Part 2

With a calm, superior smile I began to unload my colorful cargo beside his pile of green. But Hank didn't look enthusiastic. I waited for the ooohs and aaahs, and when none came I snapped,

"Well, what's the matter? You sore because I made out better than you did?"

He shifted uncomfortably and refused to meet my eye. He said,

"Well, it ain't exactly that, Jim. Only--"

"Only what?"

"Only," he gulped, "them chips ain't gonna do much good, way I figger. 'Pears to me like after what happened tonight, that there place ain't never gonna open up no more."

He was right, of course. Hank was always right. I still have two hatfuls of roulette chips; you can have them, parcel post collect. The College Clubbe folded the next morning, but the story of why it collapsed got around. And Hank became something of a celebrity.

That's how, in spite of Doc MacDowell's pigheadedness, the rest of the Midland University faculty got to hear about my rural protégé. To hear was to visit; to visit was to listen with awe. They handed him stumpers; he up-rooted them and handed them back with Q.E.D.'s tacked on them.

[Illustration: With calm nonchalance Hank Cleaver answered the questions of the incredulous scientists.]

At first, Horse-sense Hank was a sort of perambulating parlor game to the professoriat. They came and tried out on him the trick questions to which they--and presumably only they--knew the answers. No soap! They asked him about the variable nature of light waves; he derived, alone and unaided, a formula which Professor Hallowell of the Physics Department identified as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

* * * * *

They asked him about electronic structures. First they had to tell him what an electron was; after that, he did the talking. He confused me and practically everyone else present. He kept talking about a "whatchamaycallit." Finally Dr. Enderby of the Blair Research Foundation pinned him down as to the exact nature of this mysterious something.

Blair grayed visibly when he discovered that Hank's "whatchamaycallit" was identical in meaning, value and structure with _h_--that abstruse physical concept known as Planck's constant.

Hank offered apologetically, "They ain't no word to describe it exactly. It--well, it just _is_, that's all. I reckon if you wanted to, you could say it was the diff'rence in energy values in them there light rays we been talkin' about. But that ain't all. It's more'n that. It's also the amount of diff'rence in the way things are. I mean, when you bet or gamble, the whatchamaycallit comes into the picture."

Blair wept. "Heisenberg! The uncertainty factor! Identical with Planck's constant!" He went home gibbering.

Then the graybeards realized that Hank was not just a freak; he was the Answer Man in person. They started digging up toughies that had stymied them for years. They served them in simple language and Hank dished up replies in homespun.

Me, I don't pretend to understand half the stuff I heard them talking about. So you'll have to overlook it if I botch the job of retelling. I recall hearing an astronomer ask one night,

"Mr. Cleaver, what in your opinion is the explanation of the observed fact that celestial bodies apparently always move in conic sections of elliptic or infinite orbits?"

Hank twiddled his fingers and said, "Why, 'pears to me that's on account of nature is lazy."

Someone ejaculated, "Nature lazy?"

"Sure. Movin' things take the shortest path."

The astronomer, frankly dubious, said, "But, really! An ellipse could hardly do that because a 'shortest path'--"

"No?" said Hank. "You take a flat piece of paper. The quickest way acrost it is a straight line, ain't it?"

"Naturally."

"You take a globe of the world, though, an' things don't work the same. You want to go from, say, Los Angeles to Japan, you wouldn't follow straight across one of them lines of latitude, would you? You'd sort of hump up by way of Alaska."

A listener nodded eagerly. "That's right. You'd take the arc of a great circle. The Great Circle route."

"Well," said Hank, "same thing in the universe--which has got, near's I can figger out, another right angle in it besides the ones we know an' see."

"You mean another dimension? A fourth dimension?"

"Call it that. Anyhow, in this sort of super-globe which has four dimensions, stands to reason that the shortest distance from one point to another will be a closed figger. A sort of lopsided circle."

* * * * *

That stopped them cold for a moment. But Tomkins, the astronomer, wasn't through yet.

"Our observations, Hank, also indicate that in this universe, every other galaxy is running away from ours as fast as it can. Why is this?"

Cleaver repeated unbelievingly, "Runnin' away?"

"Yes. Our spectroscopes show a 'red shift' in the apparent motion of all stars. This proves that the universe is expanding--"

"Why, no!" said Hank. "Gosh, no!"

"_No?_"

"Why, you got it all backward," explained Horse-sense Hank. "What you're sayin' ain't reasonable. Truth of the matter is, the universe ain't expandin' at all. It's just a-standin' still. Reason things look thataway to us is because--we're contractin'!"

And that really _did_ stop them! Even when Hank explained that the same effect would be visible to a man standing in the middle of the floor of a gigantic room while the walls receded, as would be visible to a man _shrinking_ in the middle of a normal-sized room. They didn't get it, but they tried. They took it home to sleep on.

* * * * *

So grew the fame of Horse-sense Hank. And while all this was going on, another thing was happening, too. Hank was seeing Helen MacDowell, practically every night. And--well, if you've ever seen a supercharged carton of honey and dynamite like Helen, you know the inevitable results. Love, with a capital _boom_!

Old MacDowell had a fit--ee-eye-ee-eye-oh! But it did him no good. His mood was one of kill and boo, but Helen's was one of bill and coo. It got so every time I saw Hank and Helen together they looked a reproduction of the Laocoön[2] group.

[Footnote 2: Laocoön (lay-ock-o-on) was a priest of Apollo who warned the Trojans against the wooden horse of the Greeks. As a result he and his two sons were destroyed by serpents sent by Athene, who'd placed her bet on Greece. This mythological tragedy is portrayed in a magnificent statue now in the Vatican at Rome.--Ed.]

And then the ripples in the path of true love began to straighten out. The Isaminder Research Fund heard about Hank and granted him a five thousand dollar fellowship, and Dr. MacDowell snorted,

"Preposterous! They must be crazy!"

Then the Lowell Observatory made him an honorary member for his great help in unveiling the mystery of white dwarf stars, and MacDowell said,

"What do you think of that?"

Then the Advisory Council of Midwestern U. went over our prexy's head and offered Hank the chair of General & Practical Sciences, and MacDowell, bug-eyed, told me hopefully,

"You know, Jim, the first time I saw that young man I said he'd go places!"

And when the Nobel Committee voted to Hank Cleaver the annual awards for outstanding work in the fields of physics, astronomy and psychology, MacDowell capitulated completely. He rubbed his hands together, beamed like an April morning, and said,

"God bless you, my children! Would you like block letters or script on the announcements? Anything at all to please your little hearts!"

So it was arranged. A big church wedding for Helen and Hank, and of course I was to be best man. And Hank should have been the happiest guy alive. But was he? No. As the days narrowed toward the fateful one, he began to grow moody and thoughtful. Several times I caught him sitting by himself, pondering and shaking his head. Once I heard him mutter in a low under-tone,

"Mebbe it wouldn't exactly work like that--"

He was puzzling out some deep problem. Just what, I didn't know. I was too busy to quiz him about it. And then came the day when wedding bells were to peal.

* * * * *

I went to the church to see that everything was in apple-pie order. I left Hank wandering in a sort of daze, impressed on him the necessity of being there at eleven sharp, told him to take a drink and stop looking like Sydney Carton, and wondered if he'd stop the ceremony to tell the preacher his words were unreasonable.

Time zipped by. The guests began to arrive. The organist came in and started practicing. The preacher came. Helen arrived, surrounded by a bevy of chattering bridesmaids. But no Hank. I called the apartment; the phone continued to laugh at me. Dr. MacDowell came back to the vestry room and pouted,

"Where is he, Jim? It's getting near eleven."

"He must be on his way," I said hopefully.

But eleven came--and still no Hank. And then it was eleven-fifteen, and eleven-thirty, and people were beginning to cough and get restless. One of the bridesmaids got hysterical. Helen shot Emily Post to the four winds and came to me in the vestry room almost in tears.

"Jim," she pleaded, "he's not here! He must have been hurt or something. Can't you find out?"

"I'll try," I told her. She left, and her old man came in. He was upset, and I don't mean he had a hangover. His eyes bulged like bumps on a cucumber.

"Blakeson," he bellowed, "where's Cleaver?"

"Do I look like a crystal ball?" I snarled. "Sit tight and amuse the crowd with card tricks. I'm going out to find him." And I went ... but somehow I had a feeling that it was a futile gesture.

* * * * *

I hope the card tricks were good. They had to be to hold that crowd, because it took me three days to find my friend Hank. And I finally located him in--you've guessed it!--the south forty of his farm near Westville. Hank had reverted to the soil. Once again he was clad in coveralls and bulldog shoes. He had turned his back on civilization as a snake discards last year's skin, and the mouth that had once taught pedagogues was again clogged to the incisors with cut plug.

He saw me coming across the field, rose and dusted his knees, and shook his head dolefully.

"Nope, Jim," he said, "it ain't no use askin'. I ain't a-goin' back!"

"Man," I told him, "you're crazy! Don't you know the whole University's in a fever because you skipped out? Why did you go? Helen's all busted up. Don't you love her?"

He made a vain, twisting gesture with his hands. His eyes were bleak.

"Yup, Jim," he said.

"Then for goodness' sakes, why did you do it?"

He gulped wretchedly. "I--I can't marry her, Jim. I just can't. That's all there is to it."

"Why?" I was sore now. "For Satan's sake, why? Something like this deserves an explanation."

"On account," he said, "on account of it wouldn't work."

"It wouldn't--" I stared at him. "Come clean!"

He said, "I figgered it all out, an' it won't work. Say I married her, Awright. Purty soon, stands to reason, we'd have a youngster. A boy, I figger. Some more years'd pass, he'd grow up. Fust thing you know, he'd be a man hisself, an' he'd up an' fall in love with a girl.

"An' it just natcherally stands to reason that him bein' the kind of boy he'd be, an' me bein' the kind of man I am, we'd be sure to have a big ruckus, because--"

* * * * *

I stared at him. "Because?"

"'Cause the kind of girl he'd fall for," said Hank, "would be some durn chorus girl. An'"--Hank's voice was heavy with parental firmness--"they ain't no son of mine is gonna marry no chorus girl!"

I felt like yesterday's lettuce. I said faintly,

"But--but that's ridiculous, Hank. You can't know--"

"I do know, Jim. Afore I met Helen, I never worried none about the future, let every day take care of itself. But when we planned on gettin' hitched, I started figgerin' out the logical results, the results that _had_ to be, by natcheral cause an' effect--"

He shrugged. "An' that's the answer. So it's better to never start the chain that'd make us all unhappy."

He held out a bronzed paw. "It's been nice knowin' you, Jim. You come visit me once in a while, will you? An' if you ever get in a jam an' I can help, just say the word."

I said, "So you mean it, then? The world offers you everything--fame, money, glory, love--and you're going to stay here in this--this cheesy little old turnip patch!"

"Don't say that, Jim!" said Hank swiftly. "This is the best place in the world for me. 'Cause I'm too durn logical. An' this is the one place where I'm at a disadvantage."

"What," I asked, wondering, "do you mean?"

He shook his head, dolefully this time.

"Turnips!" said Horse-sense Hank. "Everything else in the whole wide world I can figger the results of. But turnips is hell. It don't matter where you plant 'em or what you try, they don't never do what you expect 'em to."