After lunch he and his father trudged around through the chaparral and up this and that little trail, filling a paper bag with useable refuse. They hadn’t any notion of cleaning the place up, but were looking for treasures — for odds and ends of mechanical debris to add to the bucket in Gill’s garage. Nine-tenths of the collection that afternoon consisted of bottle caps of the sort lined with little cork washers that could be pried out and used for remarkable purposes. It was possible, for instance, to clamp a bottle cap to a shirt by separating the washer from the cap, then reinserting it with a layer of shirt in between. On that Saturday in the park William Hastings went wild for the idea, and by the time both of them had had enough treasure hunting each sported fifteen or twenty bottle cap insignias like campaigners at a political convention in support of soft drinks.
Jim’s mother would roll her eyes in feigned uncertainty, as if both of them might belong in a padded room for getting up to such tricks. She would agree after their continued insistence to wear one herself, at least until they arrived at the planetarium.
So Jim and his father, their collecting at an end, set out merrily down the trail toward where Jim’s mother, having complained of an unidentifiable ache, was resting and reading her book — Balzac, Jim recalled, which she read in French. The two came bursting up, emblazoned with bottle caps, and found her asleep. At least Jim supposed she was asleep. He set out to make a racket — whistling, shouting to his father who wasn’t ten feet behind, and commenting aloud about the outstanding collection in the sack. He rummaged in it and found the skeleton of a bladeless clasp knife, the bone shell of the handle having broken away from one rusty side.
For some reason his father never made the mistake of assuming her to be asleep. Perhaps it was the position in which she lay. The next half hour seemed to Jim a sort of numb stage play in which his father, for ten grim minutes, worked to revive her, then sat beside her for another twenty, staring blankly into the twisted branches of the leafless oak against which Jim stood.
Finally two rangers summoned from the Park Service by passing hikers carried his mother on a stretcher to-a waiting ambulance and away to Metropolitan Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Jim and his father were met there by Uncle Edward. Jim could picture every dreary, white and chromium moment of the two or three hours he spent at the hospital. Two years later they seemed to mean nothing at all to him, to be completely removed from any memories of his mother. He knew little of the workings of the human heart, and it was inexplicable that hers should have stopped like a clock that had wound down. When the three of them drove silently and wearily home that night, Jim and his father were still dotted with bottle caps. His uncle hadn’t enough sense of humor left in him to ask about them. Jim could see, two years later at the meeting of the Newtonians, that his father still wore two of the caps affixed to his shirt — a White Rock cream soda and a Nehi Orange. He wished guiltily and sadly that his father would button his coat.
But William Hastings was for once oblivious to that fateful afternoon in the park — something that had pursued him through the two years since — and was carrying on about a story he intended to write. Roycroft Squires nodded and squinted and messed with his pipe, shoving a big wad of curly black tobacco into the enormous bowl carved into the head of an armadillo, and tamped it down first with his thumb and then with the business end of a sixteen-penny nail.
“As I understand it,” said William, puffing on his own pipe, “relativity is a fairly simple business. But I have an angle on it that will knock you out.”
Squires nodded, ready to be knocked out.
“Now, as an object approaches the speed of light,” said William, hunching forward and poking his pipestem in Squires’ direction, “its mass increases proportionately, which is to say it simply gets bigger and bigger. Swells like a balloon, if you follow. And that’s what restricts one from traveling at light speed — there isn’t enough universe to hold us.”
Squires began to say something, to protest, perhaps, but hadn’t gotten two words out when William, swept away in a deluge of science and art, broke in on him with another revelation. “And as we approach light speed, mind you, we fall into what the physicists call a straight line loop. Everything in the end, you see, is circular — the passing of the seasons, the four ages of man, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the cycle of evolution, time and space. It’s all one; you’ve read Fibinocci’s discussion of the whorl of seeds in a sunflower and the circular spray of stars in revolving nebulae?”
The question was rhetorical. William didn’t wait for an answer. “Parallel lines,” he continued, “meet in space. A straight line leading out into the infinite catches its own tail like a mythological oceanic serpent. The mistake, you see, made by men of science, is to remain blind to certain mysteries, certain connections. They suppose that a forest glade illuminated by sunlight is the same forest glade at midnight, lit by moonbeams. You and I know they’re wrong.”
Squires could see his point. He nodded.
‘The rays of the moon, you see, are alive with reflected emanations that are absent in the light of day. All of this, I’m telling you, is of vast importance. In my story an astronaut launches out in his ship, bound for Alpha Centauri. He settles back, watching the approaching stars through a great circular convex window as if he sees the universe in globe, and the stars, as the poem has it, are herring fish. Or rather as if he himself is in a fishbowl and the stars and planets whirling in space are eyes watching him as he hurtles among them. His craft accelerates toward light speed. He swells, moderately at first, then preposterously. His ship becomes bulbous, voluminous. He’s a grinning moon man, a cloud being, but of course he’s oblivious to it. His ship fills the void. And there ahead, just as the ship closes in on the approaching stars and those behind are on the edge of winking out, of abandoning the race, there ahead of him he sees an unbelievable sight: a glowing ship sailing in through deep space, colossal, wide as half the sky, a carnival of glowing lights, inflated with speed. He draws up behind it, wondering, an odd chill in the recesses of his brain. And through the bowl of glass atop the wonderful ship ahead, he can see the head and shoulders of an inflated giant, a grotesque, puffy-cheeked god, soaring through the avenues of space along the of the Milky Way. And in one blind rush, one last moment of icy clarity, he knows who it is he pursues!”
William slumped back into the green armchair, sweating and pale. Squires was overcome. Professor Latzarel, surprised at seeing William there in the first place, was dumbfounded.
“A masterpiece!” said Ashbless, white-haired and wild and leaning against the mantel, a bottle of beer in his hand.
“I haven’t written it yet,” said William. “But when I can get the damned keys of my typewriter cleaned out, I’m going to start in. What do you think, Roy? Will it hold up? The science is sound; I’m certain of that, and it will be a long necessary collision of art and natural law. You’ve read C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures?”
“No,” Squires put in. “But I’ve just finished Bertrand Russell’s book on relativity theory. I’ll recommend it to you ….”
But he hadn’t a chance to finish before William slammed his hand onto the arm of the chair enthusiastically and leaped up to open a fresh bottle of port. In celebration, he said. He’d try the story on Analog, who would, he insisted, appreciate the scientific accuracy. And off he dashed to the pantry for a corkscrew.
Roycroft Squires looked up at Edward St. Ives, who shrugged. “I’m certain,” said Squires, “that William is years ahead of his time.”