The Imnothero Principle was first postulated by Heinrick Imnothero, a 26th Century astrologer. It can best be summarised as ‘we think therefore it is’. According to the Principle everything is the result of thought. There was no Big Bang, no creation and no evolution. Life, death, the universe, sex, geography and everything else were created by thoughts. Once the majority of the minds in the universe believe something (anything!) then it becomes real and true.

Earlwin Zittler is a rebel. He manages to escape from a horribly polluted Earth by forging his “gene screen” results. The gene screen is one of the mechanisms used by the Intergalactic Mining & Settlement Company (IMS) to ensure that its employees are manageable and complacent. Another mechanism is the Errolist religion which teaches that after death, people go to the place where all the garbage they threw away during their life, went. The third mechanism IMS uses to keep its employees compliant is enforced vegetarianism. Earlwin is not able to live on vegetables and hunts down and kills several rats which infest the colony. He cooks and eats them and this induces an altered state of mind similar to the hallucinogenic effects of LSD or mescaline.

IMS determines that Ed is not worth the cost of the repairs necessary to restore him as a useful employee. Eventually his life support is turned off, but once again he is kept alive by the invisible Biancans. This makes him a medical anomaly.
Meanwhile his seven year old daughter, Felacia has purchased a space probe from a company on Earth that has gone into liquidation, and sends it out into an area of unexplored space. She discovers a planet made of solid gold. Unfortunately the probe gets drawn into the planet’s fierce gravitational field and crashes before Felacia can use her discovery to pay for her father’s medical treatment.

X-ray vision allows Earlwin and Sonia to see and communicate with the native Biancans. After a lot of experimentation they discover the best way to consume the cockroaches is to dry them out, crush them up and snort them like cocaine.
Wanting to share his new discoveries with his old friend Edwinkle, Earlwin smuggles some cockroach powder into the hospital where Ed is happily defying all of the principles of medical science. Ed sneezes, blowing the powder into the air where it affects the invisible Biancans by making them aware of even higher life forms which they had never suspected existed. Unfortunately for Ed, the Biancans are distracted for long enough that, without their life-preserving treatment, he finally dies — much to the relief of his baffled doctors.

Ian Purdie