Numbers Don't Lie

 

Numbers Don't Lie

 

 

by Terry Bisson

 

 

 

 

ElectricStory.com, Inc.
^®

N
UMBERS
D
ON'T
L
IE
Copyright © 2001 by Terry Bisson. All rights reserved.
Ebook edition of
Numbers Don't Lie
copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-59729-058-6
ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.
These novelettes are works of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.
Cover art by and copyright © 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.
Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.
v1.2

C
OPYRIGHT
N
OTICE
This ebook is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Know that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you, the author, and the publisher.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
All stories are reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Susan Ann Protter.
“The Hole in the Hole”: First published in
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
, February 1994, copyright © 1994 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
“The Edge of the Universe”: First published in
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
, August 1996, copyright © 1996 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
“Get Me to the Church on Time”: First published in
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
, May 1998, copyright © 1998 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines.
Special thanks to Professor of Mathematics Dr. Rudy Rucker, M.S., Ph.D., M.V.P., B.M.O.C., for checking all the formulas herein for “elegance.”

 

 

 

 

 

To my reviewers:
Smart, good-looking, and generous, every one.

 

Contents

 

 

Copyright

 

Acknowledgments

 

Dedication

 

 

Author's Note to the First Edition

 

The Hole in the Hole

 

The Edge of the Universe

 

Get Me to the Church on Time

 

 

Also by Terry Bisson

 

Other Ebooks from ElectricStory

 

Author's Note to the First Edition

 

 

N
UMBERS DON'T LIE BEGAN ON THE STREET
in Brooklyn, where a tall Chinese-American lawyer and I used to lean on our fenders and talk Volvos and Destiny. When I found a Volvo junkyard in a strange, sunken neighborhood near Jamaica Bay, I rushed to find him, for I knew he would love it—but he had moved away. So I had to take him to it in a story, which became “
The Hole in the Hole
.”

My friend Pat Molloy of NASA was kind enough to send me the specs on the Moon buggy. Rudy Rucker checked Wilson Wu's math for both elegance and accuracy, and he assures me the one is more important than the other, anyway.

I'm usually a reductive writer, but I grew to enjoy the garrulous tone of my Wu stories. I wrote two more for
Asimov's
with the aim of publishing them as one short novel, beginning with a divorce and ending with a wedding.

Hard to do! Nobody wants a short book.

Then ElectricStory made my dream come true. This is the
first and only edition
of this book in its intended form, not a reprint. It was always meant to be one story. Authors are notoriously hard to please but I'm thrilled: for I think that the still-experimental digital book is the ideal format for
Numbers Don't Lie
, which will find its readers among that still-small band of literary adventurers who are willing (and even eager) to swap ink and pulp for pixels.

Or so I hope. For I haven't seen the last of Wilson Wu, nor he the last of me.

 

The Hole in the Hole

 

 

T
RYING TO FIND VOLVO PARTS CAN BE A PAIN,
particularly if you are a cheapskate, like me. I needed the hardware that keeps the brake pads from squealing, but I kept letting it go, knowing it wouldn't be easy to find. The brakes worked okay—good enough for Brooklyn. And I was pretty busy, anyway, being in the middle of a divorce, the most difficult I have ever handled, my own.

After the squeal developed into a steady scream (we're talking about the brakes here, not the divorce, which was silent), I tried the two auto supply houses I usually dealt with, but had no luck. The counterman at
Aberth's
just gave me a blank look. At
Park Slope Foreign Auto
, I heard those dread words, “dealer item.” Breaking (no pun intended) with my usual policy, I went to the Volvo dealer in Bay Ridge, and the parts man, one of those Jamaicans who seems to think being rude is the same thing as being funny, fished around in his bins and placed a pile of pins, clips, and springs on the counter.

“That'll be twenty-eight dollars, mon,” he said, with what they used to call a shit-eating grin. When I complained (or as we lawyers like to say, objected), he pointed at the spring which was spray-painted yellow, and said, “Well, you see, they're gold, mon!” Then he spun on one heel to enjoy the laughs of his coworkers, and I left. There is a limit.

So I let the brakes squeal for another week. They got worse and worse. Ambulances were pulling over to let me by, thinking I had priority. Then I tried spraying the pads with WD-40.

Don't ever try that.

On Friday morning I went back to
Park Slope Foreign Auto
and pleaded (another legal specialty) for help. Vinnie, the boss's son, told me to try
Boulevard Imports
in Howard Beach, out where Queens and Brooklyn come together at the edge of Jamaica Bay. Since I didn't have court that day, I decided to give it a try.

The brakes howled all the way. I found
Boulevard Imports
on Rockaway Boulevard just off the Belt Parkway. It was a dark, grungy, impressive-looking cave of a joint, with guys in coveralls lounging around drinking coffee and waiting on deliveries. I was hopeful.

The counterman, another Vinnie, listened to my tale of woe before dashing my hopes with the dread words, “dealer item.” Then the guy in line behind me, still another Vinnie (everyone wore their names over their pockets) said, “Send him to Frankie in the Hole.”

The Vinnie behind the counter shook his head, saying, “He'd never find it.”

I turned to the other Vinnie and asked, “Frankie in the Hole?”

“Frankie runs a little junkyard,” he said. “Volvos only. You know the Hole?”

“Can't say as I do.”

“I'm not surprised. Here's what you do. Listen carefully because it's not so easy to find these days, and I'm only going to tell you once.”

 

* * *

 

There's no way I could describe or even remember everything this Vinnie told me: Suffice it to say that it had to do with crossing over Rockaway Boulevard, then back under the Belt Parkway, forking onto a service road, making a U-turn onto Conduit but staying in the center lane, cutting a sharp left into a dead end (that really wasn't), and following a dirt track down a steep bank through a grove of trees and brush.

I did as I was told, and found myself in a sort of sunken neighborhood, on a wide dirt street running between decrepit houses set at odd angles on weed-grown lots. It looked like one of those leftover neighborhoods in the meadowlands of Jersey, or down South, where I did my basic training. There were no sidewalks but plenty of potholes, abandoned gardens, and vacant lots. The streets were half-covered by huge puddles. The houses were of concrete block, or tarpaper, or board and batten; no two alike or even remotely similar. There was even a house trailer, illegal in New York City (so, of course, is crime). There were no street signs, so I couldn't tell if I was in Brooklyn or Queens, or on the dotted line between the two.

The other Vinnie (or third, if you are counting) had told me to follow my nose until I found a small junkyard, which I proceeded to do. Mine was the only car on the street. Weaving around the puddles (or cruising through them like a motorboat) gave driving an almost nautical air of adventure. There was no shortage of junk in the Hole, including a subway car someone was living in, and a crane that had lost its verticality and took up two back yards. Another back yard had a piebald pony. The few people I saw were white. A fat woman in a short dress sat on a high step talking on a portable phone. A gang of kids was gathered around a puddle killing something with sticks. In the yard behind them was a card table with a crude sign reading
MOON ROCKS R US
.

I liked the peaceful scene in the Hole. And driving through the puddles quieted my brakes. I saw plenty of junk cars, but they came in ones or twos, in the yards and on the street, and none of them were Volvos (no surprise).

After I passed the piebald pony twice, I realized I was going in circles. Then I noticed a chainlink fence with reeds woven into it. And I had a feeling.

I stopped. The fence was just too high to look over, but I could see between the reeds. I was right. It was a junkyard that had been “ladybirded.”

The lot hidden by the fence was filled with cars, squeezed together tightly, side by side and end to end. All from Sweden. All immortal and all dead. All indestructible, and all destroyed. All Volvos.

The first thing you learn in law school is when not to look like a lawyer. I left my tie and jacket in the car, pulled on my coveralls, and followed the fence around to a gate. On the gate was a picture of a snarling dog. The picture was (it turned out) all the dog there was, but it was enough. It slowed you down; made you think.

The gate was unlocked. I opened it enough to slip through. I was in a narrow driveway, the only open space in the junkyard. The rest was packed so tightly with Volvos that there was barely room to squeeze between them. They were lined up in rows, some facing north and some south (or was it east and west?) so that it looked like a traffic jam in Hell. The gridlock of the dead.

At the end of the driveway, there was a ramshackle garage made of corrugated iron, shingleboard, plywood, and fiberglass. In and around it, too skinny to cast shade, were several ailanthus—New York's parking-lot tree. There were no signs but none were needed. This had to be Frankie's.

Only one living car was in the junkyard. It stood at the end of the driveway, by the garage, with its hood raised, as if it were trying to speak but had forgotten what it wanted to say. It was a 164, Volvo's unusual straight six. The body was battered, with bondo under the taillights and doors where rust had been filled in. It had cheap imitation racing wheels and a chrome racing stripe along the bottom of the doors. Two men were leaning over, peering into the engine compartment.

I walked up and watched, unwelcomed but not (I suspected) unnoticed. An older White man in coveralls bent over the engine while a Black man in a business suit looked on and kibitzed in a rough but friendly way. I noticed because this was the late 1980s and the relations between Blacks and Whites weren't all that friendly in New York.

And here we were in Howard Beach. Or at least in a Hole in Howard Beach.