It was Sunday. Some religions view Sunday as a holy day. Many people consider Sunday a day of rest on which nobody should do anything but relax, watch sports, ride bicycles, bake muffins, or hurl wires with hooks at swimming fish.
For most Union members, Sunday was a time for important meetings that the Outsiders knew nothing about. For those in my Society, it was a time to watch these meetings closely. And for the Union members that I watched, Sundays required raincoats.
Although most of Lawnville, New Jersey, was experiencing a beautiful May day, around the corner from Simon Bloom’s house it was another matter entirely. It was raining there on quiet, dead-end Van Silas Way. Raining hard. The expression “cats and dogs” didn’t cover it; “tigers and wolves” was more accurate. The downpour was so fierce that the residents of Van Silas Way huddled in their nice, dry houses, unwilling to leave or even look out their windows.
In the middle of the soaking-wet road, a glowing blue dot appeared. The dot stretched into a ten-foot-long line, which grew upward, silently forming a ten-foot-high wall. Though ten feet high and ten feet wide, the wall was paper thin; if viewed from the side, it would be nearly invisible. (Of course, nobody could see much with that amount of rain anyway, but I thought I’d mention it.)
The wall was a type of door, known as a Gateway, which many in the Union use for traveling distances in seconds without having to deal with speeding tickets, shuttle launches, or airplane food.
One by one, a group of people stepped out of the glowing blue Gateway and into the soaked street. Their hooded raincoats shielded them from the rain, but they were still cold and damp as they trudged along the water-drenched street. One chewed delicious strawberry gum, but the rain washed it away when he tried blowing a bubble.
(I felt sorry for them…I was warm and dry and happily chewed my own gum. It was grape.)
As they reached the end of the street and stepped into Dunkerhook Woods, they sighed in relief. This was the sacred meeting place of their Order, and it was perfectly dry. Outside weather was not allowed in Dunkerhook Woods.
Clouds could hover outside and pout about it as much as they liked, but not a single drop of wet ever entered the area. You could ask why the forest didn’t simply dry up and die, but it would be a silly question. Any forest that was able to keep rain away could be trusted to have its own method of staying healthy.
Once the last person entered the woods, the glowing blue Gateway sank back into the ground, shrank into a line again, then a dot, and disappeared. The rain stopped, as if a faucet had been shut off; with the Gateway gone, it wasn’t needed.
As the raincoat-wearing people shuffled along the main pathway into the woods, the Breeze blew over them. It dried the moisture from the rain and soothed their jangled nerves, leaving them feeling wonderfully refreshed, even tingly. The people tossed back their hoods and savored the clean air.
No one noticed that one man, dressed in a faded tan hooded overcoat and walking with a cane, absently veered off the path. He stumbled around through the trees and shrubs as the others walked on. There was nobody else around him in the forest when he fell, but philosophers should note that he still made a sound. (It was a rather annoyed swearword, but it counted.)
That man’s name was Ralfagon Wintrofline.
The rest of the group followed the trail into a huge open space with many thick, smooth-topped tree stumps. The stumps were arranged so they faced a single, taller stump on the opposite side of the clearing. This was an important place for these people. Its official name was The Grand Meeting Place Where the Order Shall Convene, Contemplate, Converse, Control, and Sit on Tree Stumps, but most just called it the clearing.
Each person settled comfortably onto a stump. That might sound unlikely, given that tree stumps are made of wood and are thus normally hard, flat, and only good for giving out splinters, but these were no ordinary tree stumps. They were quite spongy and comfy, like sitting on a nicely padded chair. They didn’t recline or anything, but they were rather impressive for a forest.
It was several more moments before Ralfagon Wintrofline appeared. Actually, appeared is too dramatic a description: he slowly limped out of a cluster of bushes over to the tallest stump. He lowered himself carefully to his seat and then slumped forward.
As he pulled back his rain hood, he did not appear important, much less intimidating. His crinkled skin, unevenly cut gray hair, fuzzy gray eyebrows, and blurry gray eyes made him look confused. He slouched when he sat and stooped when he walked, using a scratched-up wooden cane with a shiny handle.
That cane (a gift from an old friend who no longer lived on the planet) was the first sign that Ralfagon was more than he seemed. The oval handle, made of a unique metal, contained a highly detailed—though minuscule—map of the Milky Way galaxy. It was accurate to the last moon, and whenever something in the galaxy changed, so did the handle.
Impressive or not, Ralfagon was the leader of this group. They were the Order of Physics, and he was known as their Keeper. And so Ralfagon Wintrofline, one of the most powerful men in the universe, had a meeting to begin. He cleared his throat, sat up straight, and stuck a finger in his ear.
The Order members waited while he rummaged around in there; he did this every Sunday. “Does anybody have a cotton swab?” he asked in a crackly voice. “The Breeze never dries the insides of my ears.” Almost everyone produced a swab, and he chose one. “Isn’t that rain wet?” he asked as he tended to his moist ear canal.
Nobody answered, but he didn’t notice. Ralfagon Wintrofline was known for his rhetorical questions.
“Much better,” he said after a moment. “Shall we proceed?” He paused, knowing there was something important he had to do…if he could only remember what. “Er, Eldonna, could you come here, please?”
Short, stout Eldonna Pombina walked over and whispered in his ear. “Here are your notes, sir,” she said as she handed him a handful of pages.
“Notes? Why would I need…Oh, of course. Thank you.”
Eldonna nodded, unbothered by his forgetfulness. Ralfagon Wintrofline was known as Professor Ralph Winter to his colleagues at nearby Milnes University, a small, charming university famed throughout all of north Jersey for its excellent vending machines. There, Eldonna Pombina called herself Donna Pom and worked as Professor Winter’s teaching assistant.
She handled most questions from students in Ralfagon’s physics classes. She also made sure he could find his classroom and, when the day was done, his way home.
Ralfagon turned and shuffled the notes until he found what he wanted. “Ah, yes. Right. Meeting. Very serious.” He looked up at the Order members. “And that’s why we’re here today, through the rain. I’ll see if I can put an end to that wretched downpour.”
Willoughby Wanderby thrust his hand up from his stump seat. He was a middle-size man of middling years with middle-of-the-road features, yet there was something hard about him. He had the sort of stern, forceful manner of a military commander, a world leader, or perhaps a gym teacher. “But Ralfagon, the rain has a purpose—it hides our comings and goings from Outsiders.”
Ralfagon nodded sagely. “Right. So. I’ll keep that going until we stop meeting then, yes? Good. Where was I? Ah, this meeting. I’m afraid it will be our last. Hmm, that takes care of the rain.”
The other members of the Order of Physics spent several minutes sputtering in shock while Ralfagon calmly swabbed his other ear. He found it very satisfying.