The cork from the champagne bottle flew past Hal (the skeleton Doctor Alhambra kept in the Transdimensional Authority's Lab the Sixth in case he had to explain the difference between a tracheotomy and a vasectomy to a new hire; not Hal, the x-ray (among other things) technician, although, to be fair, the x-ray (among other things) technician could stand to gain a few pounds), ricocheted off Centrifuge C (widely regarded by the scientists who regularly used her as "the least introspective piece of equipment that applies centrifugal force for the sedimentation of heterogeneous mixtures in the entire lab!"), knocked loose a bit of tape holding up a poster on lab safety (whose message consisted of twenty-three different ways of saying that people in the lab should not aim lasers at each other's eyes) and causing it to ominously curl away from the wall, hit the back of the head of eighty-three year-old theoretical alternauticist James Stubbing-Toews (who had for several months been working on the theory that he did not need a full night's sleep, just twenty-three naps during the course of a day) causing him to awaken with a start and say, "I'm innocent, your honour! The chipmunk pate had already dripped onto the painting of the monk Chip's pate when I got there!" and arced majestically in the air before finally coming to rest at the feet of Betty bos Vassant.
"Dammit!" muttered Martin Gilmandrooley, a swarthy xenopsychologist from Bangalore who had read a book by P. G. Wodehouse when he was a child and, as a result, aspired to be an upper class twit when he grew up. "I was aiming for her ample cleavage!"
"Did you factor in the inelasticity of Old Jimbo's head?" asked Tim "The Kit" Oompaloomp (he hadn't been given the nickname because he always carried a set of useful tools - although he did - or because his angular face and blue eyes made him look like a young fox - which he did - it was because somebody misspelled "kilt" in his high school yearbook - a sartorial affectation that afflicted him in his teens - and he decided to run with it) as he held out a flute (champagne tastes so much better when drunk out of a musical instrument, doesn't it?) and gestured for the pouring to commence.
bos Vassant shook her head ruefully. She had done this so often since she had accepted the Transdimensional Authority's Comfy Chair in Mathematics (a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton) that she had had to hire a personal trainer to strengthen her neck muscles. If you asked her why she dressed in a manner that showed off her ample cleavage, she would reply, "I love my body almost as much as I love solving twelve dimensional trans-universal vector geometry problems...in my head!"
You tell her girly girls can't be the smartest people in the room!
Doctor Alhambra stood in a corner of the large room, serenely watching the shenanigans of the Transdimensional Authority science division's annual ChristmaKwaanzUkah shenanig in front of him. Well, serener than the TA's Chief Scientist usually was. The fact that the 8-bit versions of holiday classics such as "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and "Fish Heads" were being blasted on the sound system did not help him maintain his calmness, but he clutched his serenity tightly to his bosom and carried on. The multicoloured lasers bouncing off silver Möbius strips hung from the wall made for a fair approximation of a disco ball, but the thought of all of the safety posters going for nought added -3 to his serenity level. The burning Hanukkah bush seemed to be a waste of a perfectly good spectral interferometer, but, after a moment's disdainful scorn, he shrugged it off as a small price to pay to maintain lab bonpersonneamie.
It wasn't even that the only belief system Doctor Alhambra recognized as having any form of legitimacy was * SCIENCE *! (Yes, all in caps and including the asterisks - his was a stern belief system that demanded attention and respect.) All-powerful sky beings meant nothing to him unless they arrived on Earth in spaceships and spoke pure mathematics. The fact that some people didn't share this belief and still called themselves scientists was one of life's mysteries that defied all of his attempts at rational solution (that and the enduring popularity of Tyler Perry's Medea movies). Even that didn't significantly affect the cockles of Doctor Alhambra's dourness (he had attached the cockles with chains to make his dour easier to lift and carry).
No, the only thing that made the annual effort at forced fellow- and ladyship, including the Secret Simon the non-denomination embodiment of ChristmaKwaanzUkah gift exchange (this year he got his draw, Melania in shipping, an app that calculated the direction to Mecca from any point in the galaxy; in return, she knitted him a pair of mismatched socks), less bearable was the fact that he couldn't drink. Oh, he did drink, everything from Slatonic Rhino Ale to Pan-dimensional Gargle Blasters (like Pan-galactic Gargle Blasters, but they affect the sobriety of all versions of you within a seven reality radius); it's just that alcohol had no affect on him. Soon after he joined the Transdimensional Authority, people with Nth degrees started dying under mysterious circumstances. Since there were only seven of them on Earth Prime at the time, Doctor Alhambra thought it best to take precautions. He programmed nanobots to constantly monitor his blood for traces of anything toxic and, if they found anything, to immediately neutralize it. The good news was that he survived.* The bad news was that the nanobots could not differentiate between bad poisons (strychnine or arsenic) and good poisons (a double whiskey on the rocks), forcing the scientist to live through office holiday parties STONE. COLD. SOBER.
"Happy snibbler's giblets!" Doctor Richardson roared, giving Doctor Alhambra a slap on the back that was so hearty you could be forgiven for wondering why Doctor Frankenstein hadn't gotten Igor to make off with it for his latest creation. The slap on the back was so enthusiastic, in fact, that Doctor Alhambra was immediately inspired to plot some form of revenge. Uhh....I mean, find a new area of science to experiment on Doctor Richardson. With! With - to experiment with Doctor Richardson! In.
Oh, you get the idea.
Assistant Chief Scientist (a position that didn't actually exist, but made him very proud about owning a t-shirt proclaiming it) Doctor Richardson was the rotund, jovial Transdimensional Authority researcher - his joviality rivalled Doctor Alhambra's dourality, cancelling each other out and leaving the lab an inspirational management dead zone. Having only multiple PhDs (111 in base two at last count), he was more susceptible to the sins of the flesh.
"You're drunk!" Doctor Alhambra stated more directly than I just did.
"I am not fullerbrush!" Doctor Richardson responded with the dignity of a small town mayor denying he had borrowed money from the local church's Windows and Organs fund. "I am pleasantly grobblestudded!"
"Ah," Doctor Alhambra ahed and took an impotent swig of grog. "You don't even know you're doing it, do you?"
"Gotterdammering what?" Doctor Richardson innocently asked.
"Doctor Richardson, I hate to break this to you, but - well, actually, no, hate is too strong a word. Mildly annoyed might be a better way of describing my emotions at this moment. Perhaps mildly is not appropriate, either, but I'm willing to allow historians to debate that question. What I'm trying to say is -" Doctor Alhambra stopped as a small plastic object thwacked him in the forehead. Reflexively, with his free hand he caught the object before it splooshed into his drink. Then, he glared at Jared Elstree and Renaldo Ealing, who were just rising from being hunched over a table hockey game that had been set up on Workstation 12.
"Uhh, sorry about that, Doctor A," Elstree, the skinny Californian with white hair (despite being only 23) whom somebody must have called the Silver Surfer, half-heartedly apologized. "We were just, like, you know, really into the game."
"Not at all," Doctor Alhambra graciously replied. "I was rumoured to have been young once, myself."
"So, bruh," Ealing, a dark-skinned, curly black haired young man whose body was so tense it always looked like it was poised to repel an alien invasion, which made his good cheer seventeen times more forced than that of the average person, "Uhh, sorry, I meant Doctor bruh, you gonna give us our puck back, or wha'?"
"No."
"No?"
Doctor Alhambra contemplatively played the small object between his thumb and forefinger. "Let me tell you a story..." he began.
Inwardly, Elstree moaned. Inwardly, Ealing urgently whispered, "Bruh! Don't inwardly moan so loud! You never know what Doctor Bruh can hear!"
Ignoring this subtext in such a pointed way that it pointed out how much effort he was putting into ignoring it, Doctor Alhambra continued: "Between my seventh and fifteenth degrees, table hockey was all the rage at the Nth Academy. We all played it in our spare time. Some students even took an extra year on whatever degree they happened to be working on at the time to get good at the game. Not me, of course. But, some. After a couple of years, we couldn't help but notice that the puck had gone missing. We assumed that the mice got loose from their cage in the middle of the night and made off with the puck as part of that day's plan to take over the world. The fact that we never caught a mouse with a puck in its cage did not entirely rule out the possibility, but it did give some of us pause. Some of us. As an alternative, that very same some of us (of which I am proud to be an honourary member, although I may be stretching the term proud a little...past its breaking point) postulated that the mice were addicted to the game, but very bad at it, as a result of which they managed to shoot the puck off the table, down the hall, into the elevator, down several floors, out the elevator and through a Dimensional PortalTM into another dimension, never to be slap shot by any of us again. No matter. Table hockey pucks are easily replaced. But then the replacements disappeared. Then, the replacements of the replacements disappeared. It got so bad that replacement pucks seemed to vanish the moment we took them out of the package! Well. Reasonable people may have given up the game at that point, but we were not reasonable people - we were scientists! We devised a system whereby we could play the game without pucks using nothing but the power of our minds! In the beginning, disputes were plentiful, I can assure you. Still, we persevered. And in the end, we triumphed. You think you have to focus playing the game the traditional way? Gentlemen, you have no idea what focus is until you've won Lord Stanley's Cup without a puck!"
"Whoa!" Elstree commented, wonder oozing from his voice.
"So, uhh, does this mean that you aren't going to give us the puck back?" Ealing asked.
"I would be doing you a disservice if I did," Doctor Alhambra informed him, pocketing the puck. "I would be depriving you of the opportunity to play the game as it was meant to be played!"
Elstree and Ealing went back to their game. At first, there was much cursing and arguing - so, no difference there. After a couple of minutes, nobody paid any attention to the game's typical rambunctiousness.
"Your dourness takes all the fun out of a ChristmaKwaanzUkah confritterlistness!" Doctor Richardson groused. If I parsed his syntax correctly.
"I have been told," Doctor Alhambra acknowledged. Dourly.
"Did you ever find out what happened?" a woman's voice asked. bos Vassant had sidled up to Doctor Alhambra's other, Doctor Richardsonless side.
"What happened?"
"To the missing hockey pucks."
"Oh. That." Doctor Alhambra waved a pfffty hand. "It only took me a couple of months to realize that Doctor Smith was using them for target practice for his Personal Laser-based Defense System (PLDS) prototype. The cheap bastard figured he could save the Transdimensional Authority a few bucks by having us replace them. Did I mention that he was a cheap bastard? Still...best quantum poker player I ever had the pleasure of meeting!"
All of the men in the lab under the age of seventy-five were jealous of Doctor Alhambra, whom they assumed was sleeping with bos Vassant. They were correct to the extent that Doctor Alhambra and bos Vassant often slept in the same bed. They were wrong, however, in the implication that because they slept in the same bed they were actually sleeping together. Sexually, I mean. For Doctor Alhambra and bos Vassant were asexual; their sex drive was so small that there wasn't a metaphor for tininess in the English language that could do it justice. Mostly, they whispered sweet transdimensional matter/information equations in each other's ears and drank cocoa until they both fell asleep.
Don't judge them. They're probably happier together than you are in your current relationship.
"How you holding up?" bos Vassant asked.
"Peachy as passelfarts!" Doctor Richardson roared.
"Good to know," bos Vassant took the interruption in stride. "And you, Doctor Alhambra, how are you holding up?"
"Thank you for asking, Doctor bos Vassant," Doctor Alhambra unemotionally answered. "On the Larry David Vexation Scale, I'm at approximately two hundred thirty-eight."
"Well within normal parameters for this time of year, then."
"Quite." Doctor Alhambra was about to explain that he could use the table hockey puck as a talisman to channel his most negative responses to the humanity around him when bos Vassant was saved from having to make a polite comment about it eventually becoming denser than a black hole by something catching his ear. "Do you hear that?" he asked.
"I chromasticate many flashbubs," Doctor Richardson thoughtfully stated.
Doctor Alhambra stepped out of the corner and shouted, "Be quiet, everybody!" Waving his arms to get everybody's attention, he shouted even harder, "Will everybody shut the ferk up!"
Everybody shut the ferk up. The music, however, continued to play, an especially jaunty 8-bit version of "The Dreidel Song" marred only by the fact that it was made up of only four lines that were repeated eighty-seven times...and the fact that, yes, another sound...even more repetitive...insistent...urgent interfered with it. "Oh, will somebody please turn that noise - I'm sorry, that religiously celebratory noise off!"
The religiously celebratory noise was turned off. Beedleboop could be heard. Beedleboop beedleboop beedleboop.
"I can hear it!" Doctor Richardson exulted. "I can krumpf intellifact!"
Doctor Alhambra knew he knew the sound; he had programmed all of the alarms, after all. This one couldn't have gone off all that often, because what it was trying to warn him of didn't come immediately to mind. The fire alarm? No, that was more of a ooohunh ooohunh ooohunh. The anti-theft alarm of the Dimensional DeloreanTM? No, that one went oooga oooga awoooga oooga. It may have been the sound of the chaos coffeemaker telling him that his morning tea was ready just the way he liked it...probably...maybe...well, honestly, there are no guarantees in this world, except that that sounded like Scarlett Johansson saying, "Doctor Alhambra, your morning tea is ready just the way you like it...probably...maybe...well, honestly, there are no guarantees in this world..." The particle accelerator alarm was a mellow chew-ba-ca chew-ba-ca chew-ba-ca. And of course, the breached Dimensional PortalTM reality containment field was more of an "Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmygod!" If the alarm wasn't any of the obvious ones, what could it possibly be trying to warn him of? What could it poss...i...bly...
Doctor Alhambra Blanched (although many of his friends and family advised him that it was a complete waste of time, his MFA in Theatre Arts continued to pay him rich dividends). He also turned very, very white. The reason he hadn't recognized the alarm was that it had never gone off before. In fact, when he created it, he had hoped that the alarm would never be needed. What it demanded his attention for was very serious. Very, very serious. Very, very, very serious. Very, very, very, very serious. Very, very, very, very, very serious.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we cross over into five verys territory...
* For more information on the incident, see: Neidergaarden, Laurie, "Too Smart to Live, Too Stupid to Contemplate," Alternate Reality News Service (V37, I231, Tuesday).