It's not widely known, but there's a town up in the mountains where the people who run things live. They are the ones who set the rules. They write the formulae. They fix the constants. Xenon is inert because of their whims. Inertial mass equals gravitational mass because they said so- they had other plans originally, but these turned out to be such a pain in the ass that the whole elaborate scheme was dropped.

From a distance, their houses look like igloos: one hundred and thirty-seven whitish mushroom shapes poking up among the flatirons. Closer inspection reveals that the igloos are geodesic domes, hundreds of triangles locked together into a Fullerene hemisphere. Moving closer still, one sees that the domes are made of paper. The power of the electrostatic bonds within the paper has been increased by the people who run things to improve the tensile strength (they're a bit games-mad, given to playing sports wherein some fundamental law or constant has been altered, and the risk of an errant ball from a game of low-gravity baseball striking a house is very real). As this is a mountain town, it snows often, but this is no problem: the boiling point of water has been lowered drastically in the space immediately above their houses so that precipitation flashes harmlessly into steam before it hits the paper.

There is one way in and out of town- a road that winds between the igloos and down the mountains, eventually hooking up to a spur that takes you into Nederland. It is a curious road. In the morning, it's gravel, and the going is slow by bicycle unless you have fat tires or have manipulated the workings of friction. By the evening, though, foot and bicycle traffic have turned the road into a Roman-style stone-block affair, complete with majestic unmasoned keystone bridges crossing the mountain streams. The people who run things have reversed the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the road, and it tends towards greater order. Throw a random handful of cards down onto it, and they'll land in an orderly-stacked deck, more often than not grouped by suit and sorted in ascending value.

Every night the road is ripped up by Eddy, the town drunk. He goes out just after dark with a sledgehammer and a temporary restoration of the Second Law. He tells anyone who'll listen that he has to do this so that they can at least attempt to show a little respect to the conservation laws. The rest of the people think he's being silly, but they tolerate him. Eddy's harmless.

Things are usually tranquil in town, but there are occasional flurries of activity. In the early 90s, for example, in the days just after two guys in Utah had gone public with a claim that they had achieved cold fusion. The town resembled an anthill after being blown open by a firecracker as the people who run things scurried around to see if they'd dropped a decimal point somewhere or overlooked some loophole. Things calmed down only after they re-checked everything and were sure that the error wasn't on their side. The subsequent shameful retraction from Utah generated many smug nods in the geodesic domes.

A greater crisis came a few years later when the particle colliders at Fermilab and CERN stepped up their searches for the Top Quark. The people who run things realized rather late in the game that they'd never bothered to nail down a mass for the Top Quark- they had been meaning to, but it was always a project for next weekend. And now they were paying for their procrastination... While they'd never worked out the specifics, they'd always had a general range in mind for the Top's mass, and they were horrified to discover that the Fermilab team had already scoured that area with a fine-toothed particle counter.

Bedlam ensued. Where were they going to put the damned mass? At the rate the Fermilab team was moving, every conceivable value would be ruled out in no time and the standard model of particle physics would be cast into serious doubt and theorists the world over would no doubt begin disemboweling themselves. Recriminations flew as the people who run things turned on themselves, chastising each other for letting serious decisions go unresolved while half the town sat around watching "Becker" and the other half was caught up in working out the rules for ten-dimensional soccer. Eddy roamed up and down the town, forsaking his street maintenance, besottedly howling that the conservation laws were finally having their day and that he'd been right all along.

And then cooler heads prevailed. Someone pointed out that if they hurried up they might have time to get the Top fixed at the very highest possible mass; and even if they didn't make it and the Fermilab team moved too fast, it would still be better to be working than to be yelling at each other. So an all-nighter was pulled, several kegs of beer were consumed, and all of the details of the Top Quark were established just in time for the formal discovery. An unusually sober Eddy stood up and suggested that they think about a more rigorous review process to make sure that an oversight like this never happened again, but he was ignored. Instead, by way of celebration, the people who run things trooped over to Ward, a mountain town out past Nederland. There's a guy in Ward who stands in his yard naked but for a kilt and his tattoos, boxing any and all comers right there on the grass for a small fee. Any time the people who run things have something to celebrate, they do so by making their way over to Ward and watching the action. Even Eddie.

They're not gods. They're not elves, or pixies, or magicians, or anything crazy like that. They're just the people who run things. And if their love of a good time occasionally gets in the way of business, well, can you blame them? Everything works out in the end.

A slightly different version of this story appeared previously in DIAGRAM, which is just one of the many reasons you should keep an eye on that fine publication.