"You know how they say that time heals all wounds, right? Well, that's wrong. Time can't heal everything even with a bit of help from our side, but most things it can. Fact is, time plus medicine can perform almost miracles. The problem is we control only one factor of this equation."

"Fascinating, George. I'm sure there is a point to all this, but, if you allow me to be direct, why are we in a barn and why is that cow looking at me like there's nothing she wants more than to gut me?"

George, bless his soul, stopped waving around his hands and looked around. Then he stared at me like I was an idiot and said, "Well, because of time."

George was a genius. This facet of his being had never brought anything good to the world or, more importantly, to me. It also meant that I never met another person with such a record of idiotic, dangerous or expensive ideas. I hoped I would be in time to stop this latest flight of fancy, whatever it was. "A cow wants to disembowel me because of time?"

"What? Oh, no no, that's because she's Betsy. Betsy has a horrible temper, but she's a great milk producer. We are here because of time. Come with me."

I followed him through the barn being careful to avoid Betsy. George opened a large trapdoor and walked down a set of stairs. Wonderful, underground lab, those never ended with us sitting in a pub with a a pint of beer and a steak.

I sighed and descended into what would probably be an afternoon of screaming, fire and pitchfork wielding peasants. I never understood where those came from, but George seemed to have the uncanny ability to conjure them.

As I entered the room I became certain troubles were coming. There was a lot of machinery, the walls were full of diagrams and formulas, George was smiling.

He opened his arms and said, "Ta-da!"

That was my cue to say something clever, something that would defuse this. "It's... nice?"

His shoulder slumped a bit. "This is the future of medicine. With this we will be able to control the missing part of the equation."

"You built a time machine?"

He scoffed. I found that to be a tad offensive. considering his past record my question wasn't that stupid. "Don't be ridiculous, you can't build a time machine. No, we distill time here."

I had nothing.

"Once we have distilled time it will be easy to use just the right amounts of it. And we can store it for emergencies."

I felt a familiar headache incoming. "George, you can't distill time."

"I can and I will. Like Reimann demonstrated time is a byproduct of quantum entanglement, which means we can gather it and distill it."

"I'm reasonably sure it doesn't work that way."

"And you would be wrong. Once it was demonstrated that it is a byproduct collecting it was only an engineering problem." He smiled condescendingly. "Look, I understand your skepticism, but this time I have a solid scientific foundation to back me up." He indicted a desk in a corner full with papers.

I decided that if there was a chance to stop this by pointing out some inconsistency it was worth a shot. I began to browse through the contents. [i]Physical Review[/i], [i]Journal of Physics[/i], [i]Book of Thoth[/i], [i]Annuals of[/i]...

"George, why is there a book from Crowley on your desk?"

"Well, because I need it."

"[i]Lovecraft's Collected Works[/i], [i]Farmer's Almanac[/i], and is that a printout of the [i]Time Cube[/i]? What are you trying to do here?"

"Timecheese."

I tried to say something, then I thought about some other retort, finally I accepted my defeat. There was no reasonable way out of this. I had to distract him and then find something to hit him with and a nice hospital that would take him in. "Timecheese?"

"Yes, from Timecows. You see, cows are a constant through human history. We didn't domesticate them, they simply appeared. There is this guy that documented everything. It also explains lactose intolerance."

I nodded while I slowly crept to an old fire extinguisher. "It certainly does."

[hr]

Today I can freely admit that I was wrong. I, and our Timecheese based society, can only be grateful to George and his genius. And to Betsy and her timely intervention. By the way, the rebuilding of my intestines was also the first practical application of Timecheese.