by Kris Neville
“Better make it ten,” Remington said. “It’s still a little thick. We’ve got to get penetration.” He stepped back from the monitor.
They waited. It seemed an eternity.
“Take ‘em out!” Sherman said.
“A little bit more,” Remington said. “This could be critical here. Let’s not goof it by hurrying.” He turned to Miss Rosenwald. “What’s the temperature set at? The thixotropic index—”
“Oh, look,” said Miss Rosenwald dreamily, with interest but without alarm.
“What?”
Talking another pill, Miss Rosenwald said, “It’s taking off so pretty. It’s at one hundred and eighty, one hundred and eighty-five—”
“A hundred and—oh, my God!” cried Sherman. “Pull ‘em out! Pull ‘em out!”
The control technicians responded promptly.
There was the twang of parting piano wires.
“Dear Jesus,” said Sherman.
Remington sprang to the ladder and scrambled up. He reached down into the tank and felt the smooth, glass-hard surface of the compound. He stared down into the clear, solid block with horror. It was beginning to acquire a faint amber cast.
“Oh, dear me,” said Sherman. “Is there . . . is there going to be much shrinkage?”
Remington turned away. “Quite a bit, I’m afraid,” he said softly. “This is one of the biggest castings I’ve ever heard of.”
Sherman stumbled from the room and made his way, almost unseeing, to the helicopter on the roof.
He flew over the grief-stricken city of Washington, D.C., a city suffering through the seventh national day of mourning so far this year. His heart went out to the American people.
Mr. Braswell’s butler greeted Sherman.
“I’ve got to see Mr. Braswell!”
“I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Braswell cannot be disturbed.”
“He’s got to be! This can’t wait! It’s too important!”
The butler led Sherman to Mr. Braswell’s room. The private nurse protested and then stepped aside to permit them to enter.
Mr. Braswell lay in the center of a king-sized bed. He looked very small and crumpled. He was breathing so slowly it could scarcely be noticed.
“He’ll live a real long time now,” the butler said. “He just had Dr. Franklin give him a huge increase in the Go-Slow injection. As I told you, he can’t be disturbed.”
“Don’t he look sweet?” the nurse said. “How far removed he is now from all the cares of this troubled world!” She bent over Mr. Braswell and listened intently for a minute. “Gee,” she said. “If he just stopped breathing entirely, I think Mr. Braswell could live forever!”
THE MAN WHO READ EQUATIONS
“Mathematics underlies everything in this universe,” Taggart said. . . .“Think what would happen if a person who understood all those equations started tinkering around . . .”
Jerry Taggert was getting on 40 when he came to town from some little place down in Arkansas. That was over 20 years ago. I always thought it was his dog, more than anything else, that caused us to wonder most what he did for a living.
In winter it gets pretty nippy here in Carthage. The snow’s been so heavy at times that it breaks off big tree limbs, and they close the grade schools for the day. You can drive out Kellog Road and see the white smoke coming up from the hedgerow where Taggert’s chimney is, and you’ll know that he’s settled in, warm as toast. Except sometimes in winter, it’ll be weeks before that smoke shows up. Turn in, and Taggert’s old ’47 two-door Ford won’t be in the little garage he had a carpenter add to the cabin 15 years ago. Coon dog will be there, though, skinny and sorrowful looking. That old hound will be sitting there waiting as if for him to get back from the store in town.
Now, we always figured if he was gone some distance and some time, then how was it the old coon hound didn’t just starve, or more likely, as old hounds like that do, finally pull up and trot off to try to scrounge something from the next farm, old Shorty Rider’s place a half mile on toward Carterville?
That puzzled us all, and I don’t think anybody will be able to solve that equation: how Taggert managed to keep that old dog fed when he was gone.
I suppose there were a half a dozen of us, over the years, who got closer to Jerry Taggert than most. We’d drop by his cabin unannounced, and if we caught him in, we’d chat a bit and have a drink or two.
Three or four times a year, he’d come along hunting with us. He was a little too impatient for a fisherman, but I’ve sat on the riverbank with him more than once. He went frogging with Tim Morris. Sometimes he’d run little favors for people in his car. For all I know, he may have helped some out with cash.
Taggert would bet on things, and never lacked for money. He’d be out hunting with me, and he’d offer to bet 10 to 1 that the dove wouldn’t fly off the telephone wire before we got a shot at it. Particularly if there was any wind to rock the wire a little, he’d lay 5 to 1 that I couldn’t knock off its head at the distance. Or 3 to 2 it’d still be fibrillating when we found it in the grass.
I was out hustle hunting some quail with him one day, and he told me that the human mind works on mathematical principles and that these computer fellows were into something with what they were doing.
“You can bet on that,” I said. “When you can take a bead on a square mile of ocean from the moon and drop a rocket right there on it, or skim along less than 100,000 miles from the top of Jupiter, you got a pretty good idea of what you’re up to.”
“It goes even deeper,” Taggert said. “Mathematics underlies everything in this whole universe. And in all the others, too, if there are any, as there well may be. Let me tell you what I mean—
“Take primitive life. It takes food in at one end and spits out waste matter at the other. There’s a kind of symmetry to it, like breathing or anything else.
“Well, now, you might say that babies do this, too. Did you ever think of that? They take food in one end and spit waste out the other. You might say that people basically differ in their personalities in a way that corresponds directly to how they learned to feel about this. When they were babies, were they more into taking food in or were they more into letting the waste out?”
“That’s positively Freudian,” I said.
“At the extremes,” Taggert continued, “you’ve got the anally fixated and the orally fixated, but from these the campanulate curve rises to the center, where most of us are at. You see this bell-shaped-curve phenomenon repeated everywhere. It’s the matrix for probabilities whose sum is reality.
“You needn’t necessarily think of it as a bell-shaped curve, even. You can make a little graph, if you want to, and have this line at a 90-degree angle on it, or an open-ended asymptotic curve. You read up the left ordinate to see how anally fixated you are, and you read down the right ordinate to get the reciprocal, which quantifies your oral fixation.”
Taggert stopped talking, almost embarrassed. He looked over to see if I were appreciative of what he was laying down on me. I thought it over for a bit and nodded my head. “You just about hit it right on the nose.”
“If you can’t compute it,” Taggert said, “it doesn’t exist.”
I’ll lay you 100 to 1 that if you were to have given him some kind of complicated algebra problem, he wouldn’t have known where to start to solve it, let alone the calculus. He just sort of intuited mathematics. He told me once that he just got his head in tune with the universal equations.
“They tell you how it’s all put together, from human society to the motion of the galaxies and the quanta,” he said.
We got the impression that he probably made his money when he went away on trips by making bets, but I don’t think you could actually cite chapter and verse of Taggert actually telling you so. If someone would have come up and said, “What do you really think Jerry Taggert does for a living?” you’d get most people to say, “Oh, he’s a betting man. He knows lots of odds. He’s a damned good judge of people and ca
n get them riled up enough to make foolish wagers.”
Nobody, as I say, can cite chapter and verse, but I expect I can come as close to it as anyone.
One of the last times I saw Taggert, he and I drove down to Tulsa in his car to see a man about a couple of old wire-barreled 12-gauge shotguns. Taggert’d been drinking beer before I met him, and I guess that afternoon we’d done between us a good half case or more. He got to talking quite expansive, for him, as we cruised along at about 75 on the interstate highway.
“A man can get all kinds of bets,” Taggert said, “if he’s a betting man. He can look at the polls in the paper and figure they’re not going to be wrong when they say it ain’t even going to be very close. Man takes the favorite and gives 5 to 1 or anything that’s credible. You’ll get action. Same with sporting events, if you pick them right. There’s more lead-pipe cinches out there than you can shake a stick at, and lots of people who want to get involved and throw their money away because they believe in their party or their team.
“And there’s always cards. But you need patience for that, and you need to travel around a lot, hitting the Legion and the lodge people’s conventions. It’s somewhat dangerous, too. Lots of times, there’ll be somebody in the pot that’s not too honest. You spot him, and he’ll want to brawl to save his name, and maybe he’ll leave you with a bleeding mouth before you get the whole message out, or a concussion, or even worse.
“And there’s other things you can look at. Now, for example, you take the reason politicians give you for doing something. You know that’s not the reason they give among themselves, and it’s not the reason they tell themselves alone, and it sure as hell is not the real reason. The real reason involves the sweep of things, the equations underneath it all. You look into them and see the real reason.
“Well, if you spend the time to study them out,” Taggert continued, “then you can lay your money down and it comes back as sure as sunrise. Because that’s what you’re really betting on: how it’s going to be, regardless.”
After looking around for highway patrol cars or motorcycle cops, Taggert took another swig of the Budweiser he was drinking and chucked the empty onto the floor in back.
“You got to be careful,” he said. “If you tell these people about these larger events that lay in the future, you’ll set in motion a feedback circuit. It’s like in higher math, where you can demonstrate that interfering in a process results in changing it in an unpredictable way. You got to place bets very carefully in that area, and you can’t go to the well too often, for damned sure. Think what would happen if a person who understood all those equations started tinkering around out there. Tell you this for sure, the underlying order would be changed into chaos! And if you think things are in a mess now—”
I figured Taggert was a little too clever for the rest of us, and maybe that was the one time he let down his guard enough to let somebody peek into his real thoughts. On the other hand, he might just have been putting me on, too.
I had some questions to ask Taggert after that on certain matters both political and otherwise that I hadn’t had any reason to think before that he kept up on. He was pretty hard to pin down, I came to realize pretty soon, and always had been. Thinking back, it seemed to me that except for betting, when he’d call the odds he’d take, he’d hardly ever even pass an opinion on the time of day.
I don’t think he was trying to tell me anything in particular on that trip to Tulsa; he was probably just rambling along, like you do when you’re drinking beer. And I certainly don’t think that things getting into so much worse a mess than they were at this time last year is in any way connected with this. But I do know this. It’s been just a year since Jerry Taggert went on one of his trips, and I don’t think, now, he’ll ever be back.
I know if a man is going to take off on a trip, and he’s a man like Taggert, he’s going to make provisions for that hound of his. That’s just what a man does. You take care of your old dogs in this part of the country and down there in Arkansas where he comes from.
Whatever provision Taggert made for that coon hound has now run out. Old Shorty Rider said that dog came creeping up to his farm last week, all skin and bones and just short of starved to death.
1976
MILK INTO BRANDY
SOUNDS of the external world brought Raul into contact with nerve endings. He groaned softly and rolled over, experiencing the familiar multiple aches and stiffnesses. As soon as he got a little broth in his stomach, though, the hangover, at least, would fade away. He had restrained himself at the last, dim minute, pouring no more brandy last night.
He remained motionless, listening to the distant clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the pavement. The milk wagon was coming. The sound through the open window on the spring air was easily identifiable.
A bird sang. He opened his eyes and turned his head to the window. The sky beyond was rose, and the bird song was like the audible cracking of darkness, like the breaking of an ice flow in summer.
He thought of a world without birds and was thankful that winter had passed. Nothing can ever duplicate the falling away of winter and the deliciousness of spring air and the lovely songs of the birds. It was another one gone.
Far away, the lonesome moan of a passenger train, screaming on time toward Wynn Crossing at 800 miles a day, speeding from east to west, following the path of the sun, tying up the two coasts of America, stitching together the continent.
. . . And Raul imagined being aboard this early morning limited, awakening to hear the click of the wheels on the rails, arising to be greeted by the conductor passing through, smiling, checking the ticket stubs of new passengers . . . and then moving into the dining car and the field of snowy linen and sparkling silver and transparent crystal and fragile blue china and the massive gold menu listing native game and innumerable other delicacies. And the service there, at this moveable feast, was such as to extend the meal seemingly forever, as though time were permanently arrested by the command of silent waiters anticipating each request and served out with endless black and bitter coffee, as much as you wanted.
And then at the end of this day orchestrated to the sound of the wheels clicking along the rails, lying in the bed at night, rocking gently, watching the great expanse of forest and fields and the moonlight through the clear and clean air, and feeling the cool sheets and remembering the smiles on the faces of new-made friends, united in the companionship of the journey as though for a lifetime, and the changed sound of the train as it echoed hollowly over a long, shiny bridge, over a rushing water, clear as glass, like a mirror in the moonlight, and falling away from memory to sleep with the thought of trout and bass and catfish and perch waiting in the huge, rolling kitchen, fresh for his selection, prepared by the chef with skill and love to his expressed desire—this from the clear mirror stream: breakfast waiting for him when the cry of the train on the morning air awoke him once again to sharp hunger . . .
These thoughts and images came before the sound of the passenger train died away, and Raul stirred and rose and made his careful, seemingly endless morning toilet, wanting more than anything else now a drink to quiet his stomach until the desire grew in him to cover everything else and bury other thoughts. Oh, my God, how he wanted a drink!
And then the hunger returned, and he thought of Martha, who was sleeping in this week, wasn’t she?—it was her turn—and he realized now that his movements had been unnecessarily stealthy merely to avoid waking her. Let her sleep.
Dressed at last, he made his way down to the kitchen. Clear broth and an egg on toast. Every breakfast, for a long time, had been clear broth and the egg, and it was strange that he had never grown tired of it. Perhaps because the taste of a fresh egg, with moist yellow and white like gelatin, is too subtle to be remembered and thus is always new, and so Raul never tired of it. The broth, of course, was for his stomach, to soothe it of its hangover.
Starting the meal, he thought, Another egg for Martha? But no, he decided. S
he would want something more substantial.
The first touch of heat brought movement in the liquid broth, raising currents. In this tiny pan there was reflected the vast atmospheric forces of heat and cold that moved fantastically large masses of air, brought winds and rain and snow and clouds and now bright and luminous clarity . . . that stirred, also, the ocean currents and in the end, too, determined the limits of the land’s encroachment upon the sea.
His nostrils found the very delicate first release of savory odor from the broth, and this brought his thoughts back from such observations to hunger and the egg. He would need salt for the egg this morning, in spite of Are feet he should eliminate salt entirely, as the doctor said, but today Martha was not yet here and who was there to stop him?
He turned from the stove, the timer showing over 60 seconds, and went for the salt shaker. Before the open window, he paused.
From the forest beyond the house, he heard faintly along with the chatter of squirrels and bird songs, the sound of music: sometime with a radio out there, this early. Probably louder than it seemed, nearer. Maybe it belonged to the girl from the house across the little brook down there, out in the maples, where there was as yet hardly sunlight, but darkness instead, and all the soft, moist, night-time smells of growing things.
. . . He imagined her there alone on the new grass, sweet and tender, perhaps having risen from a restless bed to wait for a sunrise lover, there in the spring dawn, the beginning day, with the sound of this symphony surrounding her like magic and converting the stand of maples into a cathedral where young love is worshipped. A time Raul, too, could remember—although for him it would never come again except in that memory: locked there to be handled whenever it pleased him, more real sometimes than reality, more sweet than truth.
This little forest between houses, this recreation of the environment of the very childhood of man, was filled now with music originating from long ago, resurrected electronically and cast out to trouble a little spectrum of crystal air and to launch outward at the horizon toward the moon and stars, growing fainter and fainter, finally to be lost forever beyond recovery in the static of the universe.