Page 8 of The Paradox Club

Just as she was reading about a blue light at the end of a dock, Pilgrim 3 heard the door open and looked up to see Nemo 7. She had recruited him a year or so before the Great Debate. Pilgrim 3 knew how to use her looks and charm to draw people to her side. She could flirt, she could sit back and listen, she could impress with her knowledge and flatter the wisdom of others. She’d needed none of that with Nemo 7. He had sidled up to her in the lounge one day and whispered, “I have a feeling you’re going to be running this place one of these days, and I wondered if you needed any help.” He had been with her ever since.

“Another cup of tea, Madam Vault Keeper?” said Nemo 7.

“No, thank you. Is everything quiet?”

“Everything is quiet.”

“Then I think I’ll go home.” Pilgrim 3 shelved her copy of Gatsby the Great, shed her cardigan, and strode out through the members’ lounge of the Paradox Club, scattering the few members present and leaving them, as she saw it, awestruck in her wake.

Nemo 7 watched from the window until he saw Pilgrim 3 on the sidewalk below. Then he pulled out his cell phone and typed a message: All quiet on the Western Front.

TESS AND HARRY ON THE DOCK

“Will the stars always be moving away from us?” asked Tess, feeling the cold wood of the dock against her back as she gazed up into infinity.

“Always is a big word,” said Harry. “But as far as you and I are concerned, their motion will stay the same.”

“Why?” It was Tess’s favorite question because Harry loved answering it.

“Newton’s first law.”

“Stars have to obey the law?”

“Everything in the universe has to obey the laws of science.”

“Who made the laws?”

“A very good question, Tess. When you find out the answer, I hope you’ll tell me.”

“What’s Newton’s first law?”

“Isaac Newton was a scientist who reasoned that three laws govern all motion in the universe. The first law states that an object in motion will remain in motion—at the same speed and in the same direction—unless it is acted on by an external force. It’s called inertia.”

“Inertia,” repeated Tess, rolling the word around in her mouth. “Marie uses that word when I won’t get out of bed.”

“Because inertia also says that an object at rest will remain at rest.”

“Marie doesn’t let me remain at rest.”

“And in that example, your mother is the external force that acts on you and changes your state from being at rest to being in motion.”

“And inertia says that whatever direction an object is moving…”

“It will keep moving in that direction.”

“So, wherever I’m headed in life—I’m going to keep moving in that direction?”

“Not at all, Tess.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are your own external force.”

VIVIAN AND MOTHER TERESA

Vivian Harbottle had inherited Harry Maxwell’s office furniture after his death. Marie had allowed the movers from the University of Wisconsin to box the books from Harry’s campus office and stack them in her garage, but she had no interest in cluttering her house with Harry’s oak desk or the overstuffed swivel chair that sat behind it, so Vivian had asked the movers to bring them to her office down the hall, where they replaced her standard-issue metal desk and plastic chair. Every time she sat down, she felt Harry. How many times had she sat on the other side of that desk, her lunch in her lap, talking to Harry about anything and everything? Especially Tess.

Nikola Tesla Maxwell was named after the Serbian American electrical engineer and inventor. Her father had not cared that the predicted boy turned out to be a girl—the name remained the same. Given Harry’s passion for astronomy and physics, Tess often joked she was lucky not to have been named Hubble Higgs-Boson Maxwell or worse, gone through life as Alberta in memory of Herr Einstein. Her parents tried, for a year or two, to call her Nicole, but, as her mother declared one hot summer night when the two-year-old howlingly refused to fall asleep, she was clearly not a Nicole. So, Vivian had suggested, to the sleep-deprived parents of that screaming toddler, shortening her middle name to Tess.