The auspicious egg cracks, releasing the sunlight of birth.
It was early February, 1963 when Smellison awoke in a cold sweat. "I remember
him running throughout his house at three in the morning, yelling 'China! We
must go to China,' just over and over again," a slightly confused Smellison,
referring to himself in the third person, would later remember. "If I had known
then what I was getting myself into, I probably would have yelled it in someone
else's house." Eventually this decision of delirium would take them on a grand
journey from the first Tay-Ste-Ice sold in the burgeoning communist republic
until the last, nearly a decade later. In that ten years the company would go
on an odyssey unseen since Marco Polo; through the looking glass and into a
land of human history and applied Marxism. 
filled with all
manner of near-state-of-the-art machinery, this factory was to be the start
of something large. However, it needed labor; humans were required to oversee
the machines that were replacing them. The crafty Smellison, although new to
China, knew exactly where he could get cheap labor: the sun-scorched Babylon
of undemanding workmen, Mexico. Large, rectangular rafts were built, each one
made to carry twenty Mexican workers to their new jobs in Asia. "And once the
workers have outlived their usefulness," Smellison wrote in a memo made of rice,
"we can issue them with shovels, allowing them to return to their mother country
by tunneling through the Earth."