The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        As we drew near to camp, the earth shifted.
        There was no warning. There was no sound.
        The forest simply seemed to instantly move about six inches to our right, sending our feet flying into the air as we tumbled to a halt in the soft grass that lined the trail. Then, realizing the danger of our plight, we leaped to our feet with feverish urgency and hurtled headlong into the grassy clearing that was the site of our camp. We saw there a sight that made description look beggarly.
        In the middle of the field a gigantic spaghetti-like cluster of stainless steel tubes squatted, glistening in the brilliant sunlight. The entire structure was supported by narrow iron beams that sprang disjointedly from the turf and reached barren, brittle fingers upwards, groping imploringly towards the clear autumn sky. This sparkling behemoth, with its exposed iron skeleton supporting a contorted conglomeration of spangling steel ribbons, quivered and shivered in the clear morning light.
        Our friend Egghead was right there beside this pulsating apparition, dwarfed by its gargantuan proportions as he twiddled the knobs on a flashing computer console, totally absorbed in his work.
        At the edge of the clearing sat a beat-up two-ton truck. Egghead had obviously arranged to have his monstrous, neo-scientific apparatus hauled in on this rusty relic. Its driver, however, was nowhere to be seen.
        Suddenly the earth moved under our feet again. We hollered at Egghead as we hit the dirt, sprawling knees-over-elbows in a tangled pile of humanity that slid to a halt at his feet. Egghead pushed up his glasses.
        "What's wrong with you guys?" he asked.
        We all cried out at once.
        "Wait a minute," said Egghead, "let me shut this thing off." He hit a switch and the humming apparatus wound down until it ceased its vibrations. "Now what did you guys say?" he asked.
        Billy answered him, quoting one of his own plays as he attempted to impress upon the sunny-side-up Eggster the seriousness of his error:

The greatest fools are educated fools
Who wend their way through moldy tomes
And yearn to measure the eyelids of a gnat.
Like greedy worms they bite at the wisdom of the ages,
Seeking the bauble reputation at the volume's mouth.
Some turn to wealth, and fill the earth
With heaps of rusting rubbish, while others leap
And soar on wings of wax, gathering in
The droning drafts of bombast, hoisting broad petards
As they follow the aspiring lift of the winds of pride,
Climbing, climbing, and climbing yet upward,
Ascending into the dizzying heights,
Spiraling ever higher as they sail
Still closer to their goal:
The dazzling heart of darkness.
They sail on, inured by hubris
To the smooth deceit
Of their own most blinding light,
Basking in the dazzling, darksome rays
Of the lightless sun of ambitious greed.
Countless others fret and prance their fitful moment
Upon the stage of science, crunching numbers
For their breakfasts: hoarding grand theories
For their tottering afternoons.
Chief among these is Egghead,
Who alone among the cybernauts of civilized society
Plumbs the nether depths of human folly.
(Love not War. IV, iii, 62-75)

        Egghead blushed and smiled shyly.
        "Shucks, Billy," he offered, "do you mind if I write that down?"
        "Shifting rainbow forest caught a gnarly wave, stood up, and danced beneath our grooving fast or flying furry feet," rapped Zeb. "Egg-man, can you do that again?"
        "I can try," said Egghead, throwing the power back on.
        "No, wait!" I cried.
        "Stop!" yelled Billy.
        "Gee, fellows," said Egghead, shutting the power off, "what's wrong?"
        "What on earth are you up to?" I asked him. "Are you trying to get us all killed?"
        "Gosh, Hoot," said Egghead, pushing his glasses up where they had slid down his nose. "What's the problem?"
        "Just answer this, Egghead," I whined exasperatedly, "what on earth are you doing?"
        "Elementary, my dear Hootenanny," he emoted, gesturing expansively, "you of all people must surely understand this experiment." He whipped out a small chart and hung it on the computer console. Taking a telescopic pointer out of his shirt pocket, he swiftly extended it and began to lecture. "Let's begin at the beginning," he began to begin. Billy's eyes rolled. He sat down in disgust and leaned back against a tree. Egghead started to expound his theory, pointing to key features on the chart as he spoke. He went through at least twenty different pages before he began his summation.
        "In conclusion," he opined, "we see that anti-matter equals mass times the square of the rate of entropy affecting the speed of subatomic particles within that same mass. This equation can be written as ANTI-M = M(En x En). I was just preparing to transmute a strange quark (relating to a cesium atom) into the inert particulate state peculiar to the stuff of black holes when you arrived upon the scene."
        The sound of gentle snoring provided Egghead's presentation with a fitting sound track. I watched the slumbering Billy in amazement, transfixed as a large fly lazily buzzed around the front of his open mouth.
        "Well, what do you guys think?" Eggy asked.
        "ANTI-M, ANTI-M," rapped Zeb, "and Toto too! How can a gypsy guitar-picker get back home to the heavy, rippling wheat fields of Kansas?"
        Zeb twanged his old guitar. "ANTI-M equals mass times entropy squared," he crooned, "if you need a quick nap young Egghead's prepared." As if to accentuate Zeb's last refrain, Billy cut loose with a particularly loud snort. He fell over onto his side also, thereby waking his lazy old self up. He climbed dazedly to his feet.
        "What do you think about my experiment, Hooter?" Egghead asked me.
        "I've just got one question Egghead," I replied. "Didn't you once tell me that this experiment, if successful, could cause a chain reaction that might compact the entire Milky Way Galaxy into a subneutron star comprised entirely of silly string superdupermatter... thereby destroying the earth, together with all of the temporal life forms upon it?" Egghead grimaced and slapped his head.
        "Oh, no!" he cried, "I forgot about all that!" He shook his head wonderingly. "I almost annihilated our entire galaxy," he moaned, wringing his hands.
        "It could be worse," said Billy. "How would you like it if your son was a mime?"
        We all hushed instantly. In the profound silence that followed, I reached out and gripped his shoulder in a comforting gesture of brotherly sympathy and comradely solidarity. Egghead and I swapped a pitying glance.
        "We didn't know, Billy," I said. "How long has he been this way?" I looked over at Egg, then at Billy. To my surprise, I saw a tear roll down his stoic face.
        "I don't like to talk about it," he said, "I don't know why I brought it up."
        "Then let's change the subject," I said. As if on cue, Zeb strummed a chord on his old Gibson guitar.
        "Electric light strummed the wires of my mind," he sang, "not enough play makes the strings unwind."
        The cry of an eagle suddenly pierced the clean autumn air. We looked up to see where the bird might be, and there, in the clear blue sky, a large bald eagle circled slowly above our camp. He was flying low, just barely clearing the tops of the towering trees that ringed the grassy meadow in which we stood. In his talons the eagle clutched what appeared to be a piece of paper. He let the paper go and it fluttered down toward us, sailing hither and yon as it made its descent. When it hit the ground I ran over and picked it up.
        "What does it say?" asked Egghead.
        "It says, Stuck in quicksand, need help, no smokers, please," I told him, "and it's signed Mortimer Mugtussle, Jr."
        "Who's he?" asked Billy.
        "That's Stink," said Egghead.
        "Well how on earth did he get the name Stink?" asked the Well-Trimmed Bard.
        "His mother gave him that nickname when he was just a baby," I told Billy, "after his dirty bath-water killed her prize Greater Gutchinville Goldenrods."
        "Well, fellows, what are we going to do?" asked Billy.
        "About what?" Egghead and I asked him.
        "About Stink, you idiots!" he shrieked.
        "Oh, yeah the quicksand," Egghead said. He looked over mournfully in my direction.
        "There's only one patch of quicksand around here," I told Billy, "I reckon that we can get there in about two hours."
        "What about this mess?" he asked Egghead, gesturing at the giant pile of steel that had so pollutantly potted our pristine camping-spot.
        "Oh, don't worry about that," said Egghead, "I'll have my graduate assistant clean it up."
        "Graduate assistant?' I squeaked. "Are you teaching again?" Egghead was not unlike that famous scholar and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had dropped out of Oxford for the same reasons that had propelled the departure of Eggy. Like Dr. Johnson, Egghead had also risen to the top of his field without formally earning a doctorate from his alma mater.
        "I'm working on a project with Professor Plmmschtz," he informed me. "He's the professor who's been chosen to fill the well-endowed Whimsical Quark Eminent Scholar's Chair in Sub-Atomic Physics at Southern University." Southern University had scored quite a coup in their successful recruitment of Dr. Plmmschtz, humiliating and enraging their rivals at the Snodgrass Institute. Like I said, Southeastern had scored a coup, and they had done it just as plainly as any Native American warrior had ever done, and they probably would have taken scalps if it was legal, but it wasn't, so they couldn't. The addition of Dr. Plmmschtz had turned the Southern program into the best in the country, but the involvement of Egghead in his current research would probably congeal us all into something that would fit on the head of a pin, and which would probably also end Frogstick's dream of becoming popular, once and for all.
        "Well, let's go and find Stinky," I leaked with my mouth. "I reckon that you can leave that graduate assistant a note." He wrote the note and hung it on the control console of his huge, ungainly machine.
        "He went searching for leeches," Egghead offered for our introspection. "His name is Igor."
        We grabbed a backpack and loaded it with water and sandwiches and survival gear. Then we took a vote and decided that Zeb would carry the fully loaded backpack. He was thrilled by the honor that we had so selflessly bestowed upon him.
        "Dig it, critters," he called to the squirrels that were chasing one another in the big tree at the western end of the clearing. "Making like a knocked out gassed back hermit crab is a flat-natural-born forest groove."
        We had a duty to perform. Pretending that we all had good sense, we filed out of the clearing and onto a narrow forest path. We didn't know it, but it would be many long days before we next caught sight of this familiar camp that had become our home. As for now, giving our worries the old heave-ho, we nailed our sails to the masts of our minds and, hoping for a favorable wind, we boldly sallied forth into the depths of the wild green yonder.