This is the beginnings of an epic by Matthew Kertz and I. It was inspired by the policy of wacky Physics teacher Mr. Gibson to allow students to rescue horrible test grades by making up their own super-problems and solving them in front of him - Kertz began composing such a problem and quickly fell into satire of Mr. Gibson's overly elaborate story-problems. I quickly jumped on board, and a masterpiece was born...

Quick note: Though we revise each other's chapters to a fair degree, it's pretty easy to tell who wrote most of what, and so I've been able to put Kertz's text in italics and mine plain. Be happy...for the greatest adventure of all is about to begin.

The Uncanny Adventures of Dr. Strangelove
(or, How I Learned To Perform Numerous Calculations of Questionable Value)

by Matthew Kertz and Addison Godel

Dr. Strangelove is wheeling to the super-secret meeting of the Council of Ten. As it happens, he is rolling through the underground halls on a northern course directly parallel to the Jefferson Davis highway, which, out of strange coincidence, is right above his head. He travels on a slow course for the first 10 minutes of his journey, going at around 1 mile per hour. Suddenly, due to extreme cutbacks in the Bureau of Transportation, a Mac (Apple) truck begins crashing through the highway and the ground one-half mile behind him, going at 60 miles per hour. Dr. Strangelove, however, is not fazed. He happens to notice a strange door that was not previously there, and he rolls in with not a second to lose. This door is actually a TARDIS that was left in the Pentagon by some prank-playing aliens. After exactly one second, the good Doctor finds himself driving the C bus that runs at a southernly course 100 ft above and 100 ft away from his former position.

Unfortunately for the passengers and any passing physicists, Dr. Strangelove has to make this meeting, for the fate of the world depends on him! The bus careens wildly down the street at 80 mph for 5 mins, and then turns a hard right and proceeds at the same speed for two minutes. Dr. Strangelove then dives out of the bus into an open manhole that goes downward 100 ft, as he proclaims "Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of flooding due to El Nino, and the sewer is a churning mass of water going south at roughly 9.8 m/sec^2 for the first 100 feet. The Doctor is swept along for seventy kilometers before the sewer empties into the open sea. Luckily, due to global warming, a passing iceberg saves him and he only drops 10 m. He rests as he gently floats along in a northeastern course for approximately two minutes. Out of nowhere, a hungry polar bear pops out of the ice and Dr. Strangelove is forced to activate his turbo-pack conveniently implanted in his arm.

He instantly teleports to a cage of sleeping pit bulls three feet south of the council meeting. Keeping his cool, he takes a sack of bones out of his pocket and proceeds at a rate of 1 meter a minute in the direction of the door to the council room. As he opens the door, a pit bull awakens, and leaps after him. The meeting is disrupted, and humankind is doomed.

Our hero gasps and leaps upward as a reflex action. He goes up at a rate of 50 meters per second; the pit bull starts at a distance such that even at its speed of 100 m/sec, the Doctor lands safely two seconds after the dog has passed. The man quickly slams the cage closed and turns to flee even as the pitbull corrects its path to move towards Strangelove. However, Dr. S trips over a sack of doorknobs and uses tricky legwork to swing it up into the dog's face as the beast zooms forward at 101 m/sec.

Unfortunately, all the commotion and noise has caused the flimsy construction of the underground base to reach a breaking point. Now, even as emergency systems begin automatically activating the nuclear arsenal (with a thirty-second countdown) the ceiling begins caving in due to gravity. Dr. Strangelove's only recourse is to go into the primary missile silo. He glances at his watch, and the intercom says "You have exactly fifteen seconds remaining until thermonuclear launch." He then mounts the nuclear device and drills a chamber 1 meter by 1 meter wide. This is for Schroedinger's Cat, which he has been interested in.

The missile then proceeds to launch, which is detected in Russia by Boris Badenov. He proceeds to activate Russia's remaining arsenal. All three of them fail at a rate of one every minute. Two are duds, but the last one explodes, causing a crater with size proportional to the power of the 100 megaton Zeke-34 Russian prototype explosive. Meanwhile, it so happens that a man in a cowboy hat falling from the sky intersects with the parabolic course of Dr. Strangelove's missile. Lucky for the Doctor, the nice man happens to have an extra parachute on him, which he hands to the Doctor. This is at the exact apex of the flight, and the wind is at this point going northeast at fifty miles per hour. The Doctor jumps and lands in Brazil, due to an extreme "star quake" in the neutron star GN-581 Class J.

The star itself happens to be the location of three aliens of the quief-clan, visiting the third moon approximately 3 billion miles from the star in question. The "quake" sends a mini-pulsar at 3/4 the speed of light towards Earth, and by amazing, spectacular coincidence, picks up the family's Winnebago. The significance of all this is that the outer-space beam causes a tidal wave, sending a surge of water up the Amazon. It has now been three years since the Doctor crashed, and his lean-to is 60 m above sea level. The blast displaces 4 million gallons of water, and no less than seventy-five and no more than eighty-five percent of it is sent hurtling up the river. Dr. S does not have time to figure out whether his location, 400 miles upstream, will escape the flooding because, a mere three seconds after the tsunami erupts, a helicopter swoops out of the sky and plucks our hapless hero up with a huge hook made of Cu (II)SO4.

The chopper is piloted by none other than the man in the cowboy hat, who, as it turns out, is a billionaire stock trader on the side. As the Doctor hangs from a wire made by unspindling a 40 cubic-foot plate of pure gold, the distracted pilot accidentally twirls the aircraft into an unusually southern tropical storm. Fortunately for the doctor, God lives underwater. Neptune comes out of the eye of the storm and with his mighty fists snatches the chopper out of the storm. Booming out the words "Puny humans" at a volume .5 decibels short of the human ear's intolerance level, the great sea-king outlines his terms - the Doctor and the Man In The Cowboy Hat, in exchange for the rescue, shall assist in the building of the foundation of a new Undersea Palace in Atlantis. The construction began with 500 workers three hours previous; after two hours it was 13% complete, and thanks to a spree of rigged disasters & rescues by Neptune, the worker total now (counting the two newest prisoners) is 782. However, the Man in the Cowboy Hat wishes to leave in order to manage his financial empire, and so is horribly tortured until he screams for mercy. He is thus "compelled" to stay after Neptune "convinces" him. The Doctor is far more subtle in his devious plans to escape. Luckily, Neptune has no technical knowledge and thus does not realize that Dr. Strangelove is building a doomsday machine!

This doomsday machine is small (due to a "revelation" (ho ho) Dr. Strangelove had based on St. Albert's principle) but produces a yield of 10 kilotons. Using the force of this explosion, the Doctor propels himself in a northeasterly direction, landing (with remarkable accuracy) on top of the Eiffel Tower, which is all that remains of France. Neptune, of course, is not so easily foiled, and he sends a huge tide up the shores of France, covering the flat plains easily and submerging the full area of the country under 1 meter of water within 10.5 seconds. Dr. Strangelove, above, notes that after another 10 seconds the water has risen past the sixth convenient-for-tourists one-meter height mark on the tower.

As it happens, the Doctor needs to get to his son's birthday party, so he is extremely rushed in throwing on his jetpack to escape. This means he does not have time to check his angle of liftoff, though he does know that the jetpack in lab tests was able to carry a 4-pound rat twenty thousand centimeters in two seconds, and that the party is located at the exact midpoint of the Ural Mountains. Unfortunately for the good doctor, he is so rushed he forgets to calculate for the gravitational pull of Saturn, which consequently is 19.32 fns. This makes him go off course by altering the degrees of his ascent by roughly .003. Unfortunately for him, this path happens to make a beeline for a small irregularity in the fabric of time, transporting him back to 1936 Germany, just in time to participate in the first screening of Triumph of the Will with his good friend Adolf. After reminiscing for a time, Dr. Strangelove finds himself in front of a firing squad, with 17 bullets fired at him at a speed half that of sound, with a light wind in the northeast direction. The Doctor easily dodges the bullets and incapacitates the Nazi executioners with a sound blast of approximately 10000 db for 1.3 ms, and defects to his hated enemies - the Communists!

As it happens, the local Communist branch is having financial troubles due to the flailing March 1936 Mark. Given the contemporary inflation rates and the increasingly tense world situation, the Communist Party decides to take the Doctor on as its Bonn chairperson. However, this has strange and unpredictable consequences, as the future is instantly changed, along with the Doctor's own past! The fabric of time unravels for seventy nanoseconds before restabilizing at a rate of twelve thousand chronons every ninety milliminutes. When the dust settles, the Doctor finds himself in the 1998 Kremlin, alongside Boris Badenov, who tells him that their American enemies are launching a swarm of nuclear missiles towards the country. Boris is about to arm Russia's remaining arsenal when the Doctor has a flash memory from his past life and offers an alternate strategy which is turned down immediately by a drunk Yeltsin. With exactly .01 milliseconds to spare, the Doctor and Boris take out Russia's lost remaining T-74 tank into the fabric of time. Interestingly, Natasha Fatale was sleeping in the tank at the time, and so the Doctor's calculations were thrown off approximately 100 km and 1000 years, into a magical world located around where Japan is (or was) today. The fabric of time closed behind the T-74, so the Doctor is forced to actualize all available resources - namely, the high elf priest that can turn into a dog! The trio (Natasha died horribly at the hands of an angry fish-god) searches all over the magical world for five female elves bearing strange markings on their bodies in order to get home.

While the Doctor, Boris, and the priestess engage in their otherworldly quest, the man in the cowboy hat is falling from the sky above earth. In the first iteration of history, of course, he gave his extra parachute to Doctor Strangelove; now, however, he gives it to the Doctor's new-reality counterpart, the evil Doctor Roger Chillingworth. Due to his deformed shoulder, raised .7 inches off of its natural position, his path is slightly different from Strangelove's, and he is on his way to the Virgin Islands when all that alien nonsense kicks in, only 17 seconds after this timeline's missile launch.

Meanwhile, our heroes in the tank have almost succeeded in the task. They need only penetrate the mountain-top fortress of the mad elf Footo to succeed! The walls of the castle have their weakest point exactly 100 m away from the gun turret and 20 m off the ground. Boris errs in loading the cannon, however, and the dog-priestess is accidentally fired instead of a shell! Though she weighs half of what the real ammo would, the wind shifts abruptly, enough to send her within two meters of the target. The fortress collapses instantly, but the demon within the inner sanctum is released to ravage the 7 worlds!

Unfortunately for Footo, the "ravage of the 7 worlds" consists of a dead squirrel and an accountant named Fred. They are defeated by a random arrow fired by Conan the Barbarian and the Black Man. Since the dog-priestess met with certain doom, the Doctor and Boris are compelled to "strike a deal with the devil" if you will. They return to Earth and the Virgin Islands for the price of 1/8 of their souls. Then they slay the evil doctor Roger Chillingworth and continue on their merry way with new powers, granted by the Black Man himself.

And now for a summary of our characters' respective situations at present. Dr. Strangelove and Boris Badenov are relaxing in the balmy Virgin Islands, where the temperature is a comfortable 82 degrees Fahrenheit with an invigorating sea breeze wafting through in a north-by-northeasterly direction. The elf-priestess is dead, as is Natasha Fatale. Elf-lord Footo is rebuilding his fortress in the other dimension. Neptune, due to the changing of history, has no grudge against Dr. S or the Man in the Cowboy Hat, who has landed (as he originally planned) in Nova Scotia. Roger Chillingworth's body is at the crest of a medium-speed wave in the Bermuda Triangle. Yeltsin is attempting to aid Russia's recovery from the nuclear war, which destroyed the country - though due to lack of retaliation the rest of the world is fine. However, a cloud of radioactive dust is billowing out from Asia and will, if left unchecked, completely cover the globe in 22 hours. The Doctor and Boris, thanks to their Russian military command status, are warned of this impending disaster by Yeltsin himself, who is on a drinking binge in the Virgin Islands. Thus, the Doctor and Boris leave the glorious isles, and Boris convinces the Doctor to use the secret storage of nuclear arms located in Nova Scotia.

As it happens, the MITCH is sitting on the primary detonation site having a picnic. Due to the fact that he is having ham on rye instead of turkey with dressing, the earth's axis shifts just enough so that when Doctor Strangelove, Mitch, and Boris jump 2 feet up in the air (in order to dodge an out-of-control self-propelled weedwhacker) the interstellar Winnebago swoops past and picks them up, narrowly avoiding the cloud of radioactive dust while moving at a speed of 3 m/sec north by northwest. Doctor Strangelove waves goodbye to Earth, saying "So long and thanks for all the fish!"

Coincidentally, this very line is the sacred oath of Neptune, king of the fish! As the dust settles into his ocean, Neptune becomes super-powered, in the process absorbing the radiation. He sends his praetorian guard of 25 super-dolphins flying into space after the Winnebago so he can get our missile specialists to activate the secret bombs and power him up even further.

Inside the spacecraft (which is moving in a semielliptical course towards Io with adjustment for Mars, which otherwise would have been hit after 10 seconds) the Doctor, Boris, and Mitch are attempting to adjust to the alien air. The Doctor is too old, unfortunately, and is placed in cryo-storage. When the ship reaches the asteroids, extreme conditions force the aliens to jettison the Doctor's cryo-capsule along with enough fuel to last twenty days.

Dr. Strangelove drifts in his capsule for 19 days. "Send me up a drink," jokes the Doctor, before resigning himself to his doom. However, he decides to at least have a good time, and uses the capsule's 56 K internet connection to access abcnews.com. Unfortunately, he is using AOL and has the functional capability of a 2400 baud modem. As time ticks by, he slowly loads a 10 kilobtye article about Io, moon of Jupiter. With only 30 minutes to spare, our hero learns that Io has a very potent electrical charge, much of which is channelled through space to Jupiter. The Doctor moves into a spatial path that enables him to recharge the capsule's 40,000 D cell batteries without blowing the Devo class fuse. However, he is now trapped in Jupiter's gravity, and begins to fall into the planet's chaotic atmosphere. Luckily, as it happens, Io's electrical charge fluctuates in a tolerable range of +/- 3.5 gigahertz. In theory, this charge can either ionize or deionize the capsule, which in turn would save or destroy (respectively) the doctor, by either catapulting him out of the atmosphere via the Kürtsfield-Jacob Effect or rocketing him into the planet's core via the Scröeder-Paulina Paradox. Unfortunately, the latter is formed, and Strangelove zooms towards the planet at a speed somewhere between 88 and 89 mph. Why is this important? Funny you should ask. The Astro-Rockets are activated by the capsule, which causes it to hit just the speed needed to transform it into a custom DeLorean, with Marty McFly (idly screaming "You're crazy Doc!") sitting beside the Doctor. Making some hasty calculations, the Doctor ejects Marty and blasts a 3 x 3 km hole through Jupiter, which proceeds to form a Siam-Budmi helix doughnut, which the Doctor travels through with room to spare.

Unfortunately, this doughnut structure is highly unstable and begins to collapse, forming a giant Van der Graf generator when it absorbs 65% of Io's charged mass. The Doctor is still wobbling between 88 and 89 mph, and when the generator activates, a surge of power equal to 7,000,040 lightning bolts strikes the DeLorean, which warps through time as a result. Jupiter, meanwhile, is struck by the wayward Winnebago (which bounces off unharmed), and begins spinning counterclockwise at about .8 of its original (pre-Doctor) speed. The Doctor zooms through time in the former space capsule, having no idea how to stop the car. As it happens, the time machine does not stop until all the excess power (remember, that's 7,000,040 lightning bolts) is bled off by the time-tunnel, which moves the car at roughly ten years every second. When the journey does end, the Doctor finds himself back in the early 1960's, driving the DeLorean down the Jefferson Davis highway.

Suddenly, the doctor is struck by lightning, causing him to travel even further into the past. It is now roughly 1089, and the founding of the Knights Templar has recently taken place. The Doctor appears seemingly out of nowhere and is immediately hailed by the Knights as a saint, and quickly instituted as the patron saint of wood. He is dubbed "Ed Wood," and sweeping changes are made in the Catholic religion. Now, the crosses are exactly 3 mm lower in height, which causes an assassin's arrow to successfully strike the contemporary Pope. This alters history dramatically, and when Strangelove is warped back to the 60's highway, all the cars have a density equal to or less than that of birch. This is especially troublesome when it rains, but the important result is that their lightweight construction has resulted in an (average) speed increase of 800%. The Doctor, unable to control the birch DeLorean, crashes into the flying head of Stalin. Obviously the Pope's death was more important than it seemed. Stalin invites the Doctor to help build up the Soviet nuclear program, which in this timeline has a growth rate of...oh...2% per year. The Doctor, strange as it may seem, declines in order to fix history. Enraged, Stalin fires lightning bolts from his eyes, once again sending the Doctor spiralling through time.

This time, however, he finds himself 400 ft above 17th century Puritan New England, zooming towards the Boston shore with an angle of 40 degrees from the horizon. The Doctor bails out 1.5 seconds before the car crashes, and he suffers only minor injuries. Unfortunately, since the car exploded at the very moment it struck the shore, he is now stranded in the past, but at this point, the Doctor's former evil twin Roger Chillingworth strides down the shore, plops a cowboy hat on the Doctor's head, and hands him a a time-travel potion. The potion was made by mixing 2 parts of a secret native spice (pH 2) with 3 parts saltpeter. The Doctor cries out "I'm melting! as he drinks the potion, disappears, and finds himself in the present falling from the sky holding two parachutes. He sees a bomb approaching from below with himself (!!!) riding at the front. He (the one falling) screams "There can be only one!" and laughs maniacally as the rocket shoots by him. This causes a bit of a paradox, and the "Doctor in the Cowboy Hat" vanishes. This leaves the doctor on the bomb (who shall from now on be considered the true "original" doctor) hurtling to Moscow. By amazing good fortune, the Doctor is thrown clear by the force of the explosion completely unhurt by the 100-megaton bomb, which sends him northwest (North by Northwest, to be exact) at an angle of pi/6 radians. Passing by a wayward crop-duster, he lands in the only haystack in all of Norway and surprises a lowly cow that is grazing in near (1.5 m) proximity. Or is it a lowly cow?

No! It is, in fact, a new Norwegian defense system, which, after collapsing the cow body to reveal a perfect pure lead sphere with radius 1 ft, explodes into 36 equal parts. After .01 seconds of normal flight behavior, these projectiles alter their courses with small rockets that begin turning them toward the doctor with 2 newtons of force. The Doctor, thinking fast and dialing faster, calls up his old friend Professor Steamhead, who is conducting steam experiments in the fjords. The Professor appears on the scene without a moment to lose and releases a burst of fast-dissipating but super-dense steam that lifts the Doctor 3.5 feet in in the air in a quarter-second by the force of its expansion. Before all 12 gallons of the steam dissipate 2 seconds later, the missiles have all zoomed safely under our hero, striking the surface of the water and exploding, creating even more steam. This sends Professor Steamhead into a fit of excitement for several minutes; meanwhile, however, the Doctor is rooting through the haystack for his wire collection, and as he does so, he remembers the "2/3" rule of time travel. Since Neptune wants to capture the Doctor in two other timelines, he also wants to do so here! The Doctor leaps off the haystack, grabs his old friend (in a fateful decision), and rockets away from Earth (with the same jetpack used in the Eiffel Tower adventure), just as Neptune is about to attack. The two scientists' brilliant tactic is to fly to Jupiter (now a whirling Van der Graf generator, remember) and use it to fire a bolt of power at Earth, with just enough wattage to create just enough heat to vaporize all the planet's seas. This kills Neptune instantly, but has its downsides, even if Steamhead now has the chance to perform his grand steam experiment.

When they return to Earth, they find a bleak and barren wasteland awaiting them. All is controlled by the now "evil" Professor Steamhead. He has subjugated all the survivors of the cataclysm to his super steam-powered robots. This new regime is able to maintain total control thanks to the "accidental" death of the Professor's old rival Dr. Hossenfeffer. Strangelove determines that if he captures 1/3 of the dolphins still flying through space, he can squeeze just enough water out of them to revamp the planet's water cycle. But he is not sure if he wants to, thanks to generous kickbacks from Steamhead. Boris Badenov, however, has other plans, and sets things back towards the right when he suddenly appears on the 48' 50'' latitude with the entire Nazi Army and a plan to take over Earth. They stupidly travel into the now-empty Marianas Trench, so Dr. Strangelove makes the obvious realization that if he brings back the dolphins, he can refill the seas and bring death to the Nazis! Ha ha ha!

The Doctor has reservations, however. 2% of the Nazis are soldiers he once called friends. Not to mention Boris, who is not only an old "comrade" but also is not a Nazi and should, logically, not be anywhere in this situation. But the firing squad thing (back in the 30's) was just 6% too much to swallow! So the Doctor decides to lure the dolphins back. Since they are still chasing the Winnebago through space, the Doctor must lure IT back without tipping off the nefarious Steamhead. To do so, Strangelove calls for a fireworks display! 4000 tons of gunpowder are piled up in Iceland, where a volcano is about to erupt. 16 cubic tons of pressure underground are intensified by the addition of some 6000 degree (Centigrade) steam, unwittingly provided by the Professor. The Doctor leaves Iceland 6 minutes before he predicts the lava will burst out and ignite the gunpowder, citing ill health. The explosion goes as planned and is intense enough to be seen by the Winnebago, which turns back towards Earth from roughly 6 Saturns beyond the orbit of Pluto.

However, Steamhead realizes the Doctor's treachery and sends his robots out on gas-powered skis to search the fifty-square-kilometer area of the former Arctic Ocean where the Doctor is believed to be. But then, due to the Stübterman Effect brought on by the exploding cow, three alpha particles moving at 1/2 the speed of light pass at a 90 degree angle through a soup bowl in Old Siam. This causes an ion of a radius of 2.3 nanometers (a giant ion) to misfire and strike the Pasha of Tripoli in the face. Due to a strange coincidence, he is balancing a 5% plutonium core with an average mass of 10 grams on the end of his nose. The resulting explosion is about equal to a 3.2 megaton neutron bomb, and this activates the Doomsday Device that did not go off in this timeline. Meanwhile, the good Doctor is vaporized. His soul, however, possesses Professor Steamhead. The two merge to become... PROCTOR STEAMLOVE!

Coalescing on a faraway world, the Proctor finds himself administering the PSAT to a group of aliens. Finding himself bored, he examines the statistical curves of the last year's scores. While the total number of students is unknown, the Proctor deduces (he is extremely bored) that 20% of the students got more than 50% of the questions right. Only 60 students got no questions right, but this is enough to infuriate the Proctor's Professor side, who notes that several of the questions missed deal with STEAM! In a mad rage he rips his face open, like in the Ghetto Superstar video, leaving only the Doctor, who begins rapping. For this disruption, the Doctor is thrown out of the testing area at 185,000 mph. Zooming through space, he realizes that he must breathe within the next ten seconds, but fortunately he crashes into the Winnebago before half of this time is up and finds himself back with Boris and the MITCH, who now try to figure out a way to seal the hole in the wall before all 2000 gallons of air are sucked out.

Due to an interesting coincidence, the hole has a radius of 3.5 meters and a depth (spread uniformly) of .1 cm...which happens to be the exact dimensions of the cowboy hat! As it is sucked off of the MITCH's head, it plugs the hole and is believed to be stable enough to hold for roughly 1 minute. The aliens driving the Winnebago meet their horrible deaths, while the MITCH, now hatless, turns out to be a brainless idiot due to the fact that his hat was a separate, sentient entity, bent on destroying the world!!! The good doctor notices that a huge planet looms on the horizon outside the starboard side of the ship, approximately 8,000,000 meters away. The Doctor angles the ship towards the planet and uses the now-unplugged hole as a jet to move towards it, while ingesting one of Chillingworth's rarest potions to revoke all of Newton's laws for exactly 1/8 of a second. As he descends into the cloudy atmosphere, he suddenly realizes that something is terribly wrong - these are not ordinary clouds, but STEAM!

Landing the lightweight craft on the planet's boiling surface, the Doctor and Badenov quickly piece the situation together (after throwing the former Man in the Cowboy Hat overboard (a decision which will have fateful consequences)) with the help of a native who is only 2 feet 8 inches tall! It seems that this watery world supports a population of 1 billion, exactly half of whom are roving steam-pirates of the high seas. Exactly 3/4 of the pirates and an unknown number of the others are waging violent civil war against each other, the pirates having been spurred on by none other than Steamhead!! who arrived at the planet one minute ago. He has been able to accomplish so much because of the Doctor's brief cancellation of basic physical laws, combined with the fact that on this planet, rumor spreads like an epidemic with a rate directly proportional to the number of people who have heard it, with the added variable of the phases of the planet's three moons, which have all been in formation for peak rumor-travelling rates for six hours to the minute. But what is Steamhead after??? The Doctor, overwhelmed by recent events, falls unconscious while trying to figure this out.

Of course, a planet cannot consist entirely of boiling water; as one would predict, for every square meter of boiling surface, there is an equal and opposite square meter of nothing but rain. These rainy areas tend to clump up and form huge, moving seas that interact constantly with the steam areas, and the rate of rainfall is always exactly enough to perpetuate this huge cycle without more than a 3% fluctuation in the quantity of either steam or rain from a standard median value, taken by sampling the levels in the 503 years since the planet was developed enough to measure such things. It is into one of these rainy areas that Boris takes his friend the Doctor to recover; unfortunately, this is also where (ironically enough) Steamhead and his minions have set up their hidden marine bases! A group of 17 especially vicious pirates, led by the floating head of Stalin (now wearing the cowboy hat) approach our heroes. Be they friends or foes?

Neither! They are, in fact, idiots! It is a ploy by the devious Steamhead to distract Strangelove from his real plan...the conversion of the planet into a gigantic steam generator. How? Why, with the power of the neutron star next to Pluto! (The mysterious Planet X.) The pirates, meanwhile, blundering idiots that they are, proceed to attempt to wake Strangelove by shooting him out of a cannon before any moves are made to kill him. But Strangelove has already been "cannonized" as the Patron Saint of Wood (remember?) and so he disappears mysteriously. By a strange coincidence, he reappears right next to Professor Steamhead, who is now in cahoots with the floating head of Stalin!

As the time ripple subsides, the main power fluctuator in the CPU is overloaded, and due to cutbacks, the fuse has been bypassed with a coathanger made primarily of a rare metal originating on Planet X. Unfortunately, 10^9 volts is just enough to melt the hanger, and this triggers the activation of the dead physicist (the one hit by Strangelove when he was driving the bus) who had been kept in stasis for so long. The floating head of Stalin sees the situation and flees at a rate of 9 km/s in the direction of Orion, because only the physicist knows how to destroy him. This is because the physicist was, in fact, the one who enabled Stalin's head to live on its own.

Meanwhile, however, the computer is going into the China Syndrome!!!!!!; that is, like a nuclear reactor, its heat is so great and so capable of self-sustainment, that it will melt through the very heart of a solid planet. Steamhead is ecstatic because he knows that the computer will boil away all of the planet's 4 * 10^16 gallons of water, just as he planned. What the Professor failed to take into account was the cowboy hat, which, having escaped the floating head of Stalin, has taken over Woodchuck, the struggling thief! who wants to steal 50 gallons of water from the steam planet to build a centrifuge. He is successful, which throws off Steamhead's calculations of the water volume, starting a chain reaction as the planet's weight shifts, knocking it out of orbit. Thinking fast, Strangelove pulls out Capsule #108, which creates a huge lever 70 million miles long, with a weight of only 2 grams! With the application of 2 Newtons of force to the exact other end, Strangelove moves the planet back into its place. BUT, in the process, Steamhead is flung far away to safety at an unknown angle. The Doctor realizes that he will need the help of the floating head of Stalin to track him down.

Time for another recap!

After a series of harrowing encounters with the devious Professor Steamhead, the Doctor and Boris (with the unexpected help of the flat physicist) have driven Steamhead and the floating head of Stalin far away. However, to puruse Steamhead, they must first capture TFHOS, which has fled to Orion. They decide to hail him by radio, but they don't know what station he is tuned to. Finally, they ask Independent Counsel Starr, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" The answer he gives takes exactly one-half of a second to say and is an odd whole number. Now, on with the show.

Unfortunately for the daring trio, they did not factor in the ion that originally killed the Pasha of Tripoli. This rogue ion resurrects the strange, unmoving object from Act II, scene III....a chipmonk! This Chipmonk of the Living Dead is a fakir that quickly forms the Order of Doow.

The importance of this is that the Order constructs a huge tower of their sacret relic, doow - but due to a mistranslation of the ancient texts, it is actually a tower of DEW! Mountain Dew! Each bottle contains either one or two liters, but they all have the same height, and 8 * 10^9 bottles are stacked on top of each other. The ion, by purest chance, streaks through the bottles starting at the very top and going straight down (compensating, also, for any Coriolis effects), causing them all to pop in sequence in a spectacular burst of fizz that blocks the radio wave, and, in the process, is sweet and tasty enough to revive Neptune, who now seeks to conquer the planet of boiling water (where our heroes still remain stranded).

But you must not forget about the Chipmonk of the Living Dead! Forced out of its natural habitat by humans, it is reduced down to the lowest type of zombie...a scavenger of human flesh (and chestnuts!). The fiend needs a bride...a bride unlike no other dead Chipmonk...one that will devour the floating head of Stalin to achieve its Perfect Form and rule the world! This Bride of the Chipmonk of the Living Dead, or BOTCOTLD (or BOT for short), is created using 3 gigawatts of electricity drawn from a power cable next to the big clocktower, which, as fate would have it, is struck by lightning at the precise moment that the BOT is activated. This sends a passing DeLorean into the folds of time...along with the BOT!

The original Chipmonk of the Living Dead (COTLD) realizes the need for fast action and dives into the time tunnel before the entrance closes in the Brinkman Effect. Within the tunnel, the DeLorean is revolving around an imaginary central axis with an acceleration equal to twenty times gravity even as it zooms down the tunnel at twice that acceleration.The COTLD, only six meters behind when he first enters the tunnel, is quickly left in the dust...and is soon reduced to dust at the moment when its speed equals the speed of light. Ahh, but the author miscalculated; instead of turning into dust, the COTLD becomes infinitely dense and consequently turns into Dustin Hoffman, who is immediately destroyed by all the forces of good in the universe working together for 1/10 of a second. Anyway, the BOT, inside the DeLorean, continues on through the time tunnel...heading straight for the moment when the Doctor and his colleagues are preparing to launch a makeshift rocket (built largely using the flat physicist's cyborg parts) from the Steam Planet to Orion.

The BOT lands on a solidifed piece of steam (produced by a terrible confrontation between steam and sunbeams) and sets a MIRV III warhead pointed directly at the center of the planet. Our heroes detect the warhead right off (due to the interesting smell given off by the decaying Tritium IID atom) and vacate the premises. In a fit of madness, the BOT unleashes his MIRV exactly 2 seconds too early, and instead of destroying the planet, splits it evenly into four geodesic balls, each one revolving around the others accoridng to the Z-trek effect in G minor! Unfortunately, this throws off orbit cacluations completely, and the Doctor, Boris, and the Physicistfind their spaceship impossible to control! However, the Doctor, a former colleague of R. Buckminister Fuller's, is well aware of the properties of geodesic balls and fires the Class 2 afterburners for just enough time to drop the ship into a three-dimensional figure eight (of sorts). By pure accident, this entire thing happens to be a PERPETUAL MOTION SYSTEM! Boris remarks that this cannot be possible, but the Doctor cheerfully replies that nothing is impossible...with STEAM! Cackling, he pours a 70% solution of sulfuric acid on his face, which dissolves to reveal the unmistakable visage of PROFESSOR STEAMHEAD! "How can this be?"

Professor Steamhead (or, rather, the reborn Proctor Steamlove, as he is undoubtedly some new cross between the two) dodges the question by applying a sideways force of 3000 Newtons upon himself and thus sliding right out of the ship. Fortunately for the Proctor, Steamhead's friend Noid the Void is waiting outside to save him! The Proctor has forgotten that voids are dangerous and is sucked into another dimension, and the ship follows. By extreme coincidence, it seems that this new dimension parallels our own! Except for one difference; it seems that in 1892 a soldier in the Near East misfired. As a result, Boris Badenov is now an Uzbekistani revolutionary! With a beard! And, due to a fatal mishap with a broken spoon, eight Nazis have found themselves in the Void with the group that, counting Steamhead and Strangelove separately, must be called the Council of Four. The presence of Nazis with an average height distributed evenly on the curve of 3 sin 2x brings on a change in the Proctor. But suddenly, the air in the capsule escapes through a hole of radius pi/4 meters, killing everyone...

....save an interesting-looking chimera that is a fusion between all those present. Flanazi Badelovsteam has incredible powers and is able to generate 50.890 * 10^8 Watts of power, which he uses to force himself back through the void. However, the power is not quite enough, and the void splits the creature in half. One half remains in the parallel dimension and the other returns to the "real" world. Our primary concern right now is the "real" world one, Badenazilov - now that the Badenov component is no longer an intimidating revolutionary but a cowering Communist, he runs into difficulties with the Commie-hating Nazis. Then, through a giant plot hole, a huge Energizer Bunny suddenly arrives to inhale Badenazilov. Going to Super Physicist Level 3 and channeling 4 *13 Watts, it manages to stop even the Energizer Bunny, outlasting its power after 7.9 years. Two of the Nazis have by this time eaten each other, and Strangelove has reappeared as a separate entity. Strangelove is tired of Boris's shenanigans and hates the Naxis, so he shatters the remaining fusion-creature (Nazinoris) into 11 pieces with a mysterious sword and traps the pieces in a huge music box with a volume of 6 cubic meters.

Meanwhile, however, Neptune has spent these years rebuilding his power base and is now ready to conquer both this dimension and the parallel world! He builds a car with a mass of 1500 kg and places a weightless donut on the hood. He then places Jeb Stuart at the wheel; the incompetent Civil War cavalryman steers it into a wormhole that destroys the car but accelerates the donut to 9 times the speed of light, while .01 g are added to its mass. As Neptune curses, the donut then pops up at an unknown location, right in the mouth of Spacerat Sed! The Spacerat swallows the donut and expands to its original size, poetically quoting:

"The universe is a sea of
dead screaming fetus baby heads.
They want violent revenge, with ravishing
heads and snarling teeth.
Skünte!"

Unimpressed by the poetry, Soviet leader Andropov calls for the Spacerat's death. Fortunately for Spacerat, a 6.37 month power struggle ends 2 seconds later and Andropov is overthrown. He is exiled into a circular orbit around a Class C star. It takes him 43 hours to circle it and he is travelling (interestingly enough) at 9 times the speed of light. Why is this important? Glad you asked! The Russian power struggle has lured back the Floating Head of Stalin! who is only 80 lightyears away and is also travelling at nine times the speed of light.

That's all there is right now. More will undoubtedly be written. Feel free to let us know what you think should happen to Dr. Strangelove next!

Click here for the Strangelove Character Guide, a rather bland-looking page describing a variety of Strangelove characters and identifying their origins (as most of our stars are, in fact, references to pop cultural items).

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