The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence

Author:Gavin Extence [Extence, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Contemporary, Young Adult, Humour
ISBN: 1444765884
Publisher: Redhook
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

EVER WONDERED WHY WE’RE HERE?

WHERE WE’RE GOING?

WHAT THE POINT IS?

CONCERNED ABOUT THE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE IN GENERAL??

THE SECULAR CHURCH OF KURT VONNEGUT

A book club for people interested in all or some of the following:

morality, ecology, time travel, extraterrestrial life, twentieth-century history, humanism, humour, et cetera

Phone Alex Woods: ***** *** ***

* * *

The stars, as you’ve probably worked out, were the digits of my home phone number, which I’m not going to reveal in case of nuisance calls.

A week later, I got my first response – or pair of responses – from John and Barbara Blessed. Their surname was pronounced Bless-ed, in two syllables, as in ‘Blessed are the meek . . .’ Considering the name of my reading group, this was a curiously apt surname, as Barbara Blessed, whom I spoke to on the phone, was quick to point out.

John and Barbara Blessed were both teachers, but not at Asquith. John Blessed turned out to be a compact, soft-spoken man who taught physics at a sixth-form college in Wells. Barbara Blessed was two inches taller than her husband, taught maths, suffered from chronic insomnia and to π knew one hundred decimal places. As you probably know, π is the number equal to a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, which is approximately 3.14159. It’s a number that you can’t write in full because it goes on literally for ever. Most people count sheep when they can’t sleep, but Barbara Blessed recited π.

John and Barbara Blessed were both interested in time travel. John Blessed collected research papers on the subject and would later explain to me that on a sub-atomic scale, time travel was in fact a rather common phenomenon. But when it came to macroscopic objects, such as human beings and spaceships, most physicists agreed that the laws of nature probably conspired to make time travel a practical, if not physical, impossibility. Personally, John Blessed was of the opinion that ‘whatever time is, it’s not what we think it is.’ It was an opinion he shared with not only Kurt Vonnegut but also Stephen Hawking. John Blessed said that when physicists worked out a Theory of Everything (ToE), concepts such as space and time might no longer be tenable on a fundamental level, though they’d still be useful for day-to-day purposes such as arranging appointments and going to the supermarket.

Of course, most of this did not come up during that first phone conversation, in which I spoke to John Blessed only indirectly, via his wife. This is what she said: ‘Forgive me, Mr Woods, but my husband’s been on about this ever since we first saw your advert, and I really think I need to put him out of his misery. He wants to know if you’re the Alex Woods.’

This foxed me for only a few seconds.

‘I think there’s a good chance I might be the Alex Woods,’ I admitted, cautiously. ‘But obviously it depends on which Alex Woods your husband has in mind.’

Barbara Blessed cleared her throat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.