IVIV (7): He's So Heavy

[Robin Landseadel]

Vehi Fairfield—apprentice Witch Sortilège's guru and apparently a  
distributor for Brotherhood of Eternal Love LSD—sends Doc out on a  
most intense acid trip via a magic can of 'Burgomeister Special  
Edition.' Those who don't know should know that the correct spelling  
is "Burgermeister", that it was a popular low-end beer around 1970 and  
that around 1970 the can would look something like:

http://www.angelfire.com/wi/beercans/images/bur5.gif

In any case, Vehi & Sortilège had some code—calling a can of otherwise  
everyday beer a "special edition" is supposed to mean that it's got  
LSD, but Doc doesn't know this.

So, caught unawares, Doc gets sent back three billion years and  
seemingly into the sort of alien experimentation often associated with  
particularly intense trips and DMT. The lab facility of the alien  
scientists was made from a mountain of pure osmium:

	Osmium is an extremely dense, blue-gray, hard but brittle metal
	that remains lustrous even at high temperatures. Due to
	its hardness, brittleness, and very high melting point (the tenth
	highest of all elements), solid osmium is difficult to machine,
	form, or work. Osmium is generally considered to be the
	densest known element, narrowly defeating iridium.[2]
	Calculations of density from the space lattice may produce the
	most reliable data for these elements, giving a density of
	22.562±0.009 g/cm3 for iridium versus 22.587±0.009 g/cm3 for
	osmium.[3] The extraordinary density of osmium is a
	consequence of the lanthanide contraction.[3]

	Osmium possesses quite remarkable chemical and physical
	properties. It has the highest melting point and the lowest vapor
	pressure in the platinum family. Osmium has a very low
	compressibility. Correspondingly, its bulk modulus is extremely
	high, reported between 395 and 462 GPa, which rivals that of
	diamond (443 GPa). However, the hardness of osmium is low,
	only 4 GPa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium

The alien scientists rename Doc "Xqq" and declare him to be "the  
perfect subject" for whatever weird experiment in intergalactic time  
travel they've cooked up for him. Note how the Loony Tunes leitmotiv  
pops up again:

	Before he knew it he was signing releases, and being
	costumed in what he would soon learn was a classic hippie
	outfit of the planet Earth, and led over to a peculiarly
	shimmering chamber in which a mosaic of Looney Tunes motifs
	was repeating obsessively away in several dimensions at once
	in vividly audible yet unnamable spectral frequencies ....
	IV 106

Something about that Osmium gets picked up by Larry. He's so heavy  
when he returns [more or less] to Gordita Beach, he manages to to go  
through drywall construction with little effort. Of course this also  
reflects the shoddy construction standards of new residential  
buildings in L.A., circa 1970.

	"Well," Sortilege supposed, "many of us do get uncomfortable
	when we discover some secret aspect to our personality. But it's
	not like you ended up three feet tall with the density of lead."

	"Easy for you to say. Try it sometime."