Skippy Dies Read Online Free PDF Page A

won’t work out. If we could solve them, though, if we could understand what happened in those first few
     milliseconds, it would be like a master key, which would unlock all sorts of other doors. Professor Hideo Tamashi believes
     that the future of humanity could depend on our opening these doors.’
    Spend twenty-four hours a day cooped up with Ruprecht and you will hear a lot about this Professor Hideo Tamashi and his groundbreaking
     attempts to solve the Big Bang using ten-dimensional string theory. You will also hear a lot about Stanford, the university
     where Professor Tamashi teaches, which from Ruprecht’s descriptions of it sounds like a cross between an amusement arcade
     and Cloud City in
Star Wars
, a place where everyone wears jumpsuits and nothing bad ever happens.
Ruprecht has had his heart set on studying under Professor Tamashi more or less since he could walk, and whenever he mentions
     the Prof, or Stanford and its
really first-rate
lab facilities, his voice takes on a starry, yearning quality, like someone describing a beautiful land glimpsed once in
     a dream.
    ‘Why don’t you just
go
then,’ Dennis says, ‘if everything’s so whoop-de-doo over there?’
    ‘My dear Dennis,’ Ruprecht chortles, ‘one does not just “go” to somewhere like Stanford.’
    Instead, it seems, you need something called an
academic résumé
, something that shows the
Dean of Admissions
that you are just that fraction smarter than all the other smart people applying there. Hence Ruprecht’s various investigations,
     experiments and inventions – even the ones, his detractors, principally Dennis, argue, purportedly undertaken for the Future
     of Humanity.
    ‘That tub of guts doesn’t give two hoots about humanity,’ Dennis says. ‘All he wants is to ponce off to America and meet other
     dweebs who’ll play Yahtzee with him and not make fun of his weight.’
    ‘I suppose it must be hard for him,’ Skippy says. ‘You know, being a genius and everything, and being stuck here with us.’
    ‘But he’s not a genius!’ Dennis rails. ‘He’s a total fraud!’
    ‘Come on, Dennis, what about his equations?’ Skippy says.
    ‘Yeah, and his inventions?’ adds Geoff.
    ‘His
inventions
? The time machine, a tinfoil-lined wardrobe attached to an alarm clock? The X-ray glasses, that are just regular glasses
     glued onto the inside of a toaster? How could anyone take these for the work of a serious scientist?’
    Dennis and Ruprecht don’t get on. It’s not hard to see why: two more different boys would be hard to imagine. Ruprecht is
     eternally fascinated by the world around him, loves to take part in class and throws himself into extra-curricular activities;
     Dennis, an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic, hates the world and everything in it, especially Ruprecht, and has
     never thrown himself into anything, with the exception of a largely successful
campaign last summer to efface the first letter from every manifestation of the word ‘canal’ in the Greater Dublin Area, viz.
     the myriad street signs proclaiming ROYAL ANAL, WARNING! ANAL, GRAND ANAL HOTEL . As far as Dennis is concerned, the entire persona of Ruprecht Van Doren is nothing more than a grandiloquent concoction
     of foolish Internet theories and fancy talk lifted from the Discovery Channel.
    ‘But Dennis, why would he want to make up stuff like that?’
    ‘Why does anyone do anything in this shithole? To make himself look like he’s better than us. I’m telling you, he’s no more
     a genius than I am. And if you ask me, this stuff about him being an orphan, that’s a crock too.’
    Well, that’s where Dennis and his audience part company. Yes, it’s true that details of Ruprecht’s ex-parents remain vague,
     apart from an occasional passing reference to his father’s skills as a horseman, ‘famed the length of the Rhine’, or a fleeting
     mention of his mother, ‘a delicate woman with aesthetic hands’. And it’s true