers were allowed entry on the condition that they hold their tongues until "the great M'Bugulu" saw fit to receive them.

At least three hundred Africans sat before a gigantic throne which dominated the seemingly measureless room. To Li, despite his state of exhaustion, the ebony-sheened, topless women dancing erotically by the throne certainly looked better than most of the blemished, half-starved waitresses in his Beijing neighborhood restaurant. Did all the "Bobs" surround themselves with naked women?

Usuthu and Janiti translated to the others what was transpiring.

A sick man was brought before the obese, decoratively-scarred shaman, the great M'Bugulu, Bahaab Dahaabs. A distraught widow raved at him begging him to save her "unworthy husband." Dahaabs leaned over the limp body of the stricken man, shaking his outlandishly huge feathered headress. As he intoned a litany in some strange tongue, waving one hand about with mystical gestures and twiddling the bone which pierced his nose, Li spied him surreptitiously slipping a piece of string into his mouth with his other hand. This went apparently unnoticed by the rapt audience.

"Now," announced the chieftan grandiosly, "I shall use my Magic Cord of the Spirit to draw from this man all the evil demons that inhabit him."

The overweight witch-doctor leaned over his patient, extending the string from his mouth until it touched the sick man's heaving chest. Dahaabs then afixed his mouth to the man's breast, simultaneously sucking the cord back into his mouth.

He appeared to suck strenuouosly at the man's chest. Suddenly, he lifted his head, and spat out mouthfulls of blood.

"The spirits are leaving," he announced.

He continued sucking. Again he raised his head. "There is a piece of bad magic in this fine man," he moaned melodramatically. "I will strive to remove it. But it will surely require nothing less than a miracle."

Then -- clearly, to Li's eyes -- Dahaabs transfered a previously palmed piece of quartz crystal into his mouth -- which he again lowered to the man's chest. Then he raised his head and spat the crystal into his hand.

"The evil is banished," he exulted triumphantly, holding aloft the crystal. "And I further see that this man was made sick not by normal illness, but by an evil spell cast by... by whom?"

He gazed suspiciously around the palace, from one cowering face to another. Then he looked into the smoke rising from an incense burner.

"In this smoke I see... the truth," intoned Dahaabs. "I see... the face of my rival, M'Gelbelo. He is the murderer who hexed this man."

A murmur ran through the crowd. Obviously, M'Gelbelo had little time left to live.

Suddenly the drums stopped. Both the dancers and audience fell prostrate, bowing before... before Dobbs and his companions, Li realized.

"I know who you are. Do not waste my time," thundered the obesely fat Black "Bob" from his huge bamboo throne. Sweaty maidens of inestimable beauty hovered around him, as if fearfully awaiting his next sexual demand.

"I know why you strange and very ugly foreigners come," the chieftan bellowed. "You are "Bob" Dobbs of the Future Land, and you wish to anally or monetarily dominate that one who is the opposite of all we True "Bobs," before he anally manipulates us." The four-hundred pound African shaman's eyes and nostrils flared fearsomely.

"But I must ask of you one question, before I might aid you." He narrowed his fat-creased eyes shrewdly. "What can you give me?"

Through their translators, Dobbs and Dahaabs haggled.

"I have many souls in my great banks of the future," wheedled Dobbs. "These are the souls of Bobbies -- my followers in the depraved World of Tomorrow." He wiped some sweat from his brow, his right hand clenching and unclenching as if to grip a remembered briefcase full of demographic charts. "I have been granted power by JHVH-1 Himself to transfer ownership of said unclean souls over to your psychic account."

The Black "Bob" regarded him doubtfully.

"Caucasian "Bob", I see you are every bit as stealthy and clever as Nasrudin, the Arab "Bob". I avoid doing business with such tricksters -- they are too tricky even for me."

"Hey, wait a minute, Sambo," said "Bob", blustering loudly to hide his fear. "Don't speak too soon. Look, you ain't fooling me." He lowered his voice. "I'm onto your tricks. You sucked fake blood out of that sick dude by biting your own cheek. You spat out that damn mystic cord from your mouth."

"And yet the man will be healed, will he not? I help my people," argued the Black "Bob," now whispering confidentially. "I admit to certain simple tricks. I see ants moving to their holes, and frogs croaking, and then I announce that I am about to make rain. And so comes the rain. Likewise, I suck the evil objects from the bodies of the ill people, and they become well -- simply because I always maintain an expression of utmost gravity and holiness, they believe they will become well. My people are both healed, and given hope. So, out of our common "Bob"hood, please do not blow my cover... or I will kill you."

"Okay. Just play fair with me, and I won't expose your scam to your fine people here."

"Agreed," Dahaabs conceded. "I will show you mercy and assist you... But, "Bob" Dobbs, you yourself are no better than me. You have tried to cheat me with your ludicrous "payment in souls." You would take me for another of your unquestioning, foolish customers... yet, for that I respect you. Surely, you are as great a Salesman as myself, and you, like me, use your powers for any who come to you for help in their ignorance. Though you take their money, you yet give them Slack.

"But I cannot join you in your quest, for my people need me, and moreover, I am too fat to travel the Vortex. I can offer only my magic submarine, and another thing unavailable from any of the other "Bobs" you may encounter. Gaze upon my mighty handiwork," he concluded, pointing to an ordinary American phone booth half-hidden behind his throne.

"However, I would expect some small token of payment." he added.

"Heck, if only I hadn't forgotten my Magic Wallet," groaned Dobbs, patting his pockets. "Ah! Wait! Here's something. Oh Mighty M'Bugulu," he said ceremoniously, extracting the Snake Oil vial and laying it at the feet of Dahaabs. "This is the oil of the magic snake, given me by none other than the Indian "Bob" of the Unknown World."

"By the Undulating Tail of M'Kele M'Bembe!" shouted Dahaabs, incredulous. "Simply for the use of my Magic Telephone and Submarine, you are willing to part with this rarest of elixirs?"

"I do so happily, to show my boundless respect for your own Sales Magic, which surpasses even my own," said Dobbs grandly, bowing from the waist.

As the crowd of natives kowtowed to this stranger who had dared wheel and deal with their Living God, "Bob" rushed to the phone booth. He dialed a short sequence of only three numbers, waited, and then said, "Yes, collect, please, ma'am." Then he apparently got his connection.

"Al Crowley," he shouted. "How the hell are ya, ya old sinner? Yeah? Well, listen. This is important. I'm in a big hurry. Is Jesus around?"

Dobbs waited, tapping his toes. As he did so, the air around him congealed and demonic faces leared out at him from the aethers, their claws grasping at him from some trans-dimensional fog. "Bob" simply brushed at them with his hand, murmuring irritably, "Go away, you!" -- much as an ordinary person might shoo away insects. He nonchalantly blew smoke into the half-visible demon faces, and they vanished. Then his party answered.

"Jesus! Wait'll you hear this! The fuckin' AntiBob has... oh..." Dobbs looked disappointed. "You've heard already. Boy, word travels fast! ...Well, shit. Okay. I understand. But any help you can offer would be, like, appreciated... and I don't mean with peanuts, Okay? I mean... your accounts in Switzerland... the Merovingians... RIGHT! You got it! Hey, thanks, man."

Dobbs hung up and addressed his comrades.

"That's it, guys. I just cashed in an old debt somebody owed me. My luck oughta hold out all the way through to the First "Bob's" time. First we gotta check out the Abo and Chinese "Bobs", then we're copascetic! Let's make like diarrhea and run!"

The African "Bob" led Dobbs and his crew down to the riverside, where was docked an elaborately-outfited craft composed entirely of reeds and bamboo. No more than thirty feet in length, it was indeed a submarine -- the secret weapon of Dahaabs.

"I entrust to you this great vessel," declared M'Bugulu, "In the knowledge that you shall avenge the injustices being perpetrated in both the past and the future. And I hope that you put an end to the evil ones before they make, from the past, my own existence impossible. Also, I trust that you shall return this craft, lest you face the Curse of Incurable Hemorrhoids, as afflicted the last man to cheat me, Smokes-While-Trading, He Who Stole The Snake Oil That Seems Like A Cheap Trick But Is In Actuality A True Magic Tonic From A Bottle That Never Empties."

"Uh, right, gotcha," said Dobbs. "Thanks a million! Let's do business again sometime! C'mon, guys, let's catch up with the Abo "Bob!""

Into the cramped sub crawled that motley/heroic crew. Dobbs muttered his incantation, and the Vortex swept over the craft. Through a porthole Dobbs looked for an exit. Wrenching the wooden steering device, he spun them topsy-turvy into a Vortex "exit ramp," and they were soon deposited into normal reality -- but deep underwater.

Coelocanths swam past the portholes. Weird echoing underwater sounds -- the scraping of primitive motors, valves, and technically impossible sonar bleeps -- lent a creepy atmosphere as they cruised over fantastic undersea plant life, dimly lit by oil-burning lanterns on the sub's sides. Crazy Horse, who had never seen the ocean, much less its deeps, was dumbfounded. Usuthu shivered in a corner, coughing on the cloying smoke from Dobbs' Pipe. Janiti slept, murmuring in dozens of different languages. As tired as Li was, he nevertheless joined Dobbs at the primitive control deck.

"But, Dobbs," Li demanded. "Why we in water to see Aborigine "Bob?" He not live in Australia?"

"Just off the coast," explained Dobbs. "See, Li, we're just about 20,000 years in our past. These Australian dudes used to have a highly technological civilization, inherited from the Atlanteans. But, long before your people or mine started keeping records, they kind of blew it off and decided it made a lot more sense to run around naked in the bush. I'm sure, eventually, our modern civilization will go the same way... once we kick the AntiBob's ass, anyway." He smiled smugly. "Hey," he shouted, "Here's the place!"

Li's ears popped as the submarine suddenly dropped many feet and bumped down onto seemmingly solid ground. Before Li could stop him, Dobbs thrust open the hatch. No water burst in; they were an air pocket of some kind.

The team clambered out of the ship to find themselves inside a gigantic bubble. A bizarre, unimaginable undersea landscape stretched off in all directions beyond the spherical wall, which Li assumed to be made of glass. Behind them, however, within the bubble, loomed a vast, Gaudi-like coral palace. Its form was naturalistically random, as if the coral had been grown into shapes which suggested turrets and rooms and windows. Weird, throbbing music issued from the structure.

From the palace drawbridge, across the sandy but quite dry ground, waddled a small, wiry, naked Aborigine of extremely advanced age, smoking a pipe. With his heavy brow, splayyed nose and sloping chin, he embodied the Stone Age "look".

Without opening his mouth, the little man's voice echoed through all their brains, in their own languages.

"Welcome, "Bob" Dobbs and friends! Before you flee in terror, let me explain that I still possess many talents long since forgotten in your time. I read minds and converse in any tongue, and am glad to have visitors from so many different cultures. I have been alone here with my harem for nearly one hundred years."

Multiple telepathic gigglings gargled mentally from within the coral palace.

"Yes, I know you gentlemen may be interested in this harem of mine, and I assure you that all the pleasures of the flesh will be yours for the taking."

"Yow," hooted Dobbs crudely. He stomped his feet and howled like a cartoon wolf. Steam seemed almost to shoot from his ears. "Lemme at 'em!"

"Ah, friend "Bob," you appear to have your priorities in order. Be my guest..."

To the dismay of his companions, Dobbs dashed past the old man and into the coral palace, frantically unbuckling his pants as he went.

"Yes," thought the old man towards the disappearing "Bob," "In answer to your question, I do have prairie squid. Prehistoric, by your standards."

Li and the others looked at each other questioningly.

"Do not worry, my new friends," telepathed the Aborigine. "Dobbs forgets not his mission. In this holy place, bouyed by my inestimable mental powers, we can all plan with our forebrains even while our gross bodies indulge in fleshly pleasures."

"But... how?" though Li.

"It is so sad that the simple things of life have been forgotten in your worlds," thought the man sorrowfully. "Let me explain. I am Winjin of the Pitjendadjara tribe, prince of this city. All of my people, except those lazy ones who choose to be sex slaves, are princes or princesses with their own cities. Most live upon the land in mud palaces built by ants at their telepathic direction. Because I am a "Bob," I choose to live here. The Great Water is kept back, and this bubble of air formed, simply by my own powers of concentration. All things and animals do my bidding according to my songs of power. My castle was built for free by the little corals. It is easy for me to ride on storms and commune with the dead. Say, would any of you like to smoke? I have excellent pituri."

Winjin offered his pipe, but none dared accept it, so awestruck were they.

"I can see that my magic terrifies you; don't worry, for soon Dobbs will have his way with the women here and take you away with him. Even now he is gaining new powers by copulating with my harem and my giant squid. When he is done, I will give him a magical power object which will allow him to slay, or at least cripple, the AntiBob. I have been watching your adventures, which are most amusing, on my magical mental television since you started; thus none of my own precious lovemaking-time will be wasted with stupid deals and explanations. I suggest that you all relax, smoke, and fornicate to your hearts' content."

Out of the palace dashed a bevy of naked Aborigine women, all of them projecting images of sex into the minds of the adventurers -- except for Janiti, who, strapped to Usuthu, swooned according to some pornographic telepathy broadcast from Winjin.

Soon all were indulging in frenetic sexual acts. Winjin humped joyfully upon the stunted torso and withered limbs of Janiti; Crazy Horse was pillowing three of the Stone Age women at once, and Usuthu grappled urgently with no less than eight. Li, the most modest of them, resisted, but finally gave in to the mental proddings of two Aborigine women who, in any other setting, might have struck him as supremely ugly. The beauty and poetry of their thoughts, however, far overshadowed both his cultural conditioning and his exhaustion.

But as soon as he was spent, Li leaped up. The sex had, surprisingly, invigorated him.

"What about AntiBob?" he shouted to the others, who remained oblivious in their pleasures. "Must find Dobbs! Not forget holy mission!"

He dashed into the palace. The hallways were strewn with the prone, happily sighing bodies of women, all obviously well-serviced by Dobbs. And in such a short time! Li followed the trail of fucked-out women to a great room from which emanated both Dobbs' groans of pleasure, and the moist, slurping noises of some great beast.

Rounding the corner, Li could scarcely believe his eyes. Dobbs was emersed headfirst to the pelvis in the slimey body of some gigantic prehistoric cephalopod, a slug or shell-less snail which writhed and sucked and glorped around "Bob's" nude body. The orifice which hid "Bob's" torso resembled an enormous vagina; his buttocks were being lightly spanked by a huge, prehensile penis-like appendage.

"Ah.... prairie squid," burbled Dobbs' voice from deep within the slimmy folds of the omnisexual beast. "More prairie squid than I'd ever imagined in my wildest dreams!"

Before Li could shout at Dobbs to hurry, to remember his mission, a blinding flash of light illuminated the room. Dobbs quickly yanked his sopping head from the four-ton prairie squid and, panicky, tried to regain his senses -- such as they were.

Floating within a cloudlike aura at the center of the room was the shimmmering image of a blonde American woman -- Dobbs' wife, Connie. Her perfume practically replaced the air. The magical image railed at Dobbs in angry tones.

"Well, well, well," bespoke the woman sternly, as Dobbs abashedly buckled up his pants. "Boy, are you in for trouble when you get home! I'm stuck here waiting to be rescued from the AntiBob, and what are you doing, huh? Porking a bunch of pug-nosed chippies and this slimey monster! Just what do you have to say for yourself?"

"Uh, uh, uh, nothing dear... " stammered Dobbs. Li had never before seen Dobbs show true fear. "I, uh... I mean, I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do... You know, Abo "Bob" said I had to..."

"Oh, sure," grated Connie. "Hmmmph. Maybe I'll just take the AntiBob up on his offer, Mr. Big Dick!" And with that, her image disappeared.

"Oh, shucks, Li," said Dobbs, trembling, while he zipped up. "Uh... We'd better get going..." He seemed embarrassed, and said nothing more as he hurried back to the submarine.

Their companions were waking groggily when Dobbs and Li exited the temple. Dobbs rudely hustled them all towards the submarine.

"Wait, "Bob," thought Winjin. "It's too bad you have to hurry so. You would gain more power were you to but stop and smell the roses."

"Yeah. Right. Gotta go. Here's some 'Frop," Dobbs said, tossing a small packet to Winjin. "Thanks for everything!"

And they were in the Vortex again.

The Chinese, or "Next-to-First", "Bob" had been expecting them. As the submarine beached with a crunch on a riverbank in prehistoric China, Dobbs and crew piled out of the craft and found the little man sitting patiently on a tree stump, whittling away at a stick.

LI was thrilled. Here was his homeland, thirty or forty thousand years in the past. The landscape looked exactly like an ancient Chinese pen-and-ink drawing, with imposing cliffs, weird, spindly trees, and fog lifting from burbling brooks. Besides the Chinese "Bob," not a soul was in sight... no lines of Mao-jacketed peasants carrying inhumanly heavy loads, no bicycles, nothing. Birds sang in the twisted branches overhead. An ornately carved temple loomed through the fog not far away.

The Chinese "Bob" looked up from his whittling and grinned, a clay pipe dangling from the left side of his mouth. He was a jolly-looking old man, dressed in gaily colored but tattered rags, a broad smile crinkling his eyes into slits. He said nothing, but looked at them expectantly.

Dobbs motioned with his head for Li to approach the man. Surprised that no telepathy would be involved this time, Li timidly approached the old fellow and bowed low.

"With your permission, Grandfather," he said, "I am Li Li-jing, a humble worker from our tormented future. This is the holy man "Bob" Dobbs, and our friends, who seek your guidance in locating both the First "Bob," and a Wild Man translator."

"Ah, save our breath, Young Li, for I know all this already," gummed the old man in a form of Mandarin so archaic that Li could barely comprehend it. "Your speech is so corrupted and degenerate that I can hardly understand you, but I enjoy its roughness, and will eschew the telepathy used by my show-off great-grandcousin, the Aborigine "Bob." Welcome to the land of your own ancestors, Young Li. I might even be one of them. My name is Chien Minh. Were any of your female grandparents Chiens?"

"Not to my knowledge, sir; I wish that I could claim such an honor, but am thus abased before you."

"Ah, blow off the formal shit," snapped Chien Minh, much to Li's surprise. He exuded several puffs from his pipe, surveying the small group. "Tell your friend, the Caucasian "Bob," that all of you are welcome to my modest hovel."

Li translated to "Bob," noticing that Janiti looked a bit jealous. Well, screw her, thought Li. The stuck-up, round-eyed, deformed bitch hadn't given him the time of day.

"Bob" was admiring the staggeringly beautiful temple visible over the treetops. "Hovel?" he said. "Looks like a pretty snazzy joint, if you ask me."

"That?" snorted Chien Minh. "I would never live in such an ostentatious dwelling. Too much upkeep. Waste of time better spent whittling and dreaming. That is a temple built by asinine religious fanatics for that so-called hotshot, Lao Tse. The big-mouth."

"Lou-sy?" countered Dobbs. "That place doesn't look so lousy to me!"

"You are far too easily impressed, "Bob" Dobbs," scolded Chien Minh.

Li was taken aback that Dobbs had apparently never heard of Lao Tse, China's greatest ancient philosopher. The very similarity of Dobbs' teachings to Lao's -- such as the doctrine of 'Slack,' or 'doing nothing effectively' -- would have suggested some influence.

"Well, come on," said Chien, creakily lifting his old bones from the tree stump. "You want to meet my Wild Man friend. I hope you have strong stomachs, for he smells awful, like all of his kind."

They followed a winding path through the fog-beshrouded hills, bypassing the temple, towards which Chien continued to make disparaging remarks. He seemed to hold all organized religions -- and politics -- in disdain.

When they reached Chien's hilltop abode, Li was astounded. It really was just a simple hovel -- a lean-to built into the side of a hill, with a cooking pot set over a charcoal pit, a few clay pots, some chickens running loose, and little else.

Li was puzzled. This man, the Chinese "Bob" -- probably wiser than Confucius and Lao Tse combined -- was neither hero, preacher, nor sage. He might as well have been any old farmer-peasant.

As Li was thinking this, Chien turned to him. "Young man, you have one gigantic fuck of a lot to learn about Slack."

He put a finger to one nostril and blew a long string of snot from the other. The snot snaked across the ground at Li's feet as if it had a life of its own... then fossilized like glue.

"But you will learn. You aren't too smart to learn, I can tell." He addressed the others. "You all wait here, please. Pardon me. I must water my pigs."

Chien waddled to a nearby pond. From the surrounding woods trotted several wild pigs, quite spontaneously. Chien then took up a bucket and waded out into the pond -- except that he didn't wade; he walked atop the water, strolling upon its surface as if it were a flat road. He stopped and lowered his bucket, which broke the surface and was filled. Then he walked back to shore. Murmuring lovingly to his scrawny pigs, he splashed the bucket over their hairy backs. They snorted happily; it was a hot day.

"Well," Chien continued, returning to his guests, "So much for my daily chores. Would any of you care for some pickled pork? I have a jar here that has been stored underground, fermenting, for over fifty years. Or eggs? I have thousand-year-old eggs, and they really are a thousand years old. My honored mother pickled them," he added proudly.

Suddenly, a figure swathed in black leaped from the tree-branch over Chien's head, a long dagger in his hand!

"Look out! A Ninja!" hollered Dobbs. Usuthu, Li, and Crazy Horse all leaped to their feet, running to Chien's aid. Even Janiti involuntarily struggled to rise from the cradle of skins in which Usuthu had placed her.

Simultaneously, however, Chien blew a puff of pipe-smoke over his shoulder at the attacker. Only when the villain began to float, screaming, into the air, did Chien turn around and look directly at him, smirking. The black-clad man was levitating against his will up past the treetops, protesting at the top of his lungs.

"Jealous bastards," Chien muttered. The screaming "Ninja" was now only a faint dot in the sky, ascending like a balloon.

Chien addressed "Bob." "Let me call your Yeti so that you may be on your way," he said. "Ever since this trouble started, unwitting dupes of the AntiBob have been trying to kill me. They think I set a bad example with my laziness!" He laughed heartily, then put his fingertips to his temples and concentrated. Soon, a bestial bellowing was heard through the trees.

An eight foot tall ape-man crashed out of the forest, clad head to foot only in coarse reddish fur. Accompanying the Bigfoot was a sulphuric stench almost unbearable to the time travellers. Only good manners prevented them from holding their noses. That it was male was beyond question, so long and lively was its waggling tool. All but "Bob" and Chien jumped to their feet, preparing to do battle against this macho ogre.

"What!" shouted Chien angrily. "The Yetis send a baby! This is man's work!"

"I am sorry," thought the Yeti telepathically so that all could 'hear'. "Though I am but a teenager, only fifty years old, I am the most eager of all my tribe to meet with our common ancestor and help him to stop our evil cousin, the AntiBob. Also, it is mating season, so no one of age would willingly leave our tribal grounds. Please let me join you; though I am small in size, I am savage and skillful in battles both physical and psychic."

"Ah, well, alright," snorted Chien. "Talk to Dobbs here. He's the one who's trying to save the god damn universe!" He wandered off to feed his chickens, chuckling to himself.

"Greetings, "Bob" Dobbs," said the Yeti in a voice so deep it could not have been called human, not even by a dolphin. It thrust a ten-gallon-sized hand to its face, covering its nose. "Pardon me," it said, "But your human smell is unbelievably offensive to a natural forest creature such as myself. I apologize for my rudeness, but it is necessary."

The creature kept his hand over his face as "Bob" spoke.

"Hey, uh, look, pal," said Dobbs nervously. "Any blood relative of the First "Bob" is good enough for me! I mean, jeez, this is family..." He indicated his cohorts. "...but let's face it, we're all more human than pureblood, and believe you me, we are honored all to hell by your presence, that you see fit in your elemental wisdom to join us in our Quest... and all like that."

"Yes, enough talk," rumbled the Chinese Sasquatch. "My blood boils with the urge to battle our common foe. Let us be off."

"Awreet!" exclaimed Dobbs. "But we gotta thank Mr. Chien..."

He looked around for Chien. Then he and the others espied him in the sky overhead, skipping from cloud to cloud, hitchhiking eastward. He waved at them as if in farewell, and disappeared into the bowels of a large, looming thunderhead.

"Shucks. Sure would've liked to have had that dude on our team," said Dobbs. "But I guess he's got better things to do. Oh well. Everybody ready? Let's go for it!"

The quintet that emerged from the Vortex formed a team which, under "Bob" Dobbs, adventurer supreme, could surely accomplish wonders.

However, when their submarine materialized literally floating in dinosaur excrement, they began to doubt not only their abilities to cope with this eventuality, but even their own sanities.

The stench that assailed them as they emerged from the hatch was like that of a thousand pet-turtle cages, uncleaned for decades.

"Ah, smell that natural air!" exclaimed Dobbs expansively, filling his lungs. "A perfect atmosphere for battling the forces of evil."

They were stranded in brackish water, putrid with unknown mosses and fungii, small, leaping, crab-backed things, and at least a fifty-percent content of dinosaur urine and feces.

Moreover, the sub's ricketty motor was clogged by moss, and they were without paddles.

The crew held their noses as the sub drifted to shore, and they clambered out onto the muddy ground.

The air was less humid than syrupy. Volcanoes belched smoke and lava in the distance. Bass snuffling sounds burbbled up from the slimy lake they'd left. Within the jungle could be heard vast bodies, sloughing through the undergrowth. Compared to the redwood-like trees and ferns, the team felt like toy action figures.

All were speechless. For they were wayfarers in another world!

Sparrow-sized insects buzzed them as they tore their way through thorny vines along the creekside, and they constantly slapped at enormous leeches and hideous mammalian vermin which repeatedly dropped upon them from the trees, or latched onto their shoes and wormed their way upwards towards skin and warm blood.

"Just think," said Dobbs, squishing a small ratlike critter in his palm until blood spurted. "These stinking rats are our ancestors! Partly, anyway."

Suddenly he pointed at the sky. Overhead wheeled a batlike creature with membranous wings at least twenty feet across.

"Good Lord! That," he shouted, stating the painfully obvious, "is a Pterodactyl! -- a creature thought by science to be extinct since the Cretaceous Era, eighty million years ago!"

Dobbs recited this as if he were reliving some lurid monster film of his boyhood. It meant nothing to any of his companions except Li, who had benefited from trips to the Beijing Museum.

Suddenly Dobbs halted the party. "Our chances of locating the palace of the First "Bob" will be better if we split up," he lectured, again sounding as if he were quoting some cheesy safari movie. "Li, you come with me. Usuthu, you, the Yeti, and Crazy Horse -- and what's-her-name -- head off that-a-way. We'll try to circle around and meet each other by that tall rock over to the west."

And so Li followed Dobbs into a jungle so thickly overgrown that they could travel but a few feet per minute. Two minutes later, they reached a clearing, where Dobbs suggested they stop and rest -- even though they'd traversed only a dozen yards, and could still hear their companions' grunting and grumbling off through the trees.

Abruptly, another sound rent the air -- a roar like a recording of twenty lions, played backwards at half-speed. Out of the jungle behind Dobbs, smashing trees as it went, bounded a toadlike monster at least fifty feet long from nose to tail. On its two mightily-thewed forelegs it hopped straight for Dobbs, who stood smoking, oblivious to its approach.

The sight of the full-grown dominant male Tyrannosaurus Rex paralyzed Li. With a supreme effort of will, he pointed past "Bob" to the approaching carnivore and shouted, "Run!"

"Run?" asked Dobbs, innocently. "Well, okay, if you say so!" With a pleasant look on his face, he turned and sprinted lackadaisically straight where Li pointed -- towards the Tyrannosaurus.

Dobbs dashed between its legs before he even realized it was there.

The Tyrannosaurus shook its Volkswagon-sized head in a gesture suggesting disbelief. It had never, in its 150 years of life, ever seen any creature run towards it.

Tilting its head curiously, the behemoth bent low to look between its own legs at Dobbs, who was only now gaining an inkling of what Li's warning had meant.

Indeed, the beast, in its bafflement, bowed so deeply that its now-upside-down head became stuck between its pillar-like legs. It struggled to return to an upright posture, but its head was lodged firmly betwixt its knees! Its futile struggles only caused it to slowly and majestically somersault over onto its back, head still trapped between spasming legs.

Dobbs, blind to any danger, gazed lasciviously at the cloaca of the beast, which now was spread open, exposed to the light of day by the uncomfortable contortions from which the dinosaur was striving to extricate itself.

"Hmm," considered Dobbs lustfully. But he shrugged. "Oh well... another time. C'mon, Li, let's see if we can head down the trail Old Dog-Breath here blazed for us."

Leaving the Tyrant Lizard King to outwit its own body, the two upright mammalian bipeds again struck out into the jungle.

They'd hacked and struggled for only a few minutes when Dobbs abruptly stopped and sniffed the air. Then, curiously, he held his nose closed and then repeated the same head movements of 'sniffing'.

"Shhhh...." Dobbs whispered. "Humans."

Li, by this point, had been so long without sleep that he was practically sleepwalking. He stared at Dobbs, puzzled.

"Yep... humans. Nearby. Wait here."

With that, Dobbs disappeared into the jungle. Li was left alone.

Gazing about dazedly, Li spied an odd-shaped rock in the mud at his feet and stooped to pick it up. A flint arrowhead! -- carved by some decidely human hand!

"But..." wondered Li to himself, "There are no human peoples in this age..."

He then looked up to find himself staring directly into the muzzle of a raygun. Helmeted, uniformed human beings surrounded him, brandishing futuristic ray-pistols menacingly.

They motioned with their guns for Li to follow them. Sighing resignedly, the Chinese soundman complied. Maybe they'd imprison him, and he could get some sleep.

But from behind them a mighty crashing resounded. Bursting through the towering ferns was a gigantic, three-horned Triceratops -- being ridden, rodeo-style, by "Bob" Dobbs!

Dobbs was not actually steering the tanklike dinosaur, but merely clinging to it and whooping as it kicked, bucking-bronco-style, into the air, trying to rid itself of its human burden. "Yeeeeeee-HAW!" hollered Dobbs gaily.

Li's captors were stunned. Bred to be craven cowards all, they vanished into the undergrowth as quickly as they'd appeared.

"Bob!" You save my life!" Li shouted to Dobbs, who had been thrown clear of the Triceratops and was watching it lumber back into the forest.

"Wow! That was fun!," panted Dobbs, wiping the sweat from his brow and puffing steadily on his pipe.

"Dobbs! Who are these bad peoples??" demanded Li.

"Aw, gosh, Li, those were probably some of the first true humans invented in test tubes by the Atlantean Yetis! -- quick-evolved up from rats. You're damn lucky they didn't kill you right off the bat! See," he explained, tamping his pipe, "These are rogue, purebred humans -- probably escaped from the Xist Atlantean laboratories... The First "Bob" invented the fuckers himself, intending to use them as beasts of burden. But they broke free... and, well, you know how bad most humans are."

Li nodded.

"Okay. Well, the ones we know are at least part Yeti, even if it's a tiny part. Think how cruel and nasty pure-blood, unadulterated, factory-fresh humans are! They're the most dangerous, inconsiderate, meanest things on this planet! Not that our modern humanist, evolutionist, Conspiracy scientists would ever admit it, but the dinosaurs are pussycats next to them, and they're probably serving the AntiBob in his rebellion against his own creator, and mine, the First "Bob." And they..."

He broke off as the Triceratops re-emerged from the woods. It now looked positively docile. It edged carefully towards "Bob."

"Well, I'll be a monkey's nephew! I think it likes me! I'll bet it's lonesome. It probably just needs love."

Li watched amazed as Dobbs strode up to the now-demure Triceratops, which purred in a deep bass not unlike a gigantic cat. As Dobbs scratched the stiff hide behind its neck-frill, it lifted and waved a hind leg as if to mimic the scratching.

"Aw, look at this," said Dobbs pityingly. "It's all infested with vermin."

From behind its frill, Dobbs plucked a large, black, lemur-like rat. He threw it, squealing, into the underbrush. "Poor thing," he muttered, removing one after another of what turned out to be a whole nest of rats. "And to think, our modern humans are genetically related to these nasty buggers! They're like giant ticks to these wretched dinosaurs." He snorted in disgust. "They never tell you shit like this in high school!"

Soon, Dobbs had so entranced the Triceratops that it allowed them to ride on its back as it foraged off into the jungle for food.

They came to an open hilltop clearing. Li was just beginning to enjoy the view when Dobbs shouted, "Li! Looky there!"

In the near distance stood a glimmering castle, bedecked with crystaline spires and domes. If not man-made, it was certainly alien-made.

"The First "Bob's" hometown -- the original Atlantis!" exulted Dobbs. "The first landing strip of the Xists, where the Yetis were first created!" He turned to Li. "Boy, I'd like to see the face of the sumbitch who digs up this fossil! That would show those stinking know-nothing evolutionists and creationists, once and for all!"

The Triceratops trotted towards the castle. "How about that," mused Dobbs happily. "It just happens to be going right where we want to go!"

But when they topped a rise and started descending into a ravine, an evil voice rang through the air!

"Stop, "Bob" Dobbs! I have your wife and companions in my clutches!"

The slimy voice had issued from a Masked Villain seated upon a makeshift throne just below them. Hundreds of the badly-uniformed purebred humans stood around him in strict military formation.

But that was not the worst of it. For, dangling in an iron cage suspended by a rope above a pit of fire, was Connie Dobbs.

She looked at "Bob" impatiently, tapping her toes and frowning.

And to the side of the flaming, seemingly bottomless pit, were Crazy Horse, Usuthu, and Janiti, all bound and held at spearpoint by the skull-helmeted minions of the masked leader. Even the gigantic Yeti was chained to a rock. Giggling rat-men held the Third Pipe and White Stone, toying with them like spoiled children.

The arch-evildoer wore a crimson cape and a demonic-looking mask which covered the top half of his face. The eyes which shone through were dark, somber and forbidding. His mouth, wrinkled and shrunken like an old man's, was thin and grim, pinched as if in perpetual disapproval.

"Allow me to introduce myself, "Bob" Dobbs," he hissed in a thin, reedy voice, heavily accented like a Nazi's. "I am the Young AntiBob! Ve knew you vere comink, and haf prepared this little party for your amusement!"

"Gee, that voice sounds familiar," wondered "Bob". But then he directed his attention to Connie.

"Hi, dear. How was your day?" he asked politely.

"You'd better do something but quick, you human dildo," snapped Connie peevishly. "The Phantom of the Opera here is about to lower me into this pit to feed his stinking devil god."

"'Devil god?'" shrieked the Young AntiBob. "You stupid bitch! This fiery pit leads to the throne of the Original AntiBob himself! And when He rapes and devours you, the wife of the Good Bob, His powers will be increased an thousandfold! All future history will be altered to fit our Great Plan!" His voiced reached a quavering, screaming pitch.

"Who you calling a bitch?" shouted Dobbs, enraged. "Why, you dirty..." He bravely lunged forward, but a blast from an Atlantean heat-ray knocked him to the ground, his shoes and zipper smoking. Li started to dash to Dobbs' side, but was held at bay by the heat-ray guns pointed at him.

"Oh, a buncha regular D. Woodman Atwells, eh?" groaned "Bob" sarcastically, as a dozen fiendish minions bound him with rope. Once assured Dobbs was helpess, they turned to Li and began to bind him.

"You fools!" cackled the Young AntiBob. "Now, you must lay helpless and witness my moment of greatest triumph! Lower the loud-mouthed slut into the pit!"

The fiend's henchmen began lowering Connie's cage by chain towards the hellish, fire-belching pit. A monstrous rumbling began deep within the ground, like the growling, hungry stomach of the earth's mantle itself.

"And after the woman, we will throw you, Dobbs, and your SubGenius friends in, as the main course!" His ugly laughter rattled across the clearing.

Now, replacing the fire and brimstone, a monstrous VOID opened within the pit. It was not a force, nor a light, nor even darkness; nor was it even a hole; it was the utter and absolute lack of anything whatsoever. It was a widening spacelessness of pure NOTHING, the antithesis of all existence.

It looked like the end for "Bob" and his men!

But then Li noticed that Dobbs had swiveled his Pipe in his mouth so that it was inverted. It was burning downwards -- and he pushed it against the hemp rope that held him immobile.

"M-must... s-smoke... rope..." he whispered. His eyes rolled back in his head with exertion.

With a surge of superhuman strength, "Bob" burst free from his bonds!

Li took advantage of the distraction to lash out with Bruce Lee-like speed at his captors. His flying fists and feet became a blur, a whirlwind of vengeance knocking prone all henchmen who strove to lay hands upon him.

"Stop them, you fools!" babbled the masked villain.

But the frenzied, mindless rat-men could no more stop Dobbs' mighty force of Good than could they harness a bolt of lightning! From the corner of his eye, Li noted that Dobbs was again using that strange but invincible fighting style, unlike any known even in the mysterious Orient.

For Dobbs stared, trancelike, straight ahead. His arms and legs shot out randomly. He might as well have been a blind spasmodic. And yet each thrust hit a fleshly target. In his blind idiocy of rage, Dobbs felled villains right and left. Blood pooled around shattered limbs and ribcages.

"Quickly," shrieked the Young AntiBob. "Lower the virgin into the pit that our master might be appeased!"

"VIRGIN?" shouted Dobbs. "Connie's no virgin!"

He leapt up onto the ridge where Usuthu, Crazy Horse and Janiti struggled against their bonds. Dobbs hefted the small body of Janiti by her ropes and held her aloft.

"You need a virgin? Here! Take the gimp! Fuck the universe; I want Connie back!"

And he slung the helpless Janiti towards the dilating Void-Pit!

Li reacted instinctively. "No!" he shouted, leaping into the air with a strength he'd never known he had. Flying over the pit, he snatched Janiti from thin-air and, carrying her, landed safely on the other side!

Simultaneously, Dobbs laid low the bastards who manned the chain and hauled Connie's cage back to safety. He sprung the door and swept Connie into his arms. His bleached-blonde, statuesque sweetheart looked strangely bored.

Li, meanwhile, had kung-fued his way through a horde of fanatical guards and was tearing free the bonds of Usuthu and Crazy Horse, ducking the shots of heat-ray that toasted the jungle behind him.

Soon the two great warriors were freed. They savagely waded straight into the ever-increasing hordes of attackers, breaking arms, legs and necks with their bare hands while Li freed the great Yeti.

When the Yeti sprang into the fray swinging his heavy chains, the battle became like some nightmare from Hell. The befurred giant slung human figures about like rag dolls; Crazy Horse disarmed a guard by pounding his head into his shoulders, snatched up his heat-ray, and mowed down villains who were now plowing towards him in waves of mindless, hate-filled bloodlust; Usuthu took up a log larger than many men and swung it madly, like Davey Crocket at the Alamo. Before him, a harvest of death was reaped like wheat before a madman's scythe.

A kangaroo-like dinosaur with fearful claws, a Deinonychus, pounced out of the jungle and joined the fray! Dobbs dispatched it handily with a well-placed blow to the skull from his sacred Pipe.

Flying saucers were suddenly screaming by overhead! Volcanoes erupted in the near distance! The earth was shaking, as if in fear of the deeds of these giants among men! Rivers of gore flowed from the broken bodies of the dead!

Yet, as if from nowhere, hundreds and yet more hundreds of the ratty, lab-cloned humans swarmed like ants out of the woods. Despite their courage, strength, and prowess, "Bob" and his companions were hopelessly outnumbered. The cowardly Young AntiBob stood safely at a distance and cackled in evil glee.

"No wonder," puffed Dobbs to Li, holding Connie in one arm and slaying the mewling, bovine Pink warriors with the other, "... no wonder none of the other "Bobs" wanted to go with us!"

The heroes were surely about to die when...

A great earthquake rent the ground next to the Void-Pit!

A rupturing fissure spread, and the earth heaved and shuddered, until the Void itself disappeared into this new "hole" -- this "crack" which had now reached almost beneath the feet of Dobbs and his aides, separating them from the army of evil henchmen by a bottomless gulf twenty feet across!

The battle had been halted by some force from beyond Nature itself!!

From the sky descended a blinding globe of pure light-energy and psionic power. Bug-eyed alien beings flitted in spirals around the descending ball of fire, leaving psychedelic trails in the air behind them.

From the ball of light emerged a Yeti at least twenty feet tall, a brilliant blue glowing from its long hair. Its magnificently handsome, yet grotesquely ape-like grinning face clutched in its teeth a Pipe exactly like Dobbs'.

The First "Bob" had arrived to save the day!

"Wow," gasped "Bob." "This is better than any fireworks -- even at Epcot Center!"

The terrified humans slinked and fled like the cowards they were, disappearing into the jungle. Even Crazy Horse, Usuthu and the Chinese Yeti retreated many paces, shielding their eyes from the glory that was The First "Bob."

But Dobbs, and the Young AntiBob now stood on opposite sides of that great rent in the earth, wholly attentive to the glowering Goliath, looking much like timid schoolchildren awaiting a scolding from their teacher.

The blue-haired Yeti behemoth stood straddling the chasm. With the jungle behind him, his hair began to change color like a chameoleon's until it was bright green.

"So," bellowed the Collosus in a voice which echoed off the distant volcanoes. "You puny mortals dare to venture into my domain!"

"But... but..." stammered Dobbs. He pointed an accusing finger at the Young AntiBob. "He was trying to summon the Real AntiBob! We had to protect the SubGenius half-Yetis of the future!"

"SILENCE!" crashed the voice of the First "Bob." "What dare you know of the ways of the gods, "Bob" Dobbs?"

"Well, I..."

"Shut up!" thundered the giant, and Dobbs shrank back.

"Yes, sir," he mumbled, meekly.

"You, "Bob" Dobbs, have disappointed me greatly. You dare speak of your flock's genetic purity. Yet you have copulated with many humans! You have dampened your Yeti seed, what little you have remaining, without a thought for future generations!"

Dobbs shuffled his feet in the dirt abashedly, his hands clasped behind his back in embarrassment, his head lowered.

"Gosh... I'm sorry, sir..."

"Sorry isn't good enough! So abominable has been your future behavior that I can scarcely see any difference between you, my true great-great-great-grandson, and this sniveling imposter, this mere-human who dares call himself the Young Antibob!"

The Young Antibob cringed and shivered. He seemed barely able to remain standing, so great was his fear. Urine dribbled from the legs of his scarlet uniform.

"You must both undergo...

"...The Test!" bellowed the hairy god-ape-man, magically gesturing and causing the Third Pipe to leap from the ground into his huge hand. "To prove yourselves, you must both smoke of the Third Pipe, into which I shall now place the Greatest 'Frop in the Universe!"

Both contestants, upon seeing the First "Bob" pack the Third Pipe with a glowing, pure-white vegetable admixture, responded most differently. Excrement joined urine at the Young AntiBob's feet, whereas the pure-minded Dobbs practically slobbered for the Pipe, yanking out a lighter and drooling in expectation.

"You first," bespake the towering Yeti SlackMaster, brandishing the Pipe towards the Young AntiBob.

"No! Noooo!" shrieked the craven fiend, running off into the woods.

"Lemme at it! Lemme at it!" begged Dobbs, slavering. "Don't waste it on that geek!"

A knowing grin crossed the First "Bob's" billboard-sized face. "Oh? You think you want it? Then here."

Dobbs clutched at the Pipe and feverishly "lit up." He inhaled a "toke" that seemed never to end. His chest ballooned like a bullfrog's neck in mating season. He held his breath until tears veritably sprayed from his eyes. Then he released it, a great cloud enveloping and hiding him. From within the cloud could be heard horrendously loud, wracking coughs.

"That's my boy," muttered the First "Bob," smiling shrewdly.

"Where's that fucker, the so-called Young AntiBob??" swore Dobbs as the smoke cleared, a crazed, vengeful look now lighting his fanatical eyes. "I passed the test! Now lemme at the son-of-a-bitch!"

Dobbs leaped across the crevice and strode into the woods, following the trail of fear-excretions that had run down the arch-fiend's pants-legs as he'd fled.

He soon closed in on the terrified, crimson-becaped villain in a nearby ditch, where the man cowered, panting, out of breath. Obviously, he was physically unfit. But he was surrounded by a gang of his savage minions, telepathically commanded to protect him,even if it meant suicide.

But, upon seeing Dobbs' form emerge from the trees like an Angel of Justice, the rat-men gave vent to squeaks of rage and terror, showing what spineless bloodsuckers they truly were. Though they outnumbered "Bob" by twenty to one, "Bob" yet advanced on them. He did not hurry; there was a confidence in his movements that was horrible to his foes. It was as if death itself stalked towards them. No flicker of mercy warmed the flakey glitter of "Bob's" blue eyes.

"Bob's" code was a hard one, a concept of justice to curl the hairs of those simpering sob-sisters who would mollycoddle criminals. For "Bob" doled out a brand of justice all his own. Those who went against "Bob" seldom wound up in prison; they either learned a lesson that made them law-abiding citizens for life -- or they lost their lives. "Bob" did nothing halfway.

One of the less craven thrust out a raygun...

... and the hand that held the revolver seemed to leap from the arm to which it belonged. Dobbs had delivered it a karate chop which severed it completely. The head was then propitiously launched by Dobbs' hand. It spun end over end into the jungle.

The rest fled, squealing like pigs at a slaughterhouse. Ignoring them, Dobbs bore down on his arch-foe, who cringed in whimpering terror.

"Bob's" blue eyes gave the fellow one appraising glance. Then the seemingly plastic-molded head shook regretfully.

"You had many chances to slay me," Dobbs stated grimly. "But you did not have the nerve to do it with your own hand. Like all criminals, however clever, you are a coward. You are like a rat."

The fiend struck at "Bob" repeatedly. He missed each time, for Dobbs' plasticine-like form seemed to vanish under his fists, so often did "Bob" accidentally slip and fall down.

Increased terror filled the man.

Dobbs' eyes seemed to convey thoughts as well as words could have. And what those eyes told the Young AntiBob made him cringe with fear. He squealed as though caught in a steel trap.

"You'll never kill me!" he snarled.

Strange lights glowed in "Bob's" blue eyes.

"No, I won't kill you. That is true. But you will receive your punishment nonetheless! Because I suspect your identity. You are none other than my evil twin brother, "Dick" Dobbs! What an ungrateful fellow! Our pure and unsullied Mom would not be proud. It's up to me, your older brother by five minutes, to give you a good thrashing."

The masked villain rolled his eyes in panic. He didn't know what fate "Bob" had planned for him. But it could be nothing pleasant.

Dobbs reached down and gripped the edges of the mask in his manly fingers. He suddenly yanked it off... and then he stood frozen in horror and astonishment.

"DAD! How... how could you!"

For it was, indeed, his pitiful, aging Mayan-emigrant father, long thought killed in a drugstore explosion in the 1950s. Yet here he cringed, alive!

But he was no longer the stoic, proud Spanish Mayan that Dobbs remembered. The entire top half of his face was hideously scarred by burns, disfigured to the point of inducing vomit. He did indeed somewhat resemble the Phantom of the Opera -- or the mad burn victim portrayed by Vincent Price in House of Wax.

"My own long-lost Dad!" exclaimed Dobbs. "Huh!" He slapped his forehead violently. "Who'd'a thought it?"

"Stop this charade and kill me," howled the monster-dad in misery. "You know I'm not your real father! Your accursed mother trysted with a Polish milkman -- who was also a Jew from outer space! You are the bastard son of some damnable Angel of JHVH-1, a supernatural being who cruelly cuckolded me, just so that you, earth's savior, could be born! -- indeed, whose affair with my darling Jane cost me my sanity!"

"What?" cried Dobbs, tears welling up in his eyes. "You mean... you mean I'm not half-Mayan, like you and grandad? You mean, what the Bobbies say is true... that I'm not your real son??? But..." Dobbs blubbered, tears falling pathetically to his lap. "But... I LOVE you, Dad!"

"Bob" Dobbs fell, sobbing loudly, into the arms of the disfigured villain he had been eager to kill only moments before.

"I'm... I'm scared, Dad! This doesn't make sense! Where have you been all this time?"

"Skulking the catacombs beneath San Antonio," whimpered the wizened, twisted wretch, crying and blubbering along with "Bob." "These many years I have been waiting, seeking a way to avenge myself on humanity for the humiliation of it all. And when the true AntiBob sent out his mental commands from the depths of time, and promised me powers beyond imagining, I was instantly brainwashed! He... he forced me to do it, son!"

The two clung to each other, wracked with sobs. Dobbs' companions stood dumbfounded -- except for Connie, who snapped impatiently, "I've been trying to tell him this for years -- but oh, no! He wouldn't listen!"

Suddenly Dobbs extricated himself from his legal father's embrace.

"Dad, I love you. But that doesn't matter. I must do my duty. True, it's unfair that you had to spend forty years in pain and horror and shame. But the important part is that you -- you, my own Dad, even if some wandering milkman from the stars actually sired me -- you have willingly done the bidding of the AntiBob, and so must be thrashed and pummeled accordingly."

He raised a clenched fist, ready to strike the whimpering, aged burn victim. But the man pointed over "Bob's" shoulder and cried out.

"It wasn't me, son. It was HIM -- the real AntiBob! Look! He's getting away!"

Dobbs turned. A gigantic flying saucer was lifting out of the jungle and into the sky!

"Li! Quickly!" urged Dobbs. "Toss me the Third Pipe and the White Stone!"

Li threw the items to "Bob." Swiftly, Dobbs placed the White Stone upon the bowl of the Third Pipe.

The onlookers expected some spectacular new magic to occur. But Dobbs simply pulled the Pipe back behind his head and, using it like a catapult, launched the White Stone directly at the retreating saucer.

The Stone hit the saucer and lodged in a tailpipe! The huge disc wobbled dizzily and then plunged earthwards with an ear-rending whine, crashing to the ground several hundred yards away.

"Now... for the final battle!" declared Dobbs, striding relentlessly towards the saucer he's brought down with what might as well have been, for all its holy power and all the blood that had been shed to acquire its pieces, nothing more than a simple slingshot.

"Wait, Dobbs!" bellowed the towering First "Bob," who had watched with undisguised amusement. "You cannot hope to vanquish your exact, diametric opposite; he has more demonic allies among the Old Ones than do you! It is therefore time that I bestow upon you my Secret Weapon of All the True "Bobs" -- THE THIRD FIST!"

A blinding flash enveloped Dobbs. When it faded, he possessed, growing from the wrist of his right arm, a third hand, clenched into a mighty fist composed of an ample gallon or two of scarred knuckles! Tatooed across it in crude lettering were the words, "TAYSTE THE KISS OF ETIRNAL SLACK."

"This Third Fist is the combined Fist of All Other "Bobs," thundered the First "Bob." "With this, none may defeat you. Now," the godlike apeman chuckled, "Have at him, boy!"

Dobbs dashed into the woods towards the smoking wreckage of the saucer. His companions started to follow him, but the gigantic Yeti "Bob" from the Dawn of Time held them back.

"No, my pitiful human-tainted descendants," he ordered. "It is not for mortal eyes to gaze upon the AntiBob. This is "Bob's" fight. He must conquor his nemesis alone, or the great Temper of JHVH-1 shall be lost."

And so they waited in dreadful anticipation. Soon, the sounds of an incredible battle arose from the woods. Great smoking pieces of the flying saucer began raining down upon the woods all around them, so violent was this Battle of the Ages. Dinosaurs fled past them in terror, seeking to escape the scene of carnage. A volcano exploded in the distance. The moon passed in front of the sun and there was an eclipse.

Still the sounds of battle raged on.

Eventually, even Li became bored and sat down. Connie busied herself polishing her nails. Usuthu and Crazy Horse twiddled their thumbs. Janiti, finally freed from her bonds -- by Li, as she had otherwise been ignored the whole time -- sat close to Li and nursed his wounds with her witch's magic. For had he not saved her from "Bob's" thoughtless impetuousness?

Almost two hours later, "Bob" Dobbs emerged from the woods... as they'd all known he would.

He dusted off his hands against each other with the smuggest of satisfaction. The Third Fist protruding awkwardly from his right arm evidenced bruised and scraped knuckles.

"That'll show him," muttered the Slackmaster proudly.

"But..." stammered Li Li-jing. "The AntiBob! Who was he?"

"Ah, you wouldn't believe me if I told you," mumbled Dobbs, sweeping Connie into his arms and kissing her grossly, and at length. They humped and hunched together in shameless desire. The Third Fist shrank as their passion grew.

Li looked away, embarrassed. Janiti clung to his leg, sighing romantically. Usuthu, Crazy Horse and the Yeti snickered at Li's discomfort.

Suddenly the First "Bob" interrupted the maudlin display.

"Dobbs," he intoned deafeningly, "You have done your job, and are deserving of a Smoke." He proffered a new bowlful of The Greatest 'Frop in the Universe, this time from his own Pipe of the Gods.

"Bob" smoked contentedly, occasionally hacking and spitting, feeling up Connie with his spare hand. Through the clouds of smoke, The First "Bob" addressed Dobbs' loyal friends.

"Ye who, despite the minute quantity of true Yeti blood in your veins, have proved so nobly that courage and loyalty can overcome the baser, coarse human nature... ye shall now reap the rewards ye have sewn."

He gestured arcanely with his fingers; sparkles of light danced from them dramatically.

Usuthu felt no change. But he somehow knew that the arthritis that would later cripple his giant frame was now banished forever. Crazy Horse, who had borne the aches of flat feet his entire life without complaint, suddenly had perfect arches. The Chinese Yeti grew another three feet in height, so that he now towered at eleven seet, six inches. "A dwarf no longer!" he exclaimed, shedding tears of joy. Li felt two molars he'd lost to decay grow back instantly.

These had been minor healings, for the three men and the Yeti were in relatively good health already. It was Janiti who was changed the most.

Her legs and arms straightened and grew. Her white hair became a lustrous black. Her sagging, withered breasts became perfect mounds worthy of 1940s Hollywood. Her wrinkled face smoothed over and in its place there gaped the astonished visage of a young girl of twenty. She stood up from the ground, a perfect vision of womanhood.

And she fell into Li's arms, embracing him with savage sexuality.

Connie hugged "Bob," finally no longer bitching and griping.

"Isn't that sweet," she breathed in his ear, nipping it with her teeth. "Bob," uncharacteristicly, blushed a bright red.

The First "Bob" held aloft his mighty hand for silence.

"The problem with you humans," he lectured, "Is that in dealing with the gods, you don't give yourselves enough credit. Without you, where would we primordial gods and goddesses be? We're forces of nature, and you are forces of nature. But -- which is more destructive, all the poltergeists and tribal deities on earth, or such entities as the Kerr McGee company? Eh? Which has killed off more mountain gorillas and blue whales? Which can poison the entire atmosphere and end all life by pushing a series of buttons?"

Dobbs and his companions trembled before the gargantuan Perfect Yeti.

"Always remember you are of the race that, in many ways, has the upper hand. We gods do not possess nuclear weapons; not even the saucer beings from space possess them. You are the only ones who can destroy ALL of us. Doesn't that make you proud, to be part human? Part of the species that's able to unleash more destructive force than all combined demons, gods, ghosts, UFOs, sharks, dinosaurs and natural disease germs? So many of your people depend upon gods and aliens to save you from yourselves. But why would those worthy supernatural entities save you? Just so you can go on thinking up more subtle ways to ruin our "lives," and those of all creatures on your planet?? EH? No, my mortal friends, you have a much bigger say in your destiny than ever we gods did.

"Have you ever wondered what a nuclear blast would do to your souls, humans -- above and beyond the disintigration of your physical bodies? If ever there were a magical weapon capable of erasing parts of more than one reality, it is that. So consider that mayhaps we gods also fret over your amazing weapons and warlike nature."

The First "Bob" grinned morbidly, and then vanished completely and silently.

All stood silent for a short while. Then "Bob" spoke, holding his pipe thoughtfully as he tilted back his head and mused nobly to the sunset.

"Yes, he's right, it's something to muse upon indeed. The insidious Conspiracy of the Normals doesn't recognize even itself as such, yet it has the power to destroy -- or even sell -- this whole planet. It is up to us, each in our own ways, as lone individuals, to alert the pitiful Pinks to the dangers they bring down upon us all. There are some things that merely human Man was not meant to know; certainly not those who can understand only False Slack, which can be obtained only with money -- those millions who'd prefer to cling to their fantasy that everything, even the ozone layer and the rain forests, will be okay if we just act nice...

"For, think what the otherwordly forces could do, if ever they decided to seek revenge. They can be as mechanically inclined as ourselves, if they choose. Our modern poltergeists can activate appliances, toss vases and jiggle light switches; what if a distressed nuclear weapons engineer were to commit suicide in a missile silo, which would thenceforth be haunted by his imbittered 'lower soul,' too confused to go to heaven -- clinging here, half in our reality, trying to make contact but unable to -- finally driven mad while gaining experience in discharging electrical circuitry by sheer poltergeist hate-force... or... or, it could insinuate itself into the radar viewscreens at NORAD and deliberately appear as blips on radar, like incoming Russian missiles... HOO boy."

"Bob" shook his head philosophically.

"We'll find out come Omicron Epsilon, The Vision Beholding Itself in SubGenius prophecy -- the Time Intersection, when this universe intersects with the backwards timestream universe, and the images of the Akashic Records become flesh... bringing our weirdest dreams to rampaging life. What terrible dreams will emerge from the repressed desires of the Normals, who forgot Slack?"

He paused and gazed thoughtfully at a distant volcano.

"Fortunately," he finished smugly, "Normals are my competition only until they become my customers." And with that, he winked.

To themselves, his companions all wondered at this man "Bob." Did he possess, after all, the superior vision and intuition of a prophet... or was he just a lucky salesman, blabbering inane cliches??

But that question was soon forgotten, as Dobbs and Connie -- hand in hand, whispering and giggling like newlyweds -- herded them into the submarine and summoned the Vortex. Connie served them lunches as they shot ahead through time to take each hero home.

Li fell asleep in the arms of his new girlfriend, the now-voluptuous supervixen, Janiti.

He awoke briefly to disembark from the submarine, which Dobbs was returning to Bahaab Dahaabs in Africa, and to reboard the Indian canoe for the final "leg" of their journey.

Janiti, of course, prefered to return with Li to the modern age rather than face death from her own people, the intolerant Druids.

Crazy Horse was dropped off in his time and homeland, bidding them keep the canoe.

Now Li and Janiti were to be returned to twentieth century America.

They materialized out of the Vortex, hovering in the magical canoe high in the sky over the night-time campfires of Dokstok. The lake glimmered peacefully below. The sky was no longer tormented by storm clouds, but shone clear and crystaline over a cool breeze.

It was not an especially tearful goodbye, for neither Li nor Janiti could forget Dobbs' having thrown Janiti towards the VoidPit of the AntiBob as a replacement for Connie. Nevertheless, Li and Dobbs shook hands like the real men they were. Li and Janiti then jumped overboard and, buoyed by Dobbs' antigravitational psychokinesis, floated down the towards the SubGenius camp. Above them, they watched Connie blow them a finl kiss and Dobbs wave his Pipe goodbye. Then Connie and "Bob" drifted out of sight into the moonrise, snuggling together in the enchanted canoe.

Stang and his friends, snoring in sleeping bags, never noticed Li and the half-naked, virginal beauty as descending in slow motion out of nowhere.

Nor did the SubGenii express any particular surprise when they awoke the next morning and found, in Li Li-jing's company, that hypnotically lovely woman who seemed to speak every language... for they were too absorbed in swapping stories and 'Fropmixtures amongst themselves.

Stang eventually noticed that Li had acquired not only a girlfriend, but a new and undeniable air of self-confidence. He took time out to throw his arm over Li's shoulder and say, "Well, Li... I guess Dokstok hasn't turned out so bad for you after all. Sort of a fun adventure, huh?"

"Yes," Li Li-jing smiled. "Yes, it was some sort of a fun adventure, indeed."