Science Fiction

Posted on April 17, 2013 by

The first science fiction novel I remember reading was by Robert Heinlein. It happened to be his first novel, entitled Rocket Ship Galileo. Published originally in 1947, it told the story of a nuclear scientist and some boys who built a rocket, then flew it to the moon where they had to fight against some Nazis. Just the sort of story that would capture the imagination and heart of a third grade boy.

After that, I sought out other books that were, as I called them, “space stories.” My elementary school in Westerville Ohio was rather small. Even remembering it through the eyes of an 8 year old, the library still seems inadequate: little more than a narrow closet packed with dusty volumes. Therefore, I soon exhausted the available stories. But, there was still the local public library, and I quickly located their collection of science fiction. I began with children’s books, of course, but it wasn’t long before, with my mom’s help, I was able to move on to the grown up books.

Over the years, my tastes in science fiction broadened. I discovered that there was much more to science fiction than just space opera.

For the uninitiated, their idea of science fiction might be limited to the bad movies that Hollywood has manufactured. Likewise, a lot of the science fiction books out there are admittedly not really very good. But, as Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, once said, 90 per cent of everything is junk.

The remaining ten percent of science fiction has nothing to be ashamed of. A good science fiction story, like all great literature, deals with issues beyond its setting in space, beyond all the fancy gadgetry. In fact, the gee-whiz is mere decoration for the basic human problems that are discussed, ranging from questions of whether life has meaning, to the nature of reality, human relations, and questions of love and war. Coming of age stories, romance, heartbreak and struggle all appear within its pages. But beyond that, the stories can ask questions that no other literature will touch: the implications both philosophical and theological of progress, linked to warnings about the boxes opened by technological Pandoras.

Interesting sub-genres have formed. One of my favorites is most commonly known as “alternate history.” It is a mental experiment: one looks at a turning point in history and contemplates what might have happened had things turned out a different way. For instance, a British soldier had George Washington in his rifle sight and chose not to pull the trigger. What if he had? Or what of the lost battle plans belonging to Robert E. Lee that in the real world were recovered by a northern soldier, thereby contributing to Lee’s loss of an important battle. What if the plans had not been lost?

What if the Spanish Armada had not been wiped out by a storm and instead had successfully conquered England just before the time of Shakespeare?

Harry Turtledove, trained as a historian, is a science fiction author who has contemplated many of these questions and has written detailed novels following up how the world might have turned out differently—focusing often times on how the lives of people we know from history could have been transformed, as in his novel Ruled Britannia, where Shakespeare writes subversive plays against the Spanish overlords and plots rebellion.

What if’s can sometimes be remarkably improbable, and still raise interesting questions worth exploring. Eric Flint has written a series of novels, beginning with one entitled 1632 (and currently available for free on Amazon for the Kindle or Kindle app), in which he assumes a West Virginia mining town from the year 2000 is suddenly and unexpectedly transported whole into Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. His focus is on the effect of modern ideas on seventeenth century Europe, rather than on the consequences of unexpected modern technology. So he plays with how American ideas of freedom of speech and religion, democracy, and limited government interact and alter the balance of power in old Europe. He imagines the discussions a post-Vatican II Catholic priest might have with a seventeenth century Pope. And what about our modern concepts of hygiene and disease? Or how do the kings and other tyrants of the seventeenth century react to reading about their lives in twenty-first century textbooks?

John Scalzi wrote a book a couple years ago called Old Man’s War in which he considers an odd question. What if a technology developed that could make people young again after they had gotten old—but it was only given to those who, on their 75th birthday, agreed to sign up to become soldiers fighting an interplanetary war?

Sarah A. Hoyt has written a series of books beginning with Darkship Thieves. The main character, Athena Hera Sinistra wakes up in the middle of the night in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. From there, she fights for freedom and for explanations; she winds up learning many dark secrets about her father, herself, and the world she thought she knew.

If you haven’t read any science fiction lately, or perhaps never at all, you might want to give it a try. You may be surprised by where it will lead you.

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The Problem of Suffering

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

The problem of suffering—why a good, powerful God would allow pain and misery—is one that has troubled many, at least since the time of Voltaire. In his book Candide, the atheist Voltaire tries to demonstrate that the horrors that can occur, ranging from war to earthquakes, the death of children from disease and famine, is incompatible with a belief in a God who is benevolent. The Deists tried to escape Voltaire’s conclusion by assuming that God created the universe but that he then stepped away from it as a painter might step away from his completed canvas and never touch it again with his paintbrush.

Either way—a God who starts the world up and then ignores it, or no God at all—results in the same sort of world: one lacking the hand of God. So, assuming then, that our world were devoid of God what would it be like? Would it be the world we actually experience, in which case Voltair or the Deists have reality nailed, or would it be something different?

The difference between Voltaire’s or the Deist’s world and a world in which God intervenes, in a certain respect would be subtle—because I believe that God’s involvement in our world is subtle. But subtle does not necessarily mean the differences between the two possible worlds would be small. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” So goes the old proverb. For lack of God’s movement among us, the world would be a much darker place than the one we find ourselves in.

If one assumes a benevolent, powerful deity, then one would reasonably also assume that he would create the best of all possible worlds. And by “best” we mean one that maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering. As a Christian, I would argue that God involves himself only to the extent that it maximizes good and minimizes evil without unduly encroaching human freedom and free will.

Consider a free market economy operating according to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. God, to follow the analogy, is essentially the “invisible hand” of the universe. John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University has pointed out that most economists believe that “simple economic exchanges that are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. They accept that Adam Smith’s invisible hand brings about the spontaneous order of the modern economy.” Paulos explains that thanks to the free market, you can walk into any store that sells clothing and find something that fits you in a style you like—or if that particular store lacks your particular and peculiar interests, then you can go to another store and another until you do find what you want. Consider a box of corn flakes and the complex process that gets it into your hands at Wal-Mart. Farmers grew the corn; they used modern chemical fertilizers, perhaps used irrigation to water the crops, used machinery to plow and later harvest the fields—machinery that someone else manufactured through its own complex process. Meanwhile, another corporation made cardboard from trees harvested by a lumbering company, shipped the cardboard to a box making company that printed the labels on the cereal box that had been designed by a marketing department somewhere else, using inks purchased from some other company, using printing equipment made by still another…and then the cereal company took the farmers corn, processed it, cooked it and made the flakes which were then put into the boxes, which were then ordered by stores all over the world, some of which made their way by boat, train, plane or truck to your particular store to be tossed unceremoniously into your shopping cart.

No one central planning committee, no single individual, could make that happen. It is a hard for many to accept: that random and free exchange can produce order. It is counterintuitive. But centralized planning and centralized economies always and without exception fail. Instead, it is the counterintuitive free market that gives us everything that the centralized economies would want but always fail to provide.

Counterintuitively, order comes from freedom, while stasis and anarchy grow from attempts to impose control. I believe that God maximizes the order of his universe and the order on our particular planet by ensuring the free will of his creatures. God’s sovereign will is expressed as a consequence of our free will.

But taking this to an extreme gives us the universe of the Deists, with an uninvolved God. Just as too much government is bad, none at all is likewise a disaster.

With zero intervention by God things could get really bad, really fast. His light and mild hand on our throttle keeps things from getting any worse than they otherwise might. His gentle touch creates a world that is the best possible, given our free will.

So for instance, where was God during the Holocaust? In the armies of the allies. He was bombing the stuffing out of Nazi Germany. The Holocaust is disturbing, but think how much more disturbing it would have been had the Nazis won. With no God, that would have been a possibility. Instead God intervened—perhaps less intensively than we might wish—to limit evil, to put boundaries around it. But he minimizes his interference so as to leave us our freedom.

Consider a totalitarian government. It can control the means of production, what appears on television, what people read, what people say, who they associate with, how they worship, where they go. Minor crimes are punished severely: blasphemers are stoned, thieves have their hands hacked off, adulterers are hanged, and so on. Such a society is ordered and everyone is forced to be “good” and very little “bad” ever happens.

Do you want to live there? A free society is messy: criminals get away with things and are not always punished as severely as we might like. People say and do things that annoy others. People litter. But I think most people would much prefer a free society to a dictatorship.

God apparently thinks that way too. He prefers our freedom. The Bible story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden illustrates that point. God told them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. And yet they did.

If good behavior were what mattered most to God, he would not have given them the opportunity to disobey, nor ever allowed them to do so. All the mess of human history grows from the bad decision Adam and Eve made. Clearly, the God we see revealed in the Bible thought freedom was worth that price.

So, in conclusion, if God did not intervene in the world at all, the Nazis could win, slavery would endure, and evil might never be thwarted. Since God does intervene, good ultimately triumphs. God does prefer good; but he has decided that the best way to get it is by means of, metaphorically, a lightly regulated free market rather than either a command economy or sheer anarchy.

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The Incompetence of the Political Class

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

Actually, the general incompetence of the government is a good thing; it keeps the government, most of the time, from really doing much that harms us. And that was the goal of those who created the constitution. As Thomas Jefferson has been quoted as saying, “The best government governs least.” By dividing the government into three competing branches, the legislative, executive and judiciary and in other ways making the process cumbersome and inefficient, they have forced our elected servants to scramble, compromise, and busy themselves excessively with attempting to accomplish anything. That’s good, because when they actually do accomplish something, nine times out of ten, their good intentions have really nasty consequences.

For instance, the small seminary I teach at has a website, www.theology.edu. When we first acquired that domain name in the early 1990s it cost us nothing to secure the name and nothing to keep it. Then, about ten years ago, the government gave an exclusive contract to a company called Educause to administer all the websites that have a .edu address. So Educause started charging 40 dollars a year for what before had cost us nothing.

Now, forty dollars isn’t a whole lot, but of course Educause, in reality, doesn’t have much to do except to collect that money. They don’t host the website, they don’t maintain the website, and they don’t have anything to do with managing at all; they just collect the money.

My concern with them is the simple fact that they have a monopoly. If you have a .com address, you can find any number of companies to register your domain and keep it alive and it usually costs ten dollars or even less per year to register the name. Sometimes you can get it for free. The only money you pay then is for whoever actually hosts the site on their servers (in the case of theology.edu, we are fortunate in that one of our former students hosts websites as a side business, and so hosts our site for free). Given that Educause is the only game in town—or anywhere in the US—for registering the .edu addresses, they can charge whatever they want. We have no choice if we want to keep our address. We have to pay them annually. What is to keep them from jacking up the price someday if they so choose? Nothing. Already, they charge four times what most places would charge for any other domain ending in .com, .org. or .net.

On June 29, 2011 the State of California passed a budget bill that our governor signed. Buried inside it, was a little item that was designed to raise sales tax from the likes of Amazon.com. Because Amazon.com is located in Seattle, Washington, rather than California, they are not required to collect sales tax. Unless a vendor has a physical location, or nexus, within a state, the vendor cannot be required to collect tax for that state. This limitation was defined as part of the Dormant Commerce Clause by the Supreme Court in the 1967 decision on National Bellas Hess v. Illinois. An attempt to require a Delaware e-commerce vendor to collect North Dakota tax was overturned by the court in the 1992 decision on Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. Thus, the Supreme Court has determined that states cannot force mail order businesses to collect sales taxes if they do not have a “presence” in the state. Therefore, Amazon was exempt from collecting sales tax except in the state of Washington. This has really annoyed a lot of the other states, and several have attempted to do what our legislature attempted to do in June. Amazon has a program called an Associates Program, whereby individuals, nonprofits and corporations can put a banner or link to a particular item on their website and then get five percent (or thereabouts) of any sales that are made by Amazon if someone purchases through that link.

“Aha!” thought our state legislature. “We’ll say that gives Amazon a ‘presence’ in California and now we can make them collect sales tax on anything they sell in the state.”

So what happened? Amazon simply terminated their Associates Program in California. All the owners of websites—such as theology.edu, or your neighbor’s blog—who collected a few dollars from these transactions—our seminary was lucky to make ten dollars a month—are now cut off. So, all the state of California managed to do was to cut the income of countless small entrepreneurs and nonprofits, while gaining no sales tax revenue. In fact, this was probably a net loss for the state of California, since all those countless people lost the income they were making—and declaring on their income taxes (Amazon made you give them your social security or tax id number when you signed up)—from Amazon’s Associates Program, which sadly no longer existed for California residents.

Eventually, Amazon and the State of California negotiated an agreement. But almost always, the amount of money the politicians imagine they will get for a given tax or fee always under-performs. The best example of this can be seen both in most municipal bus companies as well as in the postal service. The politicians notice that the revenue has declined because not as many people are riding the busses or mailing letters. So what do they do? The opposite of what any businessman would do. They raise their fees, calculating that since, for instance 10,000 people are currently riding the busses, and since they are bringing in X amount of money, then, to get the amount they now need, the must raise the rates by say 10 cents per rider. Then their budge will balance.

Of course they are shocked when next time around they find that ridership has declined again, to 9000; so they calculate how much income they need to meet their budget and add an additional amount to the cost of each ticket. The pattern continues, and they are constantly not bringing in enough money. Thus, surprising only the politicians and bureaucrats who run the postal service, the postal service is always losing money and it only gets worse every time they raise the cost of postage because ever fewer people are now using the postal service. The politicians never get wise.

With taxes, it works the same way; raise taxes too much and revenue will decline because a) employers cannot afford to pay as many workers, b) the workers cannot spend money they don’t have because of taxes, and/or c) there is an exodus of businesses, corporations, and individuals to other states that have lower taxes. Today many motion pictures and television shows are made outside of the state because it is cheaper for the movie and television companies to do it that way: other states offer lower taxes and other incentives, while California just piles on regulations, fees, and taxes. And then the government is always puzzled that they are running out of money and can never make ends meet.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. Our elected officials generally don’t seem to be gifted with common sense, let alone have any understanding of such things as tax law, human behavior, science, economics, education or history. They know how to run for office. That’s about it. Otherwise, they are incompetent.

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Apollo 13

Posted on April 14, 2013 by

On the night of April 13, 1970–43 years ago today–the words “Houston, we’ve had a problem” were uttered when an oxygen tank in the Service Module of the moon bound Apollo 13 exploded. The Lunar Module pilot of that mission, Fred W. Haise,Jr., gave a speech at Northrup-Grumman (builder of the Lunar Module) in July, 1995. My father-in-law was there (he worked on the B-2 project) and got Haise to sign and personalize a photograph to my wife and me.

Fred Haise, Jr.

Fred W. Haise, Jr.

I’m old enough to remember this event, just as I can remember the first moon landing. I was just 13 when Apollo 13 launched–at 13:13 CST on April 11. They returned safely to Earth on April 17.

According to Wikipedia:

As a joke following Apollo 13’s successful splashdown, Grumman Aerospace Corporation pilot Sam Greenberg (who had helped with the strategy for re-routing power from the LM to the crippled CM) issued a tongue-in-cheek invoice for $400,540.05 to North American Rockwell, Pratt and Whitney, and Beech Aircraft,[33][34] prime and subcontractors for the Command/Service Module (CSM), for “towing” the crippled ship most of the way to the Moon and back. The figure was based on an estimated 400,001 miles (643,739 km) at $1.00 per mile, plus $4.00 for the first mile. An extra $536.05 was included for battery charging, oxygen, and an “additional guest in room” (Swigert). A 20% “commercial discount”, as well as a further 2% discount if North American were to pay in cash, reduced the total to $312,421.24.[35] North American declined payment, noting that it had ferried three previous Grumman LMs to the Moon (Apollo 10, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12) with no such reciprocal charges.

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The Importance of Perspective

Posted on April 13, 2013 by

We each know remarkably little, no matter how old we may be, no matter how well educated we are. In the course of a single lifetime, how much can we actually read, watch and remember? How much of the world do we see and of what we see, how much do we truly understand? Do we ever get all the facts? Can we really cram the whole world both of today and yesterday into that small space between our ears? At best, our understanding can only be limited.

Benjamin Franklin, as an old man at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia the summer of 1787, commented, as he considered the final draft of the Constitution just before signing it, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve. But I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error…But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said, ‘I don’t know how it happens, Sister, but I meet with nobody but myself, that’s always in the right….’”

There’s always the subjective problem: all the new stuff that comes to us each day is filtered through what we already know–or think we know. Too often, we will see what we expect to see, rather than what is really there. What we know (or think we know) colors how we perceive things. It’s as if, after a quick glance at an optical illusion, we think we really understand the picture. We jump to conclusions with only half the story told.

Too often we live by slogans, imagining that a catchy phrase will serve the place of actual thought, or if it sounds good, it must be so. For instance, we might have heard the phrase, “Nothing was ever solved by violence.” It sounds profound. It’s certainly what we’d like to be true. And what we’d like to be true, what should be true, must be true. Right? But how did we solve the problem of Nazism? How did we solve the problem of slavery? And those are only two examples. Doubtless there are many soldiers and police officers, not to mention people being attacked by deranged wild animals, who could list several more times when violence was precisely what the doctor ordered. In the real world, facing real problems, the tongue-in-cheek military maxim comes closer to the truth: “There is no problem so large that it can’t be solved with a suitable application of high explosives.”

Another phrase I’ve heard: “Democracy can’t be imposed at gunpoint.” Some people actually believe this, I suppose, but it simply isn’t true, since we have, within relatively recent history, two examples of doing precisely that, with two radically different cultures, and in both cases, quite successfully. As I recall, neither Germany nor Japan had much experience with democracy prior to their defeats in World War II in 1945. And yet, at the very moment we were just starting to successfully transform those two former dictatorships into free societies, the nattering of negativity and pessimism dominated the pundit world.

In Life Magazine of January 7, 1945, an article announced that “Americans are losing the victory in Europe”, while the Saturday Evening Post of January 26, 1946 told its readers about “How we botched the German occupation”. John Dos Passos in his article in Life wrote that “Never has American prestige in Europe been lower.” He went on to discuss the disorder that followed the allied victory in Western Europe.

Meanwhile, the Saturday Evening Post article concentrated on the apparent lack of an exit strategy for getting American troops out of Europe. Demaree Best wrote, “We have got into this German job without understanding what we were tackling or why.”

A simple question. Were the pessimists right back in 1946?

And just how often are the pessimists ever right? As we consider what has gone before, do the bad guys usually and ultimately win? To help answer the question, consider a few other questions. Who won the Revolutionary War? Who won the Civil War? Who won World War II? Who won the Cold War? Have the number of democracies and free societies around the world risen or declined in the last hundred years? Did the Great Depression, which began in 1929 with the stock market crash and lasted more than a decade, render democracy obsolete, destroy America, end capitalism, destroy the American dream and leave everyone in poverty forever?

Is the world a better place today than it was a hundred years ago? Child abuse and spousal abuse were not issues a hundred years ago. Racism was not an issue a hundred years ago. Is that because such things did not exist a hundred years ago? No, it’s because most people didn’t recognize them as bad things a hundred years ago. Not only has technology improved in the last hundred years, but there has been some improvement in morality, despite what some people may feel about a given moral issue that they see as in the dumpster at the moment. And before they carp about some evil practice that bothers them, consider that whatever the evil practice might be, it’s not a new thing, nor is it likely more widespread today than it has ever been. And yes, there are societies before our own where their moral hobbyhorse was far more accepted and common than it is today. Immorality, of whatever stripe, is never new. People are people and have always had a tendency to break the rules. Which reminds us, passing more rules probably won’t solve much either, given our penchant for ignoring them when they are inconvenient. Or do you really always drive the speed limit?

The world is not getting worse and worse. It may seem worse to you now than it did when you were a child, but how much of the world did you know as a child? Getting old, having to go to work and all the attendant pressures of adulthood do make the past, when we were children, seem so much better, after all. Mostly, if we think the world’s worse off, it’s just because we’ve let our brains become cranky and we’ve lost perspective.

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Hacker’s Apprentice

Posted on April 12, 2013 by

Sometimes when you write something, it doesn’t quite work. And sometimes, you can’t immediately figure out what you can do to fix it. I have a novel which had the working title Hapax. I hated the title, but I felt like I needed something to attach my mind to it. The title is a shortened form of the Latin phrase, hapax legomenon, which is used to refer to the sole occurance of a word in a given text. In biblical studies, it gets used a lot in the Hebrew Bible; there are actually a whole slew of words that only show up once in the whole Bible (which makes them hard to be certain about their meaning). It tangentially applied to the book’s story. In any case, I wrote the first draft and struggled with the middle through the end of the thing and frankly, it just didn’t work or make much sense. So the book has been languishing on my hard drive for a long time and I’ve wondered if I would ever figure out how to fix it or what to do with it (besides ignoring it or erasing it to reclaim the hard drive space).

But over the last few days, and especially today, I figured out what needs to be done to make the story actually come together and work. I spent much of Thursday working on it, rewriting and changing. Ultimately I’m going to have to trash significant parts of it, or at least radically change them–and then add some stuff. A bunch of stuff. But the story should actually be good then, or so I hope. Here’s the opening chapter, new title and all:

Hacker’s Apprentice

Chapter One

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shambled away. His breath left great puffs of steam in the air, as snowflakes swirled. The air was cold and harsh against his lungs. He didn’t know which bothered him more, the fact that he couldn’t afford a meal at a simple fast food restaurant, or that he was alone and had no hope of the sort of life he could witness through that window.

His feet shuffled, kicking at the slush; his toes were cold and wet, and they hurt. He’d need to get to the mission soon or he might get sick or have frostbite. His nose hurt too, and so did his cheeks.

He swallowed hard, fighting back a sudden urge to cry, and stumbled more quickly toward the corner. The light was red; he punched the button and waited for it to change.

“Cold enough for you?”

He jumped, startled by the voice.

“What?” he looked around, expecting to find two people involved in a conversation; instead, all he saw was a single face, dark brown eyes gazing serenely at him. He looked behind him, but no one was there. “Did you say something?” Then added quickly, “I’m sorry.” He punched the button again.

“Nasty weather; way too cold. I don’t like the cold.” The voice was cheerful.

“You’re talking to me?” he asked.

“Um, yeah. Not talking to myself, at least I hope not.” The mouth below the brown eyes twisted up into a delightful smile, revealing perfect, straight white teeth. He let his eyes wander from that smile, up to the nose, then over to the ears, mostly hidden by thick dark hair. The woman to whom all these things were a part, was absolutely stunning. Even when he was working in the library and still had a real life, he would never imagine she might actually be talking to him. Now, in his homeless condition, it made even less sense.

“Yeah, it’s really cold. My feet are frozen, my nose is frozen. I can’t get warm.”

“I feel that way, too. A hot cup of coffee would sure help just now, eh?”

“What I wouldn’t give for that…” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“You headed for that Del Taco?” she asked, chin indicating a fast food place on the other side of the street.

The light finally turned green.

“Uh, I…” he began.

“I’m kind of hungry too,” she said. “How about you?”

“What?” he stared at her.

“My treat.” Her eyes were merry, and her mouth was still smiling.

He just stared at her eyes; they were the most lovely eyes he had ever seen in his life, and surely he was dreaming. He was a homeless bum, and no one paid any attention to guys like him. Certainly not someone with eyes like that.

But she walked with him across the street, and opened the door to let him into the restaurant. And she pointed at the menu, and asked him what he wanted and she cheerfully ordered two large steak burritos and the biggest cup of coffee that they offered, which included free refills. That was the best thing about fast food places; if you could just get the money together, they would give you free refills for as long as you stayed in the building. Of course, you had to be careful not to overstay; he’d found that after much more than an hour, he started getting dirty looks from the employees. No one had tossed him out of a place yet, but he had never pushed his luck. Like if he visited the library. He stayed in the back, and he avoided any of the employees and always stayed awake; the library was warm, and he could read, and that could make a day go by pretty well. And no one bothered him. Even the staff that might remember him from before, when he had worked there—they didn’t bother him. They never said ‘hi’, either; maybe they didn’t recognize him anymore, not with the beard and the bad clothes, and the bad smell, and besides, they might be embarrassed, not know what to say. What did you say to an ex-collegue, anyhow? What could you talk about? What wouldn’t make him unhappy or upset him? He knew what ran through their minds. It’s what would run through his mind if the tables were turned.

He sat down in a booth, cradling the cup of coffee between his hands as if it were a delicate bauble of infinite worth. He brought it slowly to his lips and let the heat sink down his throat and into the middle of his body. It radiated outward. Even his toes seemed less chilled now.

“Here you go,” said the woman with the pretty brown eyes, setting the tray of food on the table, and then sliding in next to him.

Next to him? He slid away, toward the far corner of the booth, startled beyond words.

“I can’t tell you how hungry and cold I was,” she said. “I’m so glad I ran into you.” She was still smiling, hands busy lifting the food from the tray, distributing her plate of nachos and his burritos as if they were the oldest and best of friends. She pulled the lid off her own cup of coffee and made a satisfied sigh after a long drink.

“What could be better, eh?”

“Um, yeah…” Pealing off the top of the paper wrapper on his burrito, he took a bite, half expecting to find it laced with glass or poison, but instead, it was both hot and exactly what a burrito was supposed to be. “This was very kind of you,” he managed, swallowing first before speaking.

“You looked like you needed a friend,” she said simply. “I saw how you were staring into that McDonalds.” She paused. “But I like Del Taco better.” As if that explained everything. “My name’s Alyssa White.” She held out her hand. “What’s yours?”

He gripped her hand automatically and gave it a perfunctory shake. But she didn’t release her hand right away; instead, she squeezed it gently and then let his hand go slowly.
“People call me Mudge,” he finally managed.

“I didn’t ask what people called you. What’s your name?” Her eyes bored into him with an intensity that only added to his discomfort and confusion.

“Drew Mudgeford,” he said reluctantly. It made him uncomfortable to use his own name, as if he were no longer worthy of it. But once it left his mouth, it was as if a cork had popped. Words began pouring out, making their way around the bites of his food and sips from his coffee. Mudge couldn’t stop; the words just gushed, an embarrassing torrent, revealing his soul.

When he finally ran out of words, he felt his face reddening in embarrassment. That wasn’t the sort of stuff to tell a stranger, especially not a beautiful stranger. But a homeless bum who hadn’t bathed in a week, wearing the same unwashed clothes for days and days was not exactly the sort of person who was ever going to get lucky, so what did it matter if he was a bore on top of everything else?

“You’ve had a difficult time of it; but I suspect you won’t be down forever.”

“I used to think that,” mumbled Mudge, finishing the last of his by now cold burrito; he’d been so busy talking that he’d forgotten to eat.

“It’s only reasonable that you’d be discouraged.”

He nodded. She smiled at him and stood up, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Don’t give up hope.” And she patted him on the shoulder, gathered up her trash, and left the restaurant. He felt the chill as a gust of wind swirled in through the momentarily opened door.

He looked down into his coffee cup and tried to figure out how much more time he could spend in the restaurant before they’d chase him out. Probably he could get one more refill. He stood slowly and hobbled toward the counter.

* * *

Mudge stared down at the thin and watery soup, barely warmed above the temperature of his skin and wondered that he should be so thankful for so little; hours had passed since his unexpectedly good lunch.

“Met a pretty woman today,” he murmured, spooning the broth into his mouth.

“What was that, Mudge?” Lacky looked up from his bowl and frowned at him.

“Oh, nothing,” said Mudge. Lacky grumbled to himself and went back to slurping his soup.

The Palmdale Rescue Mission was an old, ramshackle structure, older than anyone could say. The gray stone walls were flaked here and there with green and gold mildew. The air had the sour, musty resonance of an always-wet basement. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have suspected the building of being a converted dungeon. Iron grates covered the dirty windows that poked through the wall near the ceiling, which hung perhaps a dozen feet above his head. Fluorescent tubes glowed and flickered, blackened ends murmuring antiquity. Mudge wasn’t the only one sucking on the dregs; obviously the Rescue Mission itself could stand a little rescuing.

But who bothered to give money to support the failures of society when one could take the same cash and buy oneself new clothes or a new car or a new bit of electronic stupefaction?

Lacky burped suddenly, a low, bass rumble that reverberated against the stones. Lacky was old, too, perhaps not such an antique as the Rescue Mission, but definitely an object whose time had long since passed him by. Perhaps, if Lacky had been a car, he might have been considered a classic. As a human being, however, he was simply old.

And who said humanity’s values weren’t skewed?

“Excuse yourself,” commented Mudge.

Lacky barely grunted in response.

And Mudge? He glanced around the room. Sure enough, he was the youngest one there, by at least a factor of two. His hair was long and unkempt, but unlike those slurping so noisily around him, at least it was all still on top of his head and none of it had yet turned gray—not that the stress of the last few months hadn’t probably shortened the time before it would start turning gray. He still had all his teeth, too; even if he was lucky now to brush them once a week.

The last of his soup disappeared into his mouth and he swallowed with a loud gulp. He wiped his mouth with one sleeve of his jacket, barely noticing the crust there from the countless times before that he had so wiped. No one would ever mistake him for anything other than what he was: a homeless bum.

It hadn’t always been that way. Last year—had it really been a year now? He blinked, wondering how it could be so long. He shook his head. Back then he had been an assistant librarian at the central library, and he had slept in a nice little two room apartment not but a block away. He’d eaten three good meals a day, then, and he’d had hot showers every day and every day he’d brushed his teeth twice.

But one day Mayor Bowman decided that the city government had to cut back on expenses, and the library had been his first attack. Mudge had been let go, along with a half dozen other assistants. Overnight, his life had turned to mush. No money, so he couldn’t afford a place to live; no money, so he couldn’t afford any food, and no money, so now he hung out at the Rescue Mission and slept on the floor when there was room.

He’d have gotten another job, if he could have, but there didn’t seem to be any that would take him; and now, if he showed up at a job interview dressed like he was, smelling like he did—what chance did he have?

It would seem as if he had joined the ranks of the permanently unemployed and unemployable. Mudge vaguely wondered how long before he turned to crime…

“You ever seen a wizard?” The question came out of nowhere. Lacky was staring at him with his piercing black eyes, a note of intensity that Mudge couldn’t remember seeing on his face before.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“What the hell you talking about?”

“You heard me.”

“Of course I’ve never seen a wizard. Except in Disney cartoons.”

“I seen one.”

“You don’t say?” No one could accuse Lacky of having all his oars in the water at any one time. He’d probably take it as an insult, even. But this seemed a bit extreme, even for him.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Lacky, I don’t believe you’re lying to me. Despite everything, you’re not a liar.”

“Thank you. And you’re not a crook.”

“I mean, I’m sure you believe…”

“What would you call a fellow who spoke a handful of words and made a car appear.”

“A doorman—calling for a taxi.”

“Not like that.” Lacky was starting to get irritated. Mudge decided he’d better back off. He’d never seen Lacky irritated before, and considering how much booze he still had in him this morning, it was probably best not to rile him. Mudge suspected Lacky would be a mean drunk.

“So you saw a guy snap his fingers and a car just appeared out of thin air.”

“He didn’t snap his fingers, he talked, and it showed up.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

Mudge lifted a lone eyebrow. “That’s useful.”

“No, I think the priest would get mad if I put a car in his building. How would he get it out? I just know how to make a car appear, not how to make it disappear.”

“You can make a car appear out of thin air? I thought you said this guy…”

“You’re not listening to me, are you? You thinking I’m nuts and stupid. I know how you are, always looking down on me and everyone else even though you’re no better than the rest of us, even if you have been to college. You’re homeless and on the streets and that make you same as me.”

“But you said.”

“You know what I said. I seen this guy make a car appear. I heard what he said. Now, if I say them same words, I make a car appear, too.” Lacky made a face. “You fool, ain’t you heard nothing I said?”

Mudge swallowed hard. His bowl was empty, and so was his coffee cup. He’d really rather go get another cup of coffee than listen to Lacky’s delusions. But he couldn’t help himself, he stayed right where he was, and even said something that wasn’t a put down: “So you can make a car appear?”

“Yep, already did it.”

“Where is it?”

“Right out front. Had a full tank of gas, too, which was real convenient.”

“What kind of car…”

“Oh, didn’t I say? It’s a 57 Chevy. Black. Real fine looking automobile, man. Real fine.” He paused. “Only kind of car I can make. Seem to be able to pop them out any time I please, as often as I please. Made twenty of them, actually. All exactly alike, down to the keys and the mileage.”

Mudge just stared.

“Thought you might like one. After I’m done eating, I can show you.”

* * *

Mudge encouraged Lacky to finish up quickly. Not that he really believed him, but—he was curious what it was that Lacky thought he was doing. Mudge had always had a fondness for psychology and he wondered how delusions worked and how a fellow might respond when confronted with the fact that his delusion wasn’t real. So, okay, Mudge was a bit of a sadist, at least when it came to Lacky. Why he hung around him all the time, he couldn’t fathom. They had nothing in common, and the man rarely made even as much sense as he was making now. It was rather surprising to find out that he recognized a classic automobile when he imagined one.

“I know you’re just humoring me, man,” said Lacky as they crunched down the front steps of the Rescue Mission. Last night’s dusting of snow covered the blackened iciness of last week’s partly melted blizzard. “You think I’m drunk, and you’re looking forward to laughing at me and telling me I’m just a dumb drunk what don’t know nothing and can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.” He puffed. “I know big words, too, stinking jerkwad!”

Lacky pointed at the street. “See, there’s my car.”

Sure enough, there was a black 57 Chevy parked at the curb. That didn’t really surprize Mudge a whole lot. Probably Lacky had regained consciousness this morning next to that car and concocted the story in his alcohol-soaked brain.

“License number on all of them was the same, too. Yours no doubt will be, too.” He paused, then hummed. “Let me think; do I remember?” He paused, then grinned. “I got it, now:

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:
“Open macro 376 and 371
“Execute operand 32-01235.”

It sounded like gibberish, for the most part—just random numbers and words that vaguely resembled English. Mudge was about to ask Lacky how he could remember all that when he noticed that there was a second black 57 Chevy parked at the curb.

Mudge blinked, rubbed his eyes, and then just stared.

“You believe me now, doubting Thomas?”

Mudge swallowed. “Uh…no.” He shook his head. He wasn’t drunk. He was stone cold sober. Obviously he just hadn’t been paying close attention that there were two 57 Chevy’s at the curb. It must have been there all along. He was tired, after all, and sleeping in the street, you just don’t get the rest you really need…

“Think it was there all along, don’t you. You’re not so different from me. What did I tell you? We think alike. All of us on the street, we think alike. So, watch again.”
Lacky repeated the phrase he’d uttered before. Suddenly Mudge became aware of a third 57 Chevy.

“This is crazy,” he managed to sputter.

“I agree. And I admit: first thing I thought was that I was crazy—and so did the punks I gave the keys to all those cars to. But they’re real enough. I drove that one over here, slept in it last night all warm and toasty.”

Mudge gaped at the three cars. Each one was perfect, and, like Lacky had said, they appeared indistinguishable, at least at first glance. Mudge slowly approached the nearest one and peared through the side window. He could see the keys dangling from the ignition. A peek in the other new car revealed the same keys. The liscence plates were identical California plates, three letters and three numbers—but one digit different.

“Who’re these cars registered to?”

Lacky gaped like he’d just been asked the annual rainfall in Timbucktu. Mudge swallowed hard, then opened the door on the first car and peered into the glove box. The registration printout and the pink slip were both in there. Not the safest state of affairs, but…he looked at the name.

“Your last name is Lack?”

Lacky nodded.

“Elwood Lack, III is you?”

“What, you thought my parents named me Lacky? I don’t believe yours named you Mudge.”

“Thank you, but…”

“I think that when you make the car, somehow they’re personalized to you.” He paused.

“The license plates aren’t all the same.”

“They’re not?” For the first time in awhile, Lacky seemed genuinely startled.

“Nope. There’s one number difference between them.”

Lacky ran from car to car, ducking down and staring at the license plates, then running back and looking again. “Well how about that; I hadn’t noticed. I thought they were all the same. Well good, I’m not so worried then. I figured the DMV would get mighty confused…”

“They might still; how many homeless folks own twenty-two cars?”

“Got a point there.” He paused. “But this is good news. We could sell these, make some money, maybe…” A light went on and his whole face lit up. “We don’t got to live on the street no more.”

“We?”

“You think I’d leave my best friend out of this?”

“Only friend.”

“Don’t be cruel.”

Mudge looked back at the registration on the car, then stared at it after a double take. “You know anything about this address?” he asked.

“What address.”

“On the registration.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t recognize it. It’s not the address for the Rescue Mission.”

“I hadn’t thought about that…” Lacky grabbed the registration from Mudge’s fingers. “This is over the other side of town.”

“You ever been there?”

“I wasn’t born homeless, no more than you, fancy pants. I been around.”

* * *

Palmdale was one of those places where the name it had been given didn’t make much sense. Not only were there no palms, but there were no dales, either, assuming that a dale was some sort of river valley. Palmdale was tucked away on a flat plain that stretched for a fifty miles. Mountains ringed the horizon, and Palmdale itself was situated at the base of one ridgeline. But the area hardly seemed the valley it was described as. Conifers were the only trees, watered by heavy annual rain and even heavier snow during the bitterly cold winters. He’d heard that in times past Palmdale had been virtually a desert, but that must have been a hundred years or more in the past. Now it was just mostly cold and wet.

The streets were filled with slush, which added even more stress to the already worrisome prospect of Lacky driving. Mudge still wasn’t convinced that his friend was sober, let alone that after only God knew how many years of homelessness, the man still remembered how to drive—if he’d ever known. Despite his protestations, the homeless life seemed to fit the man way too comfortably. If he’d ever had a job and lived a real life, Mudge would have been surprised.

They wound down crowded, dark streets, heavy buildings lifting barren walls against the sky; scraggly trees here and there scrambled to live among the concrete and brick; gray windows with gray curtains stared vacantly from the barriers. Scarcely visible above, the sky was gray still; another storm was probably on its way. In winter, they seemed to come almost without pause; only in summer would they catch a glimpse of blue, and even then, it was an event to be remarked on.

Newer cars surrounded them, stopping and going, wheezing through the intersections. Hardly any pedestrians showed themselves on the sidewalks; all in all, it seemed like a typical weekday. For a moment he felt confused, appalled, then finally remembered: it was Tuesday.

Not that the day of the week really mattered a hell of a lot at the moment. But it was still nice to know.

The current street took them to the overpass and the onramp to the freeway. Lacky got a gleam in his eye as he turned the wheel and pressed down on the accelerator. The engine roared and Mudge gripped the edges of his seat a little tighter.

Five minutes later, they slipped down an offramp, rounded a curb, and Lacky pointed. “There, that’s Acorn.”

Mudge shrugged.

“Nice houses, eh?”

Again, Mudge shrugged.

“You’re a strange man, you know that?” Lacky gave him a funny look. “Its number….” he pulled out the registration and stared at the number, then rattled it off to Mudge. “Do you see it?”

“Where, what?…”

“House numbers…on the curbs…there!” Lacky shouted, then yanked the wheel sharply to the right.

Mudge yelped as the car jerked sideways. Lacky pulled against the curb and pressed the break, stopping the car with a lurch. He set the brake and shut off the motor.

“Where’d you learn to drive?” Mudge finally sputtered.

“Drivers ed.”

“You took drivers ed?”

“Didn’t say I passed with an A.”

Mudge shuddered, but decided not to press any more closely. Sometimes not knowing was the preferrable policy.

“Well, let’s go check it out.”

“What do you mean check it out?”

Lacky gave him a funny look. “Why’d you think we came here? Just for the drive? There’s an extra key on this key ring, and it doesn’t look like a trunk key.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think this is my house.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No crazier than having a car pop out of thin air.”

Mudge couldn’t think of a good response to that.

“This has to belong to someone…”

“Yeah, me.” Lacky opened the car door and stepped out, before Mudge could say anything else. Mudge hurriedly fumbled with the doorknob, then gasped as a gust of cold air slammed into his face. As he stepped out, a cloud of mist swirled around his head, momentarily clouding his vision. Lacky was already walking up the front steps.

The house had two stories and it looked new; the roof was buried in a blanket of white; icecycles dangled from the edges. White stucko covered the walls, and black windows, dark drapes drawn, were silent watchers of their approach.

Mudge huffed and puffed, blowing steam as he scurried to catch up.

“You can’t just walk up to a house like this.”

“It’s my house and I can do anything I want.”

“You’re crazy.”

Lacky didn’t say anything else. He just walked right up to the front door and jammed the key into the keyhole. With a twist of his wrist, he was inside.

“Lacky!” cried Mudge, panicked.

Lacky closed the door.

Mudge cursed.

So he rang the doorbell. At least it would alert whoever owned the house that there was a stranger around.

Several seconds passed. Mudge rang the doorbell a second time, only to have the door swing open even as he was pressing.

He jumped back, terrified. But it was only Lacky.

“Come on, man, get out of that house before you get in trouble!” exclaimed Mudge.

“It’s my house. Look.” He waved an envelope at Mudge.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Whose name is on this?”

Mudge took it from Lacky’s hand and stared at it. It bore the same name as the car registration, followed by the current property’s address. Mudge didn’t know what to say.

“See, I told you so,” was Lacky’s response. He turned his back and disappeared into the house. Mudge followed close behind.

The interior showed a basic disregard for style or even taste. The yellow carpet clashed with the blue walls, as much as the blue walls clashed with anything remotely resembling pleasant. The furniture was mostly red, with an occassional green pillow tossed in just for the jarring impact.

A fireplace on one side of the room was covered with purple tiles, while a stack of unread newspapers lay piled on the coffee table, a chrome and glass monstrosity that couldn’t ever have really been called attractive.

Lacky stood in the middle of the room and spread his arms. “It’s everything I ever imagined,” he grinned. Mudge suddenly faced the reality that the house was Lacky’s. No one else would be caught dead in it. In fact, Mudge wondered if the decor might actually be toxic…

“Is the rest of the house as bad as…uh, like this?”

“I haven’t checked upstairs, but I’ll bet that the kitchen is gorgeous!”

Mudge shuddered at the possibility. “I suppose the refrigerator is full of fresh food, and the shelves are loaded.”

“You know, I hadn’t checked…”

Despite his instincts, Mudge flopped down on the nearest chair, an overstuffed red-leather monster that mostly swallowed him. What it lacked in appearance it made up for in comfort. Mudge closed his eyes and tried to sort it all out, giving up in a moment. How could one ever make sense of any of this? It couldn’t be real. Things like this were impossible, and despite everything, he knew the difference between fantasy and reality. How had he gotten himself caught up in Lacky’s delusions?

He was dreaming or in a coma in some hospital. That was the only way to explain it. Unless he’d died and this was heaven.

Though surely heaven had better style than this.

Hell?

Too cold, though some had been arguing of late that certain affairs perhaps indicated a freezing over of the notoriously warm abode of the evil dead.

No, if he were dead, surely he’d remember dying. As traumatic as death surely was, the chances of forgetting the incident seemed incredible…

But if it weren’t a dream, or a delusion, or death, then what was it? Where was the explanation for what was happening? Some sicko’s perverted practical joke? Some hidden camera show, where people would all at once jump out and laugh at the poor idiot bums?

Mudge kept his eyes firmly shut. Maybe if he kept them shut long enough, it would all go away and reality would return. Maybe when he opened them he’d be back in the rescue mission, or sitting on a curb somewhere sharing a bottle…

But he could still feel the soft leather beneath him. And then there was the clatter of Lacky returning to the living room.

“Look at this,” he chortled. “Twinkies!” Mudge was jarred back to looking by something soft smashing against his chest. He opened his eyes to see an individually wrapped snack food lying atop him.

“This just can’t be happening,” he mumbled, even as his fingers began tearing at the plastic wrapper.

* * *

Mudge awakened slowly, the images of his dream playing themselves out against the insides of his eyelids. He was in a soft, clean and warm bed, smooth sheets and not a rough wool blanket up against his skin.

And then he opened his eyes and realized the dream was real; it hadn’t all disappeared in the night. The white walls and ceiling he had drifted off to were still there. The air around him was comfortable rather than freezing, and he thought he could catch a whiff of coffee brewing somewhere downstairs. He glanced to his left and saw the glowing numerals of the alarm clock. Six thirty. Early, but he felt completely rested.

If he was insane, Mudge had decided sometime after his supper of steak and mashed potatoes last night, then he wanted to stay insane. The questions could wait till another time, another place, another reality. He could live in the here and now make-believe if it stayed this nice.

And outside of the bad decor, it was nice. Too nice. The sort of nice that had to end and become a disaster soon. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living in the eye of a hurricane and the trailing edge had to be bearing down on him even now.

He wandered downstairs. Lacky was sitting at the dining room table, still wearing his dirty old jeans and brown shirt. He grinned at Mudge. “How you feeling, man?” he asked, looking up from his newspaper.

“Great,” he admitted. “I still can’t really believe…”

“I’m just going to enjoy this for however long it lasts. Might not be too long. I don’t have a job, after all, so how can I keep paying a mortgage and electricity, eh? We’ll both be on the street soon enough.”

“So you didn’t find a wallet or a bank book upstairs.”

Lacky looked up from the paper again. “You know, I didn’t think to look.”

“Who knows,” added Mudge, “Maybe you even have a job, now.”

Lacky gave him a funny, almost terrified look. “But I wouldn’t know where to go, what to do…I’d be late for sure and…and…I’m going to get fired…”

Mudge shook his head. “I wouldn’t worry.”

Lacky relaxed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Lacky let out a sigh. “They’d probably call first if I didn’t show up. And then I could ask my secretary for directions…”

“So you have a secretary now?”

“Why not?”

Mudge rolled his eyes.

“I’ll bet she’s a cute young thing, wearing a miniskirt all the time and…”

“Threatening to turn you in for sexual harrassment.”

“Her ass is what I meant,” he chortled.

“That’s an old joke—and I’m not convinced it was ever funny.”

“You know, you’re an old woman.”

“And you’re a sexist pig.”

“And proud of it,” he turned the page in his newspaper and snapped it firmly.

Give a man a car and a house, thought Mudge, and before you know it, he’s a complete jerk.

Of course, if that’s what it takes to have a house and a car, then Mudge wouldn’t mind being a jerk, too. He finally broached what had been sitting on his mind since he’d fallen asleep last night.

“Lacky, do you suppose you could teach me…” he began.

Lacky peered over the top of his paper, a suspicious quirkiness to his gaze. “Teach you what? How to get a car? I already give you one.”

“I want a house, too.”

“It goes with the car.”

“No, your house goes with your car, and the car you gave me, the registration is still in your name, and the address is this address. I want you to teach me the words. So I can do it myself.”

“You think you’re up to that much responsibility.”

“Drop dead.”

Lacky grinned, then pushed a slip of paper at Mudge. “I wrote it all down last night. Figured you’d want it sooner or later. Even if you don’t really believe it.”

Mudge took the sheet, an ordinary sheet torn from a notebook, with the bluish lines that he remembered from his years in college—and high school before that. He scanned the lines, and they seemed familiar, almost…

“Just make sure you do it outside,” said Lacky. “Don’t want no silly car in my living room.”

Fingering the paper, Mudge left the kitchen and walked through the front door. It was a cold and miserable day once again. Several inches of snow had fallen in the night and even now, flakes were swirling from the sky. Visibility was low; Lacky’s footprints, from where he had wandered out to find the morning’s paper, were even now starting to fill back in. Mudge couldn’t help but wonder how he had managed to find the paper at all—or why he had even bothered to look. Up until yesterday, he hadn’t even been certain the man could read, let alone that Lacky would give a damn about what was going on in the world around him.

How long had it been since Mudge had read the paper? Did he even know who the Secretary General was? Mudge hadn’t been on the streets that long. And elections were still a couple years off. It was still the same loser back in New York.

Mudge looked at the snow covered 57 Chevy in the driveway, then looked down at the paper. What the hell.

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:
“Open macro 376 and 371
“Execute operand 32-01235,” he muttered.

To his shock, a black 57 Chevy suddenly appeared at the curb. It was snow free, and looked as if it had just driven off a showroom floor. The falling snow quickly began to dust it.
Mudge whistled, then staggered across the lawn and pulled open the driver’s door. He took the keys from the ignition, then pulled the registration from the glove box.
“Drew Mudgeford,” was written across the top of the page. Beneath it, was a familiar address: his apartment that he’d been evicted from. So much for a fancy new house.

So did that mean?… Mudge looked back at the house behind him. Lacky had fallen a long way, if this was how he used to live, before…

Mudge shut his eyes, feeling the world spin. This was Lacky’s old house; no wonder the clothes fit him so well, and no wonder he knew how to get here. But…it still didn’t explain how…nothing explained how. Not the cars, not the house, not the words on the paper. Why the old addresses, why a return to the way things were simply by calling on the gods or whatever to create black 57 Chevrolets?

He slipped the keys into his pocket and slunk back into the house.

* * *

“Truisms seem to go right over your head,” Lacky was gabbing at him, between bites of his lunch. It seemed that about all the man was doing now was eating.

“You mean about looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

“Exactly. Why you worry about it all? Just accept it and be glad however long it lasts. Hey man, nothing’s forever, but if you always live in tomorrow you don’t never enjoy nothing today. You warm right now? You got food? You comfortable? Then why you grousing about what might happen. You don’t know tomorrow and fearing what might be just keeps you from enjoying what is.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

Lacky was shaking his head and chuckling.

“It’s no wonder you’re on the street; you never planned, never anticipated…”

“And all your worrying did so much for you, I see.”

Mudge sputtered.

“I don’t have the college education you have, but I did graduate from high school. Surprised? You never have asked about me or my life, you know. All the time I’ve known you, you done nothing but talk about yourself and your education and how you got screwed by the mayor’s cutbacks to the libraries. But you never asked me nothing about myself, just jabbered on and on. Well, I’m not the dumb fuck you take me for. I was a programmer. That’s right. I was a wizard, a code monkey. Worked for Aspect, you know, the game company? I made good money, steady work. But my wife and daughter, they died in a car wreck because a fucking drunk got behind the wheel of his car and killed them. Ironic, isn’t it? A moron gets drunk and kills my family, and what do I do? I start drinking and next thing you know I’m just a fucking drunk too without nothing and nobody.” He paused. “At least up till yesterday I didn’t have a car, so at least I couldn’t kill nobody.” He paused, looked down at his hands. “But you know something? I haven’t had a drink since I made that car appear, and I haven’t really missed it. Now isn’t that strange?”

Mudge scratched his head.

“Maybe I should get a job,” he muttered. “I was good at it, and I still got it, I know all the languages…” He looked around. “You know, the demons don’t seem to be living here no more.”

“This was your house.”

“You figured that out, did you? Your car you made got your old address on the registration, too, I suppose?”

Mudge nodded.

“Think we’re being given a chance to redeem ourselves, set things right again?”

“Like something out of a tear-jerky made for TV melodrama?”

“Yeah, like Twilight Zone…”

Mudge shook his head. “You’re a real work of art, you know that?”

Lacky just grinned.

The doorbell ringing made them both jump. Mudge spat at Lacky. “See, what’d I tell you. There are the cops and they’re going to arrest us now.”

“For what?”

Mudge sputtered. “Grand theft auto, breaking and entering…we’ll be spending the rest of our days in jail and it’s all your fault.”

“Really now?” Lacky grinned and stood up. “Let’s go greet our doom at the door, then, why don’t we?”

Mudge wanted to find the back door and escape, but, like a dumb animal in the slaughterhouse, he followed docily behind Lacky.

No wonder he was a homeless failure.

The man at the door did not look like a police officer. In fact, he didn’t look like anything more than a salesman: middle-aged, dark hair, dark suit and tie, very conservative with no facial hair. Mudge stared at him, startled. Where were the police?

“Hmmm…” said the man at the door. “You’re not what I would have expected.”

“Can I help you?” asked Lacky, taking the initiative.

“I’d rather not have to listen to you talk,” said the man at the door, waving his arm in a strange way and then rattling off a serious of what seemed to be nonsense syllables.

Mudge suddenly found himself unable to move a muscle; it was like that time he’d awakened and found his whole body paralized for a few seconds, a rare occurance that he’d learned could be explained by the fact that when you slept, your body disconnected itself from your brain to some extent so that you wouldn’t hurt yourself when you dreamed. But this wasn’t a dream, though it had certain similarities.

The stranger strolled past them into the house. Mudge could hear him stomping around behind, making grunting noises and snuffling in an affected and disgusted sort of manner, as if what he saw fulfilled his limited expectations.

“You know, you’re lucky you didn’t hurt anyone,” said the stranger, returning to where Mudge and Lacky could see him. “Do you have any idea what a foolish thing you did?”

Of course, neither Lacky nor Mudge could respond, their muscles being frozen into immobility. It took the stranger a moment to remember that. “Oh yeah,” he mumbled, then louder: “Backus landis forthwith; reverse back loose it now; forthwith.”

As suddenly as it had come upon them, the paralysis vanished.

“What is the meaning of this?” sputtered Lacky as soon as his mouth was free to flap.

“I should ask you the same question,” said the stranger, jabbing his finger at Lacky. He opened his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook. “Elwood Lack, III, forty-nine, electrician, and currently unemployed and homeless. You spend most of your time at the Palmdale Rescue Mission. There are twenty-four black 57 Chevrolets floating about in the city, four of which were involved in criminal activity in the last ten hours.” A pause. “Hense, my presence here.”

“Now wait a minute. I ain’t done nothing criminal…” began Lacky.

“I’m not accusing you, Mr. Lack. But your actions contributed to the delinquincy of others, and their deliquincy, and the police inquiries have brought things to our attention. What did you think you were doing, anyway, making twenty-four copies of the same exact car? What do you need with so many cars, even if they were all different? And how did you expect to pay the registration on all of them?” He sighed. “Not to worry; your excess has been corrected.” He paused to chew on his lower lip. “Now you sir,” he turned and looked at Mudge. “You are a puzzle. Who are you and what is your business with Mr. Lack?”

“He’s my friend,” said Lacky. “And he has a 57 Chevy, too.”

“Does he now? And how would he have gotten one? You gave him one of yours?”

“Okay, so he has two. But the other one, he got the same way I got mine.”

The stranger blanched. “You, too?”

Mudge nodded.

“This is very irregular, then. The situation is much worse than we feared.” He sucked a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. “This will not be so easy to rectify. What’s your name?”

“His name is Mudge—uh, Drew Mudgeworth.”

The stranger persed his lips, then whipped out his phone and poked at it. “You were a librarian?” he asked after a moment.

Mudge nodded.

“Hmmm…”

“What, hmmm?”

“Huh? Oh. Well, there’s nothing else to do about it then.”

“What’s your name?” asked Lacky, suddenly.

“What?” The stranger looked startled again. “That’s really of no importance.” He paused.

“So then I can just call you Dickweed?”

The stranger swallowed, a slight flash of annoyance coloring his face. “That’s enough of that. First, we must return things to the way they were—except for the four cars that the police have impounded. Nothing we can do about that.” He shook his head. “Not good, but not completely a problem. You know, if Balzac had only been more careful, you wouldn’t have to go through all of this.”

“Balzac?” asked Lacky.

“Whom you learned this handy little phrase from. Not that he’ll get in any sort of trouble.” The stranger tapped on his phone and looked dissatisfied; in fact, his face seemed to relax into a dissatisfied shape naturally. Then he cleared his throat.

“Brandywein-Gander-noph slash two:
“Open macro 376 and 371
“Unexecute operand 32-01235 (minus 87, 89, 93 and 53).”

The house twisted once around them, then flashed, as if someone had taken a picture. Instantly, the walls, the floor, the furniture in all its gloirous tackiness was gone. In its place, normal off-white walls, gray carpet and rather attractive modern furnishings appeared. Also, and perhaps most disturbingly, a woman in her mid-fifties was suddenly about three feet from all of them. Her eyes went wide, followed by her mouth, which released a shocking scream.

“Oh shit,” said the stranger.

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On Writing

Posted on April 11, 2013 by

Writers get questions. “How do you come up with your ideas?” is the classic. And my answer? I don’t really know. Except perhaps the simple fact that I’m always looking for them.

I think everyone has stray thoughts that could form the basis of something creative; but such nuggets are too often swallowed by the tyranny of the day: the need to get the children to school, to file that report, to take out the trash. But if you’re a writer, when one of the stray thoughts arrives on your driveway like the morning paper, instead of driving over it on my way to the grocery, I snatch it up and commit it to a computer file. Out of the hundreds of ideas I have, only a handful prove useful, of course. But at least none are forgotten.

Most people panic when the teacher asks them to write a one page essay. They have an aneurism when facing a ten page term paper in college. So, they naturally wonder, “how do you manage to write something that fills six hundred pages, even if it is double-spaced?”

Consider the problem of trying to eat a cow. Cows are enormous. And yet, most of us have probably eaten at least one cow in our lives. How did we do it? One hamburger at a time.

So writing a novel is just like eating a cow. I do not get up in the morning and sit at my computer and keep typing until I’ve reached that six hundred page mark without stopping. Rather, I set myself a more manageable goal of ten pages per day. If I work five days a week, then I can turn out about two hundred pages a month. In three months, the first draft will be done.

The phrase “first draft” expresses another key to actually writing anything. Some people that I went to school with would struggle over each sentence in their term paper, each paragraph, rewriting and reworking it as they went until they got it just right. They were lucky to have the paper done in time.

I don’t work that way. Instead, I just let the words fall on the page, however they happen to fall. I consciously choose not to worry about whether it sounds good or not. This is a psychological mind game I play with myself: I explain to the perfectionist in my head that it doesn’t matter if it is horrible right now. It is of no importance if the sentences are misshapen or if the story currently makes as much sense as the lyrics of a song from the sixties. So what if I can’t remember the name of this character? Just pick any name out of the air and move on: put words on the page. Don’t stop. You can worry about making it sound okay later, when you’re all done. When you finish the first draft, I patiently tell the worrywart in my brain, you can go back and cut out the lame dialogue, the hackneyed phrases, the poorly constructed descriptions. Then you can recheck that fact.

What this peculiar mind game I play with myself allows me to do is to relax, to eliminate the stress, to undo the bondage, and to actually write. Then, during the rewriting, I smooth out sentences, correct spelling, and make sure that the characters keep their same names all the way through, along with fixing the other continuity issues. Creating the first draft, I only get to see the book in ten page snippets, each snippet separated by a night of sleep. In the rewriting, I’m able to see it finally as a whole, and make sure it flows well.

The strangest aspect of the writing, however, is the weird fact that although I have a good idea of where the story is going, and even though I’ve laid it all out in my head how I’m going to get to the end of the story, writing the book sometimes is not that much different than it will be for the reader who reads it later.

For instance, in my current rewrite of the novel that I just sold, the editor wanted me to take the flashbacks and make them linear. Given that there is a gap in time between the events referenced in the flashbacks and what’s going on in the rest of the story, I was faced with building a bridge. So I laid out a series of eighteen plot points in between and then set to work. I had definite ideas of what the characters would do and what they would say. But then a funny thing happened: the characters took control of the story and some of the things I thought they’d be busy with, they weren’t. They did other things instead.

How can that be? Are not the characters simply made up things over which I have complete control? How can figments of my imagination start telling me what they want to do and start living their lives as if they are independent of me? Almost sounds psychotic.

But that’s the beauty of successful character creation: they must become alive. If they don’t, you’ve failed. It may sound crazy, but that’s what happens in the books and stories and movies where the character is someone you remember more than the explosions and special effects. Think about Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Or Scotty. Or Dr. McCoy. Think about your friends and family. All of them have character traits that you learn about as you watch them. And you know, based on their past actions, how they will behave in the future, in any given situation. Any character in a novel has to become alive like that, and once they do, the author loses a certain amount of control: he no longer can make them do just anything at all; they can only do what is part of their nature—the nature he created for them. And then you have to adjust your plot to fit them, rather than the other way around.

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Nostalgia

Posted on April 10, 2013 by

I’m told that there is this thing called nostalgia; it is an emotion of longing for the past, of remembering happier times before today, when all seemed right with the world, when the future was bright and endless. It is the feeling that people sometimes get as they remember their time in high school, or college, or an endless summer as a child, playing in green fields, collecting pollywogs from a pond or creek, building a tree house, drinking lemonade on a muggy afternoon late in July.

I know that such a thing as nostalgia exists, but I’m unsure that I’ve experienced it personally. Perhaps, as I get older, a tipping point will come when I start looking back and remembering and thinking about it more than the present and tomorrow. But for now, I find myself mostly living today, wondering about tomorrow and planning for next week. I spend practically no time mulling over yesterday. And I never look back over my shoulder and sigh wistfully, misty-eyed, through gauzy, rose tinting.

Perhaps my failure at nostalgia comes from the way I look at life, which tends toward the coldly realistic. In recalling the past, I recall not just the happy moments; I recall them fully. If I take the time, as I am just now, to consider a moment in my past, it appears to me as little different in texture than the present moment.

In college I spent two wonderful summers in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz and got to travel about the country. But I recall not just seeing the foreign land, gazing in awe at the Sea of Galilee, standing in the ruins of the ancient synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus taught or peering into the empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I don’t just remember walking on top of the city walls near Mt. Zion late at night.

Instead, I feel the exhaustion of never having enough sleep. I re-experience the embarrassment of getting lost in a banana field one morning so that I couldn’t find my way back to the tractor in time for my break. I recall the blistering heat, and the sunburns. I relive the long rides in hot stuffy buses without air conditioning. I hear the high-pitched whine of mosquitos and once again experience the horror of coming upon a banana spider as big as my head, hanging between two trees. I shiver anew in the cold showers in rusty, broken down communal huts and reuse restrooms in a public park that consisted of a lime encrusted hole in the ground instead of a toilet. I remember eating the same meal, two times a day, seven days a week for a whole summer: lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, bread and plain yogurt. I recall being pelted with stones by angry Palestinians in Ramallah while being hustled back into our bus by our Uzi-toting Israeli friends.

The same thing happens as I recall a summer on my grandparents’ farm. I remember the green fields filled with sweet smelling mint plants, the dampness of the tall grasses, the chitterings of the seven-year locusts and the cold babbling creek filled with crawdads and pollywogs. I remember picking up fossils embedded in crumbling limestone near the bridge that ran over the creek.

But I also recall worrying because my father was in Vietnam for the second time and how he wouldn’t be coming home for another seven months. I remember being bored as the night wore on and I sat in my grandparents’ living room and my mom and great aunt and my grandparents talked endlessly into the night.

With every bit of my past—which I must make an effort to dredge up since I spend no time ever thinking about it unless someone asks me—I see it in all its fullness. Life is never really rose-colored. It has, instead, the same feel, the same texture, the same reality as the present. I sit here before my computer while my youngest daughter works on her independent study school work. Occasionally I answer her questions. I can, if I put my mind to it, think back to her as an infant, and with that comes not just the cherubically snoozing pale baby, but also the diaper changes in the middle of the night, the feedings at three in the morning, and of never being able to get enough sleep. I remember the nearly weekly visits from social workers, since when she was an infant, she was still just our foster child—we had yet to adopt her. And I can remember all the good times and all the bad times and how each day and each week had its share of joys and heartaches.

Jesus told his disciples one day, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34). The author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.”(Ecclesiastes 7:10). Nostalgia for the past is little different than worry about the future. And just about as accurate or fruitful.

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Queries

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

Before I got published, I only knew one meaning for queries: a one page letter that a writer sends to a book publisher or agent, describing a book and asking if the publisher or agent might be interested. That sort of query is, in essence, a sales pitch. I often pictured myself like Bob Cratchit, the father of Tiny Tim, hat in hand approaching Ebenezer Scrooge and on bended knee begging for a lump of coal.

Of course, in reality, publishers are not scrooges. But they are businesses. When they look at an offered book, be it fiction or non-fiction, the big question on their minds is a very simple one: will it sell.

“Is it good,” may pop into their heads at some point, but that does not necessarily have anything to do with the money question. Great literature does not necessarily sell well. Compare the ratings of America’s Top Model with Masterpiece Theatre. If you’re a business, your goal is making money. So which do you think a business would pick if it had to choose?

Therefore, if you want to make it as a writer, find something that is commercially viable. You can do the great literary work of art that makes reviewers swoon later, after you’ve made money for your publisher. Only when you can sell anything just because your name is on the cover can you afford to do art.

But hat in hand begging is not the only meaning of the word “query.” There is another meaning, a scary meaning that published authors dread. After you’ve sold your book to a publisher, and your editor tells you how wonderful it is, and after they’ve sent you money, then along will come a dreadful word: “but.”

Whether you’ve done a work of fiction, or a work of non-fiction, the editor will pass your manuscript around her office—and in the case of some works, around the country and across oceans. This also happens even for books that the publisher came to you, hat in hand, and queried you to write.

These people who read what you’ve written, who are not your editor, especially these people who are outside experts—will comment on your work, ask questions, demand verification, and point out all the flaws in your beautiful, utterly perfect baby…um book.

A few years ago, after I had submitted the completed manuscript of The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, I received back a stack of such queries from my editor in London. Reader’s Digest in New York had hired a theologian to go over my book and her comments and questions had now come back to my editor in London. So my London editor was now passing them on to me. These queries added up to twenty-seven typed pages. They had arrived on my editor’s desk mostly as handwritten notes. So my poor editor had carefully and thoughtfully typed them up for me. The bulk of that page count was the consequence of the theologian quoting me and then commenting, or asking a question.

My editor told me, “it doesn’t look too bad.”

I heard: “Oh, what a cute baby.” Long pause. “Did you notice it had an ugly wart on her nose?”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t really so harsh. In fact, the bulk of the queries were regarding issues of spelling, or terms to use, or the occasional typo. Sometimes she had questions along the lines of, “are you sure that’s what the Bible says?” Or, “have you considered this other way of looking at things?” And then sometimes she thought it would be good to give a reference.

Of the hundred Bible characters that make up my book, less than half had generated any comments from the outside expert hired by Reader’s Digest, and so it took me only a pair of eight hour days and skipped meals to respond to all the issues and email them back to my editor in London. Her take on the queries was “I always find queries like this a bit frustrating, and am tempted to answer, ‘No, I just made it up for the fun of it’ when faced with a query like ‘True?’ over and over again. But then sometimes inaccuracies are caught that way, so you have to bite your tongue.”

I was pleased to learn that I wasn’t alone in feeling annoyed with some of the queries. My editor in London was pleased with my responses, which she then forwarded to Reader’s Digest in New York. Three weeks would pass before I’d have to face any queries again.

And they did come, and I once again spent time fixing them; one requested change–in a single sentence–by the Reader’s Digest “expert” was nonsensical and my editor and I spent most of a day figuring out how to say what I wanted to say, while satisfying the so-called “expert.” We were ultimately successful.

After all the queries were satisfied, the galley proofs of the book were printed in China: the actual printed, but unbound, pages of the book. Reader’s Digest in New York then received them from my editor in London, and I also got a set as well (which I still have on a shelf in my office). Our task at that point was to pour over them carefully, mostly checking for typos. Proofreading of that sort is not a whole lot of fun, either, but instead of doing plastic surgery on your baby, at that point it’s mostly just checking to see that her clothes are not on backward and that her hands and face are clean—and perhaps dealing with that odd smell coming from her backside.

A few months after that, the book was printed, distributed and in January, 2008, appeared on bookstore shelves. It was subsequently published in 13 languages, including 2 Dutch editions–and it was reissued in 2012 in English.

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Israel

Posted on April 8, 2013 by

I always find it odd when I read about how “aggressive” the state of Israel is. Let’s see: Israel is a country that is barely the size of New Jersey, surrounded by much larger nations who constantly condemn it and have as their stated policy its obliteration (As a clear example, perhaps the interested reader should pick up some of Nassar’s speeches from the 1950’s and 1960’s). So obviously Israel is aggressive if it dares to react when invaded by these countries. And a country in such a situation is going to want to fight wars with its larger, and at least on paper, better armed neighbors? It stretches credulity, I’m afraid.

The Palestinian authorities claim to desire peace, yet make inflammatory speeches (rarely reported in the English language presses), teach Antisemitism in their schools, on their television programs, and on their radios and do nothing to prevent terrorist incidents. Mein Kampf is a perennial bestseller and every conspiracy theory denegrating Jews is believed and propogated. Odd sort of peace, where one side keeps on shooting, keeps on hating, and then cries foul if the other side dares to react.

In this country, if we were to limit where a specific ethnic group was allowed to buy or build houses, we’d call it discriminatory. But in Israel, it is a threat to peace if a Jew decides to live next door to a Palestinian? Guess letting those sorts into the neighborhood really lowers the property values…

If the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel is so evil and the cause of all the problems in the Middle East, then why was the occupation of those same territories by Egypt and Jordan for thirty years (1948-1967) not a similar evil? And if the PLO (the Palestinian Liberation Organization) were really interested in creating a “Palestinian state” in those regions, then why, when it was founded in 1964 (3 years before Israel won the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai in a war begun by its Arab neighbors), did it only direct its attacks against Jewish targets rather than the Egyptian and Jordanian occupiers? I also don’t recall any UN pronouncements against Jordan or Egypt for their “illegal” and “oppressive” occupation in those years 1948=1967, either.

If Israel didn’t want peace, why was it so happy to give back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty and normalized diplomatic relations — especially when one considers that the only oil wells Israel had access to were in that peninsula?

I’m puzzled when I see otherwise reasonable people buying into the propaganda of a group responsible for terrorist acts. Personally, I tend to be very skeptical of the pronouncements of those who have no moral qualms about killing innocent civilians.

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