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The Onion's Defense Mechanism 9
Continued from last week like the previous... ehm, eight...
Sometime in the nineteen sixties, David Moffet, a tallish sort of man with a penchant for flannel shirts and blue jeans and a great big mop of hair, set down his thoughts on "smaller than usual technology." This was his term for it at the time, which he insisted he had coined.
He did this while working a day job selling furniture.
This he told me aboard the Von Neumann, while the old man was fetching us another cup of tea.
Seeing as how spending the bulk of his time at the orders desk writing down his thoughts wasn't entirely conducive to selling any furniture, he one day decided to throw down his furniture-selling suspenders, and he was fired for insubordination-- telling his sales manager to get stuffed and throwing a few leftover muffins around the showroom.
The muffins bouncing appealed to his physical sensibilities, so he retrieved the muffins and chucked them again at different walls to see the effects. He was about to try another round of throws when his social sensibilities kicked in and he decided to call it a day.
He left the little furniture store on the western edge of Worcester, Massachusetts, ran back up the hill to his home, where he packed his bags together, and headed out to the coast.
In late 1968 he boarded the Newton with a bunch of Swedish scientists, a not unattractive woman doctor from UCLA, and a Nantucketer man-of-all-trades.
The Newton was a funny-looking ship. In fact, Moffet had mistaken the tinfoil-like outer shell for a prop for a television show or a film or something. Moreso when the crew of blond, blond Swedish men in labcoats swirled out onto a balcony-like promontory, creating a mini-tempest around the doctor and man-of-all-trades who were already seated at a table on the balcony, reading a magazine and hammering a bookshelf together, respectively. Great turrets spouted from the top of the ship, and it rather looked like the business end of a mace that a knight of olden days might use.
After a few enquiries at the dock revealed to him that the Newton was sailing for an unannounced location in the middle of the Atlantic to do scientific research.
Moffet got himself aboard to check out these rumours for himself, posing as a reporter, working on a story about metal vs. wooden ships. In the middle of a tour, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and, having lost his chaperon around the vessel, hid himself in a very narrow space between two brightly coloured curved tubes, and slightly below the main floor of the level he found himself on, waist-deep in metal flooring.
Which is where he remained, because when the ship started up, the chaperon having assumed he'd left the ship out of boredom, as had a couple of previous reporters, the floor plates clanged and rattled rather too tightly against his hips, locking him in place between the tubes in the floor.
Days later, the stowaway presumed they'd reached their intended resting place, as the engines ceased to rumble and shake, and his waist, which had been jolted and jiggled repeatedly by the way the floor was shook by the engines, wobbled once more and was released from the floor plates, and he fell beneath the floor.
And this is where he made his big scientific breakthrough.
By fate, or destiny, or whatever, he'd fallen onto the floor, his rather large feet blocking a ventilation shaft and pinching off an intake valve connected to the two tubes at the very same time. An in scientific terms, generally, blocking ventilation shafts and intake valves are bad things to do. As they were in this case.
The experiments the men were carrying out in the ship, which Moffet could only guess at, resulted in a fantastic explosion, due to the lack of ventilation and intake of whatever was in the tubes.
This explosion rocked the entire ship, and somewhere in deeper in the Newton he could hear the telltale rushing of water.
Moffet had freed himself from the floor, in turn freeing the intake valve, and yet another explosion was heard from far below, somewhat muffled by water, now either between himself and the source of the explosions or dampening them at the very source.
However, blowing holes in ships wasn't his scientific breakthrough.
No. For, when he reached out through the hatch, which still remained some twenty feet above water, he looked around, and he was no longer on the planet Earth.
At least, not the planet Earth of nineteen sixty eight.
Some how, some where, he had been transported to nineteen ninety six.
All of which was probably a lie.
I took my last biscuit, headed to the hatch, and waited for the next boat back to Nantucket, where I'd preach to the locals about the dangers of nanotech, and perhaps get them to check their water, as it seemed to make captains go mad. David remained in the kitchen with the old man, sipping his tea and reminiscing about the attractive doctor from UCLA.
I was looking forward to seeing Kipper again. Call me Ishmael.
Not to be continued........................................................ ?
disclaimer:
Is that the end for our caped crusader?
Find out, in next week's thrilling bat-episode!
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