By Larry Leonard  (Copyright 2001)

    A railroad journey to a distant galaxy?
    $39.95 for a club car ticket to the Horsehead Nebula and back?
Even when you stand there and watch the damned train disappear, car by car into the tunnel, you just know that if you had a helicopter, you could fly up to the top of the ridge and see the things reappearing out the other end. Hundreds of years of human experience is involved here.
    That train has to pop out the far side.
    But it doesn’t.
    It just disappears.  And, one hour, sixteen minutes and eight seconds later, the damn thing comes out the same side of the tunnel it went in, engine first, car by car.  Proxima Centauri or M16, five minutes at the destination or five years, it doesn’t matter.  One hour, sixteen minutes and eight seconds later, the train is back.
     “Isn’t it wonderful?” said my fifth wife, whose name was Persephone because her father, a professor of classic western mythology, had wanted a son.  We could have booked seats on the train that had just disappeared (in every sense of the word) in that tunnel, but I had wanted to watch it go myself. 

After all the three vee news and documentary coverage, after all the incomprehensible explanations in the scholarly scientific publications, after all the silly science in the newspapers and even after my neighbor and his sister had come back with digital slides from the Hubcap Galaxy, I still had to see it for myself.  (I have long maintained that Frank’s sister is proof that creatures from space are already living among us.  You wouldn’t believe what she does in Frank’s toolshed when he isn’t there.)  Most importantly, I wanted to see it return one hour, sixteen minutes and eight seconds later ... and with the same passengers that had been on it when it departed.
     “Isn’t what wonderful?” I said as I guided Persephone
towards a station platform café that featured coffee made from beans grown on some planet called Xanthippe.  I placed her at a table in the shade, admiring the way her body changed shape as she sat down, and envying the chair.
     I went to the takeout window and got two cups of the dark red coffee and a couple of croissants.  She looked up and smiled as I returned.  My knees wobbled.
     “You’re so sweet.  How did I ever catch a prize like you?” she said.  You don’t know Persephone well enough, yet, to understand why that statement and that question were lovingly sarcastic.
      “Luck,” I answered.  She smiled that smile that would melt chrome and threw a sugar packet at me.  “Beast,” she said.
      “Soon,” I answered, prompting a knowing smile that seductively turned up at the corners of her mouth.  I instantly regretted my caution and wished that we had left on the train.  Sex with Persephone in a worm hole, technically, would last forever, depending on your point of view.  I could see by her expression that she knew what was in my mind.  She took in a breath of air, stretching the fabric of her silky, pale blue cotton shirt.
      “I hate it when you do that,” I said
      “It’s torture?” she said, her smile broadening and her eyes going round with false puzzlement.  “You mean you’ll get me for doing it?” She took another breath.
      It had been worth four wives to get to this.
      In exactly one hour, sixteen minutes and eight seconds, the train came out of the tunnel.  I had memorized some people’s dress and physical characteristics.  They got off.  I walked up to one fellow, a big, dark Slavic type with a square face.
     “How was the trip?” I asked him.
      “I haven’t got the words to describe it,” he said.  “You going out on the next one?”
      I nodded.  “Honeymoon,” I said.
      He stuck out his hand.  It felt like human flesh.   “Break a leg,” he said, grinning, then turned away and walked toward the coffee window.
      The train made a clunking sound.  They were adding two cars. I recalled that the spacing of standard American railroad tracks was based on the distance between the wheels of Roman chariots. A railroad truck, or set of wheels, would fit perfectly in the ruts in the ancient stone roads constructed during the Roman occupation of England.
     The world’s first railroad builders, originally people who fashioned British carriages and work wagons that had to run in those ruts, were used to those dimensions.  Their very shop tools were designed to work with those dimensions.
     So, the width of the tracks at my feet had been determined by Julius Caesar’s defeat of the Celts right about two thousand and fifty-eight years ago.  Shortly after that, he had crossed the Rubicon river and begun the civil war that ended in his dictatorship for life, and his death.
     Was I about to cross a Rubicon of my own?  An intergalactic Rubicon spanned by an Einsteinian space/time railroad trestle? This was the month of March, all right.  Oh, no.  Which day?  (This is why when people ask me what it’s like to be a freelance writer, I tell them it’s hell.  You research so many subjects that your mind is cluttered with stuff like that.  It distorts your personality. You could be falling to your death down a two thousand-foot granite cliff and idly recall that the Earth has a mass of six times ten to the twenty-seventh grams.)
     A porter was loading our gear on board.   I went along to give him a hand. Persephone was wearing something gossamer when I finished storing the luggage and entered our tiny private compartment.  Her garment was like a weak star.  You had to look to one side to see it.  I don’t think I was drooling, actually, but by the delighted look on her face, I believe she thought we were playing Dracula Closes In On The Village Virgin when the train went into the tunnel.

                                             II

Bilbo Bunny and Rascal Rabbit were well aware that their nemesis, Clem Coyote, was right behind them, and closing fast.  As they had suspected, he had not been working on his own.  From the look of his ship, the Agriculture Department, itself, was helping him. Natural control of galactic agricultural pests, they called it.
     “This sucks,” said Bilbo Bunny.  “Look at that thing!  It’s one of the Schulz designs.  Probably has trans-trans warp drive!”
     Rascal Rabbit, who was much taller and trimmer than the portly Bilbo Bunny, nodded his long-eared head.  “It’s a big bastard, all right,” he said, grinning.  “What do you say we ram it?”
     Bilbo Bunny’s eyes looked “upwards,” traditionally accepted in space as the area above the ship’s flight controls.  He shook his pudding head and sighed.  “Why can’t you ever be serious?  This is serious!”
     “Nothing is ever serious,” retorted the still grinning Rascal Rabbit. He yanked on the attitude control, flipping the ship over. The Millenium Lettuce was now aimed directly at their pursuer.  Clem Coyote’s ship began to close the distance between them at a much greater rate.  As the Lettuce slowed its former velocity, then assumed the reverse velocity, the gap between them shrank like a cheap pair of wet blue jeans in a hot dryer.
     His paws squeezing the chair arms so tightly that the blood was forced from them, Bilbo Bunny’s eyes grew larger.  Rascal Rabbit was playing space chicken with Clem Coyote!
     “Who the hell do you think you are?” he said through gritted teeth.  “James Dean?”
     “You gotta do something,” said Rascal Rabbit without looking at him.
    The two ships were no more than a thousand kliks apart.  In three minutes, if Rascal Rabbit didn’t swerve off, they would be able to see Clem Coyote’s ugly muzzle in person.  It would be the last thing they’d ever see.
     “How are your reflexes today?” asked Bilbo Bunny, suddenly.
     Rascal Rabbit had been concentrating on the approaching ship, his paw claws pressing lightly on the controls, ready for the quickest, most delicate of adjustments.
     “Ain’t no coyote quick as me,” he said without looking away from the forward view screen.
     “Glad to hear it,” said Bilbo Bunny, “because this has become The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”
     “What?” said Rascal Rabbit.
     “We have company,” said Bilbo Bunny.  “It’s a three-way shootout.”
     Rascal Rabbit frowned.  He risked a millisecond’s glance at the flanking side screens, and saw the problem, immediately.  Coming in from the port side at about thirty degrees elevation, all sixty starboard cannons blazing, was Captain Horatio Hornblower in a four-masted ship of the line. The solar sails were filled with the bright light from the nearby sun of the planet, Salad.
     “Damn!” said Rascal Rabbit.  The defensive radar beeped.  Incoming.  He twitched the controls slightly, but not quickly enough, and a twenty pound cannon ball caught the Milennium Lettuce’s radar dish square in the side, obliterating it.  The ship was blind.  The last image he saw on the forward screen was Clem Coyote’s ship veering off to starboard, flame shooting from somewhere aft.
     He had taken a ball, too.

                                       III

Imagine that all the vacuum cleaners in the world were connected in series, then plugged into the full power output of the five largest hydroelectric dams on the greatest river of the American West, the Columbia.  Now visualize that you are standing right in front of the cavernous suction pipe, encased in that clear ulti-plastic stuff.  Picture a four foot diameter titanium foundation pipe, filled with concrete and going down thirty miles to bedrock, securely attached to the bottom of that transparent cube you’re in.  Somebody throws the power switch and runs like hell.  What happens?  You just stand there and watch the top ten feet of the continent suck by.
     That is what it’s like to be in a wormhole.
     There is no feeling of personal motion, at all.
     The experience seems to go on forever and to be over before any time has passed, both.  Persephone was standing there with a shocked look on her face.  She said, “Wow!”
     The compartment was suddenly pale greenish-gold.  We looked out the window.  We looked at each other.  “It works,” we said simultaneously, and laughed.  Then we started dancing like a couple of fools.
     “Get dressed, you hussy,” I said.  “And where’s your camera bag?”
     She’s the best cameraman I ever worked with.  Stills or motion, her exposures are on target, her compositions classic and her message the poetry of the subject.  When she shoots a bum you can tell he knows every damp, rat-infested nook in the city.  When she shoots a socialite, you know that the woman is the product of two centuries of blue blood breeding, finishing schools the general public has never heard of and the grace of Almighty God.
     I fell hopelessly in love with her on first sight, but I never fool around with the help.  One night after a particularly difficult shoot, we were sitting at a country tavern in the Oregon woods.  Suddenly, she said, “No, I do not want another beer.  I want to get married.”
     “To who?” I asked, innocently.  “I didn’t know you were dating, let alone engaged.”
     Her mother is the only living relative she has.  She is six feet, six inches tall, and if she holds her breath looks like she should be guarding the entrance to the Baltic Sea.  You know, one leg on each country and her hands holding a spear with a whale impaled down the shaft.  At the wedding she said something in Norwegian just as the minister asked Persephone if she would take this man.   Persephone started laughing and my family started nodding, then began to leave.  They apparently thought the divorce had begun.

    “Where are we?” Persephone asked, unfortunately pulling on her jeans. I damn near cried, but work comes first.  “Oh, stop it!” she said, reading the look on my face.  “You’ll get double, later.  Where the hell are we?”
     Walt is the planet’s name.  At least, that’s what the wall monitor said in English.  The natives call it something else, but the word has yet to be translated.  It’s located in Andromeda and circles a sun that’s a bit brighter, whiter, than Sol.  Lots of oxygen, some nitrogen in the atmosphere.  The greenish-gold surface light is caused by sunlight filtering through waste gasses emitted by a microscopic plant that lives full time in a stratospheric layer of the atmosphere.
     The train slowed to a stop next to a building shaped like a pyramid with curving walls.  It looked like three peach slices leaning together at the top. I knew I had an article sale when I saw the station master standing there wearing jodhpurs and a beret, and holding a riding crop and a megaphone.
    Three hours later, we were riding across the strange, rolling landscape, in a WWII vintage German staff car, heading for the great falls of the Los Angeles River.  Our guide was T.E. Lawrence.
     “Are you a native of Walt?” I asked him.
     “Right,” he said, in a distinctly British upper class accent.
     “You look human,” said Persephone.
     “Quite,” he said.  “Although, to those of my species, I look exactly like I always have.”
     “So, it’s an illusion, then, Colonel?”
     “Not of my making,” he said.  “It is something in the air, we think. A kind of narcotic when humans breathe it  To you, we take on shapes that you all agree on, unconsciously.   Apparently, the most common character images, to human beings, are those presented in your entertainment mediums.  After a few humans select an image for one of us, we forever reflect that image to other human beings, as well.  I was Lawrence of Arabia to the first three humans I met.”
     We drove through a grove of spiral, coil spring shaped plants that were roughly the size of fruit trees.  What looked like oranges on the loops turned out to be eyes.  I noticed them blinking when the dust from our vehicle reached them.  A living thing that was part plant and part animal. I  made a note about it in my hand tape recorder.  Persephone would have to get a shot of them on the way back.
     “Where did this staff car come from?” asked Persephone.
     “North Africa,” he answered.  “It used to be Rommel’s.  Some of the germs on the glove compartment door produce nasal diptheria, so he must have sneezed on it just before he got out the last time.”
                                             IV

     Rascal Rabbit was flying blind, and did not like it much.  But, he was not  without resources.  The ship’s computer was fine, and he had all the data up to the point the ship had been hit.  He knew where things used to be, and could make an estimate of the ship’s current location based on last known velocity and the time that had expired.  He set it up as a video game hooked to the controls, and grinned.
     Bilbo Bunny was not happy about the situation. “I suppose you have figured out just what Clem Coyote is going to do, and programmed all his moves in there, too,” he complained.
     “Coyotes are idiots,” said Rascal Rabbit.  “I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s getting the hell out of Hornblower’s way.  So, as a matter of fact, are we.”
     He moved the controls, sending the Millennium Lettuce  into a deep diving arc to starboard.  They heard one more cannonball make a glancing hit on the hull before they got out of range.  He zeroed in the planet, Salad, on the scope  crosshairs, punched a button and let go of the controls.  The ship accelerated, and the cyber-Salad remained dead ahead.  He leaned back in the pilot’s chair, pulled a pack of Camels from his pilot’s chair pocket and, removing one from the pack, lit it with a Harley Davidson Zippo lighter.  He took in a deep drag of smoke, then let it issue from his nostrils, circling around his whiskers as it dissipated.
     “I don’t know anybody over the age of twenty who smokes those things,” said Bilbo Bunny, “Except for thugs and longshoremen, anyway.  It’s like sucking on a smelter smokestack.”
     Rascal Rabbit grinned and blew a puff in his direction.  Bilbo Bunny snorted and brought out a briar pipe.  He stuffed it with vanilla cavendish, lit it with a Diamond  wooden match he sparked from one of his front teeth and sat back contentedly, himself.
     It was an old banter between them.  An ancient, comfortable disagreement between companions of the road.
     “Snob,” said Rascal Rabbit.  “You think you’re Bing Crosby.”
     They were both asleep, counting on the ship’s planetary proximity system to warn them when they were about to enter Salad’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, that system was integrated with the data systems on the central navigation computer, and the ship, because Rascal Rabbit had failed in his game programming to compensate for solar windage, thought they were still a half a million klicks out when they hit the outer layers.
     Naturally, they were in a pickle by the time they discovered the problem.
                                          V

This whole thing, my pre-trip research convinced me, can be blamed on Dr. E. Rudite of the University of Hawaii.  Back in the late Nineties, he worked on the Kamioka experiment  which was a telescope under a mountain in Japan.  You read that right.  A telescope under a mountain.  You see, the light he collected went right through normal telescopes.  Right through the lenses the mirrors, the cameras, the film, the floor.
      This kind of light is made from neutrinos.
      Neutrinos are “weakly interactive” subatomic particles.  By weakly interactive, it means that as one flies along, it doesn’t notice other forms of matter very much.  A neutrino that happens to be good at dodging and has a bit of luck can pass through a solid block of nuclear reactor lead shielding fifty light years thick.  Since the distance light travels in a year is about six trillion miles, that means a hunk of lead three hundred trillion miles from one end to the other! Collapsing suns emit a neutrino shock wave that leads the other parts of the spectra.  So astronomers thought having a neutrino-o-scope would be a handy warning to standard optical observatories that a supernova was going to be visible in such and such a place at such and such a time.  Catching the first part of a supernova would provide lots of things for astronomers to argue about for decades.
     Some of you know the other thing about neutrinos.  Since the galaxies hold their shape instead of winding up into a ball, it means there is a lot more mass in them than we can see in visible light. The neutrino has been a candidate for this “dark matter” that adds solid spokes to a disc of stars.  As a matter of fact, the neutrino, it has been suggested, could provide the answer to the destiny of the cosmos.  Since there are so many of them, if they had the slightest amount of mass, they could collectively generate enough deformations in Einsteinian space/time that the universe would one day begin to collapse.
    This would answer one question and pose another.  The question answered would be the one about continued expansion and the ultimate heat death versus the cycling bang/crunch theory of universal reincarnation.
    The question posed would be about the necessity for God in a cyclic universe that always was and always will be.
     Well, Dr, E. Rudite and the Kamioka Klub stuffed tens of thousands of gallons of pure water in a tank under a mountain, stacked a bunch of photometers in the tank, then watched to see what came through from the other side of the Earth and happened to collide with one of the skillions of atoms in the liquid.   The weak interaction description still allows for the occasional hit.  Weak don’t mean never.  The odds of it happening are, well, astronomical, but if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, etc.
     It happened, and the measurements proved that the neutrino has mass.
     That was good enough for most folks, but not enough for Rudite.  He snuck back to the U.S. mainland and convinced some very large defense contractors that there were practical uses to this particle.  The uses he sold them on are not public, of course, but one journalist who works the defense beat suggested a neutrino missle.  If you dropped it in the right place, it would fall through the earth and come through the floor of some place you wished to disappear! (So much for a Strategic Anti-missle Defense Shield.)  Rudite, a Sixties Peace and Love fanatic to this very day (what used to be called a “hippie,” God knows why.), denied that accusation, but some still doubt his response since he has been photographed  barbecuing two dead sheep at a time on his deck.
His lambs are silenced with glowing charcoal.
     Further evidence of the potential dark side of Rudite comes from the fact that guests to his Hawaiian sheep sacrifices are often people who have tattoos.
     And, this is why we ended up with a train that travels faster than light. (Caused by the neutrinos, not the tattoos.)  Rudite built his Super Neutrino-O-Scope under a northern California mountain that on its surface, in addition to thousands of square miles of cultivated plants that are used to make rope, had a railroad track that ran through a tunnel. Some days after he was up and running, his million gallons of water were momentarily sloshed by a local earthquake generated by the San Andreas Fault.  For an instant, the surface of the liquid assumed a dish shape, which focused all incoming neutrinos from a coincidentally-timed supernova shock wave exactly on the space/time coordinates of the railroad tunnel.  The fate of tourism in the cosmos was determined on the spot.
     A permanent space/time deformation was created.  The shores of distant galaxies were suddenly just a hoot and a holler away from Oroville.
     The technical explanation is indecipherable, and, like luminiferous ether, probably wrong.  Anyway, it roughly goes like this.  Every point in space exists concurrently with an anti-point in anti-space.  Now, those who follow subatomic particle physics know that for years scientists have been looking for certain particles to match the few lonely ones in the otherwise symmetrical particle family chart.  All but a few of the pairs have been noted.  As it turns out, the anti-particle pairing for the neutrino is a particle of space in our universe, just as our neutrino is a particle of anti-space in the anti-universe.
    That's what they had missed all these years.
    Rudite’s accidental neutrino pulse aimed at that railroad tunnel increased the instantaneous density of the volume of space in a sphere four hundred feet in diameter located near the middle of the passage.  That’s how the train is able to travel at speeds apparently far greater than light.
    Ten feet of track in that sphere spans a million light years of space.
    The first train that went through that tunnel after the sphere of condensed space/time was created came out the same side it went in, one hour, sixteen minutes and eight seconds later.  Three of the passengers had died of heart attacks, four Presbyterians had converted to Buddhism, sixty-one became mildly catatonic and one, an advertising man, claimed that it had been a hallucination due to his accidental inhalation of a spray deodorant manufactured by one of his clients.  (Sales shot out of sight, and he got a vice presidency for thinking on his feet.)
    An empty engine was sent in after that.  It came out the same side it went in. Rats and monkeys were sent in, and came back.  Astronauts went in and came back with stories of visits to distant star systems.  The government tried to clamp the whole thing down and figure out how to use it as a weapon, but it was too late.  In the end, it was the Southern Pacific and Dr. E. Rudite, as its new CEO, who took over the greatest wheeled cruse ship in history.
    Overcoming fears of being stuck on a methane planet with one’s liver being eaten by something called a xxqcdaits kept sales below projections, so they dropped the rates and people who either had a death wish, no brains or a residence in Rio Linda began going on the trips.
    I got an assignment from an editor who knows the value of freelance writers as guinea pigs, and, as the expense paid trip coincided with my marriage and my wife was an adventurous freelance photographer who didn’t want to live without me, boarded the Cosmic Express, and here I am.
    Standing beside a waterfall so high and so long that the equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea falls over its edge every four minutes.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” said Persephone.

                                        VI

     It was the shriek of the atmosphere passing over the hull of the Millennium Lettuce that brought Rascal Rabbit awake.  He kicked Bilbo Bunny in the shins.
     “Wha’?” said Bilbo Bunny.  “Are we there, already?”
     “We are fried rabbits in roughly thirty seconds you useless clod,” answered Rascal Rabbit.
     “That soon?” said Bilbo Bunny.  “What’s the hurry?”
     The hull had reached eight thousand degrees.  Soon, it would begin to become moldable, like soft clay, and would quickly afterwards assume the shape of Rascal Rabbit and Bilbo Bunny just before it splatted into the surface of the planet.
     “We’ve got visual,” Rascal Rabbit cried  triumphantly.  “The berthing cameras use a visual spectrum, not radar!”
     “You mean we’re going to see where we will be buried?” said Bilbo Bunny.
     Rascal Rabbit had the retro jets firing full blast.  The rate of hull temperature increase slowed, then the curve flattened out and began to descend.
     “Were not going to melt, after all,” he said.
     “But we’re going to crash, right?” said Bilbo Bunny.
     “At the moment, that seems likely,” came the answer.
     “But, you have a cunning plan.” said Bilbo Bunny.
     “Well …”
     It was at that exact instant that Clem Coyote’s Proton Laser shot a beam of heavy light across their bow.
     “ … crap!” finished Rascal Rabbit.
     “Well crap?” said Bilbo Bunny.  “What does that mean?  Well crap?”
     “The situation has deteriorated,” said Rascal Rabbit.
     “Are you crazy?” said Bilbo Bunny.  “We’re heading at unstoppable speed toward the surface in a half blind space ship!  What the hell’s left to deteriorate?”
     “We’re under fire, too,” said Rascal Rabbit.
     “I want off,” said Bilbo Bunny.  “This isn’t fun any more.”
     Then, Rascal Rabbit saw the great falls.  He grinned.
     “I’ve seen that look on your face, before,” said Bilbo Bunny. “You’re going to do something to make it worse, aren’t you?”
     “Hold on to your hat, “ said Rascal Rabbit.  “By the way, where are the windshield wiper controls?”
     “In a space ship?  Windshield wipers?”
     Rascal Rabbit pulled back on the stick, bringing the nose of the Millennium Lettuce up a bit.  The mauve blasts of neutron light told him that Clem Coyote was right behind them.  He adjusted the stick, again.  This would be a close one.  The falls rushed to meet them. At the last moment, he twitched the stick to one side and flew behind the falls, between the water and the cliff face.
     “Shriek!” shrieked Bilbo Bunny, but his discomfiture was lost to Rascal Rabbit, who had turned the Millennium Lettuce on its side and was negotiating the passage of the wavy cliff face at something over two thousand miles per hour.  It required all his skill, but he managed it.  A quarter of an hour later, the ship emerged from the far side of the falls. He breathed a sigh of relief, brought the ship level to the surface.
     “As soon as we land,” said Bilbo Bunny weakly, “I’m going to beat the hell out of you.  Right after I throw up.”
     “That’s that for Clem Coyote,” said Rascal Rabbit, ignoring his friend. He pulled back on the stick to clear an oncoming range of hills, then headed for nearby Selery Spaceport for a good stiff carrot juice and a radar dish repair job.
     He felt just fine.

                          VII

     “Look out!” cried T.E. Lawrence.  “It’s Rascal Rabbit with Clem Coyote hot on his tail!”
      Now, you just imagine how you would react to an idiotic statement like that.  I looked at him like he had lost all his marbles, of course.
     “What the hell are you yelling about?” I yelled, to get over the noise of the falls.   But, I looked to where he was pointing.  A rutabaga-shaped space ship was heading straight for us like a meteor.
     “Perseph –“ I started to yell.
     “Something bit me,” said Persephone, just walking up and zipping her jeans.  “It looked like a marshmallow with teeth.”
      I grabbed her and shoved her under Rommel’s staff car just as a beam of laser light slipped past the oncoming ship and hit the falls with a great hissing sound.  A sonic boom knocked me to the ground as the first ship went by and disappeared behind the falls.  Then I saw the second ship, the one that had tried to flame us.  I gave it the finger and grinned as it hit the falls with a great sploosh, disintegrating into a million dripping chunks.
      “That’ll teach the bastard,” I said to the piles of junk that were now washing away from the falls.
     “No, it won’t,” said T.E. Lawrence, standing at the edge of the cliff and staring downwards.  “Look!”
      I looked.  A battered, bedraggled coyote was just dragging himself to shore.  He sat on a rock for a moment, then got up, shook to clear his fur of water and started walking down the Los Angeles River.
      “Why do you call it the Los Angeles River?” I asked T.E. Lawrence.
      “We don’t.  That’s what humans from Southern California named it. Something about irony, whatever that is.”
      “Where’s the coyote going?”
      “Well, the Agriculture Department is down that way.  Maybe that’s where he’s going.”
      “Do you think it was poisonous?” said Persephone, who had crawled out from under Rommel’s staff car.
      “A coyote?”
      “No, the marshmallow that bit me.”
      “Oh,” interrupted T.E. Lawrence, “I didn’t know that had happened. Don’t worry about it.  That’s a grntqkxa.  It was an expression of sexual interest.”
      “My husband does that, too,” she replied.  “I hope.”

      It was the next Thursday that my editor called me.
      “Hey, how was the trip?  Did you get a good article for me?”
      “Yup,” I replied.  “It should result in an overhaul of American education and culture.”
      “Wow! What did you find up there that’ll do that?” he asked.
      “Proof,” I replied, “that Americans read too many comic books.”

(C) 2001 Larry Leonard