Numbers Don't Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

boys own the dune buggy—whether you get it out of the cave or not,” said the old man, counting his money.
    â€œFair enough,” said Wu. It didn’t seem fair to me at all, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would get our money back from the old man, anyway.
    He went back to work on the engine of the 122, and Wu and I headed for the far end of the yard. We found Frankie rolling tires through the shed door: Pop, pop, pop . The pile by the fence was as big as ever. He waved and kept on working.
    Wu set down the shopping bag and pulled out two of those spandex bicycling outfits. He handed one to me, and started taking off his shoes.
    I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange—what I said, what he said, objections, arguments, etc. Suffice it to say that, ten minutes later, I was wearing black and purple tights under my coveralls, and so was Wu. Supposedly, they were to keep our skin from blistering in the vacuum. Wu was hard to resist when he had his mind made up.
    I wondered what Frankie thought of it all. He just kept rolling tires through the doorway, one by one.
    There were more surprises in the bag. Wu pulled out rubber gloves and wool mittens, a brown bottle with Chinese writing on it, a roll of clear plastic vegetable bags from the supermarket, a box of cotton balls, a roll of duct tape, and a rope.
    Frankie didn’t say anything until Wu got to the rope. Then he stopped working, sat down on the pile of tires, lit a cigarette, and said: “Won’t work.”
    Wu begged his pardon.
    â€œI’ll show you,” Frankie said. He tied one end of the rope to a tire and tossed it through the low door into the shed. There was the usual pop and then a fierce crackling noise.
    Smoke blew out the door. Wu and I both jumped back.
    Frankie pulled the rope back, charred on one end. There was no tire. “I learned the hard way,” he said, “when I tried to pull the dune buggy through myself, before I took the wheels off.”
    â€œOf course!” Wu said. “What a fool I’ve been. I should have known!”
    â€œShould have known what?” Frankie and I both asked at once.
    Wu tore a corner off the shopping bag and started scrawling numbers on it with a pencil stub. “Should have known this!” he said, and he handed it to Frankie.
    Frankie looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to me:
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    â€œSo?” I said.
    â€œSo, there it is!” Wu said. “As those figures clearly indicate, you can pass through a noncongruent adjacency, but you can’t connect its two aspects. It’s only logical. Imagine the differential energy stored when a quarter of a million miles of space-time is folded to less than a millimeter.”
    â€œBurns right through a rope,” Frankie said.
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œHow about a chain?” I suggested.
    â€œMelts a chain,” said Frankie. “Never tried a cable, though.”
    â€œNo substance known to man could withstand that awesome energy differential,” Wu said. “Not even cable. That’s why the tires make that pop . I’ll bet you have to roll them hard or they bounce back, right?”
    â€œWhatever you say,” said Frankie, putting out his cigarette. He was losing interest.
    â€œGuess that means we leave it there,” I said. I had mixed feelings. I hated to lose a third of a million dollars, but I didn’t like the looks of that charred rope. Or the smell. I was even willing to kiss my hundred bucks goodbye.
    â€œLeave it there? No way. We’ll drive it out,” Wu said. “Frankie, do you have some twelve-volt batteries you can loan me? Three, to be exact.”
    â€œUnc’s got some,” said Frankie. “I suspect he’ll want to sell them, though. Unc’s not much of a loaner.”
    Why was I not surprised?
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    Half an hour later we had three twelve-volt batteries in a