be company.”
“Good grief,” Dan thought. “Come on, Louis,” he said instead.
“Is it an emergency?” shrieked Louis, dancing up and down—or was it back and forth? Dan never could be sure.
“No, we just have to take the urn back for the second time this month.”’
“Can we take an ambulance?” he implored.
“No, Louis, we’ll take the flower truck.”
“Can we stop at my place afterwards so I can give my mother this loaf of bread?”
Dan sort of knew where Louis lived. Up one of those precipitous downtown streets. Upstairs, second floor.
Louis showed him. Up all right. Top of the hill up Seventh. Third floor. Rickety railing. The place reminded Dan of a building in which he had once helped his partner carry a 300-pound man with heart trouble down the steps in a straight chair. At one point all three of them came close to pitching headlong down the staircase.
They entered the apartment. “Ma!” Louis yelled. “Here’s your bread. I’m going back out. See you soon.”
An old person hobbled in from the back. I’ll be! Dan thought. Same curious walk. They even look alike.
“Don’t you be gone long. You know how sick I am,” barked old lady Pank. “And stay away from that crowd at the mortuary. They’re a bad influence on you.”
Dan was flabbergasted. They were a bad influence on Louis? Indeed! He felt genuine indignation. They were his only pleasure. Now he understood why.
“Who’s that with you?” inquired Mrs. Pank.
“Nobody, Ma, just a guy from the shop.”
“Huh? All right, get back here before 9 o’clock. I need you.”
Dan suggested they stop off at the Texas Tavern, affectionately referred to as the Ptomaine Tearoom, for a hamburger, a bowl of red, and a glass of buttermilk. He was buying. It was fine with Louis.
There at the counter they talked for a good hour. Dan had never known before where Louis worked. “I make screws,” he explained, “big ones and little ones, wood screws and machine screws, with nuts and washers to match.” His voice was already trailing off by the time he said “machine screws.” It was as if he were not quite sure. He added abruptly, as if coming round suddenly, “In that factory, you know, over Fairview way.” Why did the word “screwy” suddenly seem so appropriate?
Louis said he quit school at 16, had not had to go into the service because he was his mother’s sole support. “It’s just as well; I never did take to blood. He had long since given up all power to his mother; his only chance at self-assertion was to face up to blood on ambulance runs.
Dan returned to college the middle of that September 1947. Back home at Christmas he worked a couple of weeks at the mortuary but didn’t lay eyes on Louis again till the following summer.
It was a Saturday night, and there they all sat—all except Lindsay, who had his ear glued to the radio in the lounge listening to police calls. Although it was Fauber’s police month and they would be called as a matter of course to answer initially all accident and violence calls in the area, everybody knew that the competing funeral homes also listened to the radio and frequently tried to beat each other to the scene. An extra minute or so helped immensely.
“Let’s roll,” Dan heard Lindsay call out. They dashed into the foyer just as the elevator door clanked open. It shut behind them and Pank. “Where’s Hugh?” Dan asked. “Isn’t he back from the crematorium yet?”
“Don’t think so. Give the boss a ring on the intercom, will you? I’ll get the gate up.”
They put Louis up front, on the outside. A mistake, no doubt, but Dan needed to be in the middle where he could reach both spotlights if necessary.
The accident was on 29 South, a good five-mile ride across town to the highway and then, according to the police call, just a half mile this side of the airport turnoff. They were there in 12 minutes; God knows how they did it. You never knew whether you’d get through the traffic; you just headed for a clutch of cars and trucks and hoped they’d part. You never slowed up much.
Whitten was already there. Damn them! They had outrun everybody lately. Fauber’s share was a single victim, but the crew had to wait while the cops tried to pry off a door that was jammed tightly shut. The man inside looked like he wasn’t going to make it. His face was white and bloodstreaked, but not much flow was in evidence. That’s bad news.
Louis had been standing next to Dan. Suddenly, without any announcement of his intended action, he toppled forward and grabbed the door handle and with a mighty wrench pulled it open. Dan had seen some strange things at accidents, but Louis came close to pulling the door off its hinges. He did what first a crowbar and then a winch couldn’t do. Together, Louis and Dan eased the injured man out and onto the stretcher.
On the way to the hospital, Louis sat with the patient in the rear of the ambulance, steadying his roll as they made the curves, reassuring him all the way. Dan could Louis’s voice through the sliding glass panel separating the cab from the rear. He did not sound at all like a frog. Tonight Louis was his own man, no echo.
After three years Dan quit the mortuary for other things. He lost track of Louis Pank for several years but continued to drop by occasionally, especially on a Saturday evening when he was in town. Both of the guys had finished mortuary science school and were back, fully qualified.
“By the way,” Dan asked one night, whatever happened to Louis Pank?”
“You mean you didn’t hear?!” Both of them were articulating the question-exclamation.
“No,” he said, “tell me.’
Lindsay volunteered. “It was in the paper about six months ago. He had just quit work at the factory. He and his mother both dead. Asphyxiated. Gas stove. Very clean. No blood. We got the bodies. Fixed ‘em up real nice. Death call, no emergency”
Somehow, Dan felt relieved. He didn’t know exactly why.
(From Psychograms of Sickness and Death: A Partial Autobiography, by Donald D. Hook, Unlimited Publishing, 2002.)
Five
Hadrons and Strangelets
For most people in the year 2009 hadrons and strangelets meant nothing, and no one’s life seemed in the least disadvantaged by this lack. For astrophysicist William W. Williams, however, they represented the culmination of a long lifetime of research of the most esoteric sort, and he was looking forward, at age 81, to taking part in a high-level demonstration of the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. He had been invited by the director to take part as an honored guest because of his extensive work in particle physics at Princeton University. The scientists at Geneva were preparing to undertake an initial test of the collider’s capabilities in February 2009, after having postponed the earlier scheduled date of August 18, 2008, and had set up a gathering of a select group of physicists from all over the world. As one who had almost literally followed in the footsteps of Albert Einstein at Princeton, Dr. Williams’s name stood at the top of the list of attendees.
The actual test was scheduled for Monday, February 16, but Professor Williams had booked a flight to Geneva so as to arrive a full week early, during the morning of February 9. He would then have time to shake loose from jet lag so as to profit fully from a personally conducted tour of the facilities on Friday, February 13, by the director, Professor Jean-Pierre Lamont, himself a noted physicist. Outwardly a modest man, Williams nevertheless inwardly welcomed this special recognition of his importance in the world of science and profusely thanked his Swiss colleague in a letter of acceptance back in December 2008.
When Dr. Williams had first received his invitation to the test, and then the additional one to his special introduction to the facilities of the European Organization for Nuclear