The ladder is made of wood and nails. You begin by nailing a piece of wood into the side of the highest structure—a building, mountain, or very tall tree—you can find. Nail the wood in at navel-height, so that it lays parallel to the ground, with its broadest surface touching the structure. Two nails, firmly put, should do. Wood in this posture, at any height between the ground and outer space, is known as a step.

Hoist yourself up so that you are standing on the step. Then, without pausing, nail in a second piece of wood at the present height of your navel—a height expressed mathematically in terms of the navel as N?2. Climb onto your second step and make a third, continuing in this manner until the structure goes no higher.

Here, standing on your highest step yet, you may pause a moment to catch your breath and to calculate your height in terms of the navel. The highest building in the world reaches to N?521.9, in terms of the average navel as calculated by Jonathan Navel and his team of laboratory assistants in 1895. The highest mountain is at N?9073.44.

Enjoy the new air, but remember that you have many more navelsworth to climb.

In order to be higher than any available ground-bound structures, your next steps must be nailed to flying or floating structures. Birds are the obvious choice. When a bird flies past at navel-height, quickly nail a piece of wood to the bird. Then climb up onto that step, your first bird-step, and wait for another bird. Some manuals encourage the use of formaldehyde or nets in order to speed up the ladder-building process once it has reached the bird-step stage, but we encourage the use of patience. Keep in mind that bats, flying squirrels, and the largest of the flying insects may also be used to make bird-steps—any step attached to a non-ground-bound structure is, technically, a bird-step. You can climb in this way, bird-step by bird-step, until the air grows too fine for birds.

At these heights, you will need to make steps using airplanes, cannonballs, and outbound rockets. Along the upper limits of the atmosphere, you can use space-junk and passing satellites. Although they are invaluable in your ascent to outer space, such steps tend towards entropy; they may wander off the path of your ladder and become orphaned steps, leading nowhere.

Leaving the atmosphere, you may begin to nail wood to the moon, to comets or meteoroids, to planets, and to planet-like chunks of ice and frozen gas. Metoroids are fairly common within our solar system, but as your ladder stretches out of the solar system, and across the galaxy towards outer space, it will become more and more difficult to find structures for your steps. Don't miss any solid chunk that passes at navel height, or you may be stranded on your step for a long time.

The steps below you, given as they are to entropy and disintegration, may no longer be reachable. Any attempt to return to the ground from these heights would imply a terrible leap, grappling at clouds of dust. Safe return is probably impossible.

It is unknown how many people are stranded out somewhere near outer space. We followed some of the first bird-step ladders up as far as we could, but in every case we found that steps in the upper atmosphere had long since disintegrated, fallen, or flown away. We could go no farther. And though our satellite dishes listen day and night, we have not been able to detect the voices of any bird-step ladder builders. Perhaps they are beyond the reach of our machines. Or perhaps they are simply too busy, out in the whirling quiet, to send a signal back.