“Hi, Wu.” (She was speaking to him.)
We took my 145. Wu was silent all the way out to the Eastern Parkway, doing figures on a cocktail napkin from a Bay Ridge nightclub. “Go out last night?” I asked. After a whole day with Diane, I was dying to have somebody to talk to.
“Something was bothering me all night,” he said. “Since the surface of the Moon is a vacuum, how come all the air on Earth doesn’t rush through the shed door, along with the tires?”
“I give up,” I said.
We were at a stoplight. “There it is,” he said. He handed me the napkin, on which was scrawled:
“There what is?”
“The answer to my question. As those figures demonstrate, Irv, we’re not just dealing with a neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. The two areas are still separated by a quarter of a million miles, even though that distance has been folded to the width of a centimeter. It’s all there in black and white. See?”
“I guess,” I said. The fourth thing you learn in law school is to never admit you don’t understand something.
“The air doesn’t rush through, because it can’t. It can kind of seep through, though, creating a slight microclimate in the immediate vicinity of the adjacency. Which is probably why we don’t die immediately of decompression. A tire can roll through, if you give it a shove, but air is too, too . . . ”
“Too wispy to shove,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I looked for the turn off Conduit, but nothing was familiar. I tried a few streets, but none of them led us into the Hole. “Not again!” Wu complained.
“Again!” I answered.
I went back to Boulevard. Vinnie was behind the counter today, and he remembered me (with a little prodding).
“You’re not the only one having trouble finding the Hole,” he said. “It’s been hard to find lately.”
“What do you mean, ‘lately’?” Wu asked from the doorway.
“Just this last year. Every month or so it gets hard to find. I think it has to do with the Concorde. I read somewhere that the noise affects the tide, and the Hole isn’t that far from Jamaica Bay, you know.”
“Can you draw us a map?” I asked.
“I never took drawing,” Vinnie said, “so listen up close.”
Vinnie’s instructions had to do with an abandoned railroad track, a wrong-way turn onto a one-way street, a dog-leg that cut across a health club parking lot, and several other ins and outs. While I was negotiating all this, Wu was scrawling on the back of a carwash flyer he had taken from Vinnie’s counter.
“The tide,” he muttered. “I should have known!”
I didn’t ask him what he meant; I figured (I knew!) he would tell me. But before he had a chance, we were bouncing down a dirt track through some scruffy trees, and onto the now-familiar dirt streets of the Hole. “Want some more moon rocks?” I asked when we passed the kids and their stand.
“I’ll pick up my own today, Irv!”
I pulled up by the gate and we let ourselves in. Wu carried the shopping bag; he gave me the toolbox.
The old man was working on an ancient 122, the Volvo that looks like a ‘48 Ford from the back. (It was always one of my favorites.) “It’s electric,” he said when Wu and I walked up.
“The 122?” I asked.
“The dune buggy,” the old man said. “Electric is the big thing now. All the cars in California are going to be electric next year. It’s the law.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “So what, anyway?”
“That makes that dune buggy worth a lot of money.”
“No, it doesn’t. Besides, you already agreed on a price.”
“That’s right. Five hundred,” Wu said. He pulled five bills from his pocket and unfolded them.
“I said I couldn’t take less than five hundred,” the old man said. “I never said I couldn’t take more.”
Before Wu could answer, I pulled him behind the 122. “Remember the second thing we learned in law school!” I said. “When to walk away. We can come back next week—if you still want that thing.”
Wu shook his head. “It won’t be here next week. I realized something when Vinnie told us that the Hole was getting hard to find. The adjacency is warping the neighborhood as well as the cislunar space-time continuum. And since it’s lunar, it has a monthly cycle. Look at this.”
He handed me the car wash flyer, on the back of which was scrawled:
“See?” said Wu. “We’re not just dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with a periodic incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”
“Which means . . . ”
“The adjacency comes and goes. With the Moon.”
“Sort of like PMS.”
“Exactly. I haven’t got the figures adjusted for daylight savings time yet, but the Moon is on the wane, and I’m pretty sure that after today, Frankie will be out of the illegal dumping business for a month, at least.”
“Perfect. So we come back next month.”
“Irv, I don’t want to take the chance. Not with a million dollars at stake.”
“Not with a what?” He had my attention.
“That LRV cost two million new, and only three of them were made. Once we get it out, all we have to do is contact NASA. Or Boeing. Or the Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. Give me a couple of hundred bucks and I’ll give you a fourth interest.”
“A half.”
“A third. Plus the P1800.”
“You already gave me the P1800.”
“Yeah, but I was only kidding. Now I’m serious.”
“Deal,” I said. But instead of giving Wu two hundred, I plucked the five hundred-dollar bills out of his hand. “But you stick to the numbers. I do all the talking.”
We got it for six hundred. Non-refundable. “What does that mean?” Wu asked.
“It means you boys own the dune buggy—whether you get it out of the cave or not,” said the old man, counting his money.
“Fair enough,” said Wu. It didn’t seem fair to me at all, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would get our money back from the old man, anyway.
He went back to work on the engine of the 122, and Wu and I headed for the far end of the yard. We found Frankie rolling tires through the shed door: pop, pop, pop. The pile by the fence was as big as ever. He waved and kept on working.
Wu set down the shopping bag and pulled out two of those spandex bicycling outfits. He handed one to me, and started taking off his shoes.
I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange—what I said, what he said, objections, arguments, etc. Suffice it to say that, ten minutes later, I was wearing black and purple tights under my coveralls, and so was Wu. Supposedly, they were to keep our skin from blistering in the vacuum. Wu was hard to resist when he had his mind made up.
I wondered what Frankie thought of it all. He just kept rolling tires through the doorway, one by one.
There were more surprises in the bag. Wu pulled out rubber gloves and wool mittens, a brown bottle with Chinese writing on it, a roll of clear plastic vegetable bags from the supermarket, a box of cotton balls, a roll of duct tape, and a rope.
Frankie didn’t say anything until Wu got to the rope. Then he stopped working, sat down on the pile of tires, lit a cigarette, and said: “Won’t work.”
Wu begged his pardon.
“I’ll show you,” Frankie said. He tied one end of the rope to a tire and tossed it through the low door into the shed. There was the usual pop and then a fierce crackling noise.