So, guys, this is how I think it happened: Zeus was futzing around in the lab he'd set up in the backyard shed, mixing, measuring, weighing... Hey, I'm the one postulating this Zeus guy; I can make him a geek if I want to!
Anyhow, he was pouring a little of this into a little of that and his hand shook. Three extra drops of that, and Bang! Big Bang, in fact. Good thing deities are pretty near indestructible; he was blown to kingdom come. Took him a long time to get back. Couple billion years.
Okay, he gets home and finds the whole back yard empty, except for this big cold ball where the shed used to be. Close up, he could see it was full of little warm balls, all spinning round the centre. He touched one with a blade of grass; it fell out of its circuit and crashed into another one. Made a mini-explosion. Cool.
All the windows on the back side of the house were gone, and the back door hung off its hinges. Zeus' folks had moved into an apartment in town. There was a sign: For Sale (as Land). Zeus took the sign down and threw it in the trash. He stapled plastic over the windows of the master bedroom and moved his stuff up there. He could watch the bubble, as he called it, from the window.
It was still growing. It had swallowed the rosebush that used to grow behind the shed already. And it was even with the top of the second-story windows.
Zeus got his old job back, stocking shelves at the hardware store. With his first paycheck, he bought himself a good pair of binoculars and a camera. He took the binoculars out to the back yard and examined the little warm balls with them. There were thousands of them, millions. Billions, he realized once he had counted the ones in a four-inch cube, and done the math.
They were all different. Some had a bluish light, others were almost pure red. They were different sizes, too. And with the binoculars he could see on the biggest ones what looked like tiny flames. He spent every evening after work watching his bubble, eating cold take-out pizza and the fruit his Mom insisted on bringing him. He took some really cool pictures.
He needed something better than binoculars, though. Something like a telescope, but for short distances. A microscope aimed several feet away. He got on the internet and checked out equipment; the prices were scary. He stopped eating pizza and wasted some time cooking, to save money. He even did some overtime at the store, although he hated to be away from the bubble that long. The rainy weather started, and he put up a tarp to protect himself, then finally built a tiny look-out post. On wheels, so it could be moved back; the bubble was still growing, although more slowly, now.
And he got his tele-microscope. He put it together from parts he had ordered; lenses and tubes and adjusting knobs. It worked; now he could see that the little balls in his bubble had other, smaller balls spinning around them, like electrons around a nucleus. Everything very tidy, nothing bumping into anything else, except when he tampered with them by putting a tape measure into the bubble, or when a leg of his tripod accidentally poked it. Then fragments flew off in several directons, blowing up when they hit something. The explosions looked really neat, and he started a few just to get pictures of them.
His friends went off to college. Most of them forgot to say goodbye. He didn't notice anyways. His Mom started to nag at him; "Zeus, when are you going to stop playing with that thing and get on with your life?" she would say every time she came to pick up his laundry.
"I'm fine, Mom, I'm doing what I want to do. I'm happy."
But she wouldn't give up; always going on about Tom or Bob or Dylan, who had just: (pick one) got a great job, got a raise, got A's in their first assignment, gotten married. At least she also brought food as an excuse to come over, so Zeus didn't have to spend so much time in the kitchen. Sometimes she had a girl with her; "Zeus, this is Kathy. She wanted to come and see your bubble."
But they always asked stupid questions, like, "Is it dangerous?" and Zeus learned to ignore them.
More billions of years went by. Winter came, and Zeus set up his observation post in the bedroom, where it was warm. He sat up all night through a snowstorm, watching the snowflakes with a spotlight he rigged up on his window sill. When they fell on the bubble, they disappeared; they didn't melt, or run off the outside, or leave a puddle at the bottom of the bubble; they were just there, floating downwards, and then gone. Nowhere. In the morning, he saw that the bubble had grown noticeably overnight. It had swallowed up one of the trash cans at the end of the driveway; half the lid was left, making a lump under the snow at the edge of the bubble. Zeus pushed it in after the rest, which set off a wicked series of explosions.
This was a Friday morning; Zeus spent the evening and the entire weekend feeding the bubble. Snowballs, which ceased to exist. Dead flowerheads from the hydrangea; ditto. The contents of the remaining trash can. Something fuzzy from the fridge; probably that casserole his Mom had brought over a couple of weeks before. A couple of sticks of firewood. Everything disappeared, as if it had never been.
There was one exception; as long as Zeus held onto anything, it stayed put. And knocked against clumps of stuff in the bubble. And caused havoc; flashes of light and flying fragments and collisions. When he let go of the intruding object, it was gone. As if he was somehow in sync with the bubble, or maybe everything else was in sync and he was out. He poked a fingertip inside, cautiously. It was cold in there, colder than the snowballs he had been making, cold enough to give him frostbite. The fingertip was pink when he brought it back, but none of it was missing. He jabbed his whole hand into the bubble and grabbed one of the little balls; it was warm to the touch and tickled his palm. He pulled it out and his hand was suddenly empty.
His parents dropped by Sunday afternoon. They found Zeus in the back porch, wrestling with the saggy sofa that had been mildewing in the basement for years. "What are you doing?" his Dad asked, as if it weren't obvious.
"Hi, Dad, hi, Mom. Help me get this thing through the door, will you, Dad?'" And when they had carried it down the steps and across the yard, he added, "Now watch." He pushed the end of the sofa into the bubble. The arm disappeared. His Mom gasped. He pulled the sofa back so his folks could examine it; the end was sliced off cleanly, as if by a curved razor. He pushed it back into the bubble again; half of the first cushion vanished. Push, push, push; each push another bite, until all that was left in Zeus' hands was a chunk of armrest. He stood back and tossed it high over the bubble. It fell and was no more.
"Cool, huh?" he said.
His mother said nothing; she stood there, ankle deep in snow, with her hand over her mouth, looking helplessly at her husband. Who seemed to be struggling with his temper. His ears were red.
"Cool?" he echoed. "Cool? This foolishness has gone too far! That thing is dangerous! We could be sued! Get rid of it!"
"How, Dad?"
"I don't know. Bulldoze it. Or... Call somebody. Call... Somebody has to know... What have you got us into?" He stared at the grassy tracks the sofa had dug in the snow, then stepped back, pointing. "The thing is growing! At least a foot, just while we've been standing here!"
"Yeah, it does that every time I put something into it. Speeds up, I mean; it's always growing, but slowly."
"You gotta stop it! Look, it's almost to the back fence!"
They argued for hours. None of them could think of anything they could do to the bubble that wouldn't cause it to grow even faster. Zeus' Dad suggested bringing in the government, but Zeus and his mother convinced him that they would probably make things worse. Besides, they would confiscate the house and pay next to nothing for it.
In the end, Zeus agreed to put up a chain link fence high enough to keep out any kids and snug enough at the bottom to discourage dogs. And he would stop feeding the damn thing. And try to figure out some way to destroy it.
Well, he fulfilled the first two terms, but he wasn't really motivated to get rid of his bubble. He had ordered new lenses, stronger ones, and they arrived the day he finished with the fence; he had to get his money's worth.
With better equipment, he could see that the bright balls were of different shapes; some flat, some pinwheeled, some more like a fried egg. And they were changing; when he picked one and watched it over a period of time, it grew or shrunk, changed texture, changed colour. He didn't tamper with the bubble any more, but there was still plenty of activity. He had to buy a file cabinet to store all his photos.
Spring came, then summer. His Mom continued to come over every few days, bringing food and clean clothes, sometimes another girl. She came in the front door of the house now, avoiding the back yard and the bubble. She never mentioned it unless she had a girl with her: "Now you two run out and look at Zeus' bubble while I do up this spot of dishes."
"Give it up, Mom," Zeus said on several occasions.
"What?" She looked at him, all innocence. Zeus knew that look; it was the same one he felt on his face when his Dad asked him how soon he would find a way to demolish the bubble.
The girls were all alike. "Oooh!" they said; "Is it dangerous?" And, "Why is it behind a fence, then?"
But towards the end of the summer, his Mom brought a girl who was different. She asked the right questions, some Zeus had not even thought about. "What temperature is it?" "What are the lights made of?" and, "Would it swallow my finger if I'm holding your hand?" It didn't. Her name was Allie.
Allie came back the next day with a stack of library books; spectroscopic analysis, electronics, catalogs. They pored over them together and Zeus made another shopping list. He needed prisms and a better camera and something to measure radiation. They ended up choosing one of those treasure finders; Allie said she could convince an uncle to give them his old short-wave radio, besides.
The fall rains came again, and Allie helped Zeus put up a tarp to keep water out of the bubble so that it wouldn't grow too fast. It broke through the fence in two places, anyhow, and the two of them extended the fence one metre on those sides. They got chillblains from leaning into the bubble to get clear pictures of individual lights. And the old short-wave began picking up scratchy sounds; Zeus taped hours of them and Allie listened to them at work.
They were married in mid-winter.
At the reception, his Mom said to them, "So I guess you'll be finding yourself a nice apartment in town, now."
"No, Mom," they said in unison. Zeus explained: "We have a lot of work to do on the bubble these days."
His mother huddled with Allie's, to plan strategy, but both mothers ended up shaking their heads; no use arguing with kids these days.
And that's how things stand today; Zeus and Allie bike to work together, bike back and spend the evenings examining spectra and listening to static on the short-wave. A few weeks back, Zeus thought he heard faint voices in the background; it almost sounded like someone was saying, "I love Lucy." He's hoping to pick it up again.
How will it end? Anybody's guess, but sooner or later, there will be a Zeus Junior lying in front of that short-wave, and Allie won't have time to read spectra. And not too long after that, she'll be wanting space in the back yard for a swing set and sand box. And Zeus will have to finally set his mind to discovering how to shut down his bubble.
Whether that is possible or not, I have no idea.
P.S. The usual heckler asks, "And this Zeus, where did He come from?" Simple: Aphrodite was poking around in Her lab in the basement, adding a pinch of this and a smidgen of that...
©Susannah Anderson, 1999