Here you go, friends. I just put the finishing touches on my newest novel, and chapter 19 nails the coffin shut, as it were. This is the third "Michael Nitrous" novel, and I think it ties the others together. Enjoy!
19.
Salo
is 100% woody. Salo is 100% filmy. That's right – it is both
entirely woody and entirely filmy. It is the only substance on the
face of the earth that has joined, in a hypostatic union of sorts, a
perfect amount of woodiness and a perfect amount of filminess.
Scientists using the most advanced quulmeters cannot figure it out.
It is as though the woodiness and the filminess exist within and
beside and around one another.
You might
recall that Dr. Kichener-Mellon, the Bezeldan Metaphysicist who was
so critical to an earlier part of this tale put it this way in his
award-winning dissertation “Up My Big Fat Creek With Your Lumbering
Sliderule”:
x
= [(y – z) + p] + s
Where:
x
is the separation of the layers, measured in sweat, and
y
is one layer,
z
is another layer,
p
is the woody/filmy proportion, and
s
is the salo-coefficient.
It came
to be realized that salo was itself the one substance that not only
perfectly matched the salo-coefficient (for obvious reasons), but
also wreaked havoc on the rest of the equation due to the woody/filmy
proportion being expressed as either 1 or 1/1. Salo became the
philosopher's stone – the rosetta stone – the alchemic wonder of
the ages. Salo was not only a tasty ethnic treat for Ukrainians
around the world, but also a component in every research laboratory
on Bezelda.
Within
months, scientists had narrowed down (on paper, anyway) the formula
for cold fusion using salo and the salo-coefficient, and it slowly
dawned on them that the path of cold fusion was one they did not want
to walk. The path of cold fusion would leave the salo depleted.
Expended. Spent.
As it
would leave the moral fabric of Bezelda.
Dig this,
my friends – when the American scientists detonated the first
atomic bomb way back in the 1940s, they did not know it, but at the
time the detonation resulted in a 18% drop in woodiness on the planet
earth. Earthly scientists had no idea what filminess and woodiness
were, let alone how a proportion between the two could affect life on
earth, so they went ahead and detonated several atomic weapons –
resulting in woody levels to drop to dangerously low levels.
How could
earthly scientists have known? They had no quulmeters.
The
Bezeldan scientists figured out what the repurcussions of cold fusion
would be well before they ever attempted it. Mock trials were set up
in large salo-generating laboratories, and industrial-strength
quulmeters were calibrated to insanely high levels of accuracy. In
the end, the Bezeldan High Council of Common Sense ruled that cold
fusion must not be undertaken for the good of future Bezeldan
generations. The scientists boarded up the cold fusion laboratory,
coated the salo in dark chocolate, and threw a gala shindig. The
poet-laureate of Bezelda, Cran Hylen, wrote a sacred pep-mull to
commemorate the event:
In the
darkest of night-time science
O!
With a quul-knowing of filmish-ness.
For
young,
for
old.
Adipose
pork tissue without reproach; without guile!
All of
Bezelda agreed that it was one of the finest pep-mulls ever written,
and it was eventually engraved on a plaque that stands at the very
spot where the cold-fusion laboratory used to be.
At the
same time that the pep-mull was released into the eternal ether of
all layers of existence, David Hall realized what the turntable
looked like. In one place in time, anyway.
In
another place in time, a black-bladed dagger appeared, seemingly out
of nowhere, and materialized in the unfortunate position of David's
cranium. This was while he was standing between layers of existence
very near NEK-CHEK enterprises. Soon the two entities (David hall
and the dagger) were occupying the same space in the same aspect of
existence, and one or the other had to give.
You can
figure out how this fits together. Rab-klaat.
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