A Highly Concentrated Porcelain Bathtub

Look, this is a secret, Milkman, but I know you’re the kind of person I can talk to, being good friends with cows and all. See, things have been going wrong lately, and I desperately need your help.

It always worked before. I just sat down in the bathtub, pulled the curtains – one plastic liner and the outer cerulean blue with deep purple planets and a sprinkling of yellow comets and stars – and without saying a word, just by thinking about the forests on Bep, or the desert dunes of Stefpharon, or the snow-frosted peaks of Vrem, I went there. It was easy. Never took me more than a minute.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, and you really don’t need to know how it functions, believe me. In fact I’m not sure I understand it all myself but….

“How do I know it works?”

I told you. It's been slurping me off to planets for a long time -- at least, until last week…

Why do I want to go to another planet stripped bare and all soapy?”

That’s ridiculous, Milkman. I love visiting alien planets. For one thing, you meet the nicest people – well, maybe, they’re technically not people, but they are really, really nice (except the one-clawed zoopledworfie on Bep who had some kind of skin condition and was grouchier than an irate mother-in-law.)

But, wait a minute! Did you say bare-skinned? I never told you I took off my clothes when I sat down in the tub. Don’t be silly. And why would I lather up when I was about to climb out of the bathtub? There’s no water in the tub, anyway. It’s always completely dry when I swoop in and out utilizing its wormhole capabilities.

Oh, dear, you’re wagging your right eyebrow up and down like one of those electric toothbrushes. And your left ear is twitching. I know what that means. You don’t believe me.

All right. Be that way. Of course, you could ask Bessie. She used my bathtub once to journey back in time to see her great (about ten times removed) grandmother who was good friends with the dish and the spoon who ended up being the sole witnesses of her historic moon-jumping event. Bessie believed me!

Now your lip is curved into a full-voiced sneer, and your finger is making circles in the air, just short of calling me a loonie. Well, I’ve still got my two-by-fours straight. So, if you really insist, here’s what you’ve been asking me about for the past twenty minutes.

The truth is that my bathtub is actually a dense cluster from a middleweight starburst, which emitted ultraluminous x-rays ten times stronger than a neutron star. As everyone knows such super masses can grow by feasting on surrounding matter, but this cluster lost its kinetic energy because of its angular momentum resulting from the friction of its enormity which evolved itself into a galvanized black hole, but because of the particular nature of its hot gases, collapsed inward, merged, and finally unmerged into spiral seeds which powered an AGN (active galactic nucleus). The resulting concentration of metallic compounds split off to become this one highly concentrated porcelain bathtub that has become the ultimate intergenerational link to the universe.

Hey, where are you going? I thought you asked me how it worked? Milkman! I need your help. Wait. You see, I think the gravitational pull of the super accelerated mass of its spiral seeds just needs a slight booster. Now a miniature quasar could do it, or a diminutive black hole, or a super dense . . .

Milkman??? Where are you going? Wait!


LISTEN, tidal forces in the currents of the spectrum thrust the gas upwards and more or less can feed it. All I need you to do is . . .

MILKMAN! ---


Where did he go?


What's that noise?

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