Making a Universe

        The goddess Aphrodite was making a universe. She hadn't made one before, so she kept having to look up how to do things in the manual, but she was quite pleased how things were turning out.
        After a while, Zeus, chief of all the gods, came along to see how things were getting along. "This is very good," he said, approvingly, "except for one small thing."
        "What's that?" asked Aphrodite, anxiously.
        "Well, it's a bit dark, isn't it?" said Zeus.
        Aphrodite had to admit that her universe was, indeed, somewhat dim. "I can't get light to work properly," she admitted.
        "Why can't you make some more?" asked Zeus, but before she could answer he noticed the reason himself. "Aha, you've run out of that stuff that universes are made of. Now I wonder why that is?"
        "I think I may have made too many people," suggested Aphrodite. "Or spoons."
        Zeus shook his head. "They don't use up much at all. Time uses up the most. Tell me, how long is this universe supposed to last?"
        "Er, four hundred thousand million years," said Aphrodite. "Do you think that's too long?"
        "Way too long," laughed Zeus. "You only want it half that, at most. I can tell you're going to have to wind your clock back a bit."
        "But that'll take me ages," said Aphrodite, sadly. "It was bad enough winding it forward. Is there no way I can do it quicker?"
        "Of course," smiled Zeus. "We old gods do know a trick or two that aren't in the book. What we usually do in cases like this is to borrow the hands off clocks from other universes, and put them all on this universe's clock. Then, we all work together to move the hands all back at once. If, say, ten of us each took a hand from one of our own universes, we could turn your time back into universe-building stuff ten times quicker."
        "And then I'll have enough of it around to use for light!" clapped Aphrodite.

So

Many hands make light work.

Illustration by Roy Bartle
Image size: approx. 41K.