Chapter 3

“Flashing lights!”

“Flashing lights? What kind of answer is that?”

“Have you heard of the sensitivity of those with Epilepsy to lights being flashed at certain critical frequencies?”

“Yeah, I think so. How do we make use of this info?”

“If we were to go back to the time just before the enemy aliens first entered Earth’s atmosphere and set up a mechanism to flash lights at them with the frequency that disorients them, perhaps we can cause them to choose another planet to invade.”

“Isn’t that just a little bit too cute for a way to avoid world domination by aliens?”

“Do you have a better solution?”

So, we got our friends to set it up for us. We could manage the flashing light schtick on our own, but needed their help to pinpoint the exact time it would be needed and to transport us to that time. We had not yet mastered precise time travel--well, ok, time travel in any form--and needed their help to get in place.

Like many great solutions to insurmountable problems, once the method was worked out, the consummation was anticlimactic. The operation went off so smoothly that we had trouble accepting that it worked so completely and easily.

Without the stunning effect of the flashing lights, human beings had gone from masters of the Earth to food animals in short order. With the simple application of the proper intensity and frequency of flashing, the danger was completely eliminated.

Now what? Our hosts were no longer in danger--or were they? I realized that I had not heard from them lately. When I looked around for the mother and daughters they had sent back with us, they were nowhere to be found. Had we killed them off in some manner or was it simply that by getting rid of the bad aliens, the war between our hosts and the bad aliens had never spilled over onto Earth?

Where did that leave us? On the one hand, it was a huge relief to know that we had escaped a terrible fate, along with another apparently benign race, but we had also learned that Newtonian physics was not the complete answer. Trying to stuff exposure to an advanced technology back into the jar it came from is tougher than repatriating toothpaste.

Now, we were thoroughly convinced that time and space could be very easily warped and molded, if we simply had the appropriate tools. In science, it is a well known truism that the knowledge that a solution to a problem exists is half the solution. Early investigations have to first determine whether a solution exists, or is fundamentally ruled out by natural laws.

What we had accepted as natural laws for many years had been proven to be insufficient to accurately describe the universe or to manipulate it in the ways we had seen it done on a daily basis.

I gathered my crew. “I suppose you are all wondering why I have called you here”.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on with it.”

My subjects adored me, it was clear,

“It has come to my attention that we don’t know what the fuck we are doing.”

“Poor baby. Has someone forgotten to drain Master’s swamp, today”

“Silence, my lambs. I need your wits, not your wit.” I took a deep breath. “I suppose most of you have realized that there are a great many holes in our knowledge of how things really work in the universe.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what?”

“Where is all this lack of respect coming from? Any of you who feel that your talents would be more profitably spent in another venue should hit the fucking bricks, chop-chop.”

“Touchy, touchy, touchy, Oh, Master of the Universe, with the big dick. Just tell us what you want and back away. We work better without nano-management.”

“All right, Miss Smartypants. I thought you might benefit from the several hundred years of equivalent experience packed within the crevices of your master’s cavernous brain pan. Since you are so damned smart, let’s see you develop a time machine like the one that was used to put us back to exactly the right time and place, to be able to save Earth.”

“Why didn’t you say, so, Doc. Where do you want to go, and when?”

“I want to leave right now. The ‘when’ I want to go to is the day that I asked Traci Lords to go with me to the prom and she shot me down. I found out later that she had a schedule conflict with a porn shoot. She preferred to get ravished on camera by a stable of heavy hung studs, rather than give me a chance to try to talk her out of her virginity. Hah! Little did I know.”

“What makes you think that you could do anything to change her mind and her career?”

“I don’t want to change her mind. I just want to let her know what she will be missing.”

“And you hope to compete with all the studs she will be boinking?”

“Have any of you been tempted to leave for greener pastures?’

They looked at each other, questioningly, and began slowly shaking their heads from side to side. Within a minute or so, it dawned on them that not a single one of them wanted to give up her place in our unit.

“What have you done to us, Master?”

“Aha! Now you see. Successful relationships are not built on fantastic sexual experiences, alone. Each one of you knows that when I am making love with you, that my total focus is on you and my desire to make you happy. Even in a threesome or foursome, each of you knows that you are the most important person in the universe to me. Isn’t that true?”

Again, they looked around at each other, and all began unconsciously nodding in agreement.

“So, now that this question has been resolved, where is my ride? Was all that just a way to test my leadership?”

“No, no, Master. It was just that we had never stopped to think about it. Now that we have, it is plain that we are bound to you, forever.”

“Can you accept one more member?”

They agreed that they could and, presently, I found myself sitting in a gangly contraption with all sorts of knobs and displays.

“What is this?”

“This is your Time Truck, Master. Just enter the date and time you wish to move to and the location, as accurately as you can specify, then push that big green button in the middle of the panel.”

“Where the hell did you get this? You couldn’t have just built it.”

“Sorry, Wilbur told us you would be needing it, so we kind of stole the plans for it before we came back from the future.”

“Oh, yeah? Have you checked it out or will yours truly be the first Guinea pig?”

“We checked it out, a bunch. We’ve been riding all over hell and gone, trying to make it hiccup if it is going to. We are very aware of how much our future happiness depends on your survival and don’t want to take any chances on your safety.”

“Yeah? So where have you been?”

There was a lot of mumbling and lowered gazes. Nobody seemed to want to look at me.

“Come on, come on. Out with it. Where have you been and what have you done?”

“We’ve been scouting the future, Master. Please don’t be mad that we did it without telling you.”

“When did I give you the idea that you weren’t allowed to exercise independent thought?”

“Well, we assumed that your near total fixation on us as sex objects ruled out any chance that you respected our intellectual talents and abilities.”

“Ladies, ladies, ladies. I am so disappointed in you. What made you think that I could not see you in both ways?”

Again, they hung their heads and I had to point to one to get anyone to speak. “We have always been told that men can’t multitask, that if you always looked at our tits when talking to us it meant that you didn’t respect our minds.”

“Ok, so now we know the problem. That is just one more case of total bullshit that has been going around way too long. In the first place, men have no problem with multi-tasking, we just have a different approach to things. Multi-tasking in women may take the form of following a dozen simultaneous conversational threads and keeping them separate. Men can’t do that, but that is far from the only kind of multitasking that exists. We have no problem at all with keeping up our end of a conversation with you while we are reading the newspaper, following the plot on a TV show, planning our next hunting trip, trying to come up with a solution to the latest technical problem at work and working out ever more creative ways to prevent your finding out where we are planning to take you for our anniversary trip.”

They were stunned.

“Really? No shit? Are you just making that up?”, came back to me.

“No, I’m not making it up. We don’t read minds like you do, but our brains have developed other techniques that maybe you don’t even know are possible. Most men have no idea how well women can read them. Did you simply assume that the fact that we can’t do something you can do and don’t know it meant that you were intellectually superior in all ways?”

“Well, yeah”, seemed to be the consensus.

“Hey! We’re not just the only people in the house who can deal with a toilet seat lid. For your information, men are not inferior women. We have our own uses, far beyond supplying fertilization for your eggs. Many of you have been lulled into thinking that our willingness to let you think you were our equals meant that we were too weak to compete. If life were merely a contest between those with superior skills that are prized by women, then of course you would excel.

However, life does not work that way. There are a great many skills that are essential to survival and success of which you may be totally unaware. I am convinced that you have a great many skills I don’t know about, and there must be a corollary.