BISTROMATHICS

The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with improbability factors.

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that Time was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in Space, and that Space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in Time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or the number of people who subsequently join them after the show / match / party / gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival, which is known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose value can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.

The third and most mysterious piece of non-absoluteness lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for (the number of people at the table who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field). The baffling discrepancies which used to occur at this point remained uninvestigated for centuries, simply because no-one took them seriously. They were put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about the following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions of course, because they never occurred in laboratories - not in reputable ones, at least.

And so it was only with the advent of the pocket computer that the startling truth became apparent, and it was this: numbers written on restaurant bill pads within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other part of the Universe.

This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences were held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years. Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood.

To begin with, it had been too stark, too crazy, too much of what the man in the street would have said "Oh yes, but I could have told you that." About then some phrases like 'Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks' were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.

The small groups of monks who had taken to hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street-theatre grant and sent away.