Colin Fischer (19 page)
Authors: Ashley Edward Miller,Zack Stentz
“You’re innocent.”
“Innocent.” Wayne leaned back against the rack and shook his head. “No, man. I’m not. I just didn’t do it.”
“Colin,” a man’s voice said. Colin recognized it instantly. He looked up and saw his father standing there, staring at them. He looked
WORRIED
.
“Hello, Dad,” Colin said. “How was your day?”
“Good.” Mr. Fischer narrowed his eyes, taking a moment to process the sight of his son sitting with Wayne Connelly. “Let’s go home.”
They were almost
to Wayne’s neighborhood when the silence broke. “So, Wayne,” Mr. Fischer said, “you and Colin…you’re friends. In school?”
It sounded a bit like a test, and in a sense it was. Mr. Fischer knew very well how things could change
between children over time, especially between boys. Conflict had a way of forging friendships, a story as old as the epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
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The friend in this case wasn’t necessarily someone he would have chosen for his son, but Mr. Fischer understood the choice wasn’t his to make.
“Um…yeah,” Wayne managed.
“Wayne is the reason I came home from school early on the first day,” Colin offered suddenly. “He put my head in the sink, and then he put my head in the toilet and he flushed it.”
Mr. Fischer forced a smile. Wayne shifted uneasily in his seat.
“Um. Yeah,” Wayne said again, hoping Colin would leave it there.
“People think he brought a gun to school, but I know he didn’t because there was frosting on the gun and Wayne eats very neatly.” Colin was certain that a statement of the facts would allay any concerns his father might have.
Mr. Fischer shot a look at Wayne in the rearview mirror, somewhere between a question and a warning.
The more he learned, he realized, the less he knew. “That’s…fantastic,” he said.
Mercifully, it wasn’t long before Mr. Fischer’s sedan pulled up to the curb near Wayne’s house. Colin noticed someone had taken the pink Big Wheel inside as Wayne wordlessly climbed out of the car.
He was halfway to his front door when Colin’s father spoke up after him. “Wayne, wait.”
Wayne took a deep breath. Mr. Fischer was standing by the driver’s door, looking decidedly uncomfortable with the whole situation. “If you think they wouldn’t mind,” Mr. Fischer began, “I’d like to talk to your parents for a minute.”
Wayne looked at his shoes. “Yeah. They’re not home. They go out a lot. You know, the movies.”
Colin watched the exchange from the backseat. He wrinkled his nose with confusion, having never seen this particular emotion from Wayne before. Indeed, Colin had thought Wayne incapable of it. There was no recourse but to consult the cheat sheet. Colin flipped through flash cards, finally forced to accept what he could plainly see:
Wayne Connelly was
AFRAID
.
Mr. Fischer drummed his fingers on the hood of the car, weighing the pros and cons of marching up to the Connellys’ door whether Wayne liked it or not. He didn’t need permission from a fourteen-year-old boy. On the other hand, there were things he didn’t know
about this particular boy—and there was always the chance that a talk with Wayne’s parents would do far more harm than good.
“Right,” Mr. Fischer said finally. “Some other time, then.” He slid back into the driver’s seat and put the car into gear.
Wayne hesitated a moment, then gestured at Colin to roll down the window, which Colin did. “Mr. Fischer?” Wayne started as the barrier dropped. “Thanks. For picking us up I mean.” He looked at Colin with a frown that Colin couldn’t fathom at all. “And Fischer…
Colin
. I’m really sorry about the swing set.”
With that, Wayne disappeared inside his house.
Colin and his father heard the echo of a man shouting Wayne’s name and something else (unpleasant). For a moment, Mr. Fischer just sat there staring at the steering wheel. Then he turned to his son, a tight smile drawing his lips together, though Colin was quite certain his father wasn’t
HAPPY
.
“Are you angry with me?” Colin asked, guessing.
Mr. Fischer didn’t answer, which left Colin more perplexed than ever. Did his father want him to guess again? Was he too angry for words? Colin understood this was conceivable but had (to his knowledge) never actually inspired it in his parents. For the first time, Colin grappled with the possibility that he was in very serious trouble. Just as he was about to say “I’m sorry,” Mr. Fischer raised a hand with his fingers splayed.
“Coming in for a landing,” he said.
Colin braced himself as his father laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was a gentle squeeze, and it did not feel
ANGRY
or seem to have any point at all other than to be exactly what it was.
Then they drove away, and Mr. Fischer did not speak again.
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Gilgamesh was the lonely and cruel king of Uruk. He first battled and then befriended the wild man called Enkidu, with whom he had had many adventures and fought the demon Humbaba. Through his unlikely friendship with the strange, unpredictable outsider, Gilgamesh grew into a good and just king and a hero. Colin had read this was how most friendships began between men—combat, followed by misadventure. It made him wonder if his aversion to wrestling was also the reason for his relative solitude.
THE OLYMPIC TRAMPOLINE TEAM
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
My father designs drive systems for unmanned spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. This sounds very exotic and futuristic, but in fact the engines my father works on are chemical rockets that would be recognizable to Goddard, von Braun, Parsons, or the other rocketry pioneers of sixty years ago.
Other methods of powering interplanetary spacecraft have been proposed over the decades, from solar sails to ion engines and nuclear pulse propulsion, which involved ejecting atomic bombs from the rear of a spacecraft and exploding them against a metal pusher plate to launch the ship to the outer planets. None of these developed to maturity, which my father regards as the major impediment to manned space travel beyond the moon.
However, the real problems lie not in mechanical limitations, but human ones.
Using chemical rockets, a manned trip to Mars would take a minimum of six months in each direction. Astronauts on such a long journey would be subjected to the long-term physical stresses of microgravity, causing their muscles to atrophy and bones to weaken. Also, cosmic rays beyond the Earth’s magnetic field would bombard them with harmful radiation. (Apollo astronauts on lunar journeys reported “flashes” of light whenever they closed their eyes, as cosmic rays collided with their retinas.)
All of that is difficult to overcome, but they remain engineering problems. No engineering solution can address the psychological hurdle—the mental stresses caused by a handful of people living in close proximity for months at a time, with no hope for escape and no opportunities for solitude. “I’ve seen the reports from the Antarctic research stations, and they aren’t pretty,” my father told me. When I asked him why, he answered with a quote from a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit”: “Hell is other people.”
Colin and his father
found his mother and Danny waiting for them in the kitchen.
“Everything’s fine,” Mr. Fischer said flatly.
Danny leaned forward in his chair, letting his spoon fall into his ice cream bowl with a sharp clink. “Is he in trouble?” Danny asked, incongruously
HOPEFUL
. Colin was too hungry and too tired to subject his brother’s reaction to more detailed analysis.
Mr. Fischer considered his sons in turn, aware of Danny’s attitude but in no way sympathetic to it. “Colin, take your dinner and go to your room,” he said. “Danny, how we discipline your brother isn’t your problem.” He was very matter-of-fact.
Colin murmured a low “thank you” as he grabbed a plate of pizza from under the glass cover that was keeping it warm and fished in the open refrigerator for water. He tested the bottles’ temperatures each in turn with his hand so he could take the coldest, then quietly padded up the stairs, mentally reviewing the events of the day. There were almost too many; the best next step in the investigation felt like a warm bath and a good night’s sleep.
Danny watched him go, turning back to his father when Colin was safely up the stairs, out of earshot. “So he’s not in trouble,” he said.
“Zip it, or you will be,” Mrs. Fischer replied. Danny opened his mouth to argue, but his mother was quicker. “No comments from the peanut gallery.
25
I want every
peanut in the house in bed. Five minutes. Go.” Early on, she worried the techniques she used to manage teams of engineers would bleed over and complicate her efforts to discipline her children. Now she knew that engineers and children were the same animal.
Danny trudged loudly up the stairs without another word or editorial sigh, each deliberate step registering his disapproval. A moment later, the click of his bedroom door echoed down to the kitchen. There was a soft
thud
as his small body flopped onto a bed.
The Fischer parents sat at the kitchen table, two large glasses of wine already waiting for them. Then a new sound came—water, running through the pipes upstairs.
