"I was trying to get out," replied Alice.

"And very glad I am that you managed it. Of course, every home's got one these days; computermite mounds are most useful for the solving of problems. I dug this one up myself, you know, only yesterday, in a radish patch."

"A radish patch?" said Alice.

"What's so strange about that? Termites are vegetarians, you know?"

"I know."

"My previous mound was getting rather antsy, you see. Anyway, I'd heard on the badgervine that a rather nice Queen had moved her troops into an old radish patch in Didsbury -"

"Didsbury!"

"Yes. Do you know it?"

"I was there only a few minutes ago."

"Well, you must have very fast feet then, because it's five miles from here."

"Oh dear," said a very confused Alice.

"However, this is only a portable mound." Alice tried her very best to imagine a badger carrying a mound of earth through the streets, but no matter how hard she tried she still couldn't imagine it. "They say that if you could get enough computermites into a big enough mound," the Badgerman continued, "you would have a termite brain equal in imagination to the human mind. But, according to my miscalculations, that would make the -"

"Don't you mean calculations," interrupted Alice.

"I thought I had already told you that I was a Randomologist?" replied the Badgerman, crossly. "Now what would a Randomologist be doing making calculations? No, no; a Randomologist makes miscalculations, and according to my miscalculations, a computermite mound with the imagination-power of a single human would be as large as the whole world itself! But what I want to know, Alice, is this: How in the earth did you manage to get inside the mound?"

"I just found myself there," Alice said, quite dizzy from the Captain's miscalculations. "Could you tell me the time, please?"