Selby Snaps by Duncan Ball Page B

needlework picture she was sewing on a piece of cloth.
    ‘Ahah!’ Percy exclaimed again. ‘But these aren’t worm wormholes, they’re holes that go through space and time.’
    ‘Do you mean that someone could suddenly go through one of these wormhole thingies and end up in a different place at a different time?’ Dr Trifle asked.
    ‘As everybody knows,’ Percy said, ‘a microsecond after the mega blast when the universe began there were further mega blasts which left the galaxies in clusters and wrinkles in the space-time continuum. Naturally, this left wormholes. Are you with me?’
    ‘Wow!’ Selby thought. ‘I get goose bumps just listening to him. He’s sooooooooo smart! But I don’t have a clue what he’s saying.’
    ‘I don’t have a clue what you’re saying,’ Dr Trifle said.
    ‘Easy peasy. I’ll show you … ‘ Percy said, taking the cloth out of Mrs Trifle’s hands. ‘Hmmmmm. Interesting design. A girl and a dinosaur.’
    ‘It’s a Princess,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘She’s locked in a tower. That’s a dragon.’
    ‘Very nice,’ Percy said, crumpling the clothinto a tiny ball. ‘Okay, once upon a time the universe was tiny — like this.’
    ‘The whole universe?’ asked Mrs Trifle.
    ‘Even tinier. Then
kabooooooooom
and
kabooooooooom
again and again,’ Percy said, throwing the cloth onto the carpet. ‘Now the universe is like this. The earth and the sun and the moon are only tiny dots in there somewhere. See the wrinkles?’
    ‘I certainly do,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘Now I’m going to have to iron it again.’
    ‘The wrinkles cause wormholes. You could be over here one minute,’ Percy said, stabbing the cloth with his finger, ‘and suddenly
snap
you’d end up over here, say, in the time of the dinosaurs.’
    ‘Or in Europe when there were princesses in towers,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘But if these wormholes really exist why haven’t I seen one?’
    ‘Because they’re invisible. Invisible tubes that move around slowly like the thing that cleans the gunk off the bottom of your swimming pool.’
    ‘So why don’t we go snapping through wormholes and disappearing all the time?’ Dr Trifle asked.
    ‘Because we haven’t reached a hyper-sympathetic coefficient of molecular frequency!’ Percy explained. ‘We’re not jiggling at the right speed. If someone was jiggling enough and the end of a wormhole came around then snapoff they’d go. Which is what brings me here today. I want you to build a time-travel machine.’
    ‘But I’m just an old-fashioned inventor,’ Dr Trifle protested. ‘You need a young science whiz.’
    ‘You’ve already invented the perfect thing,’ Percy said. ‘Remember your B-E-D?’
    ‘My bed?’
    ‘No, not your bed, your B-E-D. Your Bifurcated Energy Dispenser. The thing you
attached
to your bed to jiggle it. It was an invention to help people get to sleep, remember?’
    ‘I remember all right,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘It jiggled us off to sleep and out the door and down the street. We woke up the next morning in the middle of the Bogusville roundabout.’
    ‘One of my more embarrassing inventions,’ Dr Trifle admitted. ‘I shouldn’t have knurled so much off the eccentrics of the sleepenhancement modulator when I was preening the cam peaks.’
    ‘And you should have nailed the bed to the floor,’ Mrs Trifle said.
    ‘Well, I think that a jiggling bed is just what we need to go through a wormhole if we can get it jiggling at the right jiggle-rate,’ Percy said. ‘Do you still have the B-E-D?’
    ‘Yes, it’s in my workroom,’ Dr Trifle said.
    ‘Okay, kiddies,’ the astronomer said, ‘time for B-E-D. There’s no time to waste!’
    And so it was that Dr Trifle raced into his workroom, got his B-E-D and bolted it to the Trifles’ bed.
    ‘This is sooooo exciting!’ Selby thought as he watched Dr Trifle nail the bed to the floor and then plug in the B-E-D controls.
    ‘Hop on and let’s go!’ Percy said, jumping on the