Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 9

Author's Note: Spay or neuter your pets.  Better yet, have someone else do it for you.  You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device.

How could I hate Finnie for anything, even wanting to kill me?  I couldn't even gather any dislike for her, and I knew if she looked at me for just a few more seconds with those eyes of hers, I would have helped her plot both my murder and her escape.

Now, Bertram was another story.  I had just met him, and although I found it very honest for him to confess to ordering my murder, I was uncertain how to deal with him.  In fact, my own father, whom I had thought dead for over twenty years, was not only alive, but also very comfortable with the idea of my becoming dead.    I sat through the rest of the coffee without saying another word to any of them. 

The whole thing was making less sense to me, and I rode in silence in the front of Finnie’s car.  Finnie sat beside me, driving the vehicle, and taking her eyes off the road every few seconds to scan me with what I interpreted as a worried look. 

From the backseat, my father cleared his throat and tried to change the atmosphere.  “You say Winston Canoehound turned into a pig?  That’s just the bee's knees.  If that’s true, it could validate a theory I’ve been working on, and may show us a way out of this mess.  Short of having Ishmael killed, I mean.  Son.”

“Thanks.”  The words were thick and stuck in my throat.  “Thanks a lot.  Dad.”

“Oh, don’t mention it, son.  But consider.  All of our top men, and women, too, I suppose, what with women leaving the home and…”  His voice faltered.  I saw he had caught Finnie’s glaring, tootsie-roll colored eye glaring at him in the rear-view mirror. 

“And who doesn’t think that’s a good idea?” she asked.  “Men, that’s who.  You’ve loused up the whole multiverse and then complain that women don’t stay home baking cookies while everything implodes around us.  Typical.”

“Now, now, that’s not what I was getting at all.  I have nothing against women, as a group, or even individual women, as individuals.  But when you’re working long hours in a laboratory, like myself, and you have the need to scratch or something, it’s just more convenient if there are no women around.  It's science.”

Bertram nodded.  He carried his stiff hat centered in his lap.  “That’s an overlooked point, and one that people of good breeding would be well-admonished to keep in their frame of reference.”

Mel, my father, cleared his throat.  “There, now that we’re clear on the women-in-the-workplace thing, I’ll continue.  We’ve always seen the dimensions as unidirectional once they formed by the splitting of the decision-tree, but it does seem as though this is not always the case.  Take our current situation.  Suppose the dimensions are not simply trying to re-merge.  Picture them as giant gears, perhaps of different sizes, whose teeth are starting to mesh.  As the teeth start to meet, there is contact, which increases until the maximum amount of contact is achieved, at which point the gears begin to separate again.”

I pictured this in my head, although I didn’t see it exactly as gears.  I saw it as one of those plastic drawing kits which were popular when I was young.  To draw amazing designs, you simply pinned a toothed plastic wheel to your paper, then selected a plastic gear.  Placing your pen or pencil point through one of the holes, you interlocked the wheels and began spinning them.  The designs were popular in that psychedelic time and I had longed for one of those kits with all my heart.  “Do you mean like a Spirograph?”

“No, but now that you mention, that is a better simile.  Good work, son!”

“Good work dad.  You promised me one for my fifth birthday.  I’m still waiting.”