I Am A Nucleus
By Stephen Barr
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I Am A Nucleus - Stephen Barr
I AM A NUCLEUS
Stephen Barr
JOVIAN PRESS
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Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Barr
Interior design by Pronoun
Distribution by Pronoun
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I am a Nucleus
I AM A NUCLEUS
WHEN I GOT HOME from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.
What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I’ve vacuumed the carpet, I’ve dusted and I’ve straightened the cushions.... Ah! The ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the place looked wife-deserted.
It had been a bad day; I had forgotten to wind the alarm clock, so I’d had to hurry to make a story conference at one of the TV studios I write for. I didn’t notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost tropical downpour. I would have turned back, but a taxi came up and a woman got out, so I dashed through the rain and got in.
Madison and Fifty-fourth,
I said.
Right,
said the driver, and I heard the starter grind, and then go on grinding. After some futile efforts, he turned to me. Sorry, Mac. You’ll have to find another cab. Good hunting.
If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform, just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain had stopped when I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington.
As I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular, a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hard-packed clay. While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size of an old-fashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight, and then his chattering drill hit it.
There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the moment of