Outside the hotel once more he saw a
small blue rock. “Oh, a rock!” exclaimed
CD. “Hello” said the rock, “my name is
Paul. I think I’ve fallen out of another
game or something. Still, here I am,
ready to impart knowledge!”
“Okay” said CD, “what knowledge do you
have to impart, exactly?”
The stone considered this. It was quite hard to tell as it looked
exactly the same as it did any other time, but given the pause before
answering, that must have been it. After
a while it said “I don’t know. I’ll tell
you when I find out. It’s good to have a
companion again. I had one before, but
she... I don’t know where she’s gone.”
Paul repeated this basic message, slightly differently worded, several
times, until CD completely lost any sympathy he’d had the first time around.
Muttering darkly to himself, the Captain
moved on. There was an ice rink of some
kind, or at least a patch of ice, outside the hotel. There was some kind of box trapped inside a
large ice cube in the middle of it.
Feeling a cretinous urge to pick up everything that wasn’t nailed down,
he slid across the ice trying to get it.
Needless to say with his exquisite poise and elegance, it took him a few
thousand times to actually manage this, after which he needed a good
sleep.
When he woke up he attempted to break the
box out of the ice, but failed to do anything other than get very cold
hands. In a rare display of lucidity he
thought of zapping the ice cube with the phaser he had picked up earlier, and
this worked. Inside the box was a small
flying saucer, but sadly batteries were not included.
Further along CD came across a wall. It had some greens on a plate, and next to
that some pudding in a bowl. I’m not
entirely sure how CD managed to put these in his pockets, or why anyone would
be willing to eat them afterwards, but he did.
“Oi!” said a small voice in his pocket.
It was Paul, the talking rock.
“I’ve just found out the first thing that
I need to tell you” he said. CD was all
ears, which made finding well-fitting clothing quite a challenge.
“What is it?” asked El Capitan, all ears
as previously mentioned, and waiting to have wisdom imparted to him such as is
only imparted by the infinitely wise and knowledgeable.
“First off, don’t stick me in that
pocket. It was horrible.”
CD noticed a brick sticking out of the
wall, and he asked Paul about this, certain that the little rock’s wisdom was
great and awe-inspiring.
“That” said Paul solemnly “is just
another brick in the wall.”
CD groaned. If this was the way it was going to be, he
was going to find a really deep hole and drop Paul in it. Although from his experience of this place so
far, that would only result in him bouncing up again for some unfathomable
reason. Paul, however, decided that now
was time to prove his worth.
“Over there” he said, gesticulating to
the west-south-west (don’t ask me how a rock gesticulated, I just write this
nonsense), “is a tragic tale. It was a
Terrahawk ship that ended up crashing due to a radio malfunction.”
“I don’t understand” said the bewildered
captain, “how did a radio malfunction crash the ship?”
Paul coughed, thereby proving once and
for all that rocks can cough. “Well you
see, unfortunately the radio jumped to an unauthorised frequency and picked up
a radio station on this moon. At the
time, they were playing a song by Sandie Shaw, and it put them all in a bit of
a tizz.
“Sandie Shaw? Oh...
oh no... you don't mean...”
“I'm afraid so” said Paul. “It was indeed that classic, but ill-fated
for our Terrahawk friends, 'Puppet on a String'”.
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