Parallel Universes meredith and urchin

An adventure in a perpendicular university

'I saw the durndest thing,' said Urchin.
Strewth, now he's talking American, thought Meredith. 'What's that then?' she asked, wriggling her bottom on the freezing concrete steps outside Tescos. If only my dreadlocks were a bit longer I could sit on them, she thought. That would be warmer.

'These two blokes were lurking out back of Piranha and Frenzi, Estate Agents (est. 2006),’ Urchin began. ‘They unfurled great black leathery wings, put on goggles and some other gear, and then flew away.'

'Really?' Meredith sounded surprised and gave Skye an old-fashioned look.
'It's true. They said they were off to another planet, and one asked the other what the escape velocity was, and he said 300. I think the shop’s closed down for good.'

Meredith took Urchin's pulse, opened his baccy tin to check the contents, and gave him a quizzical look.

'Just electronic bits, as usual,' she observed.
'You know I don't smoke!'
'We know you didn't, but it is a tall story,' interjected Skye. '300 what? pink elephants?'

Urchin dropped his tin 'Were you eavesdropping too?' he stammered.

'Don't be weird. Well, no weirder anyway. That's what Adolph, our maths teacher always used to say. "300 what? Pink elephants?!" .'

'But that is what he said,' blustered Urchin.
They laughed.
Skye thought, and so did Meredith (in a different accent) - Urchin gets a bit keen sometimes, but he's as stable as a very short table. And we don't just mean on account of his enormous boots.

'I've got an idea,' said Meredith. 'We should contact Roland the Tramp in Smogdale. He can do email via the PC in Fidget’s shed. He knows about exotic stuff through his study of Honda Prelude the philosopher. Escape velocities and planets and such.'

So they did.

***

Roland sighed and groaned, sucked his remaining teeth, and perpetrated several other mannerisms that are best forgotten when he received the email. Not that he minded, but this looked like a long job. So he packed a flask and a crust or twelve and departed for the library at the Hollyist Temple on Hampork Heath.
Moley Hoses, the Hollhyist priest, greeted him, unlocked the library door and left him to it.

***

Skye and Meredith were chewing the fat in Skye’s flat when they heard the clomp of enormous high speed boots approaching.

Urchin was excited. 'Read this!' he blurted.
So they did.

***

The International / Parallel Universes-Universities Agreement on Standardisation of Escape Velocities

(abbreviated by Roland T. Tramp, from original articles by Honda Prelude, deduced from the archives of The Wogan Institute for Penetrating Sociological Insight & High Fat Diets (W.I.P.S.I.&.H.F.D.) on Planet Donut).

Long, long ago, when the world was younger, the sky bluer and I still had all my own teeth, a small group of Chinese peasants found they no longer needed to work 16 hours a day for a bowl of rice. Consequently, they were able to very rapidly develop a civilisation, culture, the Arts, some more Arts and, of course, philosophy.
(In fact there was no discernible revolution, very little invention of machinery, no discovery of treacle mines or whatever and only one incident of blood letting. They shot their landlord).

One evening after their 3-a-side Beckhamball and Art class, they gazed up at the sky and pondered.

'What's it like up there?' asked One.
'Dunno. You talk English whenever we philosophise, y'know,' said Major Second.

'Multifaceted, that's me,' said One. ‘And the English are too idle to learn Cantonese.’
'Could we go and see?' asked a Minor Third, rather timidly.

'Could be risky,’ added a Fourth, who was reluctant to try anything unless success was assured, being something of a perfectionist.

'What's the use?' chipped in a Diminished Fifth, who was feeling blue.

One looked at the Tibetan monk, a reincarnation of the world’s first geneticist and a breeder of Elephants, who was talking to the circus master.
The circus master was very pleased with his elephants, as they'd learned to use a gigantic see saw - a crowd-pleaser and money earner.

One approached the circus master, Wip Sparing Lee, and the monk, Know Kan Doo, and recited his idea.

‘Honourable Know Kan Doo. My fellows and I have been thinking, and we would appreciate your opinion.'

Know Kan Doo smiled suspiciously, partly due to the appellation 'Honourable' which often preceded requests for unpaid help, and partly because reincarnation had amassed in his metaphorical whine-cellar seventeen lifetimes worth of cynicism.

'It is my opinion that the next shower of rain will be wet,' said Know Kan Doo. He held out his begging bowl, purely by habit.

'Fine piece of handicraft,' said One. 'What we were thinking was, if Wip Lee's elephant jumped off that plinth onto the seesaw, would an inanimate object on the other end reach the stars and maybe tell us whether they are in fact cream cheese or icing?'

The owner of the elephants, Wip Lee, grunted indignantly.

'And would this provide an even more profitable attraction for Wip Lee's circus?'
The owner of the elephants grunted in an agreeable manner.

***

X Pendable Xtra was feeling better with the fresh bandages applied to his head and a concoction containing aspirin and rice vodka to drink
'Next time you launch, I'll stay indoors,' he promised, since the inanimate object had landed on his head.

'Good lad, Xtra,' said Diminished Fifth sympathetically. 'Not to worry.'

'It's reached about 400 feet before plunging back to Earth,' said Wip Lee, who was now moonlighting as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Seeing What's Up There. (I.S.W.U.T.).

'Not the Earth. My head!' declared Xtra.
'Good lad, Xtra,' soothed A Minor Third. 'Not to worry.'

One had an idea. The plinth, the seesaw and an elephant could travel to the top of the Himmel Layers and launch from there. Maybe then the object would escape the Earth’s gravity. He said so.

The elephants eyed one another nervously, immediately went into a huddle, invented "post-totalitarian socialism with ‘Do No Evil plus modest use of pay-per-click advertising’ " and appointed Know Kan Doo as their shop steward.
They weren't entirely sure what a shop was, or a steward, but Know Kan Doo had seen the future and assured them it was a title with considerable mileage.

A bottle of champagne was launched on the spur of the moment, to celebrate the new Institution and it landed on Xtra's head. He commenced speaking in tongues. some of them forked.

'Good lad, Xtra,' said Diminished Fifth sympathetically. 'Not to worry.'

It was at about this time that Xtra became religious and commenced praying for the extinction of the duck-brained platitude, which may have been misinterpreted or misheard by the deity in question.

'Up the mountain?' said the shop steward. 'No way.' And the elephants relaxed. They promised to pay their shop steward for his sterling services, but not right this minute.

'Plan B, then,' said One. 'Let's use lots of elephants.'
'Many elephants descend at same rate as one elephant,' observed Minor Third. 'One cubit per octave squared.'

'Are you sure?'

'No. U. Sure is my ex brother in common law. I'm Minor Third.'
Know Kan Doo nodded sagely and departed purposefully towards his cave, collecting some herbs en route.

***

Three days later, the smoke ceased to pour from Know Kan Doo’s cave and he emerged unsteadily into the daylight.
'I see a system of interconnected asymmetric diagonal see-saw levers (ADSL), which sum the acceleration of the various elephants into the final see-saw,' wheezed Know Kan Doo, whilst scraping the creosote from his vision-inducing pipe. 'And the final see-saw had better be made of pretty damned strong wood, too.'

By the happiest of happy coincidences, the asymmetric seesaw levers they constructed were exactly 1 IPUSC (Intergalactic Parallel-Universities Standard Cubit) on the short side, and 2 IPUSC on the long.

And it came to pass, after this rather exotic cultural revolution, that they launched a missile into space, and it took exactly 300 elephants to do so. This historic event didn’t resolve the ‘Are the stars made of cream cheese or icing?’ debate beyond reasonable doubt so further research funding was applied for.

Happily, the genetic engineering had rendered all elephants of the circus the same mass, so they were in fact Generalised Chinese Standard Elephants (GCSEs).

Happily, the plinth turned out to be exactly 3 Intergalactic Parallel-Universities Standard Cubits high.

Of course, and you'd probably already guessed, many generations of circus owners had badgered (or possibly panda’d, being Chinese) the reincarnations of Know Kan Doo to breed pink elephants, which all right-thinking bigots know gets the punters into the circus like no other colour. Especially if it’s intimately associated with long female thighs of the human type, preferably in twos, and still attached to their owner.

'No can do,' said Know Kan Doo, so the pink paint industry was secure and the Footsie Wah Nundred at the Peking Stock-Exchange hardly wobbled.

Incredible though it may seem, and this has been proposed as incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God, the mass of the Generalised Chinese Standard Elephant was found to be exactly 3.7285691 Intergalactic Parallel-Universes Standard Boring Tonnes, which was very handy for the manufacturers of slide rules, who'd feared it may be 4.000 000

***

‘Strewth Urchin,’ said Meredith. ‘You were right.’
‘One empty shop equals one potential squat,’ observed Skye, ever mindful of the plight of her homeless pals.

The End

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