Stanley Pilbeam was one of those little men who lived in a grayish world on the periphery of everyone else’s existence. The high spot of his weekends was his metal detector. Rain or shine, he would plod around some lonely area, eyes glued to the ground, ears twitching at the faintest crackle in his headphones.
On this particular day, the metal detector wasn’t just crackling but fairly humming. The sound led him to the roots of an old, dead tree.
In fact, this storm-battered site had once been the location of the ill-fated particle accelerator that had been shut down by the government. What neither Stanley nor the public knew was the project had never been abandoned at all, but had been constructed in absolute secrecy 200 feet below that very spot; five miles of intricate equipment which, at that moment, was accelerating charged particles to stupendous speeds ready to smash into a lump of fissionable material. The tree was actually a ventilation shaft.
Unfortunately, at the precise moment the particles reached their maximum speed, Nature intervened with a bolt of lightning that struck the ventilation shaft. The accelerated particles were deflected and shot up the shaft, hitting Stanley.
The physics involved in this cosmic event would have baffled Einstein.
Sub-atomic matter spewed forth. Nuons nooed, Snarks snickered, Muons mooed, Gluons became unglued, and charged particles charged at Stanley. He was transmogrified into a massive hologram whose very molecules consisted of tiny replicas of himself and his metal detector. The hologram was so big that the solar system itself fitted between its cracks – so no one on even noticed.
That is, with the exception of the Dolderons, an advanced but warlike alien race who were concealed in an orbit behind Jupiter, getting ready to invade Earth.
The sudden appearance of the gigantic hologram that was Stanley terrified them. So complex was the physics involved, they thought he was an advanced weapon of retaliation. Their top scientists worked day and night to neutralize the massive forces locked up in Stanley. But all they could do was compress him to real size and encase him, still living, in a block of transparent Dolderum – an almost indestructible material. Then they fled the solar system forever.
Stanley might still be orbiting the moons of Jupiter, a puzzled look on his face, save that just then five Neutron stars at the center of the universe collapsed into a black hole. No bigger than a pea, the black hole weighed more than ten billion Jupiters. It was ejected at light speed to arrive simultaneously at Stanley’s orbit. In an event whose probability was 10(127): 1 (10 with 127 zeros after it), it smashed through the Dolderum and drilled a neat hole in Stanley’s forehead.
Stanley did not explode or die but, in the incomprehensible paradox of massive Space/Time forces, not only was he sucked into the black hole and reconstituted, he was also deposited in front of the same dead tree, intact, at exactly the moment the lightening bolt had struck. With one minor difference: he was now six inches further to the left.
As a result of this minute change, this time the lightening bolt struck him on the head and he died instantly.
His colleagues at Madson Mortgage & Loan, embarrassed that they couldn’t remember what Stanley looked like, bought a headstone that read:
‘Stanley Pilbeam, a good man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time’.
True. But Stanley was also in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time or even the right place at the right time.
Go figure. He saved the world.
Poor guy.