by Terry Bisson
Numbers Don’t Lie
by Terry Bisson
ElectricStory.com, Inc.®
NUMBERS DON’T LIE
Copyright © 2001 by Terry Bisson. All rights reserved.
Ebook edition of Numbers Don’t Lie copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-59729-058-6
ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.
These novelettes are works of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.
Cover art by and copyright © 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.
Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.
v1.2
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All stories are reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Susan Ann Protter.
“The Hole in the Hole”: First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1994, copyright © 1994 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
“The Edge of the Universe”: First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1996, copyright © 1996 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
“Get Me to the Church on Time”: First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1998, copyright © 1998 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
Special thanks to Professor of Mathematics Dr. Rudy Rucker, M.S., Ph.D., M.V.P., B.M.O.C., for checking all the formulas herein for “elegance.”
To my reviewers:
Smart, good-looking, and generous, every one.
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Author’s Note to the First Edition
The Hole in the Hole
The Edge of the Universe
Get Me to the Church on Time
Also by Terry Bisson
Other Ebooks from ElectricStory
Author’s Note to the First Edition
NUMBERS DON’T LIE BEGAN ON THE STREET in Brooklyn, where a tall Chinese-American lawyer and I used to lean on our fenders and talk Volvos and Destiny. When I found a Volvo junkyard in a strange, sunken neighborhood near Jamaica Bay, I rushed to find him, for I knew he would love it—but he had moved away. So I had to take him to it in a story, which became “The Hole in the Hole.”
My friend Pat Molloy of NASA was kind enough to send me the specs on the Moon buggy. Rudy Rucker checked Wilson Wu’s math for both elegance and accuracy, and he assures me the one is more important than the other, anyway.
I’m usually a reductive writer, but I grew to enjoy the garrulous tone of my Wu stories. I wrote two more for Asimov’s with the aim of publishing them as one short novel, beginning with a divorce and ending with a wedding.
Hard to do! Nobody wants a short book.
Then ElectricStory made my dream come true. This is the first and only edition of this book in its intended form, not a reprint. It was always meant to be one story. Authors are notoriously hard to please but I’m thrilled: for I think that the still-experimental digital book is the ideal format for Numbers Don’t Lie, which will find its readers among that still-small band of literary adventurers who are willing (and even eager) to swap ink and pulp for pixels.
Or so I hope. For I haven’t seen the last of Wilson Wu, nor he the last of me.
The Hole in the Hole
TRYING TO FIND VOLVO PARTS CAN BE A PAIN, particularly if you are a cheapskate, like me. I needed the hardware that keeps the brake pads from squealing, but I kept letting it go, knowing it wouldn’t be easy to find. The brakes worked okay—good enough for Brooklyn. And I was pretty busy, anyway, being in the middle of a divorce, the most difficult I have ever handled, my own.
After the squeal developed into a steady scream (we’re talking about the brakes here, not the divorce, which was silent), I tried the two auto supply houses I usually dealt with, but had no luck. The counterman at Aberth’s just gave me a blank look. At Park Slope Foreign Auto, I heard those dread words, “dealer item.” Breaking (no pun intended) with my usual policy, I went to the Volvo dealer in Bay Ridge, and the parts man, one of those Jamaicans who seems to think being rude is the same thing as being funny, fished around in his bins and placed a pile of pins, clips, and springs on the counter.
“That’ll be twenty-eight dollars, mon,” he said, with what they used to call a shit-eating grin. When I complained (or as we lawyers like to say, objected), he pointed at the spring which was spray-painted yellow, and said, “Well, you see, they’re gold, mon!” Then he spun on one heel to enjoy the laughs of his coworkers, and I left. There is a limit.
So I let the brakes squeal for another week. They got worse and worse. Ambulances were pulling over to let me by, thinking I had priority. Then I tried spraying the pads with WD-40.
Don’t ever try that.
On Friday morning I went back to Park Slope Foreign Auto and pleaded (another legal specialty) for help. Vinnie, the boss’s son, told me to try Boulevard Imports in Howard Beach, out where Queens and Brooklyn come together at the edge of Jamaica Bay. Since I didn’t have court that day, I decided to give it a try.
The brakes howled all the way. I found Boulevard Imports on Rockaway Boulevard just off the Belt Parkway. It was a dark, grungy, impressive-looking cave of a joint, with guys in coveralls lounging around drinking coffee and waiting on deliveries. I was hopeful.
The counterman, another Vinnie, listened to my tale of woe before dashing my hopes with the dread words, “dealer item.” Then the guy in line behind me, still another Vinnie (everyone wore their names over their pockets) said, “Send him to Frankie in the Hole.”
The Vinnie behind the counter shook his head, saying, “He’d never find it.”
I turned to the other Vinnie and asked, “Frankie in the Hole?”
“Frankie runs a little junkyard,” he said. “Volvos only. You know the Hole?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“I’m not surprised. Here’s what you do. Listen carefully because it’s not so easy to find these days, and I’m only going to tell you once.”
* * *
There’s no way I could describe or even remember everything this Vinnie told me: Suffice it to say that it had to do with crossing over Rockaway Boulevard, then back under the Belt Parkway, forking onto a service road, making a U-turn onto Conduit but staying in the center lane, cutting a sharp left into a dead end (that really wasn’t), and following a dirt track down a steep bank through a grove of trees and brush.
I did as I was told, and found myself in a sort of sunken neighborhood, on a wide dirt street running between decrepit houses set at odd angles on weed-grown lots. It looked like one of those leftover neighborhoods in the meadowlands of Jersey, or down South, where I did my basic training. There were no sidewalks but plenty of potholes, abandoned gardens, and vacant lots. The streets were half-covered by huge puddles. The houses were of concrete block, or tarpaper, or board and batten; no two alike or even remotely similar. There was even a house trailer, illegal in New York City (so, of cour
se, is crime). There were no street signs, so I couldn’t tell if I was in Brooklyn or Queens, or on the dotted line between the two.
The other Vinnie (or third, if you are counting) had told me to follow my nose until I found a small junkyard, which I proceeded to do. Mine was the only car on the street. Weaving around the puddles (or cruising through them like a motorboat) gave driving an almost nautical air of adventure. There was no shortage of junk in the Hole, including a subway car someone was living in, and a crane that had lost its verticality and took up two back yards. Another back yard had a piebald pony. The few people I saw were white. A fat woman in a short dress sat on a high step talking on a portable phone. A gang of kids was gathered around a puddle killing something with sticks. In the yard behind them was a card table with a crude sign reading MOON ROCKS R US.
I liked the peaceful scene in the Hole. And driving through the puddles quieted my brakes. I saw plenty of junk cars, but they came in ones or twos, in the yards and on the street, and none of them were Volvos (no surprise).
After I passed the piebald pony twice, I realized I was going in circles. Then I noticed a chainlink fence with reeds woven into it. And I had a feeling.
I stopped. The fence was just too high to look over, but I could see between the reeds. I was right. It was a junkyard that had been “ladybirded.”
The lot hidden by the fence was filled with cars, squeezed together tightly, side by side and end to end. All from Sweden. All immortal and all dead. All indestructible, and all destroyed. All Volvos.
The first thing you learn in law school is when not to look like a lawyer. I left my tie and jacket in the car, pulled on my coveralls, and followed the fence around to a gate. On the gate was a picture of a snarling dog. The picture was (it turned out) all the dog there was, but it was enough. It slowed you down; made you think.
The gate was unlocked. I opened it enough to slip through. I was in a narrow driveway, the only open space in the junkyard. The rest was packed so tightly with Volvos that there was barely room to squeeze between them. They were lined up in rows, some facing north and some south (or was it east and west?) so that it looked like a traffic jam in Hell. The gridlock of the dead.
At the end of the driveway, there was a ramshackle garage made of corrugated iron, shingleboard, plywood, and fiberglass. In and around it, too skinny to cast shade, were several ailanthus—New York’s parking-lot tree. There were no signs but none were needed. This had to be Frankie’s.
Only one living car was in the junkyard. It stood at the end of the driveway, by the garage, with its hood raised, as if it were trying to speak but had forgotten what it wanted to say. It was a 164, Volvo’s unusual straight six. The body was battered, with bondo under the taillights and doors where rust had been filled in. It had cheap imitation racing wheels and a chrome racing stripe along the bottom of the doors. Two men were leaning over, peering into the engine compartment.
I walked up and watched, unwelcomed but not (I suspected) unnoticed. An older White man in coveralls bent over the engine while a Black man in a business suit looked on and kibitzed in a rough but friendly way. I noticed because this was the late 1980s and the relations between Blacks and Whites weren’t all that friendly in New York.
And here we were in Howard Beach. Or at least in a Hole in Howard Beach.
“If you weren’t so damn cheap, you’d get a Weber and throw these SUs away,” the old man said.
“If I wasn’t so damn cheap, you’d never see my ass,” the Black man said. He had a West Indian accent.
“I find you a good car and you turn it into a piece of island junk.”
“You sell me a piece of trash and . . .”
And so forth. But all very friendly. I stood waiting patiently until the old man raised his head and lifted his eyeglasses, wiped along the two sides of his grease-smeared nose, and then pretended to notice me for the first time.
“You Frankie?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“This is Frankie’s, though?”
“Could be.” Junkyard men like the conditional.
So do lawyers. “I was wondering if it might be possible to find some brake parts for a 145, a 1970. Station wagon.”
“What you’re looking for is an antique dealer,” the West Indian said.
The old man laughed; they both laughed. I didn’t.
“Brake hardware,” I said. “The clips and pins and stuff.”
“Hard to find,” the old man said. “That kind of stuff is very expensive these days.”
The second thing you learn in law school is when to walk away. I was almost at the end of the drive when the old man reached through the window of the 164 and blew the horn: two shorts and a long.
At the far end of the yard, by the fence, a head popped up. I thought I was seeing a cartoon, because the eyes were too large for the head, and the head was too large for the body.
“Yeah, Unc?”
“Frankie, I’m sending a lawyer fellow back there. Show him that 145 we pulled the wheels off of last week.”
“I’ll take a look,” I said. “But what makes you think I’m an attorney?”
“The tassels,” the old man said, looking down at my loafers. He stuck his head back under the hood of the 164 to let me know I was dismissed.
* * *
Frankie’s hair was almost white, and so thin it floated off the top of his head. His eyes were bright blue-green, and slightly bugged out, giving him an astonished look. He wore cowboy boots with the heels rolled over so far that he walked on their sides and left scrollwork for tracks. Like the old man, he was wearing blue gabardine pants and a lighter blue work shirt. On the back it said—
But I didn’t notice what it said. I wasn’t paying attention. I had never seen so many Volvos in one place before. There was every make and model—station wagons, sedans, fastbacks, 544s and 122s, DLs and GLs, 140s to 740s, even a 940—in every state of dissolution, destruction, decay, desolation, degradation, decrepitude, and disrepair. It was beautiful. The Volvos were jammed so close together that I had to edge sideways between them.
We made our way around the far corner of the garage, where I saw a huge jumbled pile—not a stack—of tires against the fence. It was cooler here. The ailanthus trees were waving, though I could feel no breeze.
“This what you’re looking for?” Frankie stopped by a 145 sedan—dark green, like my station wagon; it was a popular color. The wheels were gone and it sat on the ground. By each wheel well lay a hubcap, filled with water.
There was a hollow thud behind us. A tire had come over the fence, onto the pile; another followed it. “I need to get back to work,” Frankie said. “You can find what you need, right?”
He left me with the 145, called out to someone over the fence, then started pulling tires off the pile and rolling them through a low door into a shed built onto the side of the garage. The shed was only about five-feet high. The door was half-covered by a plastic shower curtain hung sideways. It was slit like a hula skirt and every time a tire went through it, it went pop.
Every time Frankie rolled a tire through the door, another sailed over the fence onto the pile behind him. It seemed like the labors of Sisyphus.
Well, I had my own work. Carefully, I drained the water out of the first hubcap. There lay the precious springs and clips I sought—rusty, but usable. I worked my way around the car (a job in itself, as it was jammed so closely with the others). There was a hubcap where each wheel had been. I drained them all and collected the treasure in one hubcap. It was like panning for gold.
There was a cool breeze and a funny smell. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop. But when I finished and took the brake parts to Frankie, the pile of tires was still the same size. Frankie was on top of it, leaning on the fence, talking with an Indian man in a Goodyear shirt.
The Indian (who must have been standing on a truck on the other side of the fence) saw me and ducked. I had scared him away. I realized I was witnessing some kind of illega
l dumping operation. I wondered how all the junk tires fit into the tiny shed, but I wasn’t about to ask. Probably Frankie and the old man took them out and dumped them into Jamaica Bay at night.
I showed Frankie the brake parts. “I figure they’re worth a couple of bucks,” I said.
“Show Unc,” he said. “He’ll tell you what they’re worth.”
I’ll bet, I thought. Carrying my precious hubcap of brake hardware, like a waiter with a dish, I started back toward the driveway. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop as Frankie went back to work. I must have been following a different route between the cars—because when I saw it, I knew it was for the first time.
The 1800 is Volvo’s legendary (well, sort of) sports car from the early 1960s. The first model, the P1800, was assembled in Scotland and England (unusual, to say the least, for a Swedish car). This one, the only one I had ever seen in a junkyard, still had its fins and appeared to have all its glass. It was dark blue. I edged up to it, afraid that if I startled it, it might disappear. But it was real. It was wheelless, engineless, and rusted out in the rocker panels. But it was real. I looked inside. I tapped on the glass. I opened the door.
The interior was the wrong color—but it was real, too. It smelled musty, but it was intact. Or close enough. I arrived at the driveway, so excited that I didn’t even flinch when the old man looked into my hubcap (like a fortune teller reading entrails) and said, “Ten dollars.”