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hair ruffled, his
sweaty right hand clutching his favourite axe, his sweaty left hand clutching a
large metal toolbox, his left ear sagging under the weight of a hinged,
extensible rule, and his mouth bristling with several six-inch nails, blundered
into yet another dead-end passage. He swore through the six-inch nails and
tried another passage at random. At the very end he found the dioxystable
modulo-cystometric airlock.
    “At last!” he thought. He
turned the handle, but nothing happened. He swore through the six-inch nails
again, at which point a small red voice asked, “Beep, beep?”
    twaX had no idea what the
question was. “No,” he answered.
    “Beep, beep, beep,” continued
the small red voice.
    “Open this flipping door!” said
twaX through the six-inch nails.
    “Beep!”
    The carpenter gave the
door-handle a more forceful turn and this time it came off in his hand. He
sighed in frustration but, on pushing the door, found that it slowly creaked
open. Quickly he stepped into the airlock. The outer door gave way without a
struggle and he found himself standing outside the spaceship. He discarded the
door-handle and gave a huge grin. He breathed in the air, filling his lungs to
the brim, and then coughed vigorously to clear them again; the atmosphere had
both an unpleasant smell and an unpleasant taste.
    He was standing on solid,
black ground, which was flat and featureless as far as the eye could see. twaX
looked about for any signs of trees towering magnificently over the landscape,
but there were none.
    He shrugged. It wouldn’t be
long before he found one. Forgetting to close the airlock doors behind him, he
chose a direction and set off, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. He
broke into a run and, had anyone been watching him at that moment, they would
have seen him running off into the distance, waving his axe over his head and
muttering wildly to himself.
    *
    In his cabin, fluX filled in
the final figure in the final column of a pageful of numbers. The figure was a
‘-2’. All the other figures in the final column were ‘-2’. He nearly jumped out
of his skin with joy, punching the air victoriously.
    “I hov done it!” he cried. “I
hov jolly-vell done it! Zis is probably ze most important discovery in ze
history of Humankind!”
    “Really?” said LEP’s presence
in the dark cabin.
    “Ya. Hold on.” fluX
frantically searched through the pile of petromorphic ytterbium cellulose
sheets strewn haphazardly over his desk. The sheets were covered with tables of
figures, small multi-coloured graphs and rapidly scribbled calculations. On
finding the sheet he was after, he neatly copied out an equation from it onto a
blank sheet. He underlined the equation twice and ringed it in red. Then, in
large lettering, he wrote above it: ‘THE EQUATION OF STATE’. This, too, he
underlined several times. He drew a box encircling it in red. He gave the box a
thick red border. Then he drew four large arrows pointing to the four corners
of the box. He enlarged the arrows and added pillars on either side of the box.
Finally, he sat back to admire it.
    “Very nice,” said LEP. “But
is it Art?”
    “Vot?” asked fluX, looking up
from the sheet.
    “Never mind,” said LEP.
    “You vant to know vot zis
is?”
    “No,” said LEP quickly.
    “I hov just come even closer
to proving ze existence of God!”
    “Oh dear,” said LEP,
wondering how to change the subject.
    “Some years ago I inwented
the new Science of Quantum Semantics,” fluX started explaining. “I derived it
by applying ze laws of Quantum Mechanics to ze English language. My ideas vere
videly scorned and ridiculed.”
    LEP said nothing.
    “But now I sink I vill have
ze last laugh! I sink zat Quantum Semantics may be ze answer to proving God
exists! After all, ze proof is in ze English language; in ze very vords ve
speak.”
    fluX beamed ecstatically.
    “Let me explain,” he said.
“Ze Science of Quantum Semantics says zat all ze