The Last Romanian Frogman

By J E Murphy

You Don't Know Jack
An artist discovers that nothing can kill him.
-
If You Meet Lord Krishna on the Road
An American soldier in Southeast Asia meets the Cosmic Consciousness.
-
Baby Cthulhu
Maternal instincts may determine the destiny of the world.
-
O'Shaughnessy's Address to the Enemy Troops
An ethical warrior defeats an opposing army with words.
-
Beelzebub
True horror may not be super-natural, but way too natural.
-
The Catchers
Are they the scourge of humanity, or humanity's last hope?
-
Bodies in Motion
Out of body experiences go out of control.
-
The Last Romanian Frogman
Are there non-humans among us? The UN wants to know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J E Murphy
• Release date: Feb 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370924929

J E Murphy

J E Murphy, author, poet, philosopher, credologist, student of natural history, anthropology, sociology, genetics, and politics. Novels include A VIEW FROM A HEIGHT, THE GOD VIRUS, and THE NEXT BUDDHA.A credologist is a person who studies belief systems. I cannot say I have studied all belief systems, because I am sure there are some I have never heard of, but I have studied most of them. What I can say I have learned from this is that the world is a mystery and nobody knows enough about it to even head off in the direction of an answer. Yet still we demand that everyone else stop and look at our own broken compass.I have been around the world and have seen how people live and worship in many different countries. I have been to Tibet, China, Nepal, India, half of the countries in Europe, a few in Africa, the Solomon Islands, the Galapagos Islands and parts of South and Central America. What I have learned from these travels is that, at heart, we are all the same; we are all cousins; we all want the same things out of life. As children, our souls are as free as angels, but we grow into the molds that our cultures have shaped for us.I have always enjoyed most the books that expanded my horizons and showed me new ways to look at the world, a way to discard a broken compass, a way to break the mold of culture and belief. I hope that someday, people will say my books did that for them.

Book preview

The Last Romanian Frogman

And Other Short Works of Fiction

by

J. E. Murphy

The Last Romanian Frogman

Copyright 2018 by J. E. Murphy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

Portraits of Earth Press

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 9781370924929

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Mayflower, Arkansas 72106

U.S.A.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank Teresa Tidwell for her excellent work in proofing this book, and Kayte del Real who read early versions and pointed out logical issues with the stories.

J. E. Murphy

March 2017

The Stories --

1: You Don’t Know Jack

An artist discovers that nothing can kill him.

2: If You Meet Lord Krishna on the Road

An American soldier in Southeast Asia meets the Cosmic Consciousness.

3: Baby Cthulhu

Maternal instincts may determine the destiny of the world.

4: O’Shaughnessy’s Address to the Enemy Troops

An ethical warrior defeats an opposing army with words.

5: Beelzebub

True horror may not be super-natural, but way too natural.

6: The Catchers

Are they the scourge of humanity, or humanity’s last hope?

7: Bodies in Motion

Out of body experiences go out of control.

8: The Last Romanian Frogman

Are there non-humans among us? The UN wants to know.

Other Books by J E Murphy

A Little Song a Little Dance

(A Little Seltzer Down the Pants)

The calf will bound and the pony prance,

And the night bird sing for a lover's glance.

For all of life is song and dance,

And naught to do but sing and dance.

If we are only here by chance,

Then sing your song and dance your dance.

But if by purpose we advance,

That purpose must be song and dance.

Life’s a full and grand romance,

But empty without song and dance.

The world's a very large expanse --

A stage where we can sing and dance.

So if you would your life enhance,

Then sing your song and dance your dance.

For life's a never-ending trance,

Full of beauty, song, and dance.

And if your friends should look askance,

Then do not pose an awkward stance,

But take their hands and make them dance.

And if they still won’t take a chance,

Then try some seltzer down their pants.

You Don’t Know Jack

NOTHING CAN KILL YOU is what the sign said inside the hangar where Jack McClatchy went to work every day. It was a joke of sorts, but it was also a real warning to the people who worked in this hanger and the other hangers spaced around this large tract of open land. The employees here worked with nothing every day, large quantities of nothing.

Around the middle of the twenty-first century, chemical engineers had discovered, in theory, how to fashion single molecules of carbon in almost unlimited sizes. These hypothetical molecules would hold together best when they were in spherical shape, and the larger ones would only be able to hold their integrity when compressed by an external pressure greater than the internal pressure of the sphere thus created. Under these special conditions, spheres hundreds of feet across could theoretically be constructed with outer shells that were remarkably thin, light, and strong. For most industries, a giant thin-shelled sphere that could only have nothing, or next to nothing, inside it, was a useless novelty. But there was one industry, a new industry, yet an old one, that immediately saw a use for a giant vacuum sphere. The volume of a sphere increases as a cube of the radius, but the surface area only increases as a square of the radius. This meant that as the size of a sphere grew larger, the weight of the air displaced by it, would eventually be greater than the weight of the shell, tons greater, hundreds of tons greater. The airship industry had been reborn by this single idea.

Relatively small at first, the size of a ball bearing, and then a marble, the size of the molecules in the laboratories began to grow under the careful hands of the engineers hired by the newly-formed Nihilair Corporation.

Jack, who had been called a nihilarian (one who does useless work) by his father, was immediately attracted to the company name when he saw it in the help-wanted pages. Being a starving artist by both training and profession, with bills to pay, and a new baby on the way, Jack needed income. Having skills in welding, construction, and the handling of various tools, and with a resume of art that showed an imaginative, creative, and lively mind, Jack was hired by Nihilair as one of the ground crew. Jack had then proceeded to help build the gigantic metal frames that held the incubators for the great spheres. Because of his competence and reliability, Jack was soon promoted to being a sphere transport specialist, or ball wrangler. Jack was one of a team of three, whose job was to move completed vacuum spheres from the giant hanger where they were created, to the even larger hanger where a gigantic dirigible was being built.

Working like this had not been Jack’s plan for his life. He had wanted to become a great artist, a sculptor, someday to be famous, immortalized for some great artistic statement about life, humanity, and the universe. Jack thought of himself as a creative person with unexplored potential, not your every day laborer for wages. However, this job had some attractive aspects. Among other things, dress was casual. On warm days, Jack often wore jeans and a T-shirt. On the day of the event, Jack was wearing his favorite T-shirt, on the front of which was the printed message: YOU DON’T KNOW JACK.

There was a story behind the shirt—a memory that Jack often recalled as he came to enjoy his work at Nihilair. It was his wife who had shown him the help-wanted ad for Nihilair. Jack, seeing only that she was handing him the jobs section of the newspaper, threw the paper down without reading the ad she had circled. He knew this was her silent way of telling him that he needed to find a real job—one that produced income, and he was hurt.

I don’t need a job, he had said. I don’t want a job. I want to be an artist. I want to make great art!

You didn’t even look at the ad, she said. You know we can’t live forever on my salary. We talked about having kids. Remember?

I know I will never create great art while working for the man.

No, you don’t. Her voice was getting louder. You don’t know that! You don’t know anything about life. Your mind is shut to possibilities.

I know. . .

No! You don’t! You don’t know jack! She ran out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

Stunned, Jack picked up the jobs section and read the ad she had circled. He had to admit, there was something fascinating about the work description. He went out in the yard and found his wife crying against an oak tree.

I think you are right, he said, putting his arms around her from behind. Life is a river, and we have to recognize the right currents when we find them. I liked the job you found. I am going to go tomorrow to apply for it.

She turned around in his arms and hugged him back. After she quit crying, she told him, I’m pregnant.

Why didn’t you say so before?

I didn’t want you to blame the baby for having to work at a common job. I know how important your art is to you.

Unable to find words, he simply held her.

Silly, isn’t it, she laughed, to tell someone named Jack that he doesn’t know jack.

I guess you had other things on your mind. And anyway, maybe you were right. Maybe I don’t know myself. Maybe none of us really know ourselves.

A few days later she brought him the shirt and suggested they name the baby Jack or Jacqueline.

Jack discovered many reasons to like his new job. Nothing like this had ever been done before. The Nihilair Corporation would change life on earth with the dirigible they were building, the first of many planned. The dirigible would be able to travel anywhere on earth, point to point, carrying unbelievable tonnage, and be able to ascend or descend simply by increasing or decreasing the amount of vacuum in its spheres. Working here challenged his creativity in solving problem after problem that had never before existed as problems. Helping to build this great dirigible was like contributing to the creation of great art. The carbon spheres, themselves, were like works of art as well. Not black, like the carbon in charcoal, but iridescently clear, like the carbon in diamonds, refracting shards of brilliant colors. It was easy to think of them as spheres made of diamonds, spheres two-hundred feet tall. Their immense size was the reason for the sign: NOTHING CAN KILL YOU. For one thing, the spheres, even though buoyed up by the weight of the air around them, had quite a large mass, and to be caught between a moving sphere and any immovable object would be like an ant being caught between a shoe and a sidewalk. For another thing, the shell of the sphere was relatively fragile, like the shell of an egg, immensely strong against dispersed pressure, yet susceptible to sudden shock. Nobody was exactly sure what would happen if it lost its integrity. Based on experiments with much smaller spheres, the engineers conjectured that the sphere, if damaged, would immediately collapse into its own vacuum, and the violent inrush of nearly three-hundred-and-forty-thousand pounds of air would result in the violent death of anyone in the vicinity. The shell could have been made thicker and stronger, but it would have increased the weight of the sphere to the point that the lesser amount of cargo it could lift would make the whole project economically unfeasible.

This sphere was ready to be moved. A net of woven purple straps had been maneuvered over it, and enough air had been pumped out of it to give it the proper buoyancy. No steel cables were used to move the spheres because of the risk of damage, but ropes designed to pull great ships into harbor connected the netting to two large front-loader tractors. There should have been three tractors, but one of them had sprung a hydraulic leak that morning. As the third tractor had only been built into the plan as a safety factor, and deadlines needed to be met, a little air was let back into the sphere to make it slightly less buoyant, and the transfer of the sphere was given the go-ahead by management.

It was a still day, as had been forecast, still and hot. The front buckets of the tractors had been attached to the ropes, which were attached to the netting, which wrapped around the glittering, refractive sphere. The buckets were lowered slightly to relieve pressure on the incubator and frame, which were then removed to the side, so that all of the sphere’s buoyancy was now held by two tractors. The tractors then proceeded out the hanger door, the other tractor leading, and Jack swinging his tractor around to the rear to balance the distribution of weight. Jack read again the warning sign, NOTHING CAN KILL YOU. Jack smiled at the joke. He had never thought much about death. Thinking about a time when there would be no thinking at all seemed paradoxical. And at the center of the paradox was a vortex into which Jack did not wish to enter.

As Jack’s tractor approached the hangar doors, the sphere, already out in the open air, caught an unexpected downdraft and began slowly to swing down toward the forward tractor. Everyone held their breaths, everyone except the operator of the forward tractor, who immediately began to speed out of the way of the sphere, which was descending upon him like another planet. If the sphere touched down, the disaster would probably be fatal for someone, but if the other driver was caught directly beneath, fatality for him would be certain.

The downward momentum of the sphere slowed and then stopped, and then gradually turned into upward momentum. On its way down, with the seeming intent of crushing the forward driver, the sphere had wrapped its hawsers around the treads of the forward tractor, which had damaged them severely in the driver’s rush to escape. Now, with the sphere bounding upwards, the ropes grew taught, bounced the forward tractor off the tarmac, and then snapped. Now, the only tractor holding the sphere to the earth was Jack’s, and it was not enough. The ropes lost their slack and then pulled the tractor the remaining way out the hanger door, lifting it as it did, so that it barely missed the roof of the hanger on its way out.

Jack could not wrap his head around what was happening. It had all happened so fast. It was like a dream. It was impossible. He was airborne. He should jump, he thought. But by the time he thought it, he was over the height of the hanger, nearly three hundred feet in the air. His seatbelt held him in his seat as he craned his head around to look down. On the tarmac, people were running in all directions, some stopping to look up at him, while others ran to help the other driver, who was lying prone upon the concrete. Trucks and fire engines were coming from the distance.

His walkie-talkie crackled, Jack, can you hear me? Are you alright?

Jesus, Sam. What do I do now? What’s the plan for this situation?

We’re working on it.

Working on it?! Jesus Christ! You don’t have a plan?

Don’t worry. We’ll think of something. Our best minds are on it. Your walkie-talkie is almost out of range. Hang in there. We’re sending help.

Good God, almighty, son of a bitch, Jack yelled into the walkie-talkie. Get me a frigging helicopter! But there was no answer.

The sphere continued to drag Jack spaceward, as if the vacuum it contained longed to return to its native void. Jack could no longer tell what was going on at the hangers, as not only had the height become too great, but the sphere had drifted in a slight upper-level breeze. It seemed as if he was rising more slowly, but it was difficult to tell. He knew the apparent proportional shrinking of the earth would seem to diminish with distance. But he also knew that there would probably be a point where the sphere could not lift the tractor any higher because of lessened density of the atmosphere. He just didn’t know where that might be, but it would probably be too damn cold. He took a sighting of the horizon over a part of the tractor frame. They were still rising.

Please, God, or universe, or whoever is listening, he thought. Get me out of this. It isn’t right. I don’t deserve this. I have a wife, and a baby coming. They don’t deserve this. Who is going to take care of them? You, God? Or me? Get me down from here, and I will do my part. Hell, I’ll build a new Sistine Chapel. Jesus Christ!

He heard the sound of a helicopter; they had taken his suggestion. Thank you, Jesus. He was starting to get really cold in his thin summer clothing.

His walkie-talkie crackled again. Jack McClatchy, if you can read me, we have come to take you home.

Thank you, thank you. I am going to name all my children after you.

We have to act fast. In a few minutes, you will be higher than we can hover. We can’t get over you because of the big balloon thing, so we are going to fire a grappling hook into the ropes close to you. You will need to get into the attached harness, cut the grappling hook free, and then jump out into the air. There is a knife attached to the harness. Can you do it?

Damn right, I can do it.

OK. Get prepared to duck if this hook comes toward you, or you won’t be worth rescuing.

OK. Let’s do it.

He watched the helicopter as it hovered about a hundred feet out from him. He saw the four-pronged hook hurtle toward him with rope attached. It fell short and swung back under the helicopter. They reeled it in and moved the helicopter slightly closer.

They told us not to crack that ball, the walkie-talkie said, or it would kill us all. We are going to try again.

The helicopter was in danger now of contacting the sphere’s webbing with its blades, but he knew these guys would take it to the last inch to try to save someone. They fired again, and this time, the hooks snagged the webbing about half-way between him and the sphere. He would have to climb for it.

We’ve got to cut the rope, the walkie-talkie said. We can’t retrieve the hook.

No! I am going to climb up to it!

Hurry. We are running out of altitude.

If I don’t make it, tell my wife I love her.

Damn it! Get moving!

Jack undid his seat belt and hurriedly climbed over the steering-wheel, through the roll-bar frame of the tractor, and out onto its vertical hood. He found few handholds or footholds, but finally grasped the hawser in his hand. He was panting from the exertion and the altitude, but in desperation, he began to climb, hand over hand until he reached the webbing. His heart was already hammering in his chest, but here the climbing was a little easier because he could use his feet and legs. The helicopter was still out there waiting for him, but it looked as if it was beginning to tilt. He tried to climb faster, but the cold was stiffening his hands, and the lack of sufficient oxygen was exhausting him. Finally, just a few more feet to the hook and the harness. The helicopter was tilting more severely now, and just as he reached the hook, it turned fully on its side. A hand reached out the side door and cut the rope. Jack watched in dismay as the helicopter swooped away, righted itself, and dropped to a manageable altitude. It hung there for a while, watching him in silence, growing smaller as he continued to rise.

His tears felt warm on his cold skin, but they rapidly cooled. Soon they would freeze. He shivered uncontrollably. He shivered from the cold, and perhaps from something else. It would soon be over. All his dreams, all his plans, all his visions for the future, all the laughs, all the dancing, and loving. He would never see his child grow up, go to college, find a husband or wife, have children, his grandchildren. There would be no artistic immortality for him. Our lives are stories we write ourselves, he had often thought, but his story would be a joke. The first man in space in a humorous T-shirt. Life is a story we write ourselves, and then, like the pages of a book, we fade away, and are heard from no more. Like the paper in a book, we are torn, or we burn, or we are eaten by worms, or we molder, unread. But, he thought, if the story is a good one, it will outlive the paper. This was no way to die, drooped over the webbing, his tears frozen on his face. His hands were aching from the cold. Soon enough the pain would quit. His arms and legs were stiffening, and soon would cease to function. His heart would soon freeze, and then his brain, and then his dreams. Soon time itself would freeze for him. He would never make great art. He would never make the universal statement of truth that all would remember. His life had come to nothing as he hung, futile and pointless, beneath the giant sphere. He looked out upon the beautiful blue sphere below. He looked up at the beautiful iridescent one above, struggling to reach the boundless ocean of space, now his destination as well. He looked at his T-shirt and smiled grimly at the message. He was halfway up the webbing already. Why stop here? There was still something he could do.

Using one hand against the other, he loosened his frozen fingers from around the webbing and began to climb again. Slowly and painfully, his teeth clenched in pain, he pulled himself up from one strap to the next, using his stiffening arms instead of his already frozen hands, not wanting to pause to catch his breath, for soon, the air would be too thin to breathe at all, and soon his arms and legs would be too cold to move. Somewhere