Fiction
Speculative
The quantum cab dropped me off in front of the gates only moments later than scheduled, which was a nice surprise. I hate traveling by Q because it leaves me nauseous and light-headed, but for long-distance trips like the one I had just made, it actually was a heck of a lot cheaper than airtaxi—which, being as poor as I usually profess to be, was a prominent factor in many of my decisions, so I put up with the effects.
I swiped my thumbprint to the cab’s scanner and fought the urge to collapse on the ground in order to allow the swirlings in my gut and head to subside. I didn’t want to show weakness even to the robotic driver of the cab. It waited in its plastic cockpit for a handful of seconds while a significant number of my hard-earned credits winged their way through the ether on their two-thousand-mile journey from my bank account to the print scanner and back again to the cab company’s pockets, and only then did I hear the whining charge of the cab’s quantum capacitors as the pilot prepared for the return trip. Programmed not to destroy paying customers, the driver courteously moved the cab a few meters down the road before it disappeared with a soft whump of closing air, making the journey back onto the quantum highways on which it traveled. It would be back in New York before I stepped into sensor range of the gatepost beside me.
As soon as the cab vanished, I did collapse, sitting heavily on the grass beside the road and leaning back against the fence that bordered the ancient dirt road. The journey, though only a few minutes long if measured in time, had nonetheless taken me from one coast nearly to the other and had therefore quite upset my nervous system. I may actually have passed out briefly.
After a few minutes I managed to heave myself to my feet, my head steadier, my stomach ever-so-slightly more settled, and looked at my surroundings. I had expected a gate—plastic, or steeluminum, or Q-force. To put it bluntly, I had expected a gate of any sort, so I was surprised to see only dirt road between empty gateposts. Indeed, the posts themselves were mere wood, and in fact had no sensor apparatus that I could see. Even the fence on either side of the posts was wood—split-rail, I think it was once called. I decided I liked the look. Very quaint and old-fashioned.
With a start the thought suddenly came into my head that I was at the wrong address, but then I saw bolted to the right-hand gatepost a tin box with the number “42” attached to it in brass plates, which I knew was the correct number even before I double-checked it on my data recorder’s screen.
Shrugging inwardly, I passed between the posts and began walking the half-kilometer or so to the house ahead, which was as quaint and old-fashioned as the fence. It looked nothing like I had been expecting the monastery to look. Trees—in greater numbers than I had ever seen before—bordered the house on either side.
So caught up was I in my examination of the old-fashioned building that it wasn’t until I was on the wooden porch itself that I noticed two things, the first of which was the fact that the house wasn’t the only building on the property, as I had heretofore thought. A large circular structure, three stories high and maybe two hundred meters in diameter, stood some distance behind and to one side of the house. It had been hidden by the woods as I had approached, but could be clearly seen from my current vantage.
The second thing I noticed was that the porch upon which I stood was already occupied.
The occupant was old, maybe as old as the house, maybe not, and in spite of the white hair and beard—these were not present in any of the photographs I had seen of him—I recognized him at once as the man I had come to find.
He was dressed not in a monk’s robes as I had expected, but in a more casual, more secular manner, with slacks and loose-fitting sweater. Despite his un-monkish appearance, however, there was still definitely something of the religious about him, something intangible but nonetheless quite present. Or perhaps that was just because I’d been searching for this monk for so long that I was merely projecting my built-up expectations onto the man. He must have watched me approach the house, but he had apparently waited for me to notice him before he spoke.
“How may I help you?” he asked pleasantly.
I found myself expecting a “my son” to follow, such that it took me a moment to answer.
“Uh...Are you...”
Not a great beginning, but he waited patiently, with a small smile curling his lips and squinting his eyes, as I cleared my throat and started over.
“Are you Doctor Shepard?” I asked, more steadily.
“No,” he said, but there was a sudden twinkling in his eye as he said it. He paused for the merest of moments before continuing, “I am Brother Shepard. Doctor Shepard is who I was.” Again the twinkle, as if in some amusement.
“But you are still the man I’ve come to see,” I said, feeling myself beginning to grin at his good humor, liking the man already.
“Well, that depends,” said he, “on what you’ve come to see him about.”
I chuckled.
“I’m no collector or agent,” I said. “My name is Tim Decker, and I’m a freelancer for Popular Physics e-zine. I’m sort of an amateur geophysicist myself. I’ve come to ask you about the core sample.”
For just an instant his smile dropped away completely, but when it returned it rushed back even brighter than before. He stood, and I caught sight of the cross he wore as it fell across his chest. It was about seven or eight centimeters high, about five wide, and it glittered reflectively, though I quickly saw that this was because it was covered with a thin layer of transparent insta-crystal. Inside the polished crystal, the cross itself was composed of some smooth material in a dull and somewhat disagreeable shade of green. If not for the polished exterior, it would have been an altogether ugly thing, I thought.
Shepard held out his hand to me and I shook it.
“Yes,” he said, as if coming to some inner conclusion, “Yes, I think the timing is just right.”
He unclasped my hand and opened the screen-covered door, motioning inside.
“I think you’d better come inside. I’ll make tea. You are not in a hurry, I hope?”
I assured him that my schedule was completely at his pleasure, and preceded him inside.
Shepard’s house was sparsely but comfortably furnished, and entirely too large a structure for one solitary hermit, I thought. To open the conversation, I commented on it.
“It is just the right size,” he said. “But you do not yet know what it contains, so I forgive you your judgment of it.”
“And will you tell me what it contains, then?” I asked, finding myself entirely at ease with him, probably owing to his easy humor and perpetual smile.
“It houses God,” he said. “God in all his humor. God in all his grinning glory.”
I looked around and joked, “He keeps it well.”
Shepard laughed.
“He does!” he said, “He does indeed.” Sipping his tea, he continued, “I see you are a man with a sense of humor. Let me explain, so you understand better.”
“Before you do,” I said, taking out my recorder, “May I record our conversation? In addition to information about the core sample, I was hoping for some anecdotes about your life and the lunar exploration project for a series of possible follow-up articles.”
He glanced at the thumb-sized device with a raised eyebrow, but his grin never faltered.
“Of course,” he said with a nod. “It is, after all, quite time to deliver the punch line.”
“Excellent!” I said, switching on the recorder and placing it on the table between us. “Now, you were about to tell me about this house.”
“I was indeed,” he began, “and why I say it houses God in all his good and glorious humor.” He sat back and spoke slowly and clearly, as if he had some experience doing this sort of interview.
“You see, long ago I was a serious man,” he began. “Very serious. Too serious, I believe now. Wrapped in my work, never taking time to see the lighter aspects of His creation. Never acknowledging them at all, in fact. I was quite the atheist, in fact.”
“You were a geophysicist for the lunar program, weren’t you?” I asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” he said, with the same wry smile he had used when I had asked him his name. “I was a geologist, which is something entirely different. Today’s science is all about physics—energy and motion—owing almost entirely to the meteoric development of the discovery and study of quanta. Quantum mechanics. Quantum flux. Quantum physics. Back then, oh, fifty, sixty years ago, these things were not yet a reality. They were still being dreamed up and thought of and hypothesized over. It was altogether a more sedentary world, then. Geology is the study of rock, Mr. Decker. Motionless, largely unchanging—in today’s terms of motion this and quick that—rock. I was a student of the motionless.
“You kids today, if I may be allowed to group you into that category— which I feel I can do with complete impunity since I am so much older that you—have no idea what it is to sit back, to listen to the story being told, to wait for the punch line to be delivered, instead of rushing through the joke to meet it.”
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a punch line,” I interrupted. “I’m afraid I don’t get the reference.”
“No,” he said, “but you will. I’m afraid you must wait for me to conclude the joke properly, Mr. Decker. There’s no use trying to rush me to its end.” Again his eyes twinkled.
“Then please, continue,” I allowed.
“Thank you. As I said, I took myself very seriously, with the consequence that I became very good at my studies, and later at my job. I became so good at it, in fact, that I was invited to join the second lunar exploration program. Do you know how long man has been on the moon, Mr. Decker?”
“Well, about a hundred and fifty years,” I answered, “pretty much since those first steps in 1969.”
“Not entirely true,” he said. “In actuality, while those first steps were indeed taken in 1969, there were only six missions that actually deposited and returned humans from the moon’s surface during the first lunar exploration project. The last steps of those took place in 1972—a mere three years after the first steps. Humankind did not go back to luna firma for another hundred years after that.”
He must have seen the surprise on my face because he went on, “But the compressed history they teach you today does not adequately relay this information, does it? They talk about the lunar program’s beginnings and then continue with its recent story as if there was never a gap in all its history. It’s all about compression these days. Make it quicker; make it easier to digest. Compress data so it’ll take less virtual space. Compress devices so they’re more convenient to carry.” Here he nodded toward my recorder on the table. “Compress stories so that books can be read in minutes or hours instead of days or—God forbid!—weeks. Even the humorists today tell more one-liners than actual jokes. But God has the last laugh. He has made the ultimate joke, taking thousands of years to tell it, and is nearly at the punch line.”
“God has a sense of humor?” I asked, smiling. Even to me, unbeliever that I was, it sounded far-fetched.
“Oh, he does!” Shepard laughed aloud. “Have you ever seen a picture of a platypus, Mr. Decker? Bill of a duck, webbed feet of a frog, flat tail of a beaver! A mammal that laid eggs, and the male of the species had poison spines, Mr. Decker! Oh, yes! God has the ultimate sense of humor. Drier than the driest British wit. Sillier than the funniest American vaudeville and burlesque acts. At once more subtle and at the same time more in-your-face than the best in their fields at both extremes.”
I interrupted him again, to point out a couple of flaws in his tale.
“You mentioned dry British wit, but don’t the French have a cap on dry humor? And aren’t the Middle-Easterners the foremost vaudeville comedians?”
“Oh, by the standards of today, perhaps,” my host answered, “but Brit Wit is still, I opine, the driest of the dry, and has been for centuries. Compared to them, the modern French are as a flooded plain. And you have never, I think, heard of Bud Abbot or Lou Costello? George Burns? Gracie Allen? Fibber McGee?”
I had to shake my head, for the names meant nothing to me.
“American vaudeville and burlesque comedy teams of the early twentieth century. They are here,” he said, waving a hand toward the ceiling. “They are all here. Abbot and Costello, McGee and Molly, Laurel and Hardy, Martin, Tomlin, Radner, Cosby. Hill and Python. Oh, all the modern ones, too, for they also have their places as instruments of God’s never-ending stand-up act, but none today can do things with a mere prop telephone—an invisible one, to boot!—that Newhart could do. They all exist here, in recordings, in books, in videos, in images. You shall experience some, before you leave, and will appreciate God’s sense of humor all the more because before you leave you will have heard and seen His ultimate joke.”
He went on, talking about humor, and life, and his history and so many other things. Always he had some form of smile on his face. Every topic was punctuated by the perpetual twinkle in his eyes. Even though I was recording I nonetheless listened intently, for he was an infectious man, and knew how to tell a good story. All were peppered with humor. I laughed much but not constantly, which is often actually a painful thing. Indeed, I found myself in better humor while talking with Shepard than I had ever recalled being.
Despite my impatience to talk about the core sample, he showed me his house. Each room was dedicated to humor—some based on subject matter, some grouped by era. Ancient vinyl records—he played some for me!—cassette tapes, old-style digital video discs, books, magazines, artwork. All dedicated to humor in all its forms.
“Forgive me for saying so,” I said following a small but delicious lunch that he prepared for us after the tour, “but you are not at all what I came here expecting. You’re a rather unusual monk, are you not? I’ve never heard of a man of the cloth appreciating any kind of humor, yet you seem to have amassed quite a collection.”
“Some people come to know God through prayer,” he explained, “some through art, some through meditation. All come to appreciate some aspect of the Great One. They all have one thing in common—contemplation. Thinking, studying, watching, observing, questioning some aspect of His creation. I say ‘His,’ though there is every bit of the Female in God as well as the Male—indeed, there are as many hilarious women as there are funny men.”
He chuckled, and went on, “I came to know God through the contemplation of humor, Mr. Decker, because of the joke he played on me—on all of us, Mr. Decker! You will see.”
He stood, cleared our plates, washed his hands, and only then said, “It is time.”
“You have it, then? You have the core sample? It does exist? It’s not just a rumor?” I asked, my excitement, I am afraid, getting the better of me for a moment.
“I do have it. It does exist,” he answered. “Your rumors have led you correctly, Mr. Decker. God is ready to deliver the punch line, and you shall be in on the joke.”
He took a light jacket from a hook by the door, handed it to me, and took another for himself.
“You will want this,” he said, shrugging his on. “It is quite cool in the vault.”
I donned the coat and was surprised to find it scratchy and rough, not at all like the smooth fabrics of today. It was warm, however. Shepard smiled at my momentary discomfort.
“It is called ‘wool,’ Mr. Decker,” he said, chuckling at me, “from another of His pets, though one not quite as humorous as the platypus.”
Still chuckling, he opened the kitchen door and led me outside.
The late afternoon air was cool, but not enough, I thought, to warrant the extra outerwear. About a hundred meters away stood the huge, round building I had seen earlier, lit now by the slanting sun as if by a tremendous spotlight. I had taken it for a barn, but now that I got a better look at it, I wasn’t so sure. I’d never heard of a barn that big. It was easily a hundred and fifty meters across, and appeared to be perfectly circular. The only opening I could see was a normal-sized door at ground level facing us, and it was toward this that Shepard led me. There were the remains of a number of other foundations scattered around, none nearly so large as the building we faced, most beginning to lose themselves in the encroaching undergrowth.
My host must have noticed my curiosity about the huge structure, because he chuckled and said, “the Vault”. He said it in such a way that I clearly heard the capital “V”.
“And what does this vault hold?” I asked.
“A joke, Mr. Decker,” he answered. “One of God’s greatest jests. Perhaps the greatest.”
He chuckled again as we reached the door, a single solid barrier, locked with an elaborate and apparently very secure mechanism.
“God’s joke needs to be kept locked up?” I asked.
“Until the proper time,” he said, pulling a key from somewhere and slipping it into the lock, then pressing a series of digits on a keypad beside the door. There was a hissing sound and an in-rush of air as the door swung outward on its own, to reveal a room that was scarcely larger than an elevator. Shepard motioned me to precede him through the opening, and I became conscious of a significant drop in temperature as I did so.
“An awful lot of building to house such a small room,” I commented, looking at our immediate surroundings.
“It would be,” Shepard said, “if this was all it held. But this is not the joke.”
He closed the door behind us and I heard and felt the air grow even colder, until it was, as near as I could guess, several degrees below freezing.
“God has to keep his joke frozen?” I asked.
Shepard chuckled again.
“He does,” was all he said.
Suddenly the hiss of air stopped and the wall opened before us, opposite the door, and I actually heard myself gasp.
The space before me was vast. It extended away from us, empty, all of the hundred and fifty meters from wall to wall, and not only the three stories above me but also three more stories below. And it was cold enough for my gasp to come out as a cloud of fog.
The wall in the distance appeared to be formed of tiny horizontal lines, that, on further investigation, seemed to extend all the way around the curved interior, stacked one on top of another all the way from floor to ceiling. The very top layers were a very light gray in color, almost white, but they gradually became darker as they progressed toward the floor, and for most of their six-story height these striations variegated through levels of almost-black to dark gray. The very bottom of the wall, perhaps the final meter or less of these stacked lines, adopted a greenish hue.
A series of steeluminum catwalks circuited the walls with a height of about two or three meters between them, and these were joined by thin metal staircases, one at each compass point. The small room we were in—I now thought of it, rightly, as a sort of airlock—emerged onto one of these catwalks, which proceeded on our left to one of the stairways, not more than a dozen meters from where I stood. Shepard motioned me onto the catwalk, which, since I’m not too fond of heights, fortunately sported a proper—if not altogether sturdy-looking—railing. It proved sturdier than it appeared, however, a fact I discovered on gripping it automatically as I stepped onto the mesh catwalk suspended over three stories of open space. Shepard appeared amused, but then, he always did.
My vertigo eased after a few moments—it did not disappear altogether—and I turned to face my host, intending to ask him the purpose of this vast and apparently empty room, but before I could voice my query I saw the near wall close up.
The horizontal lines were, in fact, individual cylinders of material encased in the same insta-crystal that encompassed Shepard’s crucifix. There were hundreds of these, layer upon layer of stacked cylinders, each about five centimeters in width, with a gap of about one centimeter between them. Each narrow tube extended to the right and left of me, following the slow curve of the vast wall. Each cylinder held beneath its crystal shell a dull, cracked, dark, earthy material, utterly devoid of all but the merest hint of any pigment other than black or gray. Hundreds of five-centimeter cylinders, rising tier upon tier above me, three stories to the ceiling, dropping below the catwalk three more stories down to the floor. Based on my estimate that the circumference of the room was about five hundred meters, I did a quick mental calculation and came up with a result of over seventeen hundred kilometers of crystal-encased cylinders!
I understood at once what I was seeing. It was not a series of cylinders laid horizontally and stacked one atop the other. It was one continuous cylinder!
“This is it!” I shouted, my excitement suddenly getting the better of me. “This is the core sample!”
Shepard laughed out loud.
“This is the core sample,” he confirmed. “The only sample ever obtained of the entire depth of the material of the moon. This is, as you state with such economy of verbiage, it.”
“This is wonderful!” I exclaimed. “Just to know that it exists! Just to know that it was obtained and was not just a rumor—” I stopped, nearly dormant questions arising in the face of the evidence before my eyes and the words on my tongue.
“But why does it only exist in rumors?” I asked. “Why, if such trouble was taken to obtain it, is it not more publicly visible?”
“Because,” Shepard answered, “it is a joke.”
“You mean it’s not real? Not from the moon?”
“Oh, it’s real,” he answered, “and it is from the moon. Yet a joke nonetheless. Come, to appreciate the humor you must start at the top. I have, over many years, contemplated every centimeter of its entire one-thousand-seven-hundred-thirty-eight kilometer, three-hundred-and-twenty-four-meter, twelve-centimeter length, and so I appreciate the jest more than any other human on Earth. However, I will cater to your need to have things compressed and will take you more quickly through its length, though I do not doubt you will get the joke well enough in doing so.”
So saying, he began climbing the nearest stairway. I followed him to the top level, marveling at the subtle changes in the gray of the preserved sample. We arrived at the tip of the incomprehensibly long cylinder, which was capped in the same transparent material.
“The surface,” Shepard said, pointing to the very end of the sample, which appeared to be composed of a meter or so of fine white dust which quickly merged with more solid-looking material beside it. Below it, I corrected myself, realizing that the sample was, in fact, lying on its side.
“Dust,” I said. “Fine sand, unblown by wind for eons, untouched by rain since its creation, though occasionally pulverized by meteors.”
“Correct,” Shepard announced, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of schoolboy pride at his praise. But he continued, “Except for one fact, which is that it is not sand, as you and all the world have believed. Oh, don’t feel bad,” he said, raising a hand at my unspoken protest, “God fooled us all into thinking it was so, even me. When the first thinking creature looked at that shining orb hanging in the sky above it, it thought—it knew—it was looking at nothing more than a big rock. And I suppose by certain interpretations of definition, it is. But not rock as you and I think of it, in any case.”
“Then what is it, if not rock?” I asked.
“All in good time,” he answered. “We will now proceed down the levels, and I want you to contemplate each section in turn. Do not hurry, but do not fear. We will stay on this one staircase, examining each cylinder, skipping half a kilometer of the core at a time as we delve beneath the moon’s surface. You will understand it well enough. I will go at your pace, for I have seen it, but do not be hasty. You will want to enjoy the full effect of the joke.” He grinned.
I did what he asked. I examined each section of the core sample before me, studying the shade, the composition, the shape of it, before moving down to the next section of cylinder. I tried to guess whether the sample at which I peered was the same all through, or if there was perhaps a break, or some more solid or differently colored piece, hiding just out of my sight. For the most part, despite what Shepard had said, it appeared to be composed of nothing more or less than layers of compressed rock. I would have called it sedimentary, had there ever existed water or wind on the moon to drive the sediment, but I suppose it was more like a finely layered igneous gneiss—compressed, but not sedimentary, rock. It varied in color, as I’ve said, but when examining it as carefully as I was, the color changes were so gradual that it was only with an occasional mental start that I even noticed it. Here and there were occasional almost-microscopic voids, where perhaps there was once a minuscule pocket of trapped primeval gas. Here and there again was a small splotch or patch of hue that, while close in color to the surrounding material, was slightly different in shade, but aside from these minor and occasional imperfections, the core was remarkably unremarkable.
We spoke of things as we went, I asking questions of Shepard about the core, his life, his sudden switch from scientist to man of the cloth, he answering with great detail, always with a humorous anecdote or escapade. In fact, he made what might otherwise have been a tedious exercise—my intense contemplation of the kilometers-long core sample, however many half-kilometers of it I was bypassing—into an enjoyable and uplifting experience, simply by his inexhaustible supply of good humor.
I confess that the pace of my downward progression increased slightly as I got closer to the end of the core sample. Aside from the subtle changes of hue, the composition of the core hardly varied in the slightest, though the layers of compressed material did become more densely packed, as would be expected, the nearer the center of the moon we progressed.
“How did they obtain the sample?” I asked, stepping onto the top step of the final level of staircase leading to the floor, which housed only a small—but apparently powerful—air-cooling machine. The sample’s color at this point was nearly black, but immediately below my feet it began taking on that slightly greenish hue I had noticed from above. Ever more curious about that, I increased my pace even more. I peered through the crystal covering before me, trying to see inside the five-centimeter cylinder, which had been utterly uniform in width from its beginning to its end. It was this uniformity that had inspired my question, though I suspected I knew the answer.
“It was the first use of the quantum drill,” Shepard said, confirming my suspicions. “Well, the first non-terran use, I should say. The quantum drill, as you know, is a very expensive piece of equipment to operate, but it was once new and there was, it was thought, a practicable application for it on the moon. For decades upon decades, humankind had wondered if there was anything useful buried under luna firma. Since our nearest neighbor had been virtually untouched from the time of its creation, there was much speculation about ores, metals, perhaps gems or even natural gas, lying in wait for us under that dusty surface. Resources from which we, as a people, could profit.
“So the powers that be decided upon the first full-scale test of this new machine that could, through the use of rigidly controlled quantum mechanics, extract a sample of a planet’s core—well, a planetoid, in this case. And thus was the lunar core sample extracted. It took mere days.
“In their haste to find something of value in it, they took it back to Earth and examined it, and saw nothing but rock. Strange rock, to be sure, but simple, uninteresting rock. The entire project was ridiculed as a tremendous waste of resources and finances. Even the scientists, once they had taken samples of the core and blessed them as mere rock, began to move on to the more practical applications of the quantum-manipulating machines, such as travel. In the end, despite the tremendous fortune that had been spent on gathering and studying—albeit briefly—the sample, the creation of this vault, everything, it was decided the project would be shut down.
“But I was sure there was something the others had missed, though I did not yet know what it was. I was approaching retirement anyway, and so I asked to be allowed to care for the vault and the sample. Being a widower from early on, and having nothing else to spend my income on, and having made some smart investments in my youth, I had amassed a considerable personal fortune, and so I was allowed to purchase the vault and surrounding property. I have tended the sample ever since, studying it further, running tests of my own on it, taking my time to do so, until I began to guess what it was that everyone else had missed. I developed a hypothesis, and when I finally confirmed my theories, I laughed so hard I thought I was going to expire.”
Here he chuckled, and I realized that I had ceased my examination of the core while I was listening, enraptured, to his tale. I began to experience a strange feeling, that of sinking and being raised at once, because I began to suspect I knew what the joke was.
“And what was your theory?” I asked.
He placed a finger aside his nose and said, “Ah. We are nearly there. Notice, as we descend each step, that the core at this point begins to change hue. It proceeds from nearly black to greenish gray, and here, a mere handful of rows from the floor—a mere couple of kilometers or so from the very center of the moon, see how it quickly changes to a more uniform dark-green color.”
I had noticed this, and had made the further observation that the material in these bottom layers of crystal tube was identical in hue and shade to the material in the crystal cross around Shepard’s neck. I knew at once that they were one and the same, that Shepard had taken a small piece of the core sample, a tiny bit of the moon’s very center, and had shaped it into the symbol of his faith. In a flash of understanding, I realized the depth of the connection he had made between the moon’s core and God himself, though I had not yet made that connection myself.
He must have seen the realization on my face, for he smiled, held up the cross, and said, “Yes, this is made from the same material. A few centimeters from the very bottom of the sample, from the very center of the moon, and shaped into this reminder of God’s tremendous power, his boundless patience, his infinite mercy, and, above all, his limitless sense of humor.”
“This ultimate joke,” I said. “It is this core sample.”
I stated it. I did not ask it as a question, and Shepard’s perpetual smile widened.
“You have guessed the punch line.”
His was a statement also. I nodded, for I believe I had.
“And, in your capacity as journalist, you will now share with the world,” he said. “Be sure not to tell it too hastily. A good joke must have the proper timing, and this one has been building for billions of years.”
“If I am permitted to write it, I will,” I answered. “But I must be clear for myself, and so I will ask the question.”
I paused, stared at the dull, splotchy green of the core sample and saw its smooth texture, a texture that seemed, even through the crystal casing, to be less than totally solid, as if, were I to remove it from its preserving shell, it would allow itself to be molded, torn, crumbled, in my hands.
“The joke is the sample itself,” I said, turning away from the green material. “Indeed, the moon itself. The sample shows the moon’s composition. The layers above us are not rock, but an incredibly compressed dark material. That material—” I paused for a beat “—is mold.”
Shepard nodded, smiling broadly, confirming my suspicion. I asked the final questions.
“But where does the mold come from? If the center of the moon is not rock, what is the moon made of?”
Shepard’s grin widened still more, and he paused for a long moment before answering, gauging the timing of his response. When he spoke, even though I had already surmised the words, I laughed loudly, heartily and long, because sometimes the best joke is the one whose punch line you’ve just guessed yourself.
“It is cheese,” he said.
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Copyright 2009, Tony Lavoie. All rights reserved. Tony Lavoie writes fantasy, therefore he exists. It is possible that the converse of this is also true, but it has yet to be proven. His novel, "The Ballad of Scabbard Pete," is currently finding itself in serial form at http://scabbardpete.wordpress.com, though if it finds a publisher in the meantime it'll be quite happy with that.
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