Stick Around for the Punchline

I couldn't bear to see my friend Tortilla Flats like this. Emotional depth from him just wasn't right. It was as strange as watching him thinking.

Tortilla had lost his heart to Petal Smellis, a new girl. The pair of them pulsated like, well, pulsars in each other's presence. She however was as painfully shy as he was linguistically challenged, and as I exclaimed to Four-Eyes after weeks of this, even the most implausible plan to bring the two together had to be better than putting up with another minute of this new lovelorn Tortilla and his woe.

"You think you've got troubles," Four-Eyes had replied. "If that Smellis doesn't quit her moping I'm likely to strangle her myself."

So Four-Eyes and I became matchmakers, because I had an idea.

Our distant ancestors on Planet Earth had been great ones for sending out space-probes. It seems they'd had some notion that in the absence of their having got around to inventing any reliable form of intergalactic communication yet, the peoples of far-off galaxies would appreciate just as much a floating tin capsule with nudie drawings on the outside and a load of flea-market junk within. You've probably heard about the best-documented examples of what this policy led to - every book on gangsters, the Second World War or swanky hotels falling into the hands of some incipient alien species, who decided to base the course of their entire civilization upon it. To this day, mine and Four-Eyes's generation still met extraterrestrials who believed some obscure snapshot of Twentieth-Century experience defined in totality the human race.

Our friend Bicephale came from the planet whose grunting primitives had one day stumbled on a fallen star full of old eight-bit computer games.

We found him in the cantina, filling up about a quarter of it by himself. Twenty feet tall, green of flesh and loincloth-clad, his two heads sat upon stretchy necks which he could extend to twice the length of his body. Four-Eyes and I each bought him a bucket of the steaming mineral brew he liked, and tottered over to his table carrying these.

"Well, my little friends!" boomed from one of Bicephale's monstrous mouths, and "To what do I owe this kindness?" from the other.

"You might just be able to help us out," began Four-Eyes.

"The next time you feel like doing something which, you know, we'd like," I added, and both of us gave Bicephale a big cheesy grin.

Because you couldn't tell him. Or any of his people.

After all, this was the foundation of their very culture we were talking about. And Bicephale's people were by nature generous and giving.

So every now and then, in order to please us, they'd kidnap one of our girls. Not in any way to mistreat her, beyond occasionally tying her up, and that was only for the look of the thing. Eons of evolutionary progress and not one of Bicephale's kind had ever figured out those old computer games implied more than they showed. So to the girls it was just a bit of a nuisance, and they only really complained about it if it happened when they had homework to do.

We boys meanwhile were all on a rota, and if it was your turn when a girl was kidnapped you were granted leave from class to go and rescue her.

"This one, if that's at all possible," Four-Eyes now explained to Bicephale, showing him a holo-photo of Petal Smellis.

I for my part dug out my diary, and told him the next date Tortilla was monitor.

Four-Eyes and I wished we'd seen it. Bicephale had a self-confessed weakness for the classics, and he'd chosen an Earth-industrial area with conveyor-belts and packing-cases scattered all around. A sporty boy like Tortilla will have relished such a workout. They'd obviously both had a whale of a time anyhow, Bicephale shooting his twin heads one after the other at the tiny hopping figure in blue, and Tortilla in turn using his telekinesis to fling crates at the exposed necks each time. Bicephale was particularly proud of his flicker, and no doubt mustered a rapid succession of psychedelic shades on each splintering impact.

When the time was right, he'd uttered his best theatrical groan and collapsed. Then Petal Smellis was duly lowered from the factory ceiling on a rope.

That was what it took to get her and Tortilla to finally talk.

They exited the stage hand-in-hand, to the accompaniment of soppy end-sequence music and with a big pink heart hovering above them.

"So how was I?" begged Bicephale of me and Four-Eyes afterwards. "I mean, my motivation, my believability?" his other head went on. "And did your two friends feel I had presence?" finished the first, without waiting for the second to finish.

"Believe me, Tortilla and Petal couldn't be happier," said Four-Eyes truthfully. "With your performance," she then added.

"Oh, I am glad," breathed Bicephale. "Because," he went on, "I'm already thinking about where I go from here. I feel it's a role I can build on. So, in the event of your having another opportunity for me, I've a few ideas to try out - if, of course, that would be OK by you?"

"Hey," I assured him at once. "You're the boss."