Chapter Five

The Quillifaxians, being the no-nonsense sort of chaps they are, long ago developed a way to solve the argument once and for all about how the Universe came to be. This, they reasoned, would allow them to get on to more interesting things: They invented a way to travel in time, then popped back to the Beginning of the Universe to take a look.

They discovered that it wasn't so much a big bang as a little speck that said, “Oh!” and then expanded rapidly in an effusion of color and faraway tinkling sounds.

The seven Quillifaxians who first traveled to the Beginning of the Universe were quite speechless, after which one of them spent several minutes blinking quietly to himself before asking, “It said, 'Oh,' didn't it?” To this, his colleagues mumbled something that sounded like, “Um...hrmph...yes...I think...could be...” To which he replied, “Right. We'll get on with things, now, I suppose,” and they adjourned.

It was quite a philosophical let down for them, you know. They reasoned that such a great philosophical let down is just what every aspiring time-traveler needs and resolved that the trip to the Beginning of the Universe was to be part of the curriculum for the Academy of Time Agents that would form a thousand years after their deaths.

Then they got on with pretending it never happened. Except for dubbing it “The Little Oh Event,” they never spoke of it again. As they were getting on in years and had discovered long ago what the important things in life were, they set about inventing several types of mixed drinks and a little thing called The Veil.

The Veil was a device that would cause the inhabitants of certain worlds, once they had invented devices to look into space, to see, basically, space. It wasn't very difficult to do because people like to believe in omnipotent beings who are for some reason preoccupied with them. As though omnipotent beings wouldn't rather go to the Omnipotent Being Ball or have mindbogglingly mindboggling discussions about philosophical issues far more advanced than non-omnipotent brains could handle. Something a little more taxing, for example, than whether the Universe is the result of a giant explosion.

These seven, who were to be known simply as the Founders, spent the last years of their lives traveling the space-time continuum searching for civilizations who would not be able to handle the knowledge that the Universe was teeming with life, much of it with bad fashion sense. Earth was one of these civilizations. Except for a brief period called the 1970s, Earth managed to exist showing little evidence that it had had any contact with the inhabitants of the teeming metropolis just outside its borders – except, of course, for a brief period known as the 1970s.