"Now then," Alice thought, "I'm sure that I passed the University of Manchester on my police-auto journey into the city: perhaps the Uniworseity of Manchester could be somewhere near to that? Surely I must go there to find this professor called Chrowdingler? But however shall I manage it in time?"

Just then Celia came thumping down a book-lined corridor. "Alice, quickly!" the Automated Alice croaked out. "We must make our escape, the police are here!" At which all the other readers vanished like bookworms into the deeply tangled word-tunnels.

"Where are they?" gasped Alice, looking around in a panic.

"Suddenly everywhere!" answered Celia.

Indeed the police were suddenly everywhere! They were creeping out of every alleyway, every tunnel, every single maze-path of the librarinth. In no time at all, Alice and Celia were completely surrounded by a champing circle of dog officers. Mrs Minus and Inspector Jack Russell emerged from the ragged circumference. Mrs Minus was snakely fingering the corpse of the aquatic reader. "Girl Alice," the subtracter snake hissed, "you are under arrest for Hindering the Police in their Enquiries. You are further under arrest for the Jigsaw Murder of this poor innocent Fishman."

"Oh, what shall we do now, Celia?" pleaded Alice.

"Open up the cupboard in my right-hand thigh," whispered Celia.

"I didn't know you had a cupboard in your right-hand thigh!"

"Pablo Ogden made many rearrangements to my body. Take a little look."

So Alice did take a little look. Upon Celia's right-hand thigh was a small cupboard door, labelled TO BE OPENED IN AN EMERGENCY ONLY.

"I don't know what's in there," Celia croaked, "but won't you please open it up, Alice? The police are closing in!"

The police were closing in!

So Alice opened up the cupboard in Celia's thigh. There she found a shiny brass lever, and next to it the message PULL ME AND HANG ON TIGHTLY! Alice pulled the lever...

Four-and-a-fearsome minutes later, Alice and Celia were speeding down the Oxford Road in search of the Uniworseity of Manchester. And there was Whippoorwill the parrot, fluttering along just ahead of them, always just so tantalizingly out of reach. Police sirens were singing a plaintive song through the rain, but Celia was running at such a terbo-charged speed that the twinly twisted pair very soon escaped from their pursuers.

Six-and-a-slickety minutes later, Alice and Celia arrived at the imposing stone-built bulk of the University of Manchester. Once inside the campus, they managed (of course!) to lose Whippoorwill, but also managed to find a series of hand-painted signs that led them towards a small hole in the ground, marked with a downwards-pointing arrow: THE UNIWORSEITY THIS WAY.

Down the hole Alice and her twin twister went.

(Dearest readers, in my old age I seem to have mislaid the passage that tells of what happened when Alice pulled the lever in Celia's right-hand thigh. I must now deliver that story to you; or else the reader will surely bang shut this final Book of Alice in frustration.)

Pablo Ogden had kitted-out the Automated Alice with two thigh-cupboards, the left and the right. The left-leg cupboard was marked with the words TO BE OPENED IN AN EXTREME EMERGENCY ONLY. The right-leg cupboard was to be opened in a lesser-than-extreme emergency, and this was the door that Alice had opened, revealing the shiny brass lever which Alice pulled...

Celia's legs then started to grow up like two tree trunks, towards the ceiling of the librarinth! Alice clung onto these telescoping legs, as Celia towered towards the skylight, through which Whippoorwill the parrot had previously flown. Ever so high! Alice looked down (always a mistake) and felt quite giddy from the upwards-rushing journey.

The policedogmen were left far down below, where they could only pant and growl in frustration. Alice waved goodbye to them, with a smile. Once on the roof of the library, Celia collapsed her extended legs back into a neat porcelain pair, and then re-extended them over the side of the building so that Alice and herself could descend to the road below. Once safely on the ground, Celia folded up her legs to their usual size, and from there the two adventuring girls raced along the Oxford Road towards the University and its underfolded passages...

(I do hope I've remembered that little escapade correctly.)

The Uniworseity; a darkling underworld of glimmers and shimmers, a myriad shadows pointing Alice and Celia towards a laboratory called THE DEPARTMENT OF CHROWNOTRANSDUCTIONOLOGY. Alice knocked on the door and received no answer except for a far-off cawing; she pushed open the door and walked, quite brazenly, into the laboratory.

These are some of the things that Alice and Celia found in there: a whole concoction of scientific apparatus wriggling and steaming and fuming in every single corner of the laboratory; a giant heap of computermites noisily chomping their way through a series of terrifically difficult questions; waves of liquid mystery bubbling along a knot-work of glass pipes, until they all inserted themselves into a large wooden box that rested on the floor; some black lettering on the box's side that said DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT!; a dirty black dishcloth of an old crow that was perching on the box's lid (and wearing a bowler hat, mind!), cawing away to itself, whilst at the same time smoking a meerschaum pipe. "Quark, quark!" rasped the crow, through clouding wreathes of tobacco mist.

But the very worst thing that Alice found in the laboratory was the smell! Oh dear, the smell! It was the stench that can sometimes be emitted from the wrong end of a ghastly meat pie, in the high season.

The crow was tap-tap-tapping on the wooden box's lid with the pipe in her nicotined beak. "It's very smelly in here!" Alice commented to the crow, not expecting any answer, and receiving none, except for a further tippety-tapping. "And I was so hoping to find Professor Gladys Chrowdingler! Alice added.

At which point the crow flopped off the box with a piercing cry, "Quark!" And by the time the bird had landed at Alice's feet, it had turned into a fully grown Crow-woman: an ancient, creased-up crone of a human woman, complete with a crow's beak-and-wing accessories (and a bowler-hatted accompaniment).

"I am Professor Gladys Chrowdingler!" the Crow-woman quarked mightily, taking the steaming pipe out of her mouth for a moment (and tipping her bowler hat to the two Alices). "The horrible smell comes from my chemical and physical experiments, I'm afraid. Oh, but I'm so glad that you two girls have safely arrived in my lab; I've been waiting ages for you! Ages! Now then, which of you is the Reality Alice?"

The Crow-woman flapped at Alice and Celia with her wings of soot.

Alice had noticed that something was trapped inside the wooden box. It was banging against the insides, demanding, in a muffled voice, to be let out. Alice decided to ignore the thing in the box for the moment: "Why, I'm the real Alice, of course," she told the Professor.

"Are you sure?" asked the Crow-woman, speaking around the fuming pipe she had replaced in her beak. "You both look almost identical."

"She is the Real Alice," Celia stated plainly, and pointed. "I'm only the Automated version; my name is Celia."