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in the 99.9999th percentile, which is taking a good thing a little too far if you know what I
     
    As you know, I am an inveterate entrant of contests. I have pushed pennies along a train track with my nose, heedless of the iron horse and motivated by nothing better than a powerful wish to see young Billy Illywacker bested. Billy, needless to say, was scrambling along the alternative rail, shoving with all his might, short-trousered knees grinding through blue stone fragments which lacerated as well his horrible snot-hardened palms; the broad flat penny darkly dazzling in his vicious squinting eyes as the summer holiday sun burned up from coin and rails without discrimination as to metallic pigment; and I scrambled likewise, the damned thing teetering and skidding off the track, splinters in the sleepers tearing into skin and bone, the hoot of the on-rushing train and the panic-stricken cries of our youthful companions unheard by either of us in the unspeakable compulsion and fire of macho competition; ah, those were the days.
    Now, of course, I am far more refined. I must needs be urged by my colleagues to enter, with tremendous diffidence, such sublimated wrestling matches as the National Time 500-item Old Time Movie trivia quiz, say.
    These days, as a subscriber to many of the world’s leading intellectual journals, quarterlies, newspapers and financial advice letters, it was inevitable that I would write and submit by urgent airmail the following shrunken saga (here annotated in the usual manner for the edification of those numerous members of .26APA who, it grieves me to report, would not know their asp from their Elba).
     
    THREE MINUTE EPIC, WITH SEQUEL[1]
    Zero puckers. Bright spacetime Bangs.[2]
    Quark[3] soup[4]: that’s one-hundredth of a second.[5]
    Lumps curdle in boiling soup: nucleons[6]. Mesons[7] and anti-kin[8] smash, evaporate, leave thin grit.[9]
    The light[10] goes out.[11]
    Everything[12], blowing apart[13], cools to a hundred million degrees.[14]
    Somewhat later: stars[15], life[16], us.[17] Thin wisps in darkness.
     
    [1] That merry wag Brian W. Aldiss invented the mini-saga while penning the introduction to a short story anthology. He was, at the time, embedded in his monumental “Helliconia” trilogy, a multi-generational 70mm split-screen saga. In stark contrast, the mini-saga must be a miracle of concision and compression: precisely 50 words long, with a contributory title of up to 15 additional words. Upon public disclosure of this new art form, the Sunday magazine of the London “Telegraph” launched a contest that attracted entries by Frederick Forsythe, Frank Muir, Hammond Innes. P. J. Kavanagh, and the Australian hike editor, columnist, wit and namesake of the artform’s discoverer, Brian Wagner, whose effort graces this footnote.
    [2] A nearly perfect instance of the form can be found in the first fifty words of the King James translation of the Bible, describing creation. A somewhat more up-to-date version, using many more words and equations, has been given by the Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg, in his popular (but, I am assured by that great physicist Joe Williams, accurate) account of cosmogony, The First Three Minutes . The interval mentioned in both Weinberg’s title and my own is approximately equal to the time required for the primeval universe to settle down from the Big Bang singularity to an expanding mass of elementary nuclear particles, exchange quanta and neutrinos. Everything of importance to human beings occurred, of course, after this three minute egg had boiled and been removed from its shell.
    1975: worth the journey
    It has taken the arrival in Canberra of the Magi from Overseas, here for this international Point Two Six Convocation—prophets of Intelligence and egalitarianism alike, Hans Eysenck and Richard Lewontin, Richard Herrnstein and Isaac Asimov (a dedicated non-flyer, borne by luxury ocean liner)—to goose the media into paying attention to the