‘Blast! I seem to have ruined my trousers.’
Deep within the tangled wires of a laboratory under renovation, the interminably perturbed Dr Bertram Everbridge shook the mangled scraps of fabric from his right ankle begun counting his toes as a matter of precaution.
‘Five on the left, five on the right. Even as a matchbox.’
Bertram had long mistrusted the use of shoes when science was involved, and often would measure the integrity of a man by the dirt under their toenails. When the boundaries of knowledge were pushed, or prodded, or adorned with spinning knives, Bertram believed that the feet should be free—in spite of the statistical probability that someone would eventually lose a toe. He’d become quite good a sowing in fact.
‘Take a note,’ the doctor called to the otherwise empty laboratory, ‘the chainsaw powered bicycle and the bicycle powered chainsaw are both in need of a review. And the addition of saw blades to the chain make it terribly hard to pedal. It is therefore my hypothesis that, while they may work well on paper, the combination of these technologies would not work so well on a tree. I solemnly recommend that all efforts on the bi-sickle be abandoned and its budget reallocated.’
It was difficult to be a genius, Bertram thought glumly as he tossed his failed invention into the blast furnace, watching on as it and several alternatively powered steam engines took on a mildly radioactive glow.
There was a weight on his shoulders, immeasurable and incalculably obstante. He wanted to improve, he wanted to push the boundaries of the benefits of science. He wanted to go beyond what was scientifically beneficial, he wanted to push humanity up its Sisyphean hill and have a good shout at the gods for all the unfinished clutter of existence.
But what was the point? Was he no better than the lackadaisical deities?
Seeing his lab with a doubtful sobriety, looking at the mess of unfinished inventions and botched discoveries that filled every work bench, Bertram felt unfocused and forlorn.
Stienbath, his early mentor, was focused. With typewriter-like rhythm he would hammer out a serviceable invention and then proceed to the next task with a satisfied ding. He was by no means a red-letter scientist. There was a rural quality to the manner of his work that was easy to dismiss as mundane. But where Stienbath was meek, his inventions were long lasting, and Bertram could not fault him.
A ocean of distraction seemed to prevent Bertram from achieving a true breakthrough, and no matter how he looked these problems the cycle of their tides seemed to be endless.
‘Alas, I cannot swim,’ he said contemplatively while watching the shape of his last invention melt into formlessness inside the blast furnace, ‘but if I built a rocket…’
And there it was, as clear and as beautiful as the quantic equation for light refracting through olive oil. An idea! Promethean flame shaping the inspiration that he had been so searching of in these years of inventive frustration. He was to build a rocket.
But a rocket to what? A rocket carrying what?
While noble and within the general ideals of what a decent scientist should strive towards, rockets were quite like cars if you thought about them.
There were reliable rockets for picking up groceries, flashy rockets that you would take into town and flash about in. The sheer variety of brands and well-established geniuses within the rocket scientist world was almost worthy of research in itself.
Dr Bertram imagined becoming a rocket scientist for a moment and felt sick at himself considering it. Endless shop talk about blast containment and detach couplings. Debates, actual debates, around the proper sequences for lift off and where the mini fridge should be installed.
It was all so tawdry, fanatic detail in they hyper perfection of what engineering can achieve.
But Bertram wasn’t an engineer. No, he was in no way akin to those cloud-headed over-boffins that only thought about the direction of up.
Betram wasn’t interested in up. Once you were up, you were only in space and the statistical emptiness of the kingdom of starlight was maddingly boring. There were so many other directions that a rocket could go. Sideways, like a rail-less train streaking across the land; downward, to where the worms ate their dirt and oil slept in peaceful dream; inward, with quantum disentangling glory that resulted in the spaghettification of anything that could perceive it. Yes, rockets were the answer to Dr Everbridge’s scientific ennui, and the direction of their rocketing formed part of the question.
Slamming the blast furnace door fully open, Bertram began throwing every gadget and every gizmo into the awaiting flames. Canisters went pop creating a rain of liquid shrapnel that gouged and galloped its way up the chimney, setting off a device of perpetual motion that fanned the flames hotter and brighter than the very last of the Roman bonfires. Such was the fervour of Bertram’s disposal of his previous inventions that not a pencil nor eraser was saved from the fire of the blast furnace and only when he had run out of possessions was he ready to be calmly overcome by the fumes.
Alone, in the cavernous hollow of his empty laboratory, Bertram sketched his thoughts onto the floor with a piece of radioactive coal and attempted to solve a problem.
Where could a rocket go that it had never gone before? What bounds were a rocket constrained by in which they would no longer be defined?
From hours of thought and with quickly diminishing floor space, Dr Everidge had finally arrived at his answer.
Nowhere.
He would send a rocket into nowhere.
As a concept it was, admittedly, ridiculous. To send something to a place that does not exist is akin to sending it towards fiction. And of all the words that end with an ion, fiction was the most fictious of them all.
So how could a rocket go nowhere? It was an excellent question. If it were to disappear, it would have gone somewhere by definition. If it were to stay in place, that felt more like a problem for philosophy. What Bertram wanted was nothing, what he had just invented was travel to nowhere.
Proudly regarding the glowing formula, still eating its way through the lino, Bertram picked up an imaginary spanner and began to drag a hypothetical lump of aluminium towards of one his missing work benches.
To build a rocket that did not exist would be very unscientific indeed. But that was the thing about science, it was able to adjust after it had been proven wrong. From the tips of his uncombable hair to the corns of his shoeless feet, Bertram knew that he had finally found his direction. He had finally found the thing that he had been working towards his entire life.
He would build a rocket to nowhere out of fiction. And from nothing, everything else would hardly matter at all.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 