WINSTON (cont.):  “. . .  So don’t let yourself get tripped up by the mechanics of it, I mean, shall we go into Anne McCaffrey’s dragons?  We know full well dragons are too heavy to fly . . . don’t we?  The only really good story I have ever seen on a viable flying dragon was in an issue of OMNI, which said that they create helium inside their bodies, take off, and when they’re through with it, they excrete it and land.  Other than that, these big, huge things would have to have a wingspan two miles wide to take off.  We know that!  Yet Anne McCaffrey has readership around the world, just on the Pern series alone.  You don’t get too wrapped up on the technical end of it.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#3:  “I read somewhere a theory that the dragons are actually telekinetic.  They just think they’re flying . . .”

PAT:  “I’ll buy that . . .”

WINSTON:  “See?  Why not?”

JEAN:  “And besides, we just might be able to explain it all yet, since up until three or four years ago it was a quote fact unquote that bumblebees could not fly because they did not have the proper wingspan.  And finally, with some new kind of mathematics, it was proved that yes, they can.”  (Laughter)

WINSTON:  “And the bumblebees were very happy, and they all got their licenses again . . .”

PAT:  “Well, one problem I had with that is with these KISHI & BRADSHAW stories — that’s the universe I’m technically here for, published in GRIP 7 . . . One of the two characters is Bradshaw, who’s a human and a screwball.  He’s psychotic in the first episode, he’s a little on the binge in the second one, and somewhere around the eighth you learn some interesting facts about him — that’s he’s never been sane throughout the entire thing . . . He’s based on me.  That tells you something.  (Laughter)

“The other one known as Kishi . . . Well, it all started out as a gag.  We said ‘Let’s put two screwballs in Security . . .’ and it kind of grew from there.  And we figured, ‘Okay, let’s make one of them an alien . . . Let’s make him about two meters tall . . . He’ll be furry . . . He’ll look like a cat . . . have silver blood . . . And then we kept coming up with all these great descriptions of him.

“And then my friend turns to me — I’m the big-chemist of the group — and says, ‘Okay, now how does it work?’  And over five hours and a pot of coffee we worked out the planetology, the social structure, the biochemistry of this . . . and went through five textbooks, because everything has to interlock.  I came up with the most . . .