Friday, April 29, 1994

(Last week on "Random Access": Special Agent 23 escaped certain death at the claws of flesh-eating zombies and followed the nefarious Columbian drug lord Raphael and his double agent lover, Crank Girl, into a secret passage that led deep, deep into the very bowels of the earth. Now, Agent 23 has opened one secret door too many, and is about to learn much more than he ever bargained for...)

I stepped hesitantly through the door and found myself in an incredibly vast, amazingly bizarre chamber with bank after bank of strange control panels, replete with all sorts of flashing lights, indecipherable hieroglyphs, switches and levers and buttons and screens, bank after bank extending off into the distance as far as the eye could see and up into the air as far as the eye could see.

In the center of the room, directly ahead of me, stairs led up to a giant raised platform, surrounded by glistening fluorescent railings, where several rows of some foreign kind of computer terminals rested.

"Foreigners," I spat. "Just as I suspected..."

I saw Raphael and Crank Girl standing there, staring at a three- dimensional floating hologram of the planet Earth. Raphael was arguing heatedly with a mysterious hooded and cloaked figure.

"So," I said to myself, "at last I've found Raphael's black market contact, the one who will sell him the nuclear weapons that will bring Western civilization to its metaphorical knees..."

Capitalizing on my Native American stealth training, I moved through the room as quietly as if I had no weight, never once breaking a twig or stepping on a leaf and giving myself away. I climbed the steps slowly, managing to overhear a bit of Raphael's argument.

"That's absolutely ridiculous!" Raphael shouted. "No one wants to see a 'Love Boat' for the 90s!"

"I'm telling you," the figure replied in a murky, nearly unintelligible voice, "now's the perfect time for a Gavin Macloud comeback!"

Now was the time to act. I leapt over the glistening fluorescent railing and delivered an unbelievably cool kick to Raphael's chest. As Raphael raised his gun. Suddenly, to Raphael's dismay, Crank Girl leapt in front of Raphael to engage me in combat, and Raphael couldn't get off a shot.

As Crank Girl swung a fist my direction, I grabbed her arm and prepared to flip her like a burger. As she swooped over my shoulder, she whispered in my ear, "Don't worry, Scotto, I'm here to help..."

She landed flat on her back, and I dived out of the way of Raphael's gunfire. The bullets sailed through the air, sank into several of the banks of blinky lights and whatnot and soon bursts of sparks and small explosions began to erupt throughout the room.

"You fool!" the hooded figure shouted, knocking Raphael's gun out of his hands. "You've ruined everything!"

The hooded figure yanked Raphael up by his throat, and began choking the life out of him. Meanwhile, Crank Girl leapt up, and I demanded an explanation.

"Aliens," she whispered.

"I knew it," I said bitterly. "It's always foreigners in this business, always foreigners..."

Raphael fought back desperately, yanking the hood away from the hooded figure, and Crank Girl and I gasped as we recognized the face of Ted Lange, the bartender from "Love Boat."

"Aliens who resemble the cast of 'Love Boat,'" Crank Girl amended.

As Raphael and Ted Lange struggled desperately and explosion after explosion ricocheted throughout the chamber, I scooped up Raphael's gun and pointed it at Crank Girl.

"You traitorous scum," I said.

"You've got it all wrong," she replied. "Someone had to find out where Raphael was getting his nuclear weapons."

She motioned to a suitcase on one corner of the platform. "He planned on trading that suitcase full of baby powder that I stole for a suitcase full of alien-made nuclear weapons."

She grabbed the suitcase of nukes, and said, "We've got to get out of here. If this spaceship explodes while these nuclear weapons are still on board, the whole planet is doomed..."

I took one last glance at Raphael, who was shouting, "And you'll never get the original Gopher back..." I turned, calmly fired twice, and Raphael and Ted Lange collapsed in a heap.

"You... you just killed our first contact with an alien race!" Crank Girl exclaimed.

"I'd do it again, too, in the name of all that's American in this world!" I replied proudly. I took Crank Girl's arm, and we dashed down the steps, dodging explosions, debris, and flying blinky lights. The Star- Spangled Banner began playing loudly in the background. Crank Girl and I suddenly froze in place, and all the explosions froze in place as well. The closing credits began to roll.