Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “No, that’s not fair,” said Mr. Towne. “We should hear him out.”

  “It’s preposterous,” said Dr. Ashenback.

  “Well, let’s hear him out,” said Mr. Earles. “We’ve got to play the game. Please, now, go on with it, sir.”

  “I don’t see that you’ve proved anything, anyway,” said Mr. Cowles.

  “Wait until I get my drink,” said Mr. Trevalyn.

  The Professor settled back comfortably and lit his pipe. He smiled pleasantly, waiting.

  The clock went tick-tock, tick-tock. There was the sound of ice in a glass.

  “Very well,” said Mr. Trevalyn at last, after verifying the new mixture by taking a generous sample. “We’re all familiar with Dr. Einstein’s equation, his beautiful equation, E = Mc2. From this simple statement, for example, we can calculate the energy of a hydrogen bomb. But that’s not all. It indicates an even more powerful force—the most destructive force in the universe—a force strong enough to puncture—as the Professor puts it so aptly—our ‘space-time continuum,’ as a little boy might puncture a balloon, a toy balloon.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Mr. Earles.

  “Here,” said Mr. Trevalyn, before the opposition could rally against him. He drew forth a pen and wrote on the cocktail napkin before him:

  E = Mc2

  or

  C2 = E/M

  “Now,” he said. “Let E equal zero. Thus:”

  C2 = 0/M

  or

  c2 = 0

  c = 0

  “Now, this tells us that the speed of light is zero. This is illogical on the face of it, is it not? Because we know that the speed of light is a fixed constant, a velocity of approximately 186,000 miles per second . . . But are we, really, confronting a paradox? Now we see the beauty of the equation: how it ties together space and time into the same continuum and shows the inter-relationship of both . . . So, at the moment that one bit of intelligent life destroyed that one infinitesimal bit of energy, the speed of light would have become zero: time, gentlemen, would have ceased to exist! With time ceasing to exist, space would cease to exist. Destroying a single particle of energy would puncture a hole in the very fabric, of the universe itself and it would vanish quite away.”

  There was a lengthy silence, while each went over the logic of the reasoning for himself. Lips moved but no refutation came.

  The ornamental clock, in the silence, said, “Tick-tock.”

  Let E equal zero, then the speed of light must be zero, and if the speed of light is zero, then there can be no time, because light travels at 186,000 miles per second. They silently knit up the universe in a little ball of space and time, each dependent on the other for the pattern: each, alone, non-existent. A fabric of stars and galaxies and planets and people made up by the interaction of two nothingnesses.

  The clock went, “Tick-tock.”

  “Really,” said Mr. Earles at last, rather in awe.

  “By God, he’s right!” said Mr. Towne.

  Mr. Trevalyn sat back. “So if it could have been done, it would have been done, and we would not be here talking as we are: there would be no universe at all. What do you say, Professor?”

  But Dr. Ashenback had risen and was hurrying out the door.

  “Hey! My drink!” called Mr. Trevalyn, but the Professor was gone.

  “Queer chap,” he said. “Well. So, you see, it could be proved logically, granting the questionable premise . . .”

  “The preposterous premise,” said Mr. Cowles for reassurance.

  “Well, in any event, I’m glad it’s not true,” said Mr. Towne. “Think how lonely it would be to know that nowhere in the universe is there any intelligent life but us: just mankind, the four of us, Charley, and the rest, twirling along on this little planet: to die and be forgotten. I couldn’t look at the stars and the night, thinking there was nothing else out there. You know, I really don’t think I could stand it, knowing this whole big machine, inconceivably vast, had no friends in it anywhere.”

  “I think he’s won the bet,” said Mr. Earles. “And I think the Professor owes you a drink, too.” He called Charley over. “The Professor ran out on a bet,” he said. “We should charge this gentleman’s drink to his account.”

  “He hasn’t opened one yet.”

  “That’s all right,” Mr. Trevalyn said. “I’ve got more than I can drink already. Queer chap, though. He didn’t even finish his last one.”

  “He probably overstayed,” Charley said. “He was running an experiment tonight and he wanted to get back for the results.”

  “What’s he do out there?” Mr. Cowles asked.

  “Oh,” said Charley, “he’s messing around with anti-gravity. He doodled all over a napkin last night trying to explain it to me. It’s too deep for me. He’s set up a magnetic field of some sort or something, and he’s squeezing down mass. He said tonight the mass was going to disappear entirely, and he’d—”

  “What?” said Mr. Trevalyn.

  “Something about this machine that destroys mass,” Charley clarified.

  “I see,” said Mr. Trevalyn.

  After a moment of silence, Mr. Earles cleared his throat.

  Tick-tock, went the ornamental clock.

  “I suspect,” said Mr. Earles, “that we had better have those drinks now.”

  They all sat before nearly full glasses. Ritualistically they drank deep.

  “No hurry, gentlemen,” said Charley. “There’s still two hours until closing time.”

  Automatically all eyes went to the wall.

  Mr. Cowles broke the breath-held silence.

  “Let us fervently hope so,” he said.

  1962

  POWER IN THE BLOOD

  Why (it has been asked) did the Babylonitms—or maybe it was the Egyptians—say that pi=three when it obviously doem'tP Perhaps because (it has been suggested) it used to equal three—and then the universe grew more complex. Ma Smight, at the moment when Things Began To Change, didn't ask much: only Justice. If her own notions of what this meant were peculiar to herself, Ma being a peculiar woman, well . . . But you had better read the story, written with the familiar Kris Neville zing and color, for yourself. And perhaps you will be politer to older ladies in supermarkets from now on, too.

  WHEN THE DEW HAD SCARELY formed and the sun was no more than rosy promise in the East, Mink Smight, seated at the breakfast table, reasoned that it was going to be a beautiful day.

  Mink said, “It’s going to be a beauty.”

  Ma Smight pursed her lips, thinking. “It might, and then again it might not.”

  Joey recognized certain sure indications in Ma’s tone. With his gun-metal eyes flashing, he pleaded over a plate or corn bread: “No more visions—”

  Ma set her jaw and rolled her eyes to show how yellow her eyeballs were. “When I feel a vision coming on, I jest naturally have to go ahead and have it.”

  “Not now, when things have been going along so nice for a while,” the youngest girl said, hoping to cry back the inevitable. “Please. Remember the time I had that cute little soldier over? And then—” this to Mink—“Ma had to go and have a totally unnecessary vision right in front of him. He never did come back. I was so embarrassed I like to died.”

  “You were only eleven,” Ma said placidly.

  “Suppose I was. Suppose I was. How was he to know?”

  “Now, now,” Mink said.

  Ma drew herself up. “It hain’t everybody can have visions; it hain’t everybody God sees fit to talk to.”

  “It ain’t God,” Joey muttered.

  “Now,” Mink said. “Joey. Amelia. Levina. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Why don’t Joey tell us what’s on the news?” Levina asked.

  There was a little silence.

  The world was changing. Take Science. Mankind plugged along without much science—but no fewer brains—for a hundred thousand years until the universe shifted around in the process of simplifying itself, and it beca
me easier to see how it was more or less put together. Old theories were discarded and new ones introduced with the jerky haste of a Chaplin tightening bolts on the production line. Atomic energy, high polymer chemistry, anti-gravity. Space and time merged into a single continuum. Matter and energy were all at once interchangeable. Waves and articles blended. On the subatomic level, things were changing so fast—in the process evolving a bewildering array of ever simpler components—that it was impossible to build machines perceptive enough, fast enough, to keep pace. Logic, inherited from a more leisurely time and developed to accommodate a world now gone, cracked asunder into shards of paradox.

  Eventually, as happens to most people who are running away from society, Ma Smight and the family arrived in Southern California. There was no farther to go: short of exposing themselves to the sea change of expatriotism—unthinkable to the unthinking fundamentalist. They settled at the edge of the Pacific. Time went along without anyone doing much about it. Came a Friday morning—

  Joey cocked his head and frowned in concentration. “The newscaster on KNX is reading a commercial. I can’t find any other—Wait. Here’s one from New York . . . He’s talking about trouble in the Middle East. They’ve had anti-American riots in—”

  Mink relaxed.

  Ma said quietly: “Hit don’t matter. I got a feeling in my bones; I jest got me a feelin’ that today is the day—”

  This time the silence was oppressive. Ma blinked her eyes into it: looked ahead and smiled in confusion. Mink and the children looked at each other.

  Ma continued to look ahead. As was her custom, she drew shards and fragments from her two worlds together and assembled them to suit herself. She smiled secretly and pursed her lips again.

  “It’s about time for you to get to work, Mr. Smight.”

  Mink looked at Ma.

  “Your lunch is on the table, Mr. Smight.”

  “Well, now, iffen today is, like you say—”

  “Mr. Smight!” Ma said. “The Devil finds work (or idle hands to do. Are you gonna do the Devil’s work? Your lunch is on the table.”

  “Yes, Ma,” Mink said. His name had been Huggins before he married into the Smight family.

  The events of sunrise proceeded in the exact and logical order that man had come to expect from an exact and orderly universe. There was the gradual swelling of the sun from behind the horizon and its stately ascendency above the earth. The mists vanished. The world was light. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, the sky was blue.

  In accordance with the laws of probability, it grew later. The two girls went off somewhere on mysterious, girlish errands: perhaps to say goodby. After an uninspired protest, Joey left for school. Ma Smight straightened up the house, hashed the breakfast dishes, went to the supermarket for food, and returned home.

  Shortly before eleven, after making the preliminary arrangements for supper, she went to the parlor and rested. As was her custom—she was basically a lonely woman—she began talking to herself. “Now you take my three young uns, here,” she said, working her mouth furiously and bobbing her head to the rhythm of her rocker. “Ain’t one of ’em looks a bit like their daddy! That’s the Smight blood a-workin’ its way out!”

  Ma sat with her back to the wall. The door was open to let the spring sunshine come in, and since there wasn’t any screen door, she had to keep the flies out.

  Ma smacked her lips happily. “That’s good blood for you!” she cried emphatically.

  Joey, who looked more like Ma Smight than either of the girls, came in the door and tossed his books, done up with an old leather belt, onto the sofa.

  “There’s a cat tearin’ down the school house,” he said, going through the parlor into the kitchen for a drink of water.

  “Hump!” Ma said, showing her disapproval by rocking down fiercely. “It could of waited ’til school was out, if you ask me!” she sniffled and brushed at her hair, pushing it up from her forehead. “Now don’t waste that water in there, letting it run that a-way!”

  “I want to let it get cold!” Joey called.

  “You hyeard your Ma!” she snapped. In her anger, she accidentally let a fly get in the door, but she made him go right back out again. Rocking back and forth creakily, she called, “An’ where you goin’ to go to school at now?”

  Joey came back into the living room, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “I don’t reckon I’ll have to go no more,” he said.

  Joey crossed the room, and a little stand table with a comic book and The Reader’s Digest on it moved over out of his way. He sat down on the sofa.

  “Nonsense,” Ma said, bearing down heavily on her rocker. “Always be school. Always has been, always will be.”

  “Ma,” Joey said uncertainly. “You been outside lately?”

  “Always be school,” she said. “They’ve got it rit up in the laws, boy.” She rocked a moment in silence.

  Then she said, waving her hand toward the corner, “An’ I said to that Wilson woman, I said, shakin’ my finger right in her face, I said, There’ll come a day when the Lord will remember what you said.”

  “Were you talkin’ to me, Ma?” Joey asked.

  “No,” Ma said, staring hard at the bright pattern on the carpet.

  Outside the house, the sun shone brightly. The two Smight girls were just coming in for—as the noon meal was called—dinner.

  Across town, at slightly after one o’clock, in the machine shop where he worked, Mink looked at his lathe, and thinking of Ma, he began to sing, “Work, For the Night is Coming.” After the first chorus, he could not remember the words. He tried whistling a few bars of “Bringing In the Sheaves.”

  The sound was loud in the otherwise quiet factory. The other workers had all left shortly before lunch time. He stood on first one foot and then the other. He stopped whistling.

  His machine had quieted down a little now, so he gave it a friendly pat. It still refused to run. Sighing deeply, he crossed the shop for his lunch box, punched his time card, and walked out of the building.

  Outside, he saw the futility of waiting for a bus. He bowed his head and turned toward home.

  Block after block passed outside of time.

  Amelia saw her father coming down the street. She cried out when he came abreast of the front yard.

  “Hello,” he said. “How’s my little girl?”

  “Just fine, Poppa Mink,” she said.

  He stood at the bottom of the porch steps. He handed over his lunch box.

  “The last time you were home early, remember, was when they had a Union meeting, and you didn’t go.”

  “We were living in Parsons, then,” Mink said.

  “Yes! An’ they were goin’ to pay you, too!” Ma called through the doorway. “An’ I told you not to take any money you didn’t earn, remember that!” Ma stood on the porch, bristling. “Oh, I know you, Mr. Smight. I know you like a book, Mr. Smight. What is it now? What is it this time? What are you home early for? What have you done, Mr. Smight? Answer me!”

  Mink raised his eyebrows. He turned, puzzled, to Amelia. She shook her head, no more than an eighth of an inch, negatively, in either direction.

  Mink turned back to Ma. “The machines quit running—” he said tentatively.

  “Hump!” she said, narrowing her eyes. Her cheeks puffed in indignation. “If you’d had any of the Smight spunk, you’d of told them machines right then and there and gone on about your work.”

  “Things is changing, Ma,” Mink said. “Like you prophesied they would.”

  “No matter what,” she said, “it don’t seem right, Mr. Smight. No matter what.”

  Mink shifted his weight and waited.

  “It’s-not like today’s a holiday!” Ma cried triumphantly.

  Amelia said, “Maybe it’s Thanksgiving. How’d that be, Ma? That’d make everything all right, wouldn’t it?”

  “We jest had Thanksgiving a few months ago.”

  “I meant again,” Amelia said.

&nbs
p; “I don’t have time to do all that cookin’,” Ma said. “I ain’t ready for Thanksgiving again.”

  “Maybe Labor Day?” Amelia persisted. “You don’t have to do no special cookin’ Labor Day.”

  Ma bobbed her head. “I don’t know . . .”

  “It’s a honest holiday,” Amelia said. “An’ the way things is lookin’, it looks like it’s pretty much up to us when it is, any more.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Ma said. “Maybe that would make everything all right You can come in the house, now Mr. Smight, seein’ as today’s Labor Day, I guess.” Mink came into the parlor. Ma crossed to her rocker. Mink sat down and took off his heavy shoes. “Ahhh,” he said. “Sure feels good to get them off.” They were Safety Shoes with steel reinforcement in the toes, and consequently quite heavy. “I sure am tired. I had to walk home. Over ten miles. Them busses ain’t running.”

  Ma straightened out her dress and smacked her lips in satisfaction. Plainly she was building toward a climax deep within herself. For a moment everyone was quiet, and her rocker went squeak, squeak. “I don’t reckon we’ll have to travel no more,” she said. “It’ll be eighteen years come next corn plantin’ time that we left Cold Camp. I reember it, because it was jest two years—two years to the very day—after Uncle Come-to-Jesus got taken by that sheriff from Kentucky. An’ that was in ’48.”

  She nodded and pulled hard at her nose. “We’ve been to—let’s see, now, how many States did we figure the other day, nineteen our twenty?”

  ‘Twenty-one,” Joey said. “You remember, you’d forgotten to count Tennessee, because that’s where we came from.”

  There was a shrill scream from somewhere outside.

  Ma looked at the ceiling, and her mouth began to twist and turn. “That’s that red-headed tart next door! You can jest bet on that.”

  “Hadn’t we ought to go see?” Mink said. “Wouldn’t it be the neighborly thing to do?”

  Ma thrust her chin forward savagely. “I hain’t goin’ to have you running into that hussy’s house! This very day, this very morning . . .” She gasped for breath, her face fiery with indignation.

  “Now, Ma,” Amelia said.