Challenge 141

Ice in Egypt

Deep Bora is the author you want to bartend your parties: he’s always coming up with the tastiest beverages. First it was Martian coffee and Jupiter-juice cocktails; now it’s Venusian milkshakes. I find Deep’s stories a little hard to read not because they have a unique prose style but because they keep sending me to the fridge!

Speaking of which, the time-traveling space aliens in “Mars Connection” have a brilliant idea for preserving ancient Egyptian mummies, not to mention anything else you might want to keep on ice. But it’s unlikely we’ll be able to adopt the space aliens’ unique method of refrigeration any... um... time... soon.

This challenge is for the technologically-minded among our readers: if we could time-travel back to ancient Egypt or ancient hot anywhere, how might we set ourselves up in the ice — or ice cream — business? We’d have to think in terms of old Spanish architecture, ice houses... and the black-body principle, I’d imagine. And while you’re at it, you might toss in a creative idea or two about global warming.