"A Blast From the Past"
                                 Part Three

                    AD 1989, that is 2364 Galactic Year

[Nomad of Norad (continued)]

    "Guys," said Nomad of Norad, "it looks like we may NOT have all
of them. At least one alien may have been wearing a personal force field.
Joshua could not have teleported him out like he did the others." He glanced
back up at the screen a moment, then added "Are our prisoners secure?"
    "Yes," said Captain R/C.
    "Good," said Nomad, "all of you prepare to leave the ship. Armor on!" He
cut off the intercom.
    "Taking us down," said Pla'anuk. The ship touched the ground and Pla'anuk
opened the main ramp of the ship.

    Nomad ran down the ramp, pushing his way frantically through the rest of
the Intrepid Group, and then ran towards a boulder situated close to the force
dome. When he got there, he pressed a place on the boulder and a section of it
folded up and away. There was a small panel there, he pressed an intercom
spot. "Joshua," he asked, "why is the force dome still up?" There was only
silence. "Joshua! Respond please!" He stared at the panel a moment. "JOSHUA!
SPEAK TO ME!"
    The rest of the Intrepid Group reached the boulder and... uh... grouped
around Nomad. They looked into the opening. The panel was a simple plastic
rectangle, much like the controls seen in Star Trek the Next Generation.
    "Joshua," said Nomad, "if you can hear me, shut down the force dome."
    The force dome remained up.
    "Maybe he's just playing a joke on you," suggested Cappy. "June Fools
Day?"
    Nomad gave him a glare that would whither plants.
    "Is there a way to shut down the force dome from this side?" asked
Pla'anuk.
    "Yes," said Nomad. He turned off the intercom and then punched another dot
on the panel. A keypad appeared on the screen and Nomad punched a code into
it. The keypad was replaced by a hand-shape. Nomad placed his hand on it and a
palm-print appeared on the screen.
    "Speak your identity please," came a computerised voice, it wasn't
Joshua's.
    "David Carrol Hall," said Nomad, "son of Jene Hall, no middle name." As he
spoke, a voice pattern waveform flickered beside the palm print on the screen.
"I was born on Moine's World in 2339 Galactic, 1965 Gregorian."
    "Identity verified and correct," said the voice. The force dome
disappeared.
    Nomad pressed a place on the side of the boulder and it closed back up.
"Come on!" said Nomad, starting to run towards the main entrance to his house.
He then stopped a moment. "We had better go into the enemy ship and deal with
the jamming devices," he said. "Or some of us should."

    They all crammed inside the ship, soon they found the flight deck. They
looked about at all the various controls.
    "This is probably it," said Beelzy. He was standing before a panel that
had a round pulsating pattern displayed on it. Likely a representation of the
jamming waves. "This may be the off switch." He punched a button. The pattern
widened. "No." He punched another and the pattern changed color. "Still nope."
He punched a third button and the pattern vanished. "Aha!"
    Nomad pulled out his scanner and checked it. "Yep, that was it. My scanner
now works." He gazed at it a moment. "I find one intruder. He is in my
library!" He glanced around at the others. "Come on," he said, leaving the
flight deck.
    As they emerged from the ship, Nomad said "One of us should stay here to
guard the ship. Come to think of it, someone should guard the other ship,
too." He turned towards the alien boy. "Pla'anuk, you should guard your ship."
    "Ok," said the kid.
    "Now," said Nomad, "who's going to guard the captured ship?"
    "I will," said Pladgah.
    "Ok," said Nomad. The rest of them headed into Nomad's house. Nomad and
Cappy headed towards the computer room and the rest of the group split up to
approach the library from different directions.

    The computer-room door slid open before Nomad and Cappy and they entered.
It was a small square room, a banks of winking lights dominated two walls, and
a large screen with a console below it covered a third. There was a small hole
blasted in one panel of blinking lights, several rows of lights remained dark.
Nomad stopped and stared. Blinking back tears he raised his scanner and
assessed the damage.
    "How bad is it?" asked Cappy.
    "Well..." said Nomad. He lowered the scanner and went to the console.
"It's not very extensive..." He activated the console and started a
diagnostics routine.
    "Why did they do this?" asked Nomad, tears starting again.
    "Presumably so he couldn't do anything more to stop them," said Cappy.

    Meanwhile, in the library, the Intrepid Group surrounded the single alien.
He dropped the books he had been perusing and raised a weapon. Before he could
fire it, Verilox knocked him to the ground with a glob of energy, the weapon
went flying and Dr Depraved grabbed it. Beelzy found the forcefield projector
on the alien's belt and relieved him of it.
    "We've got him!" said Daggoth to a mic built into the powered suit.
    "Good," said Cappy over his commlink, "we are checking on Joshua now."
    They slapped the manacles on the alien and forced him to his feet. Daggoth
looked over the books the alien had been gathering. "Looks like he was
researching something here," said Daggoth. "He had taken some books on the
Ancients."
    Hearing mention of the Ancients, Verilox came quickly to Daggoth's side
and looked at the books.
    "The what?" asked Captain R/C.
    "The Ancients," said Verilox into Daggoth's mic. "They developed the
Staffs that we mages use. They are a legendary lost race, hardly anything is
known about them. We don't even know where they came from or what they looked
like. All we know is that they left lots of bits of superscience technology
sprinkled about the Galaxy."

    Back in the computer room, the diagnostics routine finished its run. On
the screen were listed several damaged systems.
    "Well," said Nomad, "the damage isn't TOO bad. Joshua is out of it for
now, I am going to have to call someone down from the Eagle's Nest to do the
repairs, though."
    "Eagle's Nest?" said Captain R/C. "What's..."
    "Starbase 7," said Nomad. "They call the place the Eagle's Nest."

    The Intrepid Group returned to the Hex with their prisoners, leaving the
alien ship behind. They turned them over to The Doc, whose interrogation
techniques are truely inhuman! But, that was only fitting.
    Nomad stayed behind, raising the force dome again after the others left.
Soon a shuttle from the starbase brought the repairman and Nomad let him in.
They began repairs on Joshua.

[Doctor Depraved]

(What was that date thing?  Was that some kinda bizarre password?)

[Nomad of Norad]

(No, my identity data. I had started to type my social security number, but
then realised that since we are writing about goings on in a parallel
universe rather different from ours there wouldn't be such a thing for my
"other self" over there.  For a long time I have been working on some
background stuff about these stories, ancient history, and had come up with
the "years Galactic" thingy. This was a perfect excuse to... uh... slip it in.
Sometime later, when appropriate, I'll incorporate some of the origins stuff
into the stories...)

    Some hours later at the Hex, all the various Dukes and above held a
meeting in the Strategist's Corner.
    The Doc (not to be confused with Doctor Depraved or The Fourth Doctor)
stepped up to the podium. "Ok," he said, "the Kryptonusians are after
something called a transmutor. It's some bit of technology the Voontokki,
that is, the Ancients, left behind. It is supposed to be hidden in some
subterranean chamber near here."
    "What does this... transmutor do?" asked Spidey.
    "Well," said The Doc, "it converts one kind of matter into other kinds of
matter. It can change, say, rock into wood."
    "How does it do this?" asked Dr Depraved.
    "Well," said The Doc, "uh... it changes matter into energy and back into
matter again."
    "But teleport systems do this all the time," said Shamrock.
    "Yes, teleports do... but..."
    "Maybe I can explain better," said Nomad, "I've studied some of the known
facts about the Ancients. The teleport systems we use convert matter into
energy, yes, but they change objects INTACT into an energy form and back
again, whereas the transmutor actually dismantles the atomic structure of
objects and re-arranges the subatomic particles. It basically changes one
element into another element."
    "You mean you can... turn lead into gold?" asked The Flip.
    "Well, yes," said Nomad, "but the process takes enormous amounts of power.
It's not like one could set up one of these in his closet and create big piles
of gold in his spare time!"
    "Okay," said The Doc, "thank you Nomad."
    "Your welcome, what else did you learn?"
    "Well," said The Doc, "as for the business with the mini-ships grabbing
people and making small duplicates out of them, they wanted to sell the people
as slaves to another planet. By taking the high-ranking people they were
effectively killing two birds with one stone, since they had to get us out of
the way so we wouldn't try to stop his taking the transmutor. Oh, by the
way, they were going to use the transmutor to make a great many duplicate
sets of the mini-ships and use them to do some wholesale people-grabbing.
Fortunately, the mini-ships were destroyed."
    "What about the DNA scans the mini-ships could do?" asked Nomad.
    "Well," said The Doc, "they said something about their race facing
extinction. I couldn't learn anything more because they didn't know much more
about it. All they knew was that the DNA sampling had something to do with
saving their race."
    "Was there anything else?" asked Shamrock.
    "Oh yeah," said The Doc. "Then they were going to exterminate us all and
take over our planet."

[Doctor Depraved]

    And Dr. Depraved spoke up.
    "Uhh...guys?  Would we have any need for a time traveling device?"

[Nomad of Norad]

    Nomad looked toward Dr Depraved. "Time traveling device? You have a time
machine?"
    "Uh...." said Dr Depraved. "No... I was just... suggesting that The Fourth
Doctor might... uh..."
    "Are you suggesting we should go back in time?" said The Doc. (It really
is a problem having so many Doctors around. Too confusing. -Ed)
    "Uh..." said Dr Depraved.
    "Look," said The Doc, "what I said was that they were GOING to invade us.
But that was only after everything else was taken care of. One of the first
things they have to do now is get the transmutor. All their other plans
seem to hang on getting this item. If we can beat them too it, it should
pretty much wreck their plans."

[Captain R/C:]

   "But,"said a voice from the back of the room.  It was that of the newly
appointed High Councillor and also the proprietor of the Strat. Corner. "What
if we were to make it look like to Caldon that we had destroyed the
Transmutator.  Wouldn't he leave us alone, having not as much of a need for
us?"
   "Explain.  Make it 'look' that way?"asked The Doc.
   "Yeah..  have the folks down in Construction whip us up a duplicate...
something that looks like the transmutator and convieniently destroy it in
front of Caldon or his forces?"
   "Yeah, that could work, but do you have any earthly idea what a
transmutor looks like?"
   "Well...uhh..."
   "Didn't think so," finished The Doc.  "Next?!"

[Doctor Depraved]  [Title: I am No-mad! I have some flaws. ]

    "But you are wrong  Oh illustrious pincushion!" exclaimed Dr. Depraved,
"I DO have a time traveling device.  Its in my black bag."
    Dr. Depraved hurried over to his medico supplies, and got a strange device
out of his bag.  He placed it in front of them.
    "Here it is.  The Decade Resistance Box.  One twist of the dials...and we
can go off to anytime we wish."

[Nomad of Norad]   [Title: I am Nomad. I am perfect. ]

    "Well," said Shamrock, "we certainly don't need it at the moment, but keep
it handy just in case. If this mission to find and take the transmutor before
Caldon does fails, we may need it. Maybe."
    A look of disappointment came over Dr Depraved, he was so eager to use his
new toy at the first excuse. Dejectedly he returned it to his bag.
    "Do we have any idea where the transmutor is located?" asked K.E.O Joe.
    "Well," said The Doc, "they did have a sort of map. It showed an
approximate location, but nothing exact."
    "And where did this map indicate the transmutor was?" asked Nomad.
    The Doc pulled out one of the big maps of the surrounding territories and
spread it out on the table. "Here," he said, pointing to a place between
CommHex and the land called The Temporal Vortex. Everyone gathered around.
    "Well," said Nomad, "I guess we had best be going."

[Koala Bear]       [Title:  Meanwhile on Captain Koala's Ship...  ]

"Ship's log, Captian's entry: Although we have had many adventures during
our three year mission, nothing can compare to what has just happened to us.
While trying to help our present port-of-call's lands deal with Caldon,(who
seems to be everyone's arch enemy) we destroyed one of Caldon's miniships.
At 1307 ship's time today, Caldon retaliated by firing some sort of time
warp weapon at us. Fortunately the beam did not hit us directly (else we
would not exist any longer). However, we did not come out of this encounter
unscathed: My entire crew has been turned into small children, with agess
ranging from infants to 10 grs. old,from last report. Decks are still re-
porting. Thanks be to the heavens, we have retained our previous knowledge.
Those who have been turned into infants have lost the ability to express
that knowledge...unfortunately they have lost their ability for, uh..,
other things as well. I am going to call a general assembly as soon as all
decks have reported in. Hopefully, we can get though this ordeal smoothly.
End of Entry."

[Koala Bear]       [Title: Later that Day... ]


    As Captain Koala entered the bridge, he looked around at his newly
outfitted flight crew. The Computer had chosen `Varamel Optional Children's
Wear` with a touch of `Local Galactic Standard` that the computer had scanned
during the past few months. The result of this combination was stunning: low
necklines, metallic trim unipiece jumper for males and the same style for
females, only adapted to very short dress lengths. "Nice." thought Koala, who
himself was adorned in a medium-blue uniform with metalic silver trim; his
pipings and rank insignia were of a lusterous gold color. The others were
adorned in compatible colored uniforms, which made them have a unified look.
Koala then turned his attention to the bridge. It looked much larger than
before, but he realized that he was a child--or at least child-sized.
    Just then, the helmsman...(woops, helmsperson)... jumped off of her chair
and stood by her station in which the consul was now neck hight.
   "Welcome Lieutenent Mechette," Koala said turning away from his thoughts,
"Welcome to the bridge."
    "Thank you, sir." Mechette said. She then proceeded to climb back onto
the chair.
    Captian Koala then decided that he better get back to business.  "Jantoth,
make a note that I have acknowledged lieut. Mechette as a replacement for
Gerrat while he's still an infant."
    "Yes sir." Jantoth replied.
    "Also I will need an extra science officer on the bridge."
    "Yes sir." Jantoth replied crisply.
    A few seconds later Jantoth replied. "Sir, Science Officer Marant Thal
will be joining us on the bridge."
    "Acknowledged." Said Captian Koala as he sat in his command chair.
Moments later Marant entered the bridge and waited for the captians welcome.
Captian Koala stood up, and faced the Science officer.  "Welcome Science
Officer Marant, Welcome to the bridge."
    "Thank you sir," Marant said crisply. Then he went to his station as
second science officer position.

[Nomad of Norad]

    The Intrepid Group (tm) arrived at the place on the map. The place was
overgrown with overgrowth. Dr Depraved was looking over a four-leaf clover
that he had overlooked b... uh...
    "I don't see anything," said Spidey.
    "Well," said Nomad, "its apparently underground, probably been hidden for
centuries. The entrance is probably covered by dirt." He pulled out his
scanner and waved it around a bit. "There is is." He pointed. "Start digging."
    They uprooted plants and dug up about a foot of dirt to reveal a thick
slab of some strange metal. It had raised alien lettering on it.
    "It's the language of the Ancients," said Verilox.
    "Can you understand it?" asked Dr Depraved.
    "Sure," said Verilox, "it's a puzzle. We have to figure it out before we
can get in."

[Nomad of Norad]   [Title: Time Marches On...]

(Hmmm, I knew I shouldn't have put in that business about the puzzle. It
brought the story to a screeching halt. Nomad is slapping himself.)

    Nomad came forward and looked at the metal slab. It had a slightly
greenish shade and was covered with tiny dots. "Looks like a star chart," he
said.
    "It is," said Verilox, "we have to pick the right stars and press them."
    "What are the clues they gave us?" asked Nomad.
    "Just this one line," Verilox ran his finger along the line of strange
lettering that appeared at the top of the slab. "It says, 'Find the livable
places and press upon them. Then shall you find the... remaker.'"
    "Hmmm, could they mean stars with Earth-type planets?" suggested Nomad.
"We need to check the starcharts aboard the RED 417, find a match for this
chart."

    Sometime later Nomad returned with the correct starchart printed out. He
spread it out on the ground near the slab and pointed to the stars that he had
circled on the chart.
    "Ok," said Verilox. He pressed upon each of the four circled stars at the
same time. The slab jerked down into the surrounding rock, and then slid
sideways to reveal a stairway. Everyone cautiously crept down the stairway,
following Verilox, through the dim light of the glowpanels. Soon they came to
a large chamber. In the center was a large translucent obelisk-shaped object.
Glowpanels shown on it like spotlights from above and to the sides.
    "So," said Nomad, "THAT'S the transmutor!" He looked it up and down,
sizing it up, and looked back at the corridor they had come through. The
transmutor was taller than the cieling there. "Now, how are we going to get
it out?"