Hugo awards the short st.., p.15
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 15
"Horzes," said Papa Schimmelhorn. "It iss the smell."
"Horses? Did you say horses?" The General pawed the ground. His eyes flashed fire. "CAVALRY!" he thundered. "We must have CAVALRY!"
No time was wasted. Within the hour, Lieutenant-General Powhattan Fairfax Pollard, the only senior cavalry officer who knew anything about gnurrs, was promoted to the rank of General of the Armies, and given supreme command. Major Hanson became a brigadier, a change of status which left him slightly dazed. And Sergeant Colliver (reflecting ruefully that he was now making more than enough to marry on^) received his warrant.
General Pollard took immediate and decisive action. The entire Air Force budget for the year was commandeered. Anything even remotely resembling a horse, saddle, bridle, or bale of hay was shipped westward in requisitioned trains and trucks. Former cavalry officers and non-com's, ordered to instant duty regardless of age and wear-and-tear, were flown by disgruntled pilots to assembly points in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. Anybody and everybody who had ever so much as seen a horse was drafted into service. Mexico sent over several regiments on a lend-lease basis.
The Press had a field day. NUDE HOLLYWOOD STARS FIGHT GNURRS! headlined many a full front page of photographs. Life devoted a special issue to General of the Armies Pollard, Jeb Stuart, Marshal Ney, Belisarius, the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and AR 50-45, School of the Soldier Mounted Without Arms. The Journal-American reported, on reliable authority, that the ghost of General Custer had been observed entering the Officer's Club at Fort Riley, Kansas.
On the sixth day, General Pollard had ready in the field the largest cavalry force in all recorded history. Its discipline and appearance left much to be desired. Its horsemanship was, to say the very least, uneven. Still, its morale was high, and—
"Never again," declared the General to correspondents who interviewed him at his headquarters in Phoenix, "must we let politicians and long-haired theorists persuade us to abandon the time-tried principles of war, and trust our national destiny to—to gadgets."
Drawing his sabre, the General indicated his operations map. "Our strategy is simple," he announced. "The gnurr forces have by-passed the Mohave Desert in the south, and are invading Arizona. In Nevada, they have concentrated against Reno and Virginia City. Their main offensive, however, appears to be aimed at the Oregon border. As you know, I have more than two million mounted men at my disposal —some three hundred divisions. In one hour, they will move forward. We will force the gnurrs to retreat in three main groups—in the south, in the center, in the north. Then, when the terrain they hold has been sufficiently restricted, Papa—er, that is, Mister —Schimmelhorn will play his instrument over mobile public address systems."
With that, the General indicated that the interview was at an end, and, mounting a splendid bay gelding presented to him by the citizens of Louisville, rode off to emplane for the theatre of operations.
Needless to say, his conduct of the War Against the Gnurrs showed the highest degree of initiative and energy, and a perfect grasp of the immutable principles of strategy and tactics. Even though certain envious elements in the Pentagon afterwards referred to the campaign as "Polly's Round-up," the fact remained that he was able to achieve total victory in five weeks—months before Bobovia even thought of promising its Five Year Plan for retrouser-ing its population. Inexorably, the terror-stricken gnurrs were driven back. Their queasy creaking could be heard for miles. At night, their shimmering lighted up the sky. In the south, where their deployment had been confined by deserts, three tootlings in reverse sufficed to bring about their downfall. In the center, where the action was heavier than anticipated, seventeen were needed. In the north, a dozen were required to do the trick. In each instance, the sound was carried over an area of several hundred square miles by huge loudspeaker units mounted in escort wagons or carried in pack. Innumerable cases of personal heroism were recorded—and Jerry Col-liver, after having four pairs of breeches shot out from under him, was personally commissioned in the field by General Pollard.
Naturally, a few gnurrs made their escape—but the felines of the state, who had been mewing with frustration, made short work of them. As for the numerous gay instances of indiscipline which occurred as the victorious troops passed through the quite literally denuded towns, these were soon forgiven and forgotten by the joyous populace.
Secretly, to avoid the rough enthusiasm of admiring throngs, General Pollard and Papa Schimmelhorn flew back to Washington—and three full regiments with drawn sabres were needed to clear a way for them. Finally, though, they reached the Pentagon. They walked toward the General's office arm in arm, and at the door they paused.
"Papa," said General Pollard, pointing at the gnurr-pfeife with awe, "we have made History! And, by God, we'll make more of it!"
"]al" said Papa Schimmelhorn, with an enormous wink. "But tonight, soldier boy, ve vill make vhoopee! I haff a date vith Katie. For you she has a girl friend."
General Pollard hesitated. "Wouldn't it—wouldn't it be bad for—er—discipline?"
"Don'dt vorry, soldier boy! Ve don'dt tell anybody!" laughed Papa Schimmelhorn—and threw the door open.
There stood the General's desk. There, at its side, stood Brigadier-General Hanson, looking worried. Against one wall stood Lieutenant Jerry Colliver, smirking loathsomely, with a possessive arm around Katie Hooper's waist. And in the General's chair sat a very stiff old lady, in a very stiff black dress, tapping a very stiff umbrella on the blotting pad.
As soon as she saw Papa Schimmelhorn, she stopped tapping and pointed the umbrella at him.
"So!" she hissed. "You think you get avay? To spoil Cousin Anton's beaudtiful bassoon, and play vith mices, and passes at female soldier-girls to make?"
She turned to Katie Hooper, and they exchanged a feminine glance of triumph and understanding. "Iss lucky that you phone, so I find out," she said. "You are nice girl. You can see under the sheep's clothings."
She rose. As Katie blushed, she strode across the room, and grabbed the gnurr-pfeife from Papa Schimmelhorn. Before anyone could stop her, she stripped it of its reed—and crushed the L-shaped crystal underfoot. "Now," she exclaimed, "iss no more gnurrs and people-vithout-trousers-monkeyshines!"
While General Pollard stared in blank amazement and Jerry Colliver snickered gloatingly, she took poor Papa Schimmelhorn firmly by the ear. "So ve go home!" she ordered, steering him for the door. "Vere iss no soldier-girls, and the house needs painting!"
Looking crestfallen, Papa Schimmelhorn went without resistance. "Gootbye!" he called unhappily. "I must go home vith Mama."
But as he passed by General Pollard, he winked his usual wink. "Don'dt vorry, soldier boy!" he whispered. "I get avay again—I am a chenius!"
A SUBWAY NAMED MOBIUS
A.J. Deutsch
In a complex and ingenious pattern, the subway had spread out from a focus at Park Street. A shunt connected the Lochmere line with the Ashmont for trains southbound, and with the Forest Hills line for those northbound. Harvard and Brookline had been linked with a tunnel that passed through Kenmore Under, and during rush hours every other train was switched through the Kenmore Branch back to Egleston. The Kenmore Branch joined the Maverick Tunnel near Fields Corner. It climbed a hundred feet in two blocks to connect Copley Over with Scollay Square; then it dipped down again to join the Cambridge line at Boylston. The Boylston shuttle had finally tied together the seven principal lines on four different levels. It went into service, you remember, on March 3rd. After that, a train could travel from any one station to any other station in the whole system.
There were two hundred twenty-seven trains running the subways every weekday, and they carried about a million and a half passengers. The Cambridge-Dorchester train that disappeared on March 4th was Number 86. Nobody missed it at first. During the evening rush, the traffic was a little heavier than usual on that line. But a crowd is a crowd. The ad posters at the Forest Hills yards looked for 86 about 7:30, but neither of them mentioned its absence until three days later. The controller at the Milk Street Cross-Over called the Harvard checker for an extra train after the hockey game that night, and the Harvard checker relayed the call to the yards. The dispatcher there sent out 87, which had been put to bed at ten o’clock, as usual. He didn’t notice that 86 was missing.
It was near the peak of the rush the next morning that Jack O’Brien, at the Park Street Control, called Warren Sweeney at the Forest Hills yards and told him to put another train on the Cambridge run. Sweeney was short, so he went to the board and scanned it for a spare train and crew. Then, for the first time, he noticed that Gallagher had not checked out the night before. He put the tag up and left a note. Gallagher was due on at ten. At ten-thirty, Sweeney was down looking at the board again, and he noticed Gallagher’s tag still up, and the note where he had left it. He groused to the checker and asked if Gallagher had come in late. The checker said he hadn’t seen Gallagher at all that morning. Then Sweeney wanted to know who was running 86? A few minutes later he found that Dorkin’s card was still up, although it was Dorkin’s day off. It was 11:30 before he finally realized that he had lost a train.
Sweeney spent the next hour and a half on the phone, and he quizzed every dispatcher, controller, and checker on the whole system. When he finished his lunch at 1:30, he covered the whole net again. At 4:40, just before he left for the day, he reported the matter, with some indignation, to Central Traffic. The phones buzzed through the tunnels and shops until nearly midnight before the general manager was finally notified at his home.
It was the engineer on the main switchbank who, late in the morning of the 6th, first associated the missing train with the newspaper stories about the sudden rash of missing persons. He tipped off the Transcript, and by the end of the lunch hour three papers had Extras on the streets. That was the way the story got out.
Kelvin Whyte, the General Manager, spent a good part of that afternoon with the police. They checked Gallagher’s wife, and Dorkin’s. The motorman and the conductor had not been home since the morning of the 4th. By mid-afternoon, it was clear to the police that three hundred and fifty Bostonians, more or less, had been lost with the train. The System buzzed, and Whyte nearly expired with simple exasperation. But the train was not found.
Roger Tupelo, the Harvard mathematician, stepped into the picture the evening of the 6th. He reached Whyte by phone, late, at his home, and told him he had some ideas about the missing train. Then he taxied to Whyte’s home in Newton and had the first of many talks with Whyte about Number 86.
Whyte was an intelligent man, a good organizer, and not without imagination. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he expostulated.
Tupelo was resolved to be patient. “This is a very hard thing for anybody to understand, Mr. Whyte,” he said. “I can see why you are puzzled. But it’s the only explanation. The train has vanished, and the people on it. But the System is closed. Trains are conserved. It’s somewhere on the System!”
Whyte’s voice grew louder again. “And I tell you, Dr. Tupelo, that train is not on the System! It is not! You can’t overlook a seven-car train carrying four hundred passengers. The System has been combed. Do you think I’m trying to hide the train?”
“Of course not. Now look, let’s be reasonable. We know the train was en route to Cambridge at 8:40 A.M. on the 4th. At least twenty of the missing people probably boarded the train a few minutes earlier at Washington, and forty more at Park Street Under. A few got off at both stations. And that’s the last. The ones who were going to Kendall, to Central, to Harvard—they never got there. The train did not get to Cambridge.”
“I know that, Dr. Tupelo,” Whyte said savagely. “In the tunnel under the River, the train turned into a boat. It left the tunnel and sailed for Africa.”
“No, Mr. Whyte. I’m trying to tell you. It hit a node.”
Whyte was livid. “What is a node!” he exploded. “The System keeps the tracks clear. Nothing on the tracks but trains, no nodes left lying around—”
“You still don’t understand, A node is not an obstruction. It’s a singularity. A pole of high order.”
Tupelo’s explanations that night did not greatly clarify the situation for Kelvin Whyte. But at two in the morning, the general manager conceded to Tupelo the privilege of examining the master maps of the System. He put in a call first to the police, who could not assist him with his first attempt to master topology, and then, finally, to Central Traffic. Tupelo taxied down there alone, and pored over the maps till morning. He had coffee and a snack, and then went to Whyte’s office.
He found the general manager on the telephone. There was a conversation having to do with another, more elaborate inspection of the Dorchester-Cambridge tunnel under the Charles River. When the conversation ended, Whyte slammed the telephone into its cradle and glared at Tupelo. The mathematician spoke first.
“I think probably it’s the new shuttle that did this,” he said.
Whyte gripped the edge of his desk and prowled silently through his vocabulary until he had located some civil words. “Dr. Tupelo,” he said, “I have been awake all night going over your theory. I don’t understand it all. I don’t know what the Boylston shuttle has to do with this.”
“Remember what I was saying last night about the connective properties of networks?” Tupelo asked quietly. “Remember the Mobius band we made—the surface with one face and one edge? Remember this—?” and he removed a little glass Klein bottle from his pocket and placed it on the desk.
Whyte sat back in his chair and stared wordlessly at the mathematician. Three emotions marched across his face in quick succession—anger, bewilderment, and utter dejection. Tupelo went on.
“Mr. Whyte, the System is a network of amazing topological complexity. It was already complex before the Boylston shuttle was installed, and of a high order of connectivity. But this shuttle makes the network absolutely unique. I don’t fully understand it, but the situation seems to be something like this: the shuttle has made the connectivity of the whole System of an order so high that I don’t know how to calculate it. I suspect the connectivity has become infinite.”
The general manager listened as though in a daze. He kept his eyes glued to the little Klein bottle.
“The Mobius band,” Tupelo said, “has unusual properties because it has a singularity. The Klein bottle, with two singularities, manages to be inside of itself. The topologists know surfaces with as many as a thousand singularities, and they have properties that make the Mobius band and the Klein bottle both look simple. But a network with infinite connectivity must have an infinite number of singularities. Can you imagine what the properties of that network could be?”
After a long pause, Tupelo added: “I can’t either. To tell the truth, the structure of the System, with the Boylston shuttle, is completely beyond me. I can only guess.”
Whyte swiveled his eyes up from the desk at a moment when anger was the dominant feeling within him.
“And you call yourself a mathematician, Professor Tupelo!” he said.
Tupelo almost laughed aloud. The incongruous, the absolute foolishness of the situation, all but overwhelmed him. He smiled thinly, and said: “I’m no topologist. Really, Mr. Whyte, I’m a tyro in the field—not much better acquainted with it than you are. Mathematics is a big pasture. I happen to be an algebraist.”
His candor softened Whyte a little. “Well, then,” he ventured, “if you don’t understand it, maybe we should call in a topologist. Are there any in Boston?”
“Yes and no,” Tupelo answered. “The best in the world is at Tech.”
Whyte reached for the telephone. “What’s his name?” he asked. “I’ll call him.”
“Merritt Turnbull. He can’t be reached. I’ve tried for three days.”
“Is he out of town?” Whyte asked. “We’ll send for him— emergency.”
“I don’t know. Professor Turnbull is a bachelor. He lives alone at the Brattle Club. He has not been seen since the morning of the 4th.”
Whyte was uncommonly perceptive. “Was he on the train?” he asked tensely.
“I don’t know,” the mathematician replied. “What do you think?”
There was a long silence. Whyte looked alternately at Tupelo and at the glass object on the desk. “I don’t understand it,” he said finally. “We’ve looked everywhere on the System. There was no way for the train to get out.”
‘The train didn’t get out. It’s still on the System,” Tupelo said.
“Where?”
Tupelo shrugged. “The train has no real ‘where.’ The whole System is without real ‘whereness.’ It’s double-valued, or worse.”
“How can we find it?”
“I don’t think we can,” Tupelo said.
There was another long silence. Whyte broke it with a loud exclamation. He rose suddenly, and sent the Klein bottle flying across the room. “You are crazy, professor!” he shouted. Between midnight tonight and 6:00 A.M. tomorrow, we’ll get every train out of the tunnels. I’ll send in three hundred men, to comb every inch of the tracks—every inch of the one hundred eighty-three miles. We’ll find the train! Now, please excuse me.” He glared at Tupelo.
Tupelo left the office. He felt tired, completely exhausted. Mechanically, he walked along Washington Street toward the Essex Station. Halfway down the stairs, he stopped abruptly, looked around him slowly. Then he ascended again to the street and hailed a taxi. At home, he helped himself to a double shot. He fell into bed.
At 3:30 that afternoon he met his class in “Algebra of Fields and Rings.” After a quick supper at the Crimson Spa, he went to his apartment and spent the evening in a second attempt to analyze the connective properties of the System. The attempt was vain, but the mathematician came to a few important conclusions. At eleven o’clock he telephoned Whyte at Central Traffic.
“I think you might want to consult me during tonight’s search,” he said. “May I come down?”
"Horses? Did you say horses?" The General pawed the ground. His eyes flashed fire. "CAVALRY!" he thundered. "We must have CAVALRY!"
No time was wasted. Within the hour, Lieutenant-General Powhattan Fairfax Pollard, the only senior cavalry officer who knew anything about gnurrs, was promoted to the rank of General of the Armies, and given supreme command. Major Hanson became a brigadier, a change of status which left him slightly dazed. And Sergeant Colliver (reflecting ruefully that he was now making more than enough to marry on^) received his warrant.
General Pollard took immediate and decisive action. The entire Air Force budget for the year was commandeered. Anything even remotely resembling a horse, saddle, bridle, or bale of hay was shipped westward in requisitioned trains and trucks. Former cavalry officers and non-com's, ordered to instant duty regardless of age and wear-and-tear, were flown by disgruntled pilots to assembly points in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. Anybody and everybody who had ever so much as seen a horse was drafted into service. Mexico sent over several regiments on a lend-lease basis.
The Press had a field day. NUDE HOLLYWOOD STARS FIGHT GNURRS! headlined many a full front page of photographs. Life devoted a special issue to General of the Armies Pollard, Jeb Stuart, Marshal Ney, Belisarius, the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and AR 50-45, School of the Soldier Mounted Without Arms. The Journal-American reported, on reliable authority, that the ghost of General Custer had been observed entering the Officer's Club at Fort Riley, Kansas.
On the sixth day, General Pollard had ready in the field the largest cavalry force in all recorded history. Its discipline and appearance left much to be desired. Its horsemanship was, to say the very least, uneven. Still, its morale was high, and—
"Never again," declared the General to correspondents who interviewed him at his headquarters in Phoenix, "must we let politicians and long-haired theorists persuade us to abandon the time-tried principles of war, and trust our national destiny to—to gadgets."
Drawing his sabre, the General indicated his operations map. "Our strategy is simple," he announced. "The gnurr forces have by-passed the Mohave Desert in the south, and are invading Arizona. In Nevada, they have concentrated against Reno and Virginia City. Their main offensive, however, appears to be aimed at the Oregon border. As you know, I have more than two million mounted men at my disposal —some three hundred divisions. In one hour, they will move forward. We will force the gnurrs to retreat in three main groups—in the south, in the center, in the north. Then, when the terrain they hold has been sufficiently restricted, Papa—er, that is, Mister —Schimmelhorn will play his instrument over mobile public address systems."
With that, the General indicated that the interview was at an end, and, mounting a splendid bay gelding presented to him by the citizens of Louisville, rode off to emplane for the theatre of operations.
Needless to say, his conduct of the War Against the Gnurrs showed the highest degree of initiative and energy, and a perfect grasp of the immutable principles of strategy and tactics. Even though certain envious elements in the Pentagon afterwards referred to the campaign as "Polly's Round-up," the fact remained that he was able to achieve total victory in five weeks—months before Bobovia even thought of promising its Five Year Plan for retrouser-ing its population. Inexorably, the terror-stricken gnurrs were driven back. Their queasy creaking could be heard for miles. At night, their shimmering lighted up the sky. In the south, where their deployment had been confined by deserts, three tootlings in reverse sufficed to bring about their downfall. In the center, where the action was heavier than anticipated, seventeen were needed. In the north, a dozen were required to do the trick. In each instance, the sound was carried over an area of several hundred square miles by huge loudspeaker units mounted in escort wagons or carried in pack. Innumerable cases of personal heroism were recorded—and Jerry Col-liver, after having four pairs of breeches shot out from under him, was personally commissioned in the field by General Pollard.
Naturally, a few gnurrs made their escape—but the felines of the state, who had been mewing with frustration, made short work of them. As for the numerous gay instances of indiscipline which occurred as the victorious troops passed through the quite literally denuded towns, these were soon forgiven and forgotten by the joyous populace.
Secretly, to avoid the rough enthusiasm of admiring throngs, General Pollard and Papa Schimmelhorn flew back to Washington—and three full regiments with drawn sabres were needed to clear a way for them. Finally, though, they reached the Pentagon. They walked toward the General's office arm in arm, and at the door they paused.
"Papa," said General Pollard, pointing at the gnurr-pfeife with awe, "we have made History! And, by God, we'll make more of it!"
"]al" said Papa Schimmelhorn, with an enormous wink. "But tonight, soldier boy, ve vill make vhoopee! I haff a date vith Katie. For you she has a girl friend."
General Pollard hesitated. "Wouldn't it—wouldn't it be bad for—er—discipline?"
"Don'dt vorry, soldier boy! Ve don'dt tell anybody!" laughed Papa Schimmelhorn—and threw the door open.
There stood the General's desk. There, at its side, stood Brigadier-General Hanson, looking worried. Against one wall stood Lieutenant Jerry Colliver, smirking loathsomely, with a possessive arm around Katie Hooper's waist. And in the General's chair sat a very stiff old lady, in a very stiff black dress, tapping a very stiff umbrella on the blotting pad.
As soon as she saw Papa Schimmelhorn, she stopped tapping and pointed the umbrella at him.
"So!" she hissed. "You think you get avay? To spoil Cousin Anton's beaudtiful bassoon, and play vith mices, and passes at female soldier-girls to make?"
She turned to Katie Hooper, and they exchanged a feminine glance of triumph and understanding. "Iss lucky that you phone, so I find out," she said. "You are nice girl. You can see under the sheep's clothings."
She rose. As Katie blushed, she strode across the room, and grabbed the gnurr-pfeife from Papa Schimmelhorn. Before anyone could stop her, she stripped it of its reed—and crushed the L-shaped crystal underfoot. "Now," she exclaimed, "iss no more gnurrs and people-vithout-trousers-monkeyshines!"
While General Pollard stared in blank amazement and Jerry Colliver snickered gloatingly, she took poor Papa Schimmelhorn firmly by the ear. "So ve go home!" she ordered, steering him for the door. "Vere iss no soldier-girls, and the house needs painting!"
Looking crestfallen, Papa Schimmelhorn went without resistance. "Gootbye!" he called unhappily. "I must go home vith Mama."
But as he passed by General Pollard, he winked his usual wink. "Don'dt vorry, soldier boy!" he whispered. "I get avay again—I am a chenius!"
A SUBWAY NAMED MOBIUS
A.J. Deutsch
In a complex and ingenious pattern, the subway had spread out from a focus at Park Street. A shunt connected the Lochmere line with the Ashmont for trains southbound, and with the Forest Hills line for those northbound. Harvard and Brookline had been linked with a tunnel that passed through Kenmore Under, and during rush hours every other train was switched through the Kenmore Branch back to Egleston. The Kenmore Branch joined the Maverick Tunnel near Fields Corner. It climbed a hundred feet in two blocks to connect Copley Over with Scollay Square; then it dipped down again to join the Cambridge line at Boylston. The Boylston shuttle had finally tied together the seven principal lines on four different levels. It went into service, you remember, on March 3rd. After that, a train could travel from any one station to any other station in the whole system.
There were two hundred twenty-seven trains running the subways every weekday, and they carried about a million and a half passengers. The Cambridge-Dorchester train that disappeared on March 4th was Number 86. Nobody missed it at first. During the evening rush, the traffic was a little heavier than usual on that line. But a crowd is a crowd. The ad posters at the Forest Hills yards looked for 86 about 7:30, but neither of them mentioned its absence until three days later. The controller at the Milk Street Cross-Over called the Harvard checker for an extra train after the hockey game that night, and the Harvard checker relayed the call to the yards. The dispatcher there sent out 87, which had been put to bed at ten o’clock, as usual. He didn’t notice that 86 was missing.
It was near the peak of the rush the next morning that Jack O’Brien, at the Park Street Control, called Warren Sweeney at the Forest Hills yards and told him to put another train on the Cambridge run. Sweeney was short, so he went to the board and scanned it for a spare train and crew. Then, for the first time, he noticed that Gallagher had not checked out the night before. He put the tag up and left a note. Gallagher was due on at ten. At ten-thirty, Sweeney was down looking at the board again, and he noticed Gallagher’s tag still up, and the note where he had left it. He groused to the checker and asked if Gallagher had come in late. The checker said he hadn’t seen Gallagher at all that morning. Then Sweeney wanted to know who was running 86? A few minutes later he found that Dorkin’s card was still up, although it was Dorkin’s day off. It was 11:30 before he finally realized that he had lost a train.
Sweeney spent the next hour and a half on the phone, and he quizzed every dispatcher, controller, and checker on the whole system. When he finished his lunch at 1:30, he covered the whole net again. At 4:40, just before he left for the day, he reported the matter, with some indignation, to Central Traffic. The phones buzzed through the tunnels and shops until nearly midnight before the general manager was finally notified at his home.
It was the engineer on the main switchbank who, late in the morning of the 6th, first associated the missing train with the newspaper stories about the sudden rash of missing persons. He tipped off the Transcript, and by the end of the lunch hour three papers had Extras on the streets. That was the way the story got out.
Kelvin Whyte, the General Manager, spent a good part of that afternoon with the police. They checked Gallagher’s wife, and Dorkin’s. The motorman and the conductor had not been home since the morning of the 4th. By mid-afternoon, it was clear to the police that three hundred and fifty Bostonians, more or less, had been lost with the train. The System buzzed, and Whyte nearly expired with simple exasperation. But the train was not found.
Roger Tupelo, the Harvard mathematician, stepped into the picture the evening of the 6th. He reached Whyte by phone, late, at his home, and told him he had some ideas about the missing train. Then he taxied to Whyte’s home in Newton and had the first of many talks with Whyte about Number 86.
Whyte was an intelligent man, a good organizer, and not without imagination. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he expostulated.
Tupelo was resolved to be patient. “This is a very hard thing for anybody to understand, Mr. Whyte,” he said. “I can see why you are puzzled. But it’s the only explanation. The train has vanished, and the people on it. But the System is closed. Trains are conserved. It’s somewhere on the System!”
Whyte’s voice grew louder again. “And I tell you, Dr. Tupelo, that train is not on the System! It is not! You can’t overlook a seven-car train carrying four hundred passengers. The System has been combed. Do you think I’m trying to hide the train?”
“Of course not. Now look, let’s be reasonable. We know the train was en route to Cambridge at 8:40 A.M. on the 4th. At least twenty of the missing people probably boarded the train a few minutes earlier at Washington, and forty more at Park Street Under. A few got off at both stations. And that’s the last. The ones who were going to Kendall, to Central, to Harvard—they never got there. The train did not get to Cambridge.”
“I know that, Dr. Tupelo,” Whyte said savagely. “In the tunnel under the River, the train turned into a boat. It left the tunnel and sailed for Africa.”
“No, Mr. Whyte. I’m trying to tell you. It hit a node.”
Whyte was livid. “What is a node!” he exploded. “The System keeps the tracks clear. Nothing on the tracks but trains, no nodes left lying around—”
“You still don’t understand, A node is not an obstruction. It’s a singularity. A pole of high order.”
Tupelo’s explanations that night did not greatly clarify the situation for Kelvin Whyte. But at two in the morning, the general manager conceded to Tupelo the privilege of examining the master maps of the System. He put in a call first to the police, who could not assist him with his first attempt to master topology, and then, finally, to Central Traffic. Tupelo taxied down there alone, and pored over the maps till morning. He had coffee and a snack, and then went to Whyte’s office.
He found the general manager on the telephone. There was a conversation having to do with another, more elaborate inspection of the Dorchester-Cambridge tunnel under the Charles River. When the conversation ended, Whyte slammed the telephone into its cradle and glared at Tupelo. The mathematician spoke first.
“I think probably it’s the new shuttle that did this,” he said.
Whyte gripped the edge of his desk and prowled silently through his vocabulary until he had located some civil words. “Dr. Tupelo,” he said, “I have been awake all night going over your theory. I don’t understand it all. I don’t know what the Boylston shuttle has to do with this.”
“Remember what I was saying last night about the connective properties of networks?” Tupelo asked quietly. “Remember the Mobius band we made—the surface with one face and one edge? Remember this—?” and he removed a little glass Klein bottle from his pocket and placed it on the desk.
Whyte sat back in his chair and stared wordlessly at the mathematician. Three emotions marched across his face in quick succession—anger, bewilderment, and utter dejection. Tupelo went on.
“Mr. Whyte, the System is a network of amazing topological complexity. It was already complex before the Boylston shuttle was installed, and of a high order of connectivity. But this shuttle makes the network absolutely unique. I don’t fully understand it, but the situation seems to be something like this: the shuttle has made the connectivity of the whole System of an order so high that I don’t know how to calculate it. I suspect the connectivity has become infinite.”
The general manager listened as though in a daze. He kept his eyes glued to the little Klein bottle.
“The Mobius band,” Tupelo said, “has unusual properties because it has a singularity. The Klein bottle, with two singularities, manages to be inside of itself. The topologists know surfaces with as many as a thousand singularities, and they have properties that make the Mobius band and the Klein bottle both look simple. But a network with infinite connectivity must have an infinite number of singularities. Can you imagine what the properties of that network could be?”
After a long pause, Tupelo added: “I can’t either. To tell the truth, the structure of the System, with the Boylston shuttle, is completely beyond me. I can only guess.”
Whyte swiveled his eyes up from the desk at a moment when anger was the dominant feeling within him.
“And you call yourself a mathematician, Professor Tupelo!” he said.
Tupelo almost laughed aloud. The incongruous, the absolute foolishness of the situation, all but overwhelmed him. He smiled thinly, and said: “I’m no topologist. Really, Mr. Whyte, I’m a tyro in the field—not much better acquainted with it than you are. Mathematics is a big pasture. I happen to be an algebraist.”
His candor softened Whyte a little. “Well, then,” he ventured, “if you don’t understand it, maybe we should call in a topologist. Are there any in Boston?”
“Yes and no,” Tupelo answered. “The best in the world is at Tech.”
Whyte reached for the telephone. “What’s his name?” he asked. “I’ll call him.”
“Merritt Turnbull. He can’t be reached. I’ve tried for three days.”
“Is he out of town?” Whyte asked. “We’ll send for him— emergency.”
“I don’t know. Professor Turnbull is a bachelor. He lives alone at the Brattle Club. He has not been seen since the morning of the 4th.”
Whyte was uncommonly perceptive. “Was he on the train?” he asked tensely.
“I don’t know,” the mathematician replied. “What do you think?”
There was a long silence. Whyte looked alternately at Tupelo and at the glass object on the desk. “I don’t understand it,” he said finally. “We’ve looked everywhere on the System. There was no way for the train to get out.”
‘The train didn’t get out. It’s still on the System,” Tupelo said.
“Where?”
Tupelo shrugged. “The train has no real ‘where.’ The whole System is without real ‘whereness.’ It’s double-valued, or worse.”
“How can we find it?”
“I don’t think we can,” Tupelo said.
There was another long silence. Whyte broke it with a loud exclamation. He rose suddenly, and sent the Klein bottle flying across the room. “You are crazy, professor!” he shouted. Between midnight tonight and 6:00 A.M. tomorrow, we’ll get every train out of the tunnels. I’ll send in three hundred men, to comb every inch of the tracks—every inch of the one hundred eighty-three miles. We’ll find the train! Now, please excuse me.” He glared at Tupelo.
Tupelo left the office. He felt tired, completely exhausted. Mechanically, he walked along Washington Street toward the Essex Station. Halfway down the stairs, he stopped abruptly, looked around him slowly. Then he ascended again to the street and hailed a taxi. At home, he helped himself to a double shot. He fell into bed.
At 3:30 that afternoon he met his class in “Algebra of Fields and Rings.” After a quick supper at the Crimson Spa, he went to his apartment and spent the evening in a second attempt to analyze the connective properties of the System. The attempt was vain, but the mathematician came to a few important conclusions. At eleven o’clock he telephoned Whyte at Central Traffic.
“I think you might want to consult me during tonight’s search,” he said. “May I come down?”
