gone out and bought upthe whole supply of picture postcards at the 88-Cent Store, $14.22 worth of postcards, and he’d already started writing a few. Andrea McKenzie, sophomore at Happiton High, said she was really worried and had had nightmares about the gas, but her parents told her not to worry, things had a way of working out. Andrea said maybe her parents weren’t taking it so seriously because they were a generation older and didn’t have as long to look forward to anyway. She said she was spending an hour each day writing postcards. That came to 15 or 16 cards each day. Hank Hoople, a janitor at Happiton High, sounded rather glum: “ It’s all fate. If the bullet has your name on it, it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not.” Many other citizens voiced concern and even alarm about the recent development. But some voiced rather different feelings. Ned Furdy, who as far as anyone could tell didn’t do much other than hang around Simpson’s bar all day (and most of the night) and buttonhole anyone he could, said, “ Yeah, it ’s a problem, all right, but I don’t know nothin’ about gas and statistics and such. It should all be left to the mayor and the Town Council, to take care of. They know what they're doin ’ . Meanwhile, eat, drink, and be merry!” And Lulu Smyth, 77-year-old proprietor of Lulu’s Thread ‘N Needles Shop, said “ I think it’s all a ruckus in a teapot, in my opinion. Far as I’m concerned, I’m gonna keep on sellin’ thread ‘n needles, and playin’ gin rummy every third Wednesday.” Doc Hazelthorn came back from his fishing weekend at Lazy Lake, he had some surprising news to report. “ Seems there’s a demon left a similar set-up in the church steeple down in Dwaynesville,” he said. (Dwaynesville was the next town down the road, and the arch-rival of Happiton High in football.) “ The Dwaynesville demon isn’t threatening them with gas, but with radioactive water. Takes a little longer to die, but it’s just as bad. And I hear tell there’s demon with a subterranean volcano up at New Athens.” (New Athens was the larger town twenty miles up the Cornyawl from Dwaynesville, and the regional center of commerce.) A lot of people were clearly quite alarmed by all this, and there was plenty of arguing on the streets about how it had all happened without anyone knowing. One thing that was pretty universally agreed on was that a commission should be set up as soon as possible, charged from here on out with keeping close tabs on all subterranean activity within the city limits, so that this sort of outrage could never happen again. It appeared probable that Curt Dempster, who was the moving force behind this idea, would be appointed its first head. Ed Thurston (Wally’s father) proposed to the Jaycees (of which he was a member in good standing) that they donate $1,000 to support a postcard-writing campaign by town kids. But Enoch Swale, owner of Swale’s Pharmacy and the Sleepgood Motel, protested. He had never liked Ed much, and said Ed was proposing it simply because his son would gain status that way. (It was true that Wally had recruited a few kids and that they spent an hour each afternoon after school writing cards: There had been a small article in the paper about it once.) After considerable debate, Ed’s motion was narrowly defeated. Enoch had a lot of friends on the City Council. Nellie Doobar, the math teacher at High, was about the only one who checked out the Demon’s math. “Seems right to me,” she said to the reporter who called her about it. But this set her to thinking about a few things. In an hour or two, she called back the paper and said, “ I figured something out. Right now, the clock is still ringing very close to once every hour. Now there are about 720 hours per month, and so that means there are 720 chances each month for the gas to get out. Since each chance is 1 in 100,000, it turns out that each month, there’s a bit less than a 1-in-100 chance that Happiton will get gassed. At that rate, there’s about 11 chances in 12 that Happiton will make it through each year. That may sound pretty good, but the chances we’ ll make it through any 8-year period are almost exactly 50-50, exactly the same as tossing a coin. So we can’t really count on very many years. . . . ” This made big headlines in the next afternoon’s Eagle-Telephone—in fact, even bigger than the plans for the County Fair! Some folks started calling up Mrs. Doobar anonymously and telling her she’d better watch out what she was saying if she didn’t want to wind up with a puffy face or a fat lip. Seems like they couldn’t quite keep it straight that Mrs. Doobar wasn’t the one who’d set the thing up in the first place. After a few days, though, the nasty calls died down pretty much. Then Mrs. Doobar called up the paper again and Each month there’s a bit less than a 1-in-100 chance that Happiton will get gassed. The chances we’ll make it through any 8-year period are almost exactly 50-50, exactly the same as tossing a coin. told the reporter, “ I’ve been calculating a bit more here, and I’ve come up with the following, and they’re facts every last one of them. If all 20,000 of us were to spend half an hour a day writing postcards to the Demon, tha t would amount to 160,000 postcards a day, and just as the Demon said, the bell would ring pretty near every five hours instead of every hour, and that would mean that the chances of us getting wiped out each month would go down considerable. In fact, there would only be about 1 chance in 700 that we’d go down the tubes in any given month, and only about a chance in 60 that we’d get zapped each year, Now I’d say that’s a darn sight better than 1 chance in 12 per year, which is what it is if we don’t write any postcards (as is more or less the case now, except for Wally Thurston and Andrea McKenzie and a few other kids I heard of). And for every 8- year period, we’d only be running a 13 percent risk instead of a 50 percent risk.” “That sounds pretty good,” said .the reporter cheerfully. “Well,” replied Mrs. Doobar, “ it’s not too bad, but we can get a whole lot better by doublin’ the number of postcards.” “ How’s that, Mrs. Doobar?” asked the reporter. “Wouldn’t it just get twice as good?” “ No, you see, i t ’s an exponential curve,” said Mrs. Doobar, “which means that if you double N, you square X.” “ That’s Greek to me,” quipped the reporter. “N is the number of postcards and X is the time between rings,” she replied quite patiently. “ It we all write a half hour a day, X is 5 hours. But that means that if we all write a whole hour a day, like Andrea McKenzie in my algebra class, X jumps up to 25 hours, meaning that the clock would ring only about once a day, and obviously, that would reduce the danger a lot. Chances are, hundreds of years would pass before five 7’s would turn up together on those infernal dice. Seems to me that under those circumstances, we rfould pretty much live our lives without worrying about the gas at all. And that’s for writing about an hour a day, each one of us.” The reporter wanted some more figures de ta iling how much d if fe ren t amounts of postcard-writing by the populace would pay off, so Mrs. Doobar obliged by going back and doing some more figuring. She figured out that if 10,000 people—half the population of Happiton—did 2 hours a day for the year, they could get the same result—one ring every 25 hours. If only 5,000 people spent 2 hours a day, or if 10,000 people spent one hour a day, then it would go back to one ring every 5 hours (still a lot safer than one every hour). Or, still another way of looking at it, if just 1250 of them worked full-time (8 hours a day), they could achieve the same thing. “What about if we all pitch in and do 4 minutes a day, Mrs. Doobar?” asked the reporter. “ Fact is, ‘twouldn’t be worth a damn thing! (Pardon my French.)” she replied. “N is 20,000 that way, and even tnougn that sounds pretty big, X works out to be just 1.2, meaning one ring every 1.2 hours, or 72 minutes. That way, we still have about a chance of 1 in 166 every month of getting wiped out, and 1 in 14 every year of getting it. Now that’s real scary, in my book. Writing cards only starts making a noticeable difference at about 15 minutes a day per person.” J ^ y this time, several weeks had passed, and summer was getting into full swing. The County Fair was buzzing with activity, and each evening after folks came home, they could see loads of fireflies flickering around the trees in their yards. Evenings were peaceful and relaxed. Doc Hazelthorn was playing golf every weekend, and his scores were getting down into the low 90’s. He was feeling pretty good. Once in a while he remembered the Demon, especially when he walked downtown and passed the courthouse tower, and every so often he would shudder. But he wasn’t sure what he and the City Council could do about it. The Demon and the gas still made for interesting talk, but were no longer such big news. Mrs. Doobar’s latest revelations made the paper, but were relegated this time to the second section, two pages before the comics, right next to the d a i ly ho roscope co lum n . And rea McKenzie read the article avidly, and showed it to a lot of her school friends, but to her surprise, it didn’t seem to stir up much interest in them. At first, her best friend Kathi Hamilton, a very bright girl who had plans to go to State and major in history, enthusiastically joined Andrea and wrote quite a few cards each day. But after a few days, Kathi’s enthusiasm began to wane. “ What’s the point, Andrea?” Kathi asked. “A handful of postcards from me isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference. Didn’t you read Mrs. Doobar's article? There have got to be 160,000 a day to make a big difference.” “That’s just the point, Kath!” replied Andrea exasperatedly. “ If you and everyone else will just do your part, we’ ll reach that number—but you can’t cop out!” Kathi didn’t see the logic,and spent most of her time doing her homework for the summer school course in World History she was taking. After all, how cou ld she get into State if she flunked World History? A n d r e a j u s t c o u ld n ’ t figu re ou t how come Kathi, of all people, so interested in history and the flow of time and w o r ld e v e n ts , could not see her own l i fe be ing touched by such factors, so she asked Kathi, “ How do you know there will be any you left to go to State, if you don’t write postcards? Each year, there’s a 1- in-12 chance of you and me and all of us being wiped out! Don’t you even want to work against that? If people would just care, they could change things! An hour a day! Half an hour a day! Fifteen minutes a day!” “Oh, come on, Andrea!” said Kathi an- noyedly, “ Be realistic.” “ Darn it all, I ’m the one who’s being realistic,” said Andrea. “ If you don’t help out, your’ re adding to the burden of someone else.” “ For Pete’s sake, Andrea,” Kathi protested angrily, “ I’m not adding to anyone else’s burden. Everyone can help out as much as they want, and no one’s obliged to do anything at all. Sure, I’d like it if everyone were helping, but you can see for yourself, practically nobody is. So I’m not going to waste my time. I need to pass World History.” And sure enough, Andrea had to do no more than listen each hour, right one the hour, to hear that bell ring to realize that nobody was doing much. It once had sounded so pleasant and reassuring, and now it sounded creepy and ominous to her, just like the fireflies and the barbecues. Those fireflies and barbecues really bugged Andrea, because they seemed so normal, so much like any other summer—only this summer was not like any other summer. Yet nobody seemed to realize that. Or rather, there Clinton St. Quarterly 45
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