The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell by Harry Harrison Page B

you. It all seems fairly straightforward.”
    â€œStraightforward! I see nothing but confusion and obfuscation where you …”
    â€œSee the forest as well as the trees. I can inform you in full confidence that inventing the temporal helix for my time machine was much more difficult.” His teeth snapped off a piece of toast and he chewed it with quick rodént-like enthusiasm.
    â€œYou wouldn’t care to chop some of that metaphorical wood for me—would you?”
    â€œYes, of course.” He patted his lips with his napkin, giving his protruding teeth a surreptitious polish at the same time. “As soon as I discovered that Jiving Justin was involved in this matter, the shape of future things to come became clear …”
    â€œJiving Justin?” I burbled with complete lack of comprehension.
    â€œYes,” he cackled, flashing His teeth at me. “That’s what we used to call him at university.”
    â€œWho, who?” I was in owl overdrive again.
    â€œJustin Slakey. He used to play the slide trombone in our little jazz quartet. I must admit to being fairly groovy myself on the banjo as well—”
    â€œProfessor! The point of it all, please—would you kindly return to it?”
    â€œOf course. Even when I first met him, Slakey was a genius.
Old beyond his years—which considering the state of geriartrics might have been far older than he appeared. He took the theory of galactic strings, which as you undoubtedly know has been around as theory for a long time. No one had ever come close to tackling it until Slakey invented the mathematics to prove their existence. Even the theoretical wormtubes between galaxies were clear to him. He published some papers on these, but never put everything together into a coherent whole. At least, until now, I thought he hadn’t completed his theory. It is obvious that he has.”
    He washed some more nibbled toast down with a quick swig of coffee. I resisted more owl imitations.
    â€œStop at once!” I suggested. “Start over since I haven’t the slightest idea of what you are talking about.”
    â€œNo reason that you should. The reality of the wormholes between one universe and another can only be described by negative number mathematics. A nonmathematical model would be only a crude approximation—”
    â€œThen crudely approximate for me.”
    He chewed away, forehead furrowed in thought, unconsciously brushing away a strand of lank hair that floated down in front of his eyes. “Crudely put …”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œVery crudely put, our universe is like a badly cooked fried egg. In a pan of equally badly cooked and stringy eggs.” Breakfast had obviously inspired this imagery; I had eaten the eggs here before. “The frying pan represents space-time. But it must be an invisible frying pan since it has no dimensions and cannot be measured. Are you with me so far?”
    â€œYoke and all.”
    â€œGood. Entropy will always be the big enemy. Everything is running down, cooling down towards the heat death of the universe. If entropy could be reversed the problem would be easy to solve. But it cannot. But—” This was a big but since he raised an exclamatory finger and tapped his teeth. “But although entropy cannot be reversed, the rate of entropic decay
can be measured and displayed, only by mathematics of course, and can be proven to proceed at a different rate in different universes. You see the importance of this?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThink! If the rate of entropy in our universe were faster than the rate of entropy in universe X, let us say. Then to a theoretical observer in that universe our universe would appear to be decaying at a great rate. Right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œThen, it also becomes obvious that if an observer in our universe were to observe universe X, the entropy rate there would appear to be going in the