Once More With Footnotes

minutes.
     
                  There was also a noise. We have a number of descriptions of this noise. It was "sort of weird," "kind of a whooping sound," and "rather like radio oscillation." The only one we have been able to check is the description fr om Curtis V. J. McDonald, who said, "You know in that Star Trek epi s ode when they meet the fish men from an alternate Earth? Well, the fish men's matter transmitter made just the same noise."
     
                  We have viewed the episode in question. It is the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with the girl (Tape A).
     
                  …
     
                  Cluck?
     
                  (Foot twist) √ 2t β ... [Σ /peck]/Scratch 2 * * oon (Gurgle)(Left-shoulder-preen) = (Right-shoulder-preen) ...
     
                  HmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmm.
     
                  Cluck.
     
                  …
     
                  We also know that the person calling himself Elrond X, an itinerant, entered the area around 2 a.m. When located subseque ntly, he said: "Yeah, well, maybe sometimes I used to take a chicken but there's no law against it. Anyway, I stopped because it was getting very heavy, I mean, it was the way they were acting. The way they looked at you. Their beady eyes. But times are t o ugh and I thought, okay, why not ...
     
                  "There's no chickens there, man. Someone's been through it, there's no chickens!"
     
                  When asked about the Assemblage, he said: "There was only this pile of junk in the middle of the bushes. It was just twigs and wire a nd junk. And eggs, only you never touch the eggs, we know that, some of those, eggs give you a shock, like electricity. 'Cos you never asked me before, that's why. Yeah, I kicked it over. Because there was this chicken inside it, okay, but when I went up c lose there was this flash and, like, a clap of thunder and it went all wavy and disappeared. I ain't taking that from no chicken."
     
                  Thus far we have been unable to reassemble the Assemblage (Photos A thru G). There is considerable doubt as to its function , and we have dismissed Mr. X's view that it was "a real funky microwave oven." It appeared simply to have been a collection of roadside debris and twigs, held together with cassette tape.* ( * "The Best of Queen." ) It may have had some religious significan ce. From drawings furnished by Mr. X, there appeared to have been space inside for one chicken at a time.
     
                  Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on our finding either it or Dr. Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.
     
                  For the sake of completeness, please note Document B, which is an offprint of Paperbuck and Macklin's Western Science Journal paper. "Exaggerated Evolutionary Pressures on Small Isolated Groups Under Stress."
     
                  All that we can be certain of is that there are no chickens in the area where chickens have been for the last seventeen yea rs.
     
                  However, there are now forty-seven chickens on the opposite verge.
     
                  Why they crossed is of course one of the fundamental riddles of popular philosophy.
     
                  That is not, however, the problem.
     
                  We don't know how.
     
                  But it's not such a great verge over there, and they're all clustered together and some of the hens are laying.
     
                  We're just going to have to wait and see how they get back.
     
                  …
     
                  Cluck?
     
     
     
     
    Author's note: In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of th e busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world. Some chickens escaped and bred. They survived — are surviving — very well, even in the hazardous atmosphere of the roadside. But this story is about another Hollywood. And other chickens.

Three times s o far British universities have suffered short bouts of insanity during which they have awarded me honorary degrees as a