The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  When I went out back, which was where the toilets were, I did not expect to see her, not really, even if I had let her feel my arm, which is something I do sometimes. But there she was and this is what she said, with the little marks around it that you are supposed to use and all of that stuff. Dottie help me with this part.

  “Hercules, I really need your help. I don’t know whether I was really one of the daughters of King Thespius, but there were fifty of them so there’s a pretty good chance of it. Will you help me?”

  That was the first thing Junie ever said to me, and I remember it just like it was a couple days ago. Naturally I said I would.

  “You will!?! Just like that????”

  I said sure.

  “I can pay you. I was going to say that. A hundred pounds right now, and another hundred pounds when I’m over the fence. I can pass it to you through the fence. Look.” She opened her purse and showed me the money. “Is that enough?”

  I explained how she did not have to.

  “You’ll be in danger. You might be arrested.”

  Junie looked really worried when she said that, and it made me feel wonderful, so I said that was okay. I had been arrested once already in England besides in America, and to tell the truth in England it was kind of fun, especially when they could not get their handcuffs to go around my wrists and then they got these plastic strap cuffs and put those on me and I broke six pairs. I like English people, only nothing they say makes any sense.

  Junie said, “Back there, you threw an enormous barbell up in the air and caught it. How much did you say it weighed?”

  I said, “Three hundred. That was my three-hundred-pound bell.”

  “And does it actually weigh three hundred pounds?”

  I said sure.

  “I weigh only a little more than half that. Could you throw me, oh, fifteen feet into the air?”

  I knew I could, but I said I did not know because I wanted to get my hands on her.

  “But you might? Do you really think you might be able to, Hercules?”

  I sort of raised up my shoulders the way you do and let them drop.

  “We—if you failed to throw me high enough I would get a severe electric shock.” She looked scared.

  I nodded really serious and said what we ought to do was try it first, right now. We would measure something that was fifteen feet, and then I would throw her up, and she could tell me if I got her up that high. So she pointed to the temporary wires they had strung up for the fair, and I wanted to know if those were the ones. She said no. They were not fifteen feet either. Ten or twelve maybe. But I said, “Okay, only do not reach out and grab them or you might get killed,” and she said okay.

  So I got my hands around her, which was what I had been wanting to do, and lifted her up and sort of weighed her a couple times, moving her up and down, you know how you do, and then I spun around like for the hammer throw, and I heaved her maybe ten feet higher than those wires, and caught her easy when she came down. It made her really scared too, and I was sorry for that, but I got down on my knees and hugged her and I said, “There, there, there,” and pretty soon she stopped crying.

  Then I said, “Was that high enough?” And she said it was.

  She was still shaky after that, so we went back inside and she sat with me while I waited for the next tip. That was when she showed me the pictures that Roy T. Laffer had taken up on the White Cow Moon and the pictures of the rock that he had brought back, a great big rock that did not hardly weigh anything. “He let a little boy take it to school for a science show,” Junie told me, “and afterward the science teacher threw it out. Mr. Laffer went to the school and tried to reclaim it the following day, but apparently it had been blown out of the Dumpster.”

  I promised her I would keep an eye out for it.

  “Thank you. But the point is its lightness. Do you know why the moon doesn’t fall into the Earth, Hercules?”

  I said that if I was going to throw her around she ought to call me Sam, and she promised she would. Then she asked me again about the moon and I said, “Sure, I know that one. The moon beams hold it up.”

  Junie did not laugh. “Really, Sam, it does. It falls exactly as a bullet falls to Earth.”

  She went and got a broom to show me, holding it level. “Suppose that this were a rifle. If I pulled the trigger, the bullet would fly out of the barrel at a speed of three thousand feet per second or so.”

  I said okay.

  “Now say that you were to drop that weight over there at the very same moment that the rifle fired. Your weight would hit the ground at the same moment that the rifle bullet did.” She waited for me to argue with her, but I said okay again.

  “Even though the bullet was flying along horizontally, it was also falling. What’s more, it was falling at virtually the same rate that your weight did. I’m sure you must know about artificial satellites, Sam.”

  I said I did, because I felt like I could remember about them if I had a little more time, and besides, I had the feeling Junie would tell me anyhow.

  “They orbit the Earth just as the moon does. So why doesn’t the bullet orbit it too?”

  I said it probably hit a fence post or something.

  She looked at me and sort of sucked on her lips, and looked again. “That may be a much better answer than you can possibly be aware of. But no. It doesn’t orbit Earth because it isn’t going fast enough. A sidereal month is about twenty-seven days, and the moon is two hundred and forty thousand miles away, on average. So if its orbit were circular—that isn’t quite true, but I’m trying to make this as simple as I can—the moon would be traveling at about three thousand, five hundred feet a second. Not much faster than our rifle bullet, in other words.”

  I could see she wanted me to nod, so I did.

  “The moon can travel that slowly.” “Slowly” is what she said. Junie is always saying crazy stuff like that. “Because it’s so far away. It would have to fall two hundred and forty thousand miles before it could hit the Earth. But the bullet has to fall only about three feet. Another way of putting it is that the closer a satellite is, the faster it must move if it is to stay in orbit.”

  I said that the bullet would have to go really fast, and Junie nodded. “It would have to go so fast that the curve of the Earth was falling away from it as rapidly as the bullet itself was falling toward the Earth. That’s what an orbit is, that combination of vertical and horizontal motions.”

  Right then I do not think I was too clear on which one was which, but I nodded again.

  Then Junie’s voice got sort of trembly. “Now suppose that you were to make a telephone call to your wife back in America,” is what she said. So I explained I did not have one, and after that she sounded a lot better.

  “Well, if you were to call your family, your mother and father, your call would go through a communications satellite that circles the Earth once a day, so that it seems to us that it is always in the same place. It can do that because it’s a good deal lower and going a great deal faster.”

  Then she got out a pen and a little notepad and showed me how fast the bullet would have to go to stay in orbit just whizzing around the world over and over until it hit something. I do not remember how you do it, or what the answer was except that it was about a jillion. Junie said anything like that would make a terrible bang all the time if it was in our air instead of up in space where stuff like that is supposed to be. Well, about then is when the tip came in for the last show. I did my act and Junie sat in the front row smiling and cheering and clapping and I felt really swell.

  So after it was all over we went to Merlin’s cave under the big castle and down by the water, and that was when Junie told me how King Arthur was born there, and I told her how I was putting up at the King Arthur, which was a pub with rooms upstairs. I said they were nice people there and it was clean and cheap, which is what I want anywhere, and the landlord’s name was Arthur too, just like the pub’s. Only after a while when we had gone
a long ways down the little path and got almost to the water I started to sort of hint around about why are we going way down here, Junie, with just that little flashlight you got out of your purse?

  Maybe I ought not say this right here, but it is the truth. It was scary down there. A big person like I am is not supposed to be scared and I know that. But way up on the rocks where the fair was the lights kept on going out and you could see the fair was just sort of like paint the old walls of that big castle. It was like somebody had gone to where my dad was buried and painted all over his stone with flowers and clowns and puppies and kitties and all that kind of thing. Only now the paint was flaking away and you could see what was underneath and he had run out with his gun when the feds broke our front door and they killed him.

  Here is what I think it was down there and what was so scary about it. King Arthur had been born there and there had been knights and stuff afterward that he was the head of. And they had been big strong people like me on big strong horses and they had gone around wearing armor and with swords and for a while had made the bad guys pay, and everybody had loved them so much that they still remembered all about them after a hundred years. There was a Lancelot room in the pub where I was staying and a Galahad room, and I was in the Gawain room. And Arthur told me how those men had all been this king’s knights and he said I was the jolly old green giant.

  Only it was all over and done with now. It was dead and gone like my dad. King Arthur was dead and his knights were too, and the bad guys were the head of everything and had been for a long, long time. We were the paint, even Junie was paint, and now the paint was getting dull the way paint does, with cracks all over it and falling off. And I thought this was not just where that king was born; this was where he died too. And I knew that it was true the way I meant it.

  Well, there was a big wire fence there with a sign about the electricity, only it was not any fifteen feet high. I could have reached up to the top of it. Ten feet, maybe, or not even that.

  “Can you pick me up and throw me over?” Junie said.

  It was crazy, she would have come down on rocks, so I said I could, only she would have to tell why she wanted me to so much or I would not do it.

  She took my hand then, and it felt wonderful. “People come back, Sam. They come back from death. I know scientists aren’t supposed to say things like that, but it’s true. They do.”

  That made me feel even better because it meant I would see my dad again even if we would not have our farm that the feds took anymore.

  “Do you remember that I said I might have been one of the fifty daughters of Thespius three thousand years ago? I don’t know if that’s really true, or even whether there was a real King Thespius who had fifty daughters. Perhaps there was, and perhaps I was one of them—I’d like to think so. But this really was Merlin’s cave and Roy T. Laffer was Merlin in an earlier life. There were unmistakable indications in his papers. I know it with as much certainty as I know Kepler’s Laws.”

  That got me trying to remember who Kepler was, because I did not think Junie had told anything about him up to then. Or after either. Anyway, I did not say much.

  “I’ve tried to contact Laffer in his house in Tulsa, Sam. I tried for days at a time, but he wasn’t there. I think he may be here. This is terribly important to me, and you said you’d help me. Now will you throw me over?”

  I shook my head, but it was really dark down there and maybe Junie did not see it. I said I was not going to be on the other side to catch her and throw her back, so how was she going to get out? She said when they opened in the morning. I said she would get arrested and she said she did not care. It seemed to me that there were too many getting arrested when she said that, so I twisted on the lock, thinking to break the shackle. It was a pretty good lock and I broke the hasp instead. Then I threw the lock in the ocean and Junie and I went inside like she wanted. That was how she found out where White Cow Moon was and how to get on it too, if she wanted to.

  It was about two o’clock in the morning when we came out, I think. I went back to the King Arthur’s and went to bed, and next day Junie moved in down the hall. Hers was the Lancelot room. After that she was my manager, which I told everybody and showed her off. She helped me write my course then, and got this shop in Falmouth to print it up for us.

  Then when the fair was over she got us tickets home, and on the airplane we got to talking about the moon. I started it and it was a bad mistake, but we did not know it for a couple of days. Junie had been talking about taking pictures and I said, “How can you if it goes so fast?”

  “It doesn’t, Sam.” She took my hand and I liked that a lot. “It circles the Earth quite slowly, so slowly that to an observer on Earth it hardly seems to move at all, which was one of the things Roy T. Laffer confided to me.”

  I said I never had seen him, only the lady with the baby and the old man with the stick.

  “That was him, Sam. He told me then, and it was implied in his papers anyway. Do you remember the rock?”

  I said there had been lots of rocks, which was true because it had been a cave in the rocks.

  “I mean the White Cow Moon rock in the picture, the one he lent to the science fair.”

  I said, “It didn’t hardly weigh anything.”

  “Yes.” Junie was sort of whispering then. “It had very little weight, yet it was hard to move. You had to pull and pull, even though it felt so light when you held it. Do you understand what that means, Sam?”

  “Somebody might have glued it down?”

  “No. It means that it had a great deal of mass, but very little weight. I’m sure you haven’t heard of antimatter—matter in which the protons are replaced by antiprotons, the electrons by positrons, and so on?”

  I said no.

  “It’s only theoretical so far. But current theory says that although antimatter would possess mass just as ordinary matter does, it would be repelled, by the gravitational field of ordinary matter. It would fall up, in other words.”

  By the time she got to the part about falling up Junie was talking to herself mostly, only I could still hear her. “Our theory says a collision between matter and antimatter should result in a nuclear explosion, but either the theory’s mistaken or there’s some natural means of circumventing it. Because the White Cow Moon rock was composed of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. It had to be! The result was rock with a great deal of mass but very little weight, and that’s what allows the White Cow Moon to orbit so slowly.

  “Listen to me, Sam.” She made me turn in my airplane seat till I was looking at her, and I broke the arm a little. “We physicists say that all matter falls at the same rate, which is basically a convenient lie, true only in a hard vacuum. If that barbell you throw around were balsa wood, it wouldn’t fall nearly as fast as your iron one, because it would be falling in air. In the same way, a satellite with great mass but little weight can orbit slowly and quietly through Earth’s atmosphere, falling toward the surface only as fast as the surface falls away from it.”

  “Wouldn’t it hit a mountain or something, Junie?”

  “No, because any mountain that rose in its path would be chipped away as it rose. As light as the White Cow Moon must be, its mass has got to be enormous. Not knowing its orbit—not yet—we can’t know what mountain ranges it may cross, but when we do we’ll find it goes through passes. They are passes because it goes through them.”

  Junie got real quiet for a while after she said that, and now I wish she had stayed quiet. Then she said, “Just think what we could do, Sam, if we could manufacture metals like that rock. Launch vehicles that would reach escape velocity from Earth using less thrust than that of an ordinary launch vehicle on the moon.”

  That was the main trouble, I think. Junie saying that was. The other may have hurt us some too, but that did for sure.

  We were flying to Tulsa. I guess I should have written about that before. Anyway, when we got there Junie got us a bunch of rooms like an apa
rtment in a really nice hotel. We were going to have to wait for my bells to come back on a boat, so Junie said we could look for the White Cow Moon while we were waiting and she would line me up some good dates to play when my stuff got there. We were sitting around having Diet Cokes out of the little icebox in the kitchen when the feds knocked on the door.

  Junie said, “Let me,” and went, and that was how they could push in. But they would have if it had been me anyway because they had guns. I would have had to let them just like Junie.

  The one in the blue suit said, “Ms. Moon?” and Junie said yes. Then he said, “We’re from the government, and we’ve come to help you and Mr. Moon.”

  My name never was Moon, but we both changed ours after that anyway. She was Junie Manoe and I was Sam Manoe. Junie picked Manoe to go with JM on her bags. But that was not until after the feds went away.

  What they had said was we had to forget about the moon or we would get in a lot of trouble. Junie said we did not care about the moon, we had nothing to do with the moon, what we were doing mainly was getting ready to write a biography about a certain old man named Roy T. Laffer.

  The man in the blue suit said, “Good, keep it that way.” The man in the black suit never did say anything, but you could see he was hoping to shoot us. I tried to ask Junie some questions after they went away, but she would not talk because she was pretty sure they were listening, or somebody was.

  When we were living in the house she explained about that, and said probably somebody on the plane had told on us, or else the feds listened to everything anybody said on planes. I said we were lucky they had not shot us, and told her about my dad, and that was when she said it was too dangerous for me. She never would tell me exactly where the White Cow Moon was after that, and it traveled around anyway, she said. But she got me a really good job in a gym there. I helped train people and showed them how to do things, and even got on TV doing ads for the gym with some other men and some ladies.