Read The Ultimate Inferior Beings Online
Authors: Mark Roman
NEUTROENCEPHELOHOLOGRAPHIC
INSTITUE.
The largest institute on Tenalp devoted to work on, and research into,
neutroencepheloholography. It is crammed with plenty of
neutroencepheloholographic equipment and neutroencepheloholographic apparatus,
and is staffed by some of the planet’s top neutroencepheloholographers. Thus
the Neutroencepheloholographic Institute is the place to go if you ever want to
do some neutroencepheloholography yourself or to have some
neutroencepheloholography done on you.
NIOBIUM CORDITE.
A tough, black, naturally
occurring substance.
NOTSUE.
The blue-light district of
Tenalp’s capital city, Nodnol. (The reader may have already noticed that the
original colonisers of the planet Tenalp had very little imagination when it
came to naming streets, suburbs, towns and cities). The entire district of
Notsue is devoted to mankind’s most modern sexual activity. This activity was
discovered in 2034 by a sixteen year-old girl while watching her elder sister
shaving her legs in the bathroom. It revolutionized sexual perversion
overnight, and every city came to have a blue-light district, such as Notsue in
Nodnol. Very soon it became impossible to walk after dark through such a
blue-light district without being assaulted in the manner outlined by that sixteen
year-old girl. Extra police stations had to be built in these districts to deal
with the crowds of hopeful late-night strollers.
PETROMORPHIC YTTERBIUM
CELLULOSE.
Petromorphic ytterbium cellulose is to paper what plasto-lignose polycellulose
is to wood –
ie
a very poor substitute.
PHONON DRIVE TUBES.
As you know, phonons are the
quantized modes of vibration of a crystal lattice. Literally years of research
were devoted to producing a sufficiently powerful transducer to transmit
phonons into vacuum – the main challenge being, of course, that vibrations (
eg
sound) don’t travel in a vacuum. Many other things were discovered along the
way: non-stick milk-bottles, disposable socks, collapsible furniture, etc.
Finally, a quartz lactite transducer was found to work adequately. Housed in a
long impedance-matching tube and driven by a 10 Megawatt power supply, the
quartz lactite transducer became the first ever way of propelling a large
spaceship by acoustic phonons.
When compared with existing
propulsion systems, phonon tubes were absurdly uneconomical and laughably
inefficient. And they were terribly noisy. So there was no way of justifying
their use in modern spaceships. However, their designers were determined to
have them become the primary spaceship propulsion systems. After all the years
they’d spent developing the things, they didn’t want it all to look like a
complete waste of time and money. So, they resorted to blackmail.
The head of the largest
spaceship manufacturing company on Tenalp was persuaded to use phonon drives in
all his company’s next generation of spaceships. And, because of this, the
world will never know just what personal secret of his the blackmailers had
threatened to reveal. Rumour had it, though, that it had something to do with that
sixteen year old girl mentioned in the Notsue entry above. (See
Notsue
).
PHOTOTRIODE.
Like a photodiode, only
bigger.
PINK VELVEX.
Substance from which the
cheapest, most tasteless, most hideous wallpaper is made. Its production
involves a highly complex process that has been kept a closely guarded secret
by its manufacturers ever since they developed it. There have been no known
attempts to steal the secret.
PLASDERM LEATHER SUBSTITUTE.
This is formed by allowing a
gelloidal endoplastic substance such as esthermethene to partially set in vast
tanks overnight. In the morning the surface skin is peeled off and, when dried,
becomes the plasderm leather substitute. Apart from being inherently
semi-transparent it looks and feels just like real leather. It has two major
disadvantages: it is not as porous as real leather, and it smells awful. Thus
shoes made of this substance present a real problem, and socially-conscious
wearers must always wear a pair of special odour-absorbing carbon-fibre socks –
preferably
over
the shoes themselves rather than just on the feet.
POLYOX E-PROTHENE.
The hardest liquid plastic
known to Humankind. No one has yet found a use for this substance, and any
suggestions the reader may have are welcome.
SCN (= Singularity Catalogue
Number).
The
SCN is a number assigned to every newly discovered Singularity. The Singularity
Catalogue is published monthly and is available from all newsagents and major
booksellers. Price 10 minutes (see Tenalp Currency), or a yearly subscription
of 2 hours 12 minutes. Order your copy NOW!
SIGH EAST MIDLANDS BOMB
COMPANY.
Situated at its secret underground location in the East Midlands, the Sigh Bomb
Company is the largest known bomb company on Earth. Its products span the
entire range of explosive devices: from the safety match to the neutrino bomb
(see
Safety Match
and
Neutrino Bomb
). Shortly after Sigh Co was
founded, a few minor mishaps occurred in its dangerous Bomb Construction
Division. These were blown out of all proportion by the press, and subsequently
Sigh Co found it harder and harder to recruit personnel. No one seemed very
keen on working for them. Their shares plummeted.
So, a novel recruitment drive
was launched to save the company from bankruptcy. Sigh asked the governments of
the world to offer death-row criminals the choice between capital punishment
and a job in Sigh Co’s dangerous Bomb Construction Division. Many (well most)
condemned criminals readily grabbed the chance of prolonging their lives and
chose the latter option. The scheme was a huge success, and Sigh’s profits
soared.
Of course, Sigh met with all
sorts of ignorant criticism from the press – particularly from the local press
in the East Midlands area. The newspapers expressed their concern at the
company employing kidnappers, murderers and terrorists with ready access to
highly explosive devices. “Might not this be putting the lives of everyone in
the world at risk, not least the people living in the East Midlands area?” they
asked in their usual sensationalist way. Sigh Co replied that all their
employees underwent strict security procedures that included the frisking of
all workers before they left the company premises. Anyone found carrying a bomb
home was firmly asked to return it to whence it had come.
SKYWAY CODE.
Invented by Samuel Skyway,
this Code is used on all space missions. Astropilots taking their astropilot
test have to know if off by heart; as do astronavigators, astrosynchronizers
and astrodrivers. The test involves decrypting something written in the Code
from a distance of twenty-five metres. To ensure absolute fairness, the rules
of the test can sometimes be relaxed. For example, the distance of twenty-five
metres can be reduced so as not to disadvantage the shortsighted. Prompting can
also be given, particularly in cases where the examinee is tired through lack
of sleep, disoriented as a result of drunkenness, or slightly befuddled on
account of senility.
SNOTTIES.
Trade name for a leading
brand of tissues. These tissues are probably the toughest ever produced. They
are made from a special brand of tissue-paper first synthesized at the
Rutherford Laboratories. The makers claim that it is incredible: if you were to
fire a 15-inch shell at a piece of this tissue paper it would come back and hit
you. (Subtle scientific joke, this).
SPACE.
The final frontier.
STASIS FIELD.
Every science fiction book
mentions a stasis field. So here is this book’s mention.
TENALP CURRENCY.
The currency used on Tenalp
is the life-prolonging pill. Each pill will prolong the natural lifespan of
anyone taking it by the length of the time inscribed upon it. For example, a
ten second pill will prolong one’s life by ten seconds. (This may not sound
very long, but if your life depended on you living for another ten seconds, you
wouldn’t hesitate taking one, would you).
The pills are used as
currency in the ordinary way. For example, a book may cost forty minutes, a
train journey five hours twenty-three minutes, and a quarterly electricity bill
five years three months and six days. Hence the Tenalp expression ‘Money is
Time’.
The pills themselves are
enclosed in a protective plastic coating that melts in the mouth and not in the
hand. The coating prevents the money devaluing through erosion. After all, each
pill will have passed through many hands, many purses, many pockets, and many
other places by the time you put it in your mouth and swallow it.
Of course, it is important to
guard against forgeries – pills that do not contain the life-prolonging
ingredients, or pills that contain life-shortening ingredients such as arsenic
or cyanide. A number of important advances have been made recently to detect
such forgeries; alas, none are yet on the market.
TENALP TRANS-URANIC
GEOCENTRAL TIME.
The planet-wide synchronized time of Tenalp as shown on the large
clock in the centre of Nodnol, known affectionately as Big Richard. Tenalp
Trans-Uranic Geocentral Time should not be confused with Tenalp Currency. (See
Tenalp Currency)
ULTRASONIC BACKGROUND
REVERBERATION.
This is the Pseudogravitic Continuum’s answer to the Microwave Background
Radiation that pervades Normal Spacetime. Simply speaking, whereas the
Microwave Background is what’s left of the light of the Big Bang, the
Ultrasonic Background is what’s left of the noise. It is the ‘Bang’ of the Big
Bang.
Like the Microwave
Background, the Ultrasonic Background has been shifted in frequency so that
only the ultrasonic and hypersonic components now remain. These are only
audible to bats and dogs. A bat or a dog would go deaf and/or mad very, very
quickly in the Pseudogravitic Continuum, so, if you plan to travel there, it is
best to leave them at home.
VOLTAIC CELL.
A Voltaic Cell is where you
get locked up for a salten battery; a very serious charge, and also a very bad
pun.
100-WATT LIGHT BULB.
A commercially available
source of photons. Brighter than the 60
-
watt light bulb, but not quite
as bright as the 150
-
watt light bulb, it is guaranteed not to explode
more than once.
WIND-POWERED CLOCK.
Obsolete timepiece powered
by winding it up every night before going to bed. A fine spring (prone to
breaking) used to store the wind-power from the winding fingers.
YRASSOLG.
This is Glossary backwards.
(See
Glossary
)
The
evolution of
the
Mamms was not like the evolution of the other creatures on planet Ground.
Indeed, one can barely call it ‘evolution’ at all as it involved the individual
emergence and growth of the Mamms, each developing from a separate primordial
pool to fully-grown slimy green blob over many millennia. No cross-fertilization
of genetic material ever took place between species members. Perhaps the most
remarkable thing about this unique process was how it resulted in all the
members of the species having such similar morphology and physiology.
Schizzo-plankton
So, it all started in the
primordial birth-pools on Ground. And there were plenty of them: in rocky tidal
regions, in flood plains and marshlands, neighbouring hot springs and so on. In
those days, of course, the landscape was not perfectly flat and black, but much
like that of any other newly formed, rocky planet.
Most of the other animals on
Ground evolved from these very same pools. The difference being that all these
other creatures evolved
out
of those pools and went on to develop into
bigger and better things long before the Mamms made an appearance. Once on dry
land, these numerous and varied animals roamed the planet’s surface killing and
eating one another for generation upon generation, like animals do.
The one species that didn’t
emerge from the pools to partake in the planet-wide carnage were the tiny
schizzo-plankton. These were a rapidly procreating microscopic lifeform that
generated energy by photosynthesis and so gave the pools their greenish colour
and their slimy consistency. They stayed behind because they had no reason to
leave. Where else could they swim about as much as they liked, sleep, eat,
drink and play as much as they liked, and continue rapidly procreating as much
as they liked?
The trouble was, the more
they did of all of these things, the more crowded (and hence greener and
slimier) their primordial pools became. In fact, very soon the pools were so
full of the waste matter of the little schizzo-plankton, so full of the
decaying bodies of the little schizzo-plankton, and so full of the little buggers
themselves, that there was hardly any room left for them to enjoy themselves
any more.
What was worse, this increase
in the density of the pools, and consequent rise in their nutrient content, did
not escape the notice of the other creatures on Ground. The fact that the pools
were brimming over with the living, dead, dying, or just plain bored, little
schizzo-plankton was good news for all and sundry, and so it wasn’t long before
they became a popular food resource. The suction plant sucked them up, the
lapping dog lapped them up, the slurping stork slurped them up, and the syphon
rat stuck its long trunk into them, crawled into a depression at the side of
the pool and simply syphoned them off. The pools were so nourishing, in fact,
that many animals stopped killing and eating one another and, instead, gorged
themselves on the slimy green pools.