by John Helfers
‘‘Tall,’’ Samantha said, ignoring the clanking sound coming from behind one of the tail fins. She made the word sound icy and then, thinking better of it, she rubbed her brother’s neck just below his ever-present fishbowl helmet. She had never cared for Scotty and Cedric and so had been unable to shed even a single tear when, following a long night of funnel activity, their mother had discovered the fishes lifeless amidst a flurry of glass shards in a puddle of water on the dresser . . . Cedric with his tail fin gone, and Scotty minus his head. But since then, with Ben having taken to wearing a new fishbowl on his head like one of the spacemen in their father’s prized collection of old comic books from the closing years of the last millennium, she found that she missed the fishes dearly.
‘‘How tall is it is what you mean to ask,’’ Samantha said, her voice now displaying a slightly more compassionate tone.
Ben grunted, one hand shielding his eyes from the reflected light.
‘‘ ‘High’ refers to the distance between an object and the ground whereas ‘tall’ talks about the object’s actual length.’’
Jerry Stuczi appeared from behind one of the tail struts with a thick roll of gray duct tape in his left hand. He gave Samantha a glare that was more sad than recriminatory.
‘‘What? I was just explaining the diff—’’
‘‘How tall is it, Pops?’’ Ben asked, interrupting his sister.
‘‘How tall do you think?’’
Ben turned his full attention back to the rocket ship and, craning his head backward, he held his hand against the fishbowl and tried to estimate. ‘‘Half a mile?’’ he said at last.
A funnel split the air above them and, just for a few seconds, they all glimpsed a star-dotted blackness beyond the rip. The funnel disappeared almost immediately, like lightning, and the air smelled of burning. A dull plop sounded from the bushes over to the right.
Ben cheered and ran over. ‘‘Hey, it got a bird.’’
‘‘Leave it, Benny,’’ Jerry Stuczi said. ‘‘Come on back over here.’’
‘‘Yeuch! Half of it’s gone.’’
The boy stepped back from the strangely mutilated creature, its one remaining wing flapping weakly, and looked around the grass and bushes in front of him.
‘‘Gross!’’ was Samantha’s verdict on the whole affair, but Jerry knew that it was just his daughter’s way of keeping herself going.
‘‘Time to go time,’’ Jerry said.
‘‘I think we need to be on our way, honey,’’ Sally shouted. She was leaning out of the hatch at the top of the drop-down ladder, looking anxiously up at the sky.
‘‘Dad just said,’’ Samantha shouted back.
Her mother nodded and, catching Samantha’s dad’s eye, she added, ‘‘And soon, honey?’’ She disappeared into the ship.
Ben and Samantha looked at their father.
Jerry smiled.
‘‘Are we going to be okay, Daddy?’’
‘‘We’re going to be just fine.’’
‘‘It’ll be just like the old days, won’t it, Pops?’’
‘‘Yes, just like the old days,’’ Jerry agreed. And he laughed.
The old days to which his son referred involved Jerry’s long stint piloting supply ships from Earth to Marsopolis. Those were the early days of FTL drive and even what Jerry referred to as his ‘‘desk-job’’ of Mars’ moon runs, ferrying iron ore back from Phobos and Deimos, when the Board of Directors of Tachyon plc decided that, at 34 years old, Jerry Stuczi was now just a little long in the tooth for negotiating his way through meteor showers or landing some thirty million credits’ worth of rocket ship on an area the comparative size of a pea on a drum.
And then, soon after he had settled into a quiet life at home wondering what he was going to do to pay the bills, the first funnel had appeared.
Out on the pond something broke the surface of the water and returned with a remarkably loud plop, its identity kept secret from the people in the clearing and their large metal vehicle.
Jerry Stuczi looked at his son’s eager face, the wide eyes, and, just for a second, the boy’s eyes lost some of their sparkle and maybe gained just a little resignation . . . or maybe even despondency. The writing was on the wall here and let’s not forget it, Jerry thought. He was heading for the big four-oh now and his reactions and skills were not what they had used to be. And that wasn’t even counting the fact that the ship in which he was preparing to leave Earth— virtually sidestepping into oblivion through one of the funnels—was the equivalent of a soapbox flyer . . . and the task ahead the likes of the Indianapolis 500.
But what was it they said about glasses being either half empty or half full? Hell, wherever there was life there was hope. And right now, at this single wonderful split second, they were all blissfully alive.
‘‘We going into one of the tunnels, Pops?’’ Ben asked, his voice hushed and conspiratorial.
‘‘Funnels,’’ said Samantha.
‘‘Yes, we are,’’ Jerry said, and he clapped his hands before swinging his right hand up into the air. ‘‘Whooosh!’’ he said. ‘‘Just like that.’’
‘‘But you don’t know where we’ll end up, right?’’
‘‘That’s right, Sammy. I don’t know where we’ll end up.’’
‘‘I still think it’s sui—’’
‘‘Sam!’’
Jerry’s daughter didn’t respond. She just thrust her hands into her coat pocket and jiggled her foot at a tuft of grass.
Jerry moved over to his daughter and dropped the duct tape by his feet before wrapping his arms around her. ‘‘The Earth—’’ He caught himself at that moment and wondered whether he was going to have the strength to finish the sentence. But the smell of Samantha’s ginger shampoo gave him a tiny sliver of optimism. Hell, he had to make it all work.
‘‘She’s finished,’’ he went on. ‘‘Plumb tuckered out, as my old granddaddy used to say when we had a horse to put down. The Earth won’t last the month. She’s already totally imbalanced since the funnel that took out most of mainland Europe, and all the way down to the substrata. Staying here is suicide: going out there—’’ He nodded upward and pulled Ben up alongside. ‘‘—going out there is our one chance.’’
Nobody said anything for a minute or two after that, and then Ben asked, ‘‘Are we the last ones, Pops? Are we the last family in America?’’ There was no disguising the awe that the boy felt at such a situation.
Jerry shrugged. He didn’t know for sure, but they could just be. ‘‘The Last Family in America,’’ he said, and then he pulled his children closer. ‘‘Sounds kind of special, doesn’t it?’’ He raised his voice imitating a public address system announcement: ‘‘Will the last family in America please switch off the lights when they leave? Thank you.’’
Birds twittered in the trees, but otherwise the world was singularly unimpressed.
‘‘Where do you think we’ll come out? Of the tunnel, I mean,’’ Ben added.
Jerry thought on that one without looking down at his son’s upturned face. Getting into the funnel was going to be a tall order. Getting out of it—wherever that happened to beâ€
”was something he had hardly dared to think about. The whole thing was pie in the sky, if the truth be known. But in these dark times, who wanted truth? All they wanted was a little hope. This way was the only way. The only chance for survival.
There were rumors of people making the jump and living to tell the tale, but such stories were apocryphal, told by wide-eyed believers who knew people who knew people. Even before planet-wide and even inter-spatial communications collapsed completely and the large starship liners set off on their multi-generational missions to find a new Earth, talk shows regularly featured folks who had met someone who had met someone who had funnel-jumped, maybe met them at one of the asteroid bars over beyond the rim, listening to their tales of warped space and distorted instrumentation. These were the tales of the space amputees, grizzled tattooed old-timers who, spending up to fifty of their fifty-two weeks among the stars, had elected to have their legs removed to improve maneuverability— every barroom on Lunar and the floating cities above Venus had them, speaking in hushed tones about funnel-jumpers. The popular theory was that, well . . . it made sense, didn’t it? Statistically, someone had to have succeeded in coming back to tell the tale. But, as the gainsayers would counter, shouldn’t the same rationale apply to life after death?
‘‘You’re worried, aren’t you?’’
Jerry shook his head and smiled at his daughter. He wasn’t sure whether the sadness he could see in her face was for herself or for him . . . or maybe for him and her mother. He allowed a small chuckle. ‘‘Do I look worried?’’
‘‘Yeah, you do.’’
He shrugged and crouched down to fold up his tool-box. ‘‘Okay, yes, I’m a little nervous.’’
‘‘Worried.’’
‘‘Nervous,’’ Jerry insisted. ‘‘And it makes a lot of sense to be nervous. A little perspiration is a good thing—ask any pilot.’’
Samantha scowled. ‘‘Yeuch!’’
Sally slid her way down the last few rungs on the ladder. ‘‘What’s your father saying, honey?’’
‘‘He’s being gross again.’’
‘‘He’s always being gross.’’ She dusted her hands together and, as she reached the three of them, she ran a hand over Jerry’s shoulder. ‘‘Ever since I met him,’’ she added. They all stood in silence for a few seconds and then Sally said, ‘‘So, we ready for the takeoff?’’
Jerry raised his eyebrows and made a bemused mouth-shape. ‘‘Well, everything that can be done has been done,’’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘‘So—’’
‘‘We might be the last ones, Mom,’’ Ben said excitedly.
‘‘The last family on Earth is what he means,’’ Samantha explained.
Ben nodded. ‘‘In America anyways,’’ he added.
Sally shuddered. She turned to her husband and said, ‘‘Kind of makes you feel a little strange, doesn’t it?’’
‘‘Strange how?’’
She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the edge of the clearing. Through the trees she could see the lean-to they’d built while Jerry worked on the old transport ship he’d bought with all their savings. Jerry had said they needed to move from the city because the evidence suggested that the funnels seemed to be attracted to high-density population areas. Smoke drifted lazily from the chimney and up into the afternoon air. She followed it with her eyes and then looked away when a small rip opened and closed way over in the distance, making a sound like far-off thunder.
‘‘They’re getting more frequent, aren’t they?’’ she asked.
Jerry didn’t answer. Instead, he said ‘‘How does it make you feel strange, honey?’’ He moved up behind his daughter and wrapped his arms around her, clasping his hands against her arms and squeezing.
‘‘Well . . . like it’s all over. I mean, it’s not just whether you and I can make it—not whether any of the others have made it before us. We don’t know for sure that anyone’s got through one of those damn things.’’ Samantha nodded at a brief explosion of starry blackness in the sky over to their right, unconsciously waiting for the distant thunderclap of ruptured matter that always accompanied a funnel’s appearance. ‘‘It’s the end of America. The end of Earth. Maybe it’s even the end of humanity.’’
‘‘No, we’ll survive this someplace.’’
Sally wondered whether Jerry meant ‘‘we’’ as in them or ‘‘we’’ as in humankind. But she didn’t want to ask.
‘‘I guess it comes down to faith,’’ Jerry went on. He planted a kiss on the crown of Samantha’s blonde hair. ‘‘Like believing whether there’s anything after we’re gone.’’
‘‘You mean after we’re dead,’’ Ben said, imbuing the word with fierce excitement. ‘‘Like zombies,’’ he added.
‘‘We know ones that didn’t make it,’’ Samantha said, her voice hardly above a whisper. Nobody said anything to that. They were all too aware of the Nautilus tragedy, captured on a live television news-strand (when they still had television)—a two-thousand-berth clipper ship neatly sheared in half by a closing funnel as the ship rose up from Woomera, spilling bodies and body parts alike out onto the gray landing area below. Just like the old image of the falling man, leaping from the destruction of New York’s fabled twin towers in the last century, the clip was never shown again. But, as horrific as it was, the image had contained a magical and almost ballet-like beauty.
They all knew that that wasn’t what Samantha had meant. But nobody was about to spoil it all and verbalize it. The odds were stacked against them, and they all knew it. Even Ben.
Out of the blue, Jerry said, ‘‘You ever hear of Schrödinger’s cat?’’
Nobody said anything for a few seconds and then Samantha broke the silence. ‘‘I never even heard of Schrödinger!’’
Sally chuckled at her husband’s crinkly smile and raised eyebrows.
‘‘He that old guy with the black hat and the curly sideburns?’’ Ben looked first at his mother and then his father, shifting his glass helmet and nodding as he suddenly recalled ‘‘He had a cat.’’
‘‘Mister Liebowitz, sweetie,’’ Sally thought of suggesting that Ben remove his helmet until they were on their way, but she didn’t have the heart. Instead, she placed a hand on the glass bowl’s smooth surface. She tried to burn away the memory of Abraham Liebowitz’s puffed and blackened lips and protruding eyes when Jerry and Wayne Springer from the apartment upstairs had cut the old man down from the light fitting and laid him alongside his beloved cat, Balthazar.
He just couldn’t take it, honey, Jerry had explained to his sobbing wife. Some folks can’t deal with uncertainty. So he poisoned the cat and hanged himself.
In that instant, Sally Stuczi had understood that feeling more profoundly than ever before . . . that feeling of not being able to take it. If she had had the means right then to do the same for her two children and Jerry and herself, she would have done it . . . would have thrown those pills back and washed them down with a healthy glass of oblivion, thereby removing doubt, banishing uncertainty, eradicating confusion. But that was then, not now. Though, truth be told, there were times that she had flashes back to it.
‘‘Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist, way b
ack in the early 1900s.’’
‘‘A fizzy cyst?’’
‘‘A scientist,’’ Jerry explained to his son. ‘‘He came up with the theory of quantum mechanics.’’
Ben nodded. Okay, this he could understand. Mechanics . . . guys in greasy coveralls working of rocket ship exhausts like the ones in the old Tachyon hangars over in Boston. So those must have been Tachyon mechanics. He nodded some more and said, ‘‘And he had a cat?’’
‘‘Well, no—or should I say, I don’t know. It was a metaphorical cat.’’
‘‘That a color?’’
Jerry nodded tiredly. ‘‘Schrödinger came up with the concept of, well . . . alternate universes.’’
‘‘Honey, you think—’’
Jerry shook his head at Sally and, smiling, continued. ‘‘He came up with the idea that if you put a cat and a deadly virus in a box and close the lid, then you’re basically creating two existences: one in which the cat will live and one in which it will die.’’
Samantha shuddered and scanned the sky. ‘‘Shouldn’t we be getting onboard?’’
‘‘No hurry,’’ Jerry said. ‘‘We have all the time in the world.
‘‘You only find out which of the two universes you inhabit when you open the box.’’ Jerry held out his hands and shrugged meaningfully. ‘‘And you can do it with numerous identical dimensions, with every single one having a key change. Like even if there are multiple dimensions in which the cat dies, then each one might have a different time of death.’’
‘‘Honey, I think that’s enough about dead cats.’’
Ben rolled his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘‘Jeez,’’ was all he could think of to say, so he did.
