Here he is again, the irrepressible Septimus Spink, in a tale as
rollicking as an elder giant juggling the stars and the planets in
his great, golden hands and laughing mirthfully as one tiny
world--our own--goes spinning away from him into caverns measureless
to man. With specifications drawn to scale, Joe Archibald, whose
versatility with the quill never ceases to amaze us, has managed
with slangy insouciance to achieve a rare triumph over space and
time, and to aureole Spink in a resplendent sunburst of imperishable
renown._
Operation
Earthworm
_by ... Joe Archibald_
Septimus Spink didn't need to read Jules Verne's "Journey to
the Center of the Earth." He had more amazing ideas of his own.
_Interplanetary Press, Circa 2022--Septimus Spink, the first Earthman to
reach and return from New Mu in a flying saucer, threw a hydroactive
bombshell into the meeting of the leading cosmogonists at the University
of Cincinnatus today. The amazing Spink, uninvited, crashed this august
body of scientists and laughed at a statement made by Professor Apsox
Zalpha as to the origin of Earth and other planets._
_"That theory is older than the discovery of the antiquated zipper,"
Spink orated. "Ha, you big plexidomes still believe the Earth was
condensed from a filament, and was ejected by the sun under the
gravitational attraction of a big star passing close to the Earth's
surface. First it was a liquid drop and cooling solidified it after a
period of a few million years. You citizens still think it has a liquid
core. Some of you think it is pretty hot inside like they had atomic
furnaces all fired up. Ha, the exterior ain't so hot either what with
taxes we have to pay after seven wars."_
_Professor Yzylch Mgogylvy, of the University of Juno, took violent
exception to Septimus Spink's derisive attitude and stoutly defended the
theory of adiabatic expansion. It was at this juncture that Spink
practically disintegrated the meeting._
_"For the last seventy years," he orated, "all we have thought about was
outer space. All that we have been hepped up about is what is up in the
attic and have forgot the cellar. What proof has any knucklehelmet got
that nobody lives far under the coal mines and the oil pockets?
Something lives everywhere! Adam never believed anythin' lived in water
until he was bit by a crab. Gentlemen, I am announcin' for the benefit
of the press and everybody from here to Mars and Jupiter and back that I
intend to explore inner space! I have already got the project
underway."_
_A near panic ensued as representatives of the press made for the
audio-viso stellartypes. "You think volcanoes are caused by heat
generated far down inside the earth. They are only boils or carbuncles.
Awright, where do earthquakes come from?" Here Spink laughed once more.
"They are elastic waves sent out through the body of the Earth, huh?
Their observed times of transmission give a means of finding their
velocities of propagation at great depths. I read that in a book that
should be in the Terra-firmament Institute along with the Spirit of St.
Louis."_
_Septimus Spink walked out at this point, surrounded by Interplanetary
scribes, one of whom was Exmud R. Zmorro. Spink informed the Fourteenth
Estate that he would let them have a gander at the model of his inner
space machine in due time. He inferred that one of his financial backers
in the fabulous enterprise was Aquintax Djupont, and that the fact that
Djupont had recently been brain-washed at the Neuropsychiatorium in
Metropolita had no bearing on the case whatsoever._
* * * * *
I am seeing and listening to that news item right now which has been
repeated a dozen times the last twenty-four hours as if nobody could
believe it. I am Septimus Spink, and descended from a long line of
Spinks that began somewhere back at the time they put up the pyramids.
All my ancestors was never satisfied with what progress they saw during
when they lived, and they are the reasons we have got where we are
today. And if there was no Spinks today the scientists would get away
with saying that the Earth was only a drop from the sun that got a crust
on it after millions of years. And they want to send me back to get
fitted for a duronylon strait jacket again.
An hour after I shut off the viso-screen, and while I am taking my
calves' liver and onion capsules, my friend and space-lanceman,
D'Ambrosia Zahooli comes in. He just qualifies as a spaceman as he
takes up very little and is not much easier to look at than a Nougatine.
Once D'Ambrosia applied for a plasticectomy but the surgeons at the
Muzayo clinic just laughed and told him there was a limit to science
even in the year 2022. But the citizen was at home when they divided the
brains. Of course that is only my opinion. He is to fly with me into
inner space.
"Greetin's and salutations, and as the Martians say...
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