4.
Epilog
The tale of the Parallelocator had its precedents.
In ancient times, the inhabitants of an Aegean island named Hermetica unsuccessfully tried to use the infernal machine of an inventor named Critias to destroy the tide of Roman conquest.
The Romans, having defeated Syracuse, and soon after Hannibal in his ravages upon the Italian peninsula, won the minor skirmish for Hermetica with a brief sea battle in the harbor.
The odd thing was that, during the battle, the Roman admiral Gaius Porcius Duro sent out several military dispatches to his higher command at Misenum. Later, when Duro returned home in triumph, a committee of Senators took him aside to ask about one puzzling detail. After congratulating him on his victory, and promising he'd be put in for Rome's highest honors, they asked him: why had four separate messengers arrived, each bearing news of a different number of Roman ships. Did not Admiral Porcius Duro know whether he had under his command fifty ships, seventy, eighty, or a hundred?
In the light of greater global events, like Hannibal's defeat at Zama by Scipio Africanus, the question was forgotten—a faded gloss in the palimpsest of history.
In much later times, a group of distinguished planters and other wealthy men from the thirteen British colonies met to discuss a better way to pursue their respective businesses and avocations. The unanimous conclusion, after a number of strange turns and arguments that left everyone tied in knots, was to chuck the whole thing and simply resign from the British Empire.
After some disagreeable skirmishes and disputations, this turned out to be a most successful course of events. In a remarkable and poorly explained flip of flops, the empire and the colonies changed directions, so that the colonies became the empire, and the empire became the colonies.
Historians are hard put to explain such a drastic reversal.
As a footnote, we might observe that, a quarter millennium later, a Professor Critias of Syracuse University advanced a most succinct figure of speech to explain this mystery. He urges students to close one eye, make a funny face, and squint while imagining that a cow standing on the Old Boston Post Road has turned around by 180 degrees. Thus, its tail has become its head, and its head has become its arse.
Dr. Critias received, to thunderous applause at their recent plenary session, the Postlethwaite Wreath for Meritorious Metaphors from the North Atlantic History Society—a most coveted honor, for this stupendous simile.
A young graduate student named Arthur Stowe was working in his barn on an invention called the Parallelocator one warm summer evening during the mid-20th Century, when his machine inexplicably caught fire and exploded, leveling the barn.
Arthur staggered out, singed of shirt and ego, but otherwise intact, into the waiting arms of his loving fiancée Nellie, whom he wed several days later, and the couple lived for many decades in connubial bliss.
Sixty years later, on a wintry evening, Arthur hauled out the dusty wooden control panel for the benefit of two visiting graduate students.
Arthur explained his impractical and useless theory-gone-wrong to them.
He pressed the switch repeatedly, and nothing happened.
They all finished their cocoas in the study. Nellie went off to bed. Professor Stowe, and his students Tom and Ben, remained in the library for another hour at least, sipping cocoa. They puffed on cigars, as they looked out over the bright fantasia of snowflakes, and speculated about the nature of the universe.
Which was a thing students and their wise masters had done since the beginning of time.
As to the Parallelocator, once invented, it had the most uncanny way of being reborn from one age to the next. If there be only three tales of parallelocation here, it is because there are infinitely many such incidents of which to speak, but the margin of this volume is not sufficiently large to contain them.
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