Numbers Don't Lie

by Terry Bisson

  “Hi, Wu.” (She was speaking to him.)

  We took my 145. Wu was silent all the way out Eastern Parkway, doing figures on a cocktail napkin from a Bay Ridge nightclub. “Go out last night?” I asked. After a whole day with Diane, I was dying to have somebody to talk to.

  “Something was bothering me all night,” he said. “Since the surface of the Moon is a vacuum, how come all the air on Earth doesn’t rush through the shed door, along with the tires?”

  “I give up,” I said.

  We were at a stoplight. “There it is,” he said. He handed me the napkin, on which was scrawled:

  “There what is?”

  “The answer to my question. As those figures demonstrate, Irv, we’re not just dealing with a neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. The two areas are still separated by a quarter of a million miles, even though that distance has been folded to the width of a centimeter. It’s all there in black and white. See?”

  “I guess,” I said. The fourth thing you learn in law school is to never admit you don’t understand something.

  “The air doesn’t rush through, because it can’t. It can kind of seep through, though, creating a slight microclimate in the immediate vicinity of the adjacency. Which is probably why we don’t die immediately of decompression. A tire can roll through, if you give it a shove, but air is too, too . . .”

  “Too wispy to shove,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  I looked for the turn off Conduit, but nothing was familiar. I tried a few streets, but none of them led us into the Hole. “Not again!” Wu complained.

  “Again!” I answered.

  I went back to Boulevard. Vinnie was behind the counter today, and he remembered me (with a little prodding).

  “You’re not the only one having trouble finding the Hole,” he said. “It’s been hard to find lately.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lately’?” Wu asked from the doorway.

  “Just this last year. Every month or so it gets hard to find. I think it has to do with the Concorde. I read somewhere that the noise affects the tide, and the Hole isn’t that far from Jamaica Bay, you know.”

  “Can you draw us a map?” I asked.

  “I never took drawing,” Vinnie said, “so listen up close.”

  * * *

  Vinnie’s instructions had to do with an abandoned railroad track, a wrong-way turn onto a one-way street, a dog-leg that cut across a health club parking lot, and several other ins and outs. While I was negotiating all this, Wu was scrawling the back of a car-wash flyer he had taken from Vinnie’s counter.

  “The tide,” he muttered. “I should have known!”

  I didn’t ask him what he meant; I figured (I knew!) he would tell me. But before he had a chance, we were bouncing down a dirt track through some scruffy trees, and onto the now-familiar dirt streets of the Hole. “Want some more moon rocks?” I asked when we passed the kids and their stand.

  “I’ll pick up my own today, Irv!”

  I pulled up by the gate and we let ourselves in. Wu carried the shopping bag; he gave me the toolbox.

  The old man was working on an ancient 122, the Volvo that looks like a ’48 Ford from the back. (It was always one of my favorites.) “It’s electric,” he said when Wu and I walked up.

  “The 122?” I asked.

  “The dune buggy,” the old man said. “Electric is the big thing now. All the cars in California are going to be electric next year. It’s the law.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “So what, anyway?”

  “That makes that dune buggy worth a lot of money.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Besides, you already agreed on a price.”

  “That’s right. Five hundred,” Wu said. He pulled five bills from his pocket and unfolded them.

  “I said I couldn’t take less than five hundred,” the old man said. “I never said I couldn’t take more.”

  Before Wu could answer, I pulled him behind the 122. “Remember the second thing we learned in law school!” I said. “When to walk away. We can come back next week—if you still want that thing.”

  Wu shook his head. “It won’t be here next week. I realized something when Vinnie told us that the Hole was getting hard to find. The adjacency is warping the neighborhood as well as the cislunar space-time continuum. And since it’s lunar, it has a monthly cycle. Look at this.”

  He handed me the car wash flyer, on the back of which was scrawled:

  “See?” said Wu. “We’re not just dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with a periodic incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”

  “Which means . . .”

  “The adjacency comes and goes. With the Moon.”

  “Sort of like PMS.”

  “Exactly. I haven’t got the figures adjusted for daylight savings time yet, but the Moon is on the wane, and I’m pretty sure that after today, Frankie will be out of the illegal dumping business for a month, at least.”

  “Perfect. So we come back next month.”

  “Irv, I don’t want to take the chance. Not with a million dollars at stake.”

  “Not with a what?” He had my attention.

  “That LRV cost two million new, and only three of them were made. Once we get it out, all we have to do is contact NASA. Or Boeing. Or the Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. Give me a couple of hundred bucks and I’ll give you a fourth interest.”

  “A half.”

  “A third. Plus the P1800.”

  “You already gave me the P1800.”

  “Yeah, but I was only kidding. Now I’m serious.”

  “Deal,” I said. But instead of giving Wu two hundred, I plucked the five hundred-dollar bills out of his hand. “But you stick to the numbers. I do all the talking.”

  * * *

  We got it for six hundred. Non-refundable. “What does that mean?” Wu asked.

  “It means you boys own the dune buggy—whether you get it out of the cave or not,” said the old man, counting his money.

  “Fair enough,” said Wu. It didn’t seem fair to me at all, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would get our money back from the old man, anyway.

  He went back to work on the engine of the 122, and Wu and I headed for the far end of the yard. We found Frankie rolling tires through the shed door: Pop, pop, pop. The pile by the fence was as big as ever. He waved and kept on working.

  Wu set down the shopping bag and pulled out two of those spandex bicycling outfits. He handed one to me, and started taking off his shoes.

  I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange—what I said, what he said, objections, arguments, etc. Suffice it to say that, ten minutes later, I was wearing black and purple tights under my coveralls, and so was Wu. Supposedly, they were to keep our skin from blistering in the vacuum. Wu was hard to resist when he had his mind made up.

  I wondered what Frankie thought of it all. He just kept rolling tires through the doorway, one by one.

  There were more surprises in the bag. Wu pulled out rubber gloves and wool mittens, a brown bottle with Chinese writing on it, a roll of clear plastic vegetable bags from the supermarket, a box of cotton balls, a roll of duct tape, and a rope.

  Frankie didn’t say anything until Wu got to the rope. Then he stopped working, sat down on the pile of tires, lit a cigarette, and said: “Won’t work.”

  Wu begged his pardon.

  “I’ll show you,” Frankie said. He tied one end of the rope to a tire and tossed it through the low door into the shed. There was the usual pop and then a fierce crackling noise.

  Smoke blew out the door. Wu and I both jumped back.

  Frankie pulled the rope back, charred on one end. There was no tire. “I learned the hard way,” he said, “when I tried to pull the dune buggy through myself, before I took th
e wheels off.”

  “Of course!” Wu said. “What a fool I’ve been. I should have known!”

  “Should have known what?” Frankie and I both asked at once.

  Wu tore a corner off the shopping bag and started scrawling numbers on it with a pencil stub. “Should have known this!” he said, and he handed it to Frankie.

  Frankie looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to me:

  “So?” I said.

  “So, there it is!” Wu said. “As those figures clearly indicate, you can pass through a noncongruent adjacency, but you can’t connect its two aspects. It’s only logical. Imagine the differential energy stored when a quarter of a million miles of space-time is folded to less than a millimeter.”

  “Burns right through a rope,” Frankie said.

  “Exactly.”

  “How about a chain?” I suggested.

  “Melts a chain,” said Frankie. “Never tried a cable, though.”

  “No substance known to man could withstand that awesome energy differential,” Wu said. “Not even cable. That’s why the tires make that pop. I’ll bet you have to roll them hard or they bounce back, right?”

  “Whatever you say,” said Frankie, putting out his cigarette. He was losing interest.

  “Guess that means we leave it there,” I said. I had mixed feelings. I hated to lose a third of a million dollars, but I didn’t like the looks of that charred rope. Or the smell. I was even willing to kiss my hundred bucks goodbye.

  “Leave it there? No way. We’ll drive it out,” Wu said. “Frankie, do you have some twelve-volt batteries you can loan me? Three, to be exact.”

  “Unc’s got some,” said Frankie. “I suspect he’ll want to sell them, though. Unc’s not much of a loaner.”

  Why was I not surprised?

  * * *

  Half an hour later we had three twelve-volt batteries in a supermarket shopping cart. The old man had wanted another hundred dollars, but since I was now a partner I did the bargaining, and we got them for twenty bucks apiece, charged and ready to go, with the cart thrown in. Plus three sets of jumper cables, on loan.

  Wu rolled the two wire mesh wheels through the shed door. Each went pop and was gone. He put the toolbox into the supermarket cart with the batteries and the jumper cables. He pulled on the rubber gloves, and pulled the wool mittens over them. I did the same.

  “Ready, Irv?” Wu said. (I would have said no, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. So I didn’t say anything.) “We won’t be able to talk on the Moon, so here’s the plan. First, we push the cart through. Don’t let it get stuck in the doorway where it connects the two aspects of the adjacency, or it’ll start to heat up. Might even explode. Blow up both worlds. Who knows? Once we’re through, you head down the hill with the cart. I’ll bring the two wheels. When we get to the LRV, you pick up the front end

  and—”

  “Don’t we have a jack?”

  “I’m expecting very low gravity. Besides, the LRV is lighter than a golf cart. Only 460 pounds, and that’s here on Earth. You hold it up while I mount the wheels—I have the tools laid out in the tray of the toolbox. Then you hand me the batteries, they go in front, and I’ll connect them with the jumper cables, in series. Then we climb in and—”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something, Wu?” I said. “We won’t be able to hold our breath long enough to do all that.”

  “Ah so!” Wu grinned and held up the brown bottle with Chinese writing on it. “No problem! I have here the ancient Chinese herbal treatment known as (he said some Chinese words), or ‘Pond Explorer.’ Han dynasty sages used it to lie underwater and meditate for hours. I ordered this from Hong Kong, where it is called (more Chinese words), or ‘Mud Turtle Master’ and used by thieves; but no matter, it’s the same stuff. Hand me those cotton balls.”

  The bottle was closed with a cork. Wu uncorked it and poured thick brown fluid on a cotton ball; it hissed and steamed.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Pond Explorer not only provides the blood with oxygen, it suppresses the breathing reflex. As a matter of fact, you can’t breathe while it’s under your tongue. Which means you can’t talk. It also contracts the capillaries and slows the heartbeat. It also scours the nitrogen out of the blood so you don’t get the bends.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I was into organic chemistry for several years,” Wu said. “Did my master’s thesis on ancient Oriental herbals. Never finished it, though.”

  “Before you studied math?”

  “After math, before law. Open up.”

  As he prepared to put the cotton ball under my tongue, he said, “Pond Explorer switches your cortex to an ancient respiratory pattern predating the oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Pretty old stuff, Irv! It will feel perfectly natural, though. Breathe out and empty your lungs. There! When we come out, spit it out immediately so you can breathe and talk. It’s that simple.”

  The Pond Explorer tasted bitter. I felt oxygen (or something) flooding my tongue and my cheeks. My mouth tingled. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad; as a matter of fact, it felt great. Except for the taste, which didn’t go away.

  Wu put his cotton ball under his tongue, smiled, and corked the bottle. Then, while I watched in alarm, he tore two plastic bags off the roll.

  I saw what was coming. I backed away, shaking my head—

  I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange. Suffice it to say that, minutes later, we both had plastic bags over our heads, taped around our necks with duct tape. Once I got over my initial panic, it wasn’t so bad. As always, Wu seemed to know what he was doing. And as always, it was no use resisting his plans.

  If you’re wondering what Frankie was making of all this, so was I. He had stopped working again. While my bag was being taped on, I saw him sitting on the pile of tires, watching us with those blue-green eyes; looking a little bored, as if he saw such goings-on every day.

  It was time. Wu grabbed the front of the supermarket cart and I grabbed the handle. Wu spun his finger and pointed toward the shed door with its tattered shower curtain waving slightly in the ripples of the space-time interface. We were off!

  I waved goodbye to Frankie. He lifted one finger in farewell as we ran through.

  * * *

  From the Earth to the Moon—in one long step for mankind (and in particular, Wilson Wu). I heard a crackling, even through the plastic bag, and the supermarket cart shuddered and shook like a lawnmower with a bent blade. Then we were on the other side, and there was only a huge cold empty silence.

  Overhead, a million stars. At our feet, gray dust. The door we had come through was a dimly lighted hole under a low cliff behind us. We were looking down a gray slope strewn with tires. The flat area at the bottom of the slope was littered with empty bottles, wrappers, air tanks, a big tripod, and of course, the dune buggy—or LRV—nose down in the dust. There were tracks all around it. Beyond were low hills, gray-green except for an occasional black stone. Everything seemed close; there was no far away. Except for the tires, the junk and the tracks around the dune buggy, the landscape was featureless, smooth. Unmarked. Untouched. Lifeless.

  The whole scene was half-lit, like dirty snow under a full moon in winter, only brighter. And more green.

  Wu was grinning like a mad man. His plastic bag had expanded so that it looked like a space helmet; I realized mine probably looked the same. This made me feel better.

  Wu pointed up behind us. I turned, and there was the Earth—hanging in the sky like a blue-green, oversized moon, just like the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog. I hadn’t actually doubted Wu, but I hadn’t actually believed him either, until then. The fifth thing you learn in law school is to be comfortable in that “twilight zone” between belief and doubt.

  Now I believed it. We were on the Moon, looking back at the Earth. And it was cold! The gloves did no good at all, even with the wool over the rubber. But there was no time to worry about it. Wu had already picked up the wire mesh w
heels and started down the slope, sort of hopping with one under each arm, trying to miss the scattered tires. I followed, dragging the grocery cart behind me. I had expected it to bog down in the dust, but it didn’t. The only problem was, the low gravity made it hard for me to keep my footing. I had to wedge my toes under the junk tires and pull it a few feet at a time.

  The dune buggy, or LRV, as Wu liked to call it, was about the size of a jeep without a hood (or even an engine). It had two seats side by side, like lawn chairs with plastic webbing, facing a square console the size of a portable TV. Between the seats was a gearshift. There was no steering wheel. An umbrella-shaped antenna attached to the front end made the whole thing look like a contraption out of E.T. or Mary Poppins.

  I picked up the front end, and Wu started putting on the left wheel, fitting it under the round fiberglass fender. Even though the LRV was light, the sudden exertion reminded me that I wasn’t breathing, and I felt an instant of panic. I closed my eyes and sucked my tongue until it went away. The bitter taste of the Pond Explorer was reassuring.

  When I opened my eyes, it looked like a fog was rolling in: it was my plastic bag, fogging up. I could barely see Wu, already finishing the left wheel. I wondered if he had ever worked on an Indy pit crew. (I found out later that he had.)

  Wu crossed to the right wheel. The fog was getting thicker. I tried wiping it off with one hand, but of course, it was on the inside. Wu gave the thumbs up, and I set the front end down. I pointed at my plastic bag, and he nodded. His was fogged up, too. He tossed his wrench into the toolbox, and the plastic tray shattered like glass (silently, of course). Must have been the cold. My fingers and toes were killing me.

  Wu started hopping up the slope, and I followed. I couldn’t see the Earth overhead, or the Moon below; everything was a blur. I wondered how we would find our way out (or in?), back through the shed door. I needn’t have worried. Wu took my hand and led me through, and this time I heard the pop. Blinking in the light, we tore the bags off our heads.