by Victor Allen
**********
From “A Famous Case History of SHC: William X”, which aired on a Saturday night as an investigative special. The picture shows an attractive young woman of about twenty-five. She is Lucy Simmons, the journalist who did the probing feature article on the mysterious death of William X, best selling novelist.
“There is no question that William X’s death will forever be categorized as unexplained, but whether his death was murder or misadventure, his life was far more revealing.
“William X was portrayed to me as a great man who heaped the burdens of his friends on himself; a saint walking among mortals. He was also portrayed as selfish and uncaring, unwilling to make time even for his wife and daughter; Mother Teresa and Ebenezer Scrooge.
“The truth, even a truth as strange as this, lies somewhere in the middle. William X was benevolent and benighted, caring and cold, but he was mainly human, with human faults and merits, capable of great strength and, like all humans, fragile and prone to break.
“And break he finally did, not with a whimper, but with a bang; not with a sigh, but in a blaze.”
A World for the Wishing
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
Kenny Ross felt the shadow of his math teacher looming over him, but it was too late. A hand swooped down and snatched away the magazine he had carefully placed within his open math book.
Mr. Norton casually leafed through the magazine’s pages, staring down at them from his baronial six feet three, inches in length. The wire brush on his upper lip occasionally quivered as his mouth puckered with interest. The magazine was a cheaply printed “special edition” -what would be called pulp by most, but Kenny, at eleven years old, wouldn’t know that -entitled Strange Facts about Outer Space. The cover was a gaudy collage of spinning white vortices and sizzling meteor trails interspersed with a sundry collection of H.G. Wellesian era spaceships belching contrails of superheated plasma. The four color poster fairly leaped off the page and mugged your eyes like a bad dream of psychedelia, just the kind of thing to fire the curiosity of a fifth grader.
“At it again, Ross,” Mr. Norton asked agreeably.
Kenny was aghast. He studied his desk avidly, afraid to speak. A warm blush of embarrassment crimsoned his cheeks and heated his ears. This was the second time this week he had been caught red handed, and every little kid that plays baseball knows that three strikes and you’re out.
Mr. Norton flipped through a few more pages before thinking to look around at the classroom reaction. Fresh out of college, this was his first teaching gig and he had to make his presence felt. Not that a room full of fifth graders was particularly intimidating, but he knew the eye of every spit-baller and apple polisher in the class rested on him. He caught several pairs of eyes that hastily retreated to the books on their desks. Papers started rustling with the sounds of half-hearted scribbling.
“Come and see me after class, Ross,” Mr. Norton said. “You can get your magazine back, then.”
He strolled away, his stilt legs giving him the appearance of gliding. He made one slow circuit of the room, letting his stern eye rest on a couple of kids that looked like they might try to take advantage of the situation, and ended up back at his own desk. He sat down in the deplorably small, entirely uncomfortable wooden chair and propped his feet on the desk. He wasn’t overly concerned with Kenny reading something besides his math text in his class. Kenny’s grades were good and while he might not be the next Enrico Fermi, or Philip K. Dick, or Robert Goddard, he at least wasn’t one of the slack-jawed, fish-eyed zombies who spent every waking second endlessly Facefarcing, Twattering, or texting away.
He thumbed through the magazine while the class worked on their assignments, occasionally having to shush them with the smart rap of a ruler on his desk when they became more interested in the sound of their own voices than in their math homework. He read a couple of articles, one having to do with Worm holes and squeezing space-time, the other on particle entanglement. A little more erudite than the pulp cover would have led him to believe. Not college level, but beyond the scope of 99% of fifth graders. But Kenny would probably grasp it pretty easily. He had started on a third article (Gravity Wave Propagation: Is Light Speed Really the Cosmic Speed Bump?) when the bell rang.
Twenty-seven students stood as one. Books snapped shut with bangs, papers crinkled, chairs creaked and tongues flapped. Somewhere out in the hallway, somebody bellowed in a fair imitation of a wounded moose as the students trooped out. The twenty-eighth student trudged to Mr. Norton’s desk with a foot dragging shuffle and looked at him expectantly, a little put upon.
“Sit down, Ross,” Mr. Norton said.
Wooden feet scraped sadly across the floor in inanimate pantomime of his own mood as Kenny dragged up a chair. He sat down, his face a living alloy of resignation and expectation.
“Can I have my magazine back?”
Norton looked at Kenny, a small kid, even for eleven. Norton must have seemed like a giant to him. Norton gave a last, short glance at the magazine, then spoke.
“You’re really interested in this stuff, aren’t you, Kenny?”
Kenny nodded hopefully. Mr. Norton had used his first name and that was a good sign. Kenny was already warming to the thought of the strange, wondrous, and dangerous things the universe had to offer. Things like radio stars, quasars, dark matter and super novae; matter and anti-matter squared off locked in a desperate struggle against total annihilation; infinitely dense black holes and world-killing Gamma ray bursts.
“There’s so many things,” Kenny said, warming up. “Comets and nebulae, massive stars like V Y Canis Majoris and Eta Carinae, red giants, solar flares, the water hole, planetary systems, binary stars, neutron stars, pure crystallized carbon stars….”
Norton interrupted. “Crystallized carbon? You mean, like, diamond, crystallized carbon?” That was a new one to him.
“Oh, sure,” Kenny answered promptly, apparently unworried about any discipline Mr. Norton had in store for him. “I was reading about them just the other day. Dwarf stars about the size of the earth made from pure diamond. Practically right next door, too. Right here in our own galaxy.” Kenny’s unlined forehead wrinkled softly as he concentrated, searching for a word to convey a specific image. “The galaxy is crammed with them,” he finished.
Students for the next class, seventh grade math, had begun sauntering in. Sweat-slick palms squeaked on wooden desktops and the smacking of bubble gum registered dimly in Norton’s ears and its sweet, pink smell curled nostalgically in his nose.
“What I wouldn’t give to have one of those stars,” Kenny answered glumly. “I wouldn’t ever have to worry about money my whole life. Daddy wouldn’t have to work anymore, or worry about getting me and mom the things we need.” He looked down at his cheap, frazzled tennis shoes, the kind his more affluent classmates referred to as “buddies”, with their lace-thin, cloth topsides and cheap, plastic soles that slipped and slid like ice on a polished gym floor. Norton noticed that Kenny’s blue jeans bottomed out two inches above his shoe tops. He had heard some of the other kids call him “Noah” because, as they so cattily said, he always looked like he was waiting on a flood. How bad must things be for an eleven year old kid to have to worry about money?
“What,” Mr. Norton asked, “would you do with that star?”
Kenny’s eyes lit up and he smiled what would be in years to come a real, lady-killer smile.
“I guess I’d be rich, wouldn’t I? I mean, a whole star made out of diamond? That would be enough, wouldn’t it?”
“Where would you keep this star?”
Kenny squinched his face up like crumpled tissue paper. “I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess it would have to be close-by, wouldn’t it? So I could get to it?”
“It wouldn’t really make you rich, you know,” Mr. Norton counseled kindly. “Unless you were the only one with access to
it.”
“What do you mean,” Kenny asked. Grown-ups had some odd ideas.
“Diamonds now are valuable because they’re scarce, but if you had a diamond as large as the earth, they would be as common as, well, not to put too fine a point on it, dirt.”
Some internal rheostat muted the light in Kenny’s eyes. “Oh. I never thought of that, either.” Kenny sighed, the sound of a fragile dream fluttering down like a house of cards. “It’s too bad I wasn’t born rich, instead of with all these looks.”
“It’s not a bad idea, Kenny, just not possible with present technology.”
Kenny gave a sideways look to the magazine in Norton’s hand.
“Even with things like particle entanglement? Wormholes that bend space time and turn the distance between two points to zero?”
Norton grinned curiously at Kenny.
“You sure you’re only eleven years old, or have you just been reading too much Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke?”
“Arthur Clarke said ‘it may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.’ I dream about that star. It seems like the only way I can have anything is when they’re in my dreams. Nobody can take them away from me.”
The tardy bell rang, clanging in the now lonely hallways.
“You can have any star you want,” Mr. Norton said. “You can go out tonight and pick any star in the sky for your very own.”
“But it wouldn’t really be mine.” Kenny’s mood shifted suddenly and he seemed on the verge of tears. “There’s no telling how many kids just like me go out and pick a star for their very own and I could go out and take somebody else’s star and then it wouldn’t be their star or mine, anymore.”
Kenny stood up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Norton. I gotta go. I’m already late for class.” He kept his eyes lowered and turned to shuffle off, his magazine forgotten.
“Wait a minute, Kenny. I’ll write you a note so your teacher will know why you were late.”
Kenny stood miserably by Norton’s desk while he wrote out a late admission slip, feeling the unkind eyes of everyone looking at him in his high-water blue jeans and buddy tennis shoes and making smart comments behind their hands. Maybe someday something would happen to let him wipe the slate clean and start all over.
Mr. Norton signed the slip and handed it to Kenny along with the magazine. Kenny turned to go, but before he could leave, Norton said: “Don’t let your dreams get bogged down because you didn’t think far enough ahead. For every possibility there is also a consequence, it comes with the territory of discovery. But if you really want something, there’s always a way to get it.”
Kenny nodded, red-eyed and humiliated. He had successfully checked the outside waterworks, but they were running inside. Pretty soon they’ll just fill up my lungs and I’ll drown. He plodded from the classroom, heart thudding like a clock with a lead pendulum.
Norton watched him leave. There was something about that kid. He couldn’t fine tune exactly what, but….
Sally June Reynolds let loose with a short, snorting laugh as Kenny walked out the door. His pace quickened and Mr. Norton turned towards her with a cutting look. He crooked a finger at her and beckoned blackly.
Uh-oh.