Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

'Again?'

'Yep. This time for real.' So I got up and dressed as quietly as I could. By the time I got down to the kitchen, Muffin had made peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and was messing around with the waxed paper, trying to wrap them. She had twice as much paper as she needed and was making a total botch of things.

'You're really clueless sometimes,' I said, whispering so Mom and Dad wouldn't hear. I shoved her out of the way and started wrapping the sandwiches myself.

'When I rule the world, there won't be any waxed paper,' she said sulkily.

We were halfway down to the bus stop when Uncle Dave came running up behind us. He'd been staying the night in the guest room and he must have heard us leaving. 'Where do you think you're going?' he asked, and he was a bit mad at us.

'Down to the boatyards,' Muffin said.

'No, you aren't. Get back to the house.'

'Uncle Dave,' Muffin said, 'it's time.'

'Time for what?'

'The Eschaton.'

'Where do you pick up these words, Muffin? You're talking about the end of the world.'

'I know.' The first bus of the day was just turning onto our street two corners down. 'Come to the boatyards with us, Uncle Dave. It'll be okay.'

Uncle Dave thought about it. I guess he decided it was easier to give in than to fight with her. That's what I always think too. You can't win an argument with Muffin, and if you try anything else, she bites and scratches and uses her knees. 'All right,' Uncle Dave said, 'but we're going to phone your parents and tell them where you are, the first chance we get.'

'So talk to me about the Eschaton,' Uncle Dave said on the bus. We were the only ones on it except for a red-haired lady wearing a Donut Queen uniform.

'Well,' Muffin said, thinking things over, 'you know how Daddy talks about astronomy things moving? Like the moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the sun and the sun moves with the stars in the galaxy and the galaxy is moving too?'

'Yes…'

'Well, where is everything going?'

Uncle Dave shrugged. 'The way your father tells it, everything just moves, that's all. It's not going anywhere in particular.'

'That's stupid. Daddy doesn't understand teleology.' She waved her hand at the world out the window. 'Everything's going to where it's supposed to end up.'

Uncle Dave asked, 'What happens when things reach the place they're going?'

Muffin made an exasperated face. 'They end up there.'

'They stop?'

'What else would they do?'

'All the planets and the stars and all?'

'Mm-hmm.'

'People too?'

'Sure.'

He thought for a second. 'In perfect frozen moments, right?'

'Right.'

Uncle Dave leaned his head against the window like he was tired and sad. Maybe he was. The sun was coming up over the housetops now. 'Bus drivers driving their buses,' he said softly, 'and farmers milking their cows…the whole world like a coffee-table book.'

'I think you'd like to be in a church, Uncle Dave,' Muffin said. 'Or maybe walking alone along the lakeshore.'

'Maybe.' He smiled, all sad. 'Who are you, Muffin?'

'I'm me, dummy,' she answered, throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a kiss.

He left us in front of the warehouse by the lake. 'I'm going to walk down to the Rowing Club and back.' He laughed a little. 'If I do get back, Muffin, I'll have your parents ground you forever!'

'Bye, Uncle Dave,' she said, hugging him.

I hugged him too. 'Bye, Uncle Dave.'

'Don't let her do anything stupid,' he said to me. We watched for a while as he walked away, but he never turned back.

Up on the warehouse roof, there was a monk waiting with a McDonald's bag under his arm. He handed it to Muffin, then kneeled. 'Bless me, Holy One.'

'You're blessed,' she said after looking in the bag. 'Now get going to the temple. There's only ten minutes left.'

The monk hurried off, singing what I think was a hymn. We got into the plane-boat and I helped Muffin strap herself into one of the big padded seats. 'The thing is,' she said, 'when the earth stops turning, we're going to keep on going.'

'Hey, I know about momentum,' I answered. I mean, Dad is a physicist.

'And it's going to be real fast, so we have to be sure we don't run into any buildings.'

'We're going to shoot out over the lake?'

'We're high enough to clear the tops of the sailboats, then we just fly over the lake till we're slow enough to splash down. The monks got scientists to figure everything out.'

I strapped myself in and thought about things for a while. 'If we go shooting off real fast, isn't it going to hurt? I mean, the astronauts get all pressed down when they lift off…'

'Jeez!' Muffin groaned. 'Don't you know the difference between momentum and acceleration? Nothing's happening to us, it's everything else that's going weird. We don't feel a thing.'

'Not even wind?'

'The air has the same momentum we do, dummy.'

I thought about it some more. 'Aren't the buildings going to get wrecked when the earth stops?'

'They're going to stop too. Everything will freeze except us.'

'The air and water freeze too?'

'In spots. But not where we're going.'

'We're special?'

'We're special.'

Suddenly there was a roar like roller-coaster wheels underneath us and for a moment I was pressed up against the straps holding me down on the seat. Then the pressure stopped and there was nothing but the sound of wind a long way off. Over the side of the boat I could see water rushing by beneath us. We were climbing.

'Muffin,' I asked, 'should one of us maybe be piloting this thing?'

'It's got a gyroscope or something. The monks worked absolutely everything out, okay?'

'Okay.'

A long way off to the right, I could see a lake freighter with a curl of smoke coming out of its stack. The smoke didn't move. It looked neat. 'Nice warm day,' I said.

After a while, we started playing car games to pass the time.

The sun shone but didn't move. 'If the sun stays there forever,' I asked, 'won't it get really hot after a while?'

'Nah,' Muffin answered. 'It's some kind of special deal. I mean, it's stupid if you set up a nice picture of kids playing in the park but then it gets hot as Mercury.'

'Who's going to know?' I asked.

'It's not the same,' she insisted.

'How can we see?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, is the light moving or what?'

'It's another special deal.'

That made sense. From the way Dad talked about physics, light was always getting special deals.

The water below us gradually stopped racing away so fast and we could sometimes see frozen whitecaps on the peaks of frozen waves. 'Suppose we land on frozen water,' I said.

'We won't.'

'Oh. Your turn.'

'I spy with my little eye something that begins with B.' Right away I knew she meant the Big Macs, but I had to pretend it was a toughie. You have to humor little kids.

We splashed down within sight of a city on the far side of the lake. It was a really good splash, like the one on the Zoomba Flume ride when you get to the bottom of the big long water chute. Both of us got drenched. I was kind of sad there was no way to do it again.

Then I thought to myself, maybe if we were getting a special deal on air and water and light and all, maybe we'd get a special deal on the Zoomba Flume too.

We unstrapped ourselves and searched around a bit. Finally we found a lid that slid back to open up a control panel with a little steering wheel and all. We pushed buttons till an inboard motor started in the water behind us, then we took turns driving toward shore. Every now and then we'd see a gull frozen in the sky, wings spread out and looking great.

We put in at a public beach just outside the city. It had been early in the day and the only people in sight were a pair of joggers on a grassy ridge that ran along the edge of the sand. The man wore nothing but track shorts and sunglasses; the woman wore red stretch pants, a T-shirt, and a headband. They each had Walkmans and were stopped midstride. Both were covered with deep dark tans, and as Muffin pointed out, a thin coat of sweat.

I wanted to touch the joggers to see what they felt like, but when my finger got close, it bumped against an invisible layer of frozen air. The air didn't feel like anything, it was just solid stuff.

Down at one end of the beach, a teenage girl was frozen in the act of unlocking the door into a snack stand. We squeezed past her and found out we could open the freezer inside. Muffin had a couple of Popsicles, I had an ice cream sandwich, and then we went swimming.

Lying in the sun afterward, I asked Muffin what was going to happen next.

'You want to go swimming again?' she said.

'No, I mean after.'

'Let's eat,' she said, dragging me back toward the boat.

'You can't wiggle out of it that easy,' I told her. 'Are we the only ones left?'

'I think so.'

'Are we going to freeze too?'