Selby Snaps (14 page)

‘Hey, that guy’s funny!’ Selby said, clapping his paws together.

‘You eat more?’ Etuc asked.

‘No, I couldn’t possibly —’ Selby started. Then he saw the beautiful bowl of fruit that Etuc and Ecin held in their hands. ‘Dessert, eh? Oh, why not,’ Selby said.

Selby opened his mouth and waited till Etuc had spooned him out some wonderfully sweet fruit. And when he’d finished it, Ecin dabbed his mouth with the bottom of her long skirt.

‘Well I wanted to go on holidays and be treated like a king,’ Selby thought, ‘that’s just what happened.’

Selby slept the most wonderful sleep of his life that night as Etuc and Ecin took turns standing over him fanning him gently. And in the morning he awoke to the soft chanting of the villagers, kneeling before him.

‘Nail-Art-Sua,’ they chanted, ‘God Nail-Art-Sua.’

Days passed and Selby was treated as he’d never been treated before. He ate and ate till he
could hardly walk and Ecin and Etuc sang beautiful songs to him.

Then one morning his thoughts turned to the Trifles. Somewhere at a distant airport on the resort island of Sunseasia, they would be pleading with people to find him. In Selby’s mind, there were tears streaming down their faces. Then tears formed in his own eyes.

‘It’s all very nice being a god-king,’ he sniffed, ‘but the poor Trifles must be worried sick about me. And I miss them too. I’ve got to explain to these nice people who I really am and see if they’ll take me back to the airport.’

‘Excuse me, girls,’ Selby said. ‘Could I say something?’

‘Say?’ Etuc said.

‘I am not a god or a king,’ Selby said.

‘No god?’ Ecin said.

‘No, I mean yes. I mean no I’m not a god. I’m Selby. Can you say Selby?’

‘Selby?’ the puzzled girl said.

Selby took a stick and spelled his name out in the dirt.

‘Ybles!’ she cried.

‘No,
Selby,’
Selby said.

‘Ybles!’

‘You’re reading it backwards!’ Selby said.

Then something in Selby’s brain snapped.

‘Hey, hang on,’ he said, climbing off of the throne and looking at the tag on his cage.

‘God. Dog,’ he said to Ecin pointing to the letters. ‘You’ve been reading everything backwards!’

‘Back … wards?’ Ecin asked.

‘Yes, back-to-front. Look, you’ve even read Australian backwards. Nail-Art-Sua is
Australian
spelled backwards! It’s beginning to make sense now.’

‘Nail-Art-Sua. Nail-Art-Sua,’ everyone chanted again.

‘How am I going to convince you people that I’m not a god?’ Selby said as he popped another piece of delicious fruit in his mouth.

Maybe he’d eaten too much. Or maybe he was nervous but there was a sudden rush of air from his stomach and out came a big burp.

‘Oooops, pardon me,’ he said. ‘Now where was I?’

Ecin and Etuc looked on in shock — as did the other villagers.

‘What?’ Ecin asked.

‘Nothing,’ Selby said. ‘I just burped, that’s all.’

‘Burp?’ Etuc asked.

‘Yes, you know. Air. It came out of my mouth. Sorry, I won’t do it again.’

The big man grabbed the crown of flowers from Selby’s head.

‘You no god,’ Ecin said.

‘Hey, hang on,’ Selby protested. ‘Everybody burps, don’t they? That doesn’t mean I’m not a god. What am I saying? No, I’m not a god. It was just a normal burp. It wasn’t a bottom burp or anything. Would you mind terribly if I just went back to where you found me? To the airport?’

‘You good dog,’ Ecin said, patting him.

‘Very good dog,’ Etuc said, kissing him on the head.

And so it was that Selby said a sad goodbye to the people who had been so kind to him. They had lost their god-king but they still seemed to like him. Ecin and Etuc guided him to the airport. There he was discovered by the airport staff and flown to Sunseasia.

‘Selby! Here you are at last!’ Mrs Trifle said, taking him out of his cage and giving him a big
hug. ‘It certainly looks like you’ve been well fed and well looked after. They said you’d be well taken care of.’

‘Yes, we had a good holiday too,’ Dr Trifle said. ‘But it’s time to go back to Bogusville now so back in your cage. See you when we get there.’

‘Hey, hang on,’ Selby thought as they put him back in the cage. ‘Don’t I get to see Sunseasia, too? No,
(sigh)
I guess not.’

Selby headed off down the long conveyor belt. Two baggage handlers picked him up.

‘Here’s one for Bogusville,’ one of them said.

‘Never heard of Bogusville,’ the other one said. ‘They must mean
Bougainville.
Put it on that trolley over there.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘Oh no,’ Selby moaned as he headed off on the wrong trolley to the wrong aeroplane to the wrong country. ‘Here we go again.’

A STORY OF WORMHOLES AND WISHES

‘Travel through time?!’ Dr Trifle exclaimed to his old astronomer friend Percy Peach
.’Is that possible?’

‘Absolutely!’ Percy exclaimed back. ‘I do believe that there are wormholes in the universe.’

‘There are some in the backyard, too,’ Mrs Trifle said, looking up from the 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 cloth
into 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 snap
off 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 sleep
enhancement 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 bed.

‘I’m sure your theory is wrong, Percy,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘But I can do with a bit of a lie-down.’

Soon Percy Peach and the Trifles were sitting on the bed as Percy turned up the knob on the B-E-D controls.

‘They’re not going without me,’ Selby thought, climbing up on to the foot of the bed.