The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

- Chapter 36 -
Professor Nemo

        By mid-morning we were well on our way, heading down a narrow cowpath that cut between a swamp and a creek. We were making decent time, wheezing along in that old jalopy, when we saw something blocking our way up ahead. It was a man, I reckon, or a passable imitation thereof.
        The character blocking our path had a head that towered pumpkin-like over a shiny be-bowtied body. His head sort of bobbed and weaved like a balloon on a tether, and a loose one at that.
        "Professor Nemo!" I heard Egghead force cheesily through grated teeth. "This is bad news, Hooter."
        Stink gasped in wonder at the sight. Billy gaped in boredom. Slug glugged, and Egghead gulped uneasily in the globular gloaming.
        "Right unusual," offered the Old Coot.
        About that time Professor Nemo started to speak, but his tongue split in two and shot out in different directions, so he had to reload and try again. So this was the famous Professor Nemo, B.A., M.A., PhD, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, et al. He was known as a veritable walking compendium of weighty abstractions, the Footnoter of Footnoters, the Prince of Papers, Earl of Obfuscation.
        I was impressed. Then he opened his mouth, and he taught me better.
        "Halt!" he cried, and we did, not wanting to be rude or to hurt his feelings. He seemed surprised when we complied. "I demand to speak with my fellow academic (though no colleague, I assure you), Sidney Zenoborkowitz." Well, sir, that was no other than our own Egghead, and we were pleased as punch to see him so recognized by such a smart and famous fellow, one who swam swimmingly in the swarming schools of higher education, in an environment that we could only see from a distance, like through the dirty glass of a far-off aquarium.
        Of course, he was a mighty strange sort of fellow, but then again we might have even seemed a little bizarre ourselves to such a one as him, as fantastic as that may seem. Not everybody is as normal as us, not by a long shot, but we all believe in loving them just the same, seeing as they can't help not being us any more than we can help being us, if you hark to my winds of fragrant insight.
        Egghead stepped forward, and the Great Conversation commenced.
        Of their debate, or of its fame, I need not remind my gracious and attractive reader, seeing as how it has been incorporated into just about every Philosophy 101 text in the whole wide world. I would like to "fill in the blanks," however, on a few details these texts omitted, considering their source, which was a thoroughly Fizziefied Mortimer Mugtussle III. The debate climaxed with this:

Nemo: I have considered at length your treatise concerning the Fantastic Fiction Theory of the Origin of the Specious. Although your argument is a slickly packaged logocentric presentation, its reliance upon logic to prove its point is anachronistic. I expect better from you.

Egghead:        !

(Eggheads reply consisted solely of a confabulation of the spaces between words).

Nemo: I beg your pardon?

        About this time I noticed a movement beside the creek to our right. It was Zeb! He sat there on his trusty steer, the soon-to-be-famous courser, Steerius. At first, Zeb listened intently to the Grand Debate. But by and by, his ingenious hillbilly brain caused him to dismount and begin sneaking around behind Professor Nemo in hopes of giving him a hot foot. Billy, who by now was sound asleep, began to snore loudly, while Stink's awe-inspired mouth had finally caught a fly. Slug snoringly harmonized with Billy while Zeb quickly closed from behind the Professor with matches in hand and a playful gleam in his eye.
        The debate continued:

Nemo: It is obvious that any author of our tale who might exist, as suggested by your theory, is necessarily regressive, an atavistic fluke, neither feminist nor marxist, in short, a fool. I bring to your attention the fact that no enlightened women or socialist brethren are in this so-called novel.

Egghead: Was it you that spoke, or a crockpot that broke?

        "Nemo's ticking me off," I muttered to Billy. "Have you noticed that his hair doesn't even match his eyes?"
        Then the most amazing thing happened.
        Nemo started to swell.
        His head swelled first. Then his slender body followed suit. He began to puff up like a gigantic toad-frog, his eyes bulging and his mouth kicking into overdrive. Oh, he extruded some fine-sounding words, allright; it was all dealing with Egghead's scatterbrained Fantastic Fiction Theory; Nemo didn't believe a word of it; he held out that we were a beautiful concantenation of incomprehensively complex interacting and ever-changing dynamic structures that sort of accidentally happened, sort of a monumental coincidence born by a shipwreck of cosmic forces. It was kind of like the sun hit some soup and we all sprang out, complete with computers and refrigerators, give or take a few billion years.
        Well, sir, it got to where I could see the fork in his tongue where it had split in the first place, and so could the boys, but the professor couldn't see it, or he would have shut up. On and on he went, swelling up bigger all of the while. Oh, it was gaudy; I wouldn't have taken a plug nickel to have missed it, and I only wished that old Huck was there with us to see it, but he was off frolickin' with Becky in that holler, as you have been foreknowledged about.
        In due time, Zeb got right behind him. Nemo was nigh unto twenty feet tall by now and broader still. His mouth machine-gunned words that flew out in both directions while his double tongue tried to follow them, as swift as a hummingbird's wings, as smooth as the cheek of an infant.
        Zeb was just fixing to light that hotfoot when I saw his eyes bug out. Straightaway I saw what he was excited about: there, on Nemo's foot, was an airplug! Zeb's eyes met mine, and he grinned like a possum. With a dreamy look on his face he casually pulled the plug on the massive, quivering, Nemo-Zeppelin.
        That did it.
        A loud, shrieking, explosive KABOOM jolted us as the professor blew up. Well, actually, his foot blew off. At least that's how it looked.
        Everything went so fast that we had to piece it all together after the fact, sort of like looking for a haystack in the needle. Nemo shot up, up, and away, a scholarly rocket, an airborne, jet-propelled spot in the clear autumn sky. It was simply awesome. He soared upward, shrinking into a tiny dot that slowly arched over toward the horizon before he dissapeared from sight.
        I didn't see a parachute.
        As our attention returned to ourselves we were rudely accosted by a horrible stench. A bluish mist befouled the forest air, the legacy of this deep thinker.
        "Who'd've thought that anyone could be so rotten?" gasped Egghead.
        "Are all professors like this on the inside?" I moaned.
        "Booming bloater-child spacewalked amidst the fallow wood. He blew his cool, and the fauna wept with dew," rapped Zeb.
        "Enough," pled Billy, "plots, like plays, are wont to go astray, yet none may chaff the greaves of this o'er-swelling besom of decay."
        Slug slept on, a champion of consistency if nothing else.
        Stink smugly reclined in his little red wagon, knowing that this competing aroma, though potent, possed no real staying power. A champion in his prime, as indomitable as a lion of the plains, he feared no paltry challenge... even from such a formidable windbag as Nemo.
        The Old Coot now spoke up, and he made some real sense, too. It was time that somebody did.
        "Get in boys," he said, "let's go rescue my son." He looked back down the dark, narrow cowpath as we climbed into the dented jalopy. He popped it into gear, and we drove slowly through the narrow passage and into the brightness of another large plain.
        "The wrong books can pison a man," he drawled in his thick Redneck brogue, "I'd heard tell of it, and now I've smelt the proof." We jolted up onto an old, rutted railroad grade. The morning had sprung, so to speak, and the sun was warming us all wonderfully there in that old rusty tin can. We creaked and rocked along in a drowsy state of happy passivity.
        "He couldn't hold a candle to Stinker!" honked an obnoxious, braying voice. To our considerable surprise, it was Slug, doing a right passable imitation of old Frogstick.
        "Frogstick would have said it," he informed us. Immediately, like highly trained bears, our minds returned to the mission at hand. But then, while our minds put on muzzles and performed complex bicycle maneuvers to the shouts of a Russian trainer, we temporarily lost track of what we had just remembered. Then our minds, unlike highly trained bears, were unmuzzled, and we recalled our solemn duty.
        We traded sober and determined glances. Our mission still lay ahead of us: to the north. There, behind the gleaming, polished facade, within the perniciously impacted bowels of Florida World, our innocent comrade was trapped like a fly in an artificial web, struggling to regain the precious gift of his own personal liberty.
        Frogstick was in trouble. He needed help.
        So did we.