by Steve Reynolds

       Earlier that morning, two ducks had been holding a conversation on Professor Hawking’s farm. They were discussing the concept of “infinity,” which they had discovered in a book discarded on the floor of the barn.

       “It doesn’t say that THINGS last for infinity, just that INFINITY goes on forever,” said the second duck.

       “Well, if INFINITY goes on forever, but leaves everything else behind, don’t you think that’s rather silly?”

       “Maybe. But who are we to say what’s silly and what isn’t?”

       “Good point,” said the first duck as they both stopped to watch a cow dressed in a tutu leap out the window of the hayloft.

       “Full moon again?” asked the second duck.

       “Looks like it,” said the first.

       They both watched as the cow got a running start and hit the edge of the hayloft window rather gracefully for such a large animal, then saw it throw its legs out and begin a parabolic trajectory that would lead it to a spot just a bit to the left of a large amount of hay which the cow had laboriously piled in the barnyard below.

       “You know, the path through the air that she’s going to travel is what they call a ‘parabolic trajectory,’” said the first duck.

       “Oh yeah?” said the second. “Isn’t that where an object, let’s just use a large, bovine-type creature in this for-instance—starts moving away from a high gravitational field such as the Earth, then peaks at the top, turns and, gathering speed all the while, returns to the source of gravity?”

       “Yeah, that’s pretty much it, but it doesn’t land where it took off.”

       “Depends if they figured the parabola right to start with and put the hay at the end of the rainbow, so to speak. If you draw one on paper, it kind of looks like a rainbow, or an upside-down ‘u.’”

       They both looked briefly out to the meadow, where indeed, some of the ewes were trying in vain to stand on their heads. It didn’t look anything like the cow as it cascaded through the air, but it did add a certain rococo ambience to the rolling countryside.

       “You know they used parabolas to figure out the best way to shoot cannonballs at the enemy in the old days,” said the first duck.

       “Really?” asked the second duck. “Who was the enemy?”

       The first duck considered this, looked back down at the book and decided that the enemy must have been whoever was standing at the end of the parabola. Both ducks considered this for some while, marveling that a mathematical construct could not only tell you HOW to fire your cannonballs, but WHO to shoot them at.

       It was about this time that the goat walked in and asked the ducks in a conversational manner what they were up to. They responded that they were discussing infinity and asked the goat for his opinion. “Well,” said the goat, “I really can’t say much on that subject because we goats lack the mental firepower necessary to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. I mean, just look at what we eat. But, that said, I would tend to agree with Galileo, who stated that we cannot think properly about infinity with finite minds.”

       “Well, he’s got a point there,” said the first duck.

       They all thought about this for a moment while the goat chewed on something. It looked for a moment like the goat was going to add another comment when a small commotion came from the front of the barn. The goat and ducks turned to see Carlos, the farm-hand as he came in from the yard. All the animals hated Carlos and they let him know it whenever he came in. Of course, what they said was all in animal-talk, which Carlos didn’t understand, but the animals didn’t let that stop them.

       “Hey Carlos!” said the goat while pawing at a big fresh cow pie. “Eat this!”

       “Bite me!” barked the dog.

       “Hi! What’s your name?” asked the lamb, who was new.

       Carlos booted the animals aside to get to the tool bench.

       “Hey! Son of a bitch!” squealed the pig.

       “Hey, YOU watch YOUR mouth!” said the rooster to the first duck.

       “Fuck you,” said the second duck.

       “Pipe down, beakless. Don’t make me come over there!”

       “Oh, why don’t you go outside and sniff the crack of dawn, crow-boy?”

       “Bill me!” quipped the rooster, his feathers ruffled and his head turning from side to side in quick, petulant jerks.

       Things certainly would have gotten much worse if it hadn’t been for the fox, who had silently slipped into the barn during the commotion just after Carlos had left.

       “Well,” said the fox, his voice cutting through the din with the added element of surprise, “don’t we have a real barn-burner going on down here.”

       The animals stopped instantly to look up to the loft where the fox was sitting peacefully, staring down on the festivities below.

       “I really hate to interrupt this productive session,” said the fox, “but I think there’s something out in the yard that you ought to see.”

       The cow whispered to the mule, “Spinoza said, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’” The mule glanced back at the cow, raised an eyebrow and nodded his head knowingly while the mice squeaked heatedly that it was Nietszche, not Spinoza, and weren’t cows just the biggest, stupidest, ruminant animals that God had ever put on the face of the Earth?

       This probably would have started the ruckus up again if not for the cat, who merely glanced in the direction of the mice while slowly stretching her paws out in front of her, flexing her claws in and out several times to make her point.

       The animals turned their attention back to the fox and watched warily as he climbed down the ladder gracefully to land silently on the floor of the barn.

       “This way,” he said. “I’ll go first so you can keep your eyes on me.” It was a seemingly nice gesture, but of course, in reality, it made it more difficult for the ducks and chickens, since they had to walk forward while turning their heads sideways to watch the fox. The goat fought hard to keep from laughing and the mice thumbed their whiskers at the cow as they made their way into the yard.

       It was later said by some that the fox had tricked the other animals just to get what he wanted, but with each retelling of the story over the years, the accounts began to change until they were indistinguishable from a fairy tale. As told by the ducks, they were following their scientific instincts and made great inroads on the prevailing philosophy of the times. The story as passed down by the mice blamed the unfortunate events of the day on the stupidity of the cat, and the sheep—well, the sheep wrote it down in the annals of sheep history, but then left the annals out in the field. The next day it rained and all of sheep history was lost. From the surviving accounts as written by the cows, comes the rest of the story:

       “Oh my,” said the first duck.

       “My goodness,” said the second duck.

       Only after they got out to the yard and looked in the direction of the hay stack, did the ducks recall that even though they had SEEN the cow jump from the hay loft, they had never HEARD it land. And now, as they looked up again, they were somewhat astonished to see the bovine caught in a graceful pose—feet up, tutu pressed back, and tail out, yet it seemed to be stopped in mid-air. More than that, it seemed to have magically corrected its course and was now almost directly above the little haystack.

       “Well, I’ll say,” said the first duck. “This does seem to be a bit of a surprise.”

       “You’re telling me,” said the second duck. “Usually they don’t keep their form through the whole dive.”

       There was quite a bit of mumbling and hashing out of the evidence until the first duck replied, “Basically what we have here is the master fiddling around in the barnyard again with one of his experiments and this bovine decided to get in on the action.”

       “Yeah,” said the second duck. “They can be just the biggest, stupidest, ruminant animals that God ever put on the face of the Earth sometimes. You see, the cow has entered another, what they call, ‘frame of reference’ due to a high gravity field located nearby. I would say it’s probably located in that hay, wouldn’t you, Pervis?”

       “Definitely,” said the first duck. “It’s got to be one of the master’s ‘black haystacks’ that he’s so fond of these days.”

       “Black haystack?” asked the fox.

       “A black haystack is a haystack so dense with hay that it begins to collapse under its own weight,” said the second duck. “As it keeps falling in on itself, they just keep piling more and more hay on it until after a while it starts sucking in all the hay around it.”

       “And everything else that gets too close to it,” warned the first duck.

       “When does it stop?” asked the fox.

       “Oh, it doesn’t stop,” said the second duck. “That’s just the thing. It keeps going and going until the end of time.”

       “That would be when time stops,” said the first duck.

       “And time will never stop because that, my friends, is infinity,” said the second duck.

       The fox smiled the way foxes do when they have two ducks standing directly in front of them, but to be absolutely accurate, this fox was smiling the way foxes do when they have two ducks standing directly in front of them AND a cow hovering over a small bit of hay in the background.

       “And just what might ‘infinity’ be?” said the fox while he leisurely sharpened up one of his canine teeth with a handy nail file. “And why is that cow stuck in the middle of the air?”

       “Infinity,” chimed the first duck, “is a theoretical concept that we were discussing just before you arrived. Perhaps you could give us YOUR take on it.”

       “NOTHING is theoretical in a barnyard,” said the fox.

       “Well,” said the first duck, “to answer your second question first, that cow isn’t actually ‘stuck’, by HER standards. But by ours, I guess you could say she is.”

       “Right,” said the second duck. “You see, from her point of view, it takes only a couple of seconds for her to land in the black haystack and disappear. If she had time to turn her head and look at us, we would appear to move faster and faster.”

       “To the cow, our conversation here has all happened in a heartbeat,” said the first duck. “For her, it’s probably all over and what’s happening out here went by in just a second.”

       “Oh,” said the fox. “Then she already knows which one of you I’m going to eat.”

       The two ducks’ bills dropped open and their eyes went wide as they turned to stare at the fox while the other animals gasped at the audacity of the interloper in their midst.

       The fox laughed, raised his eyebrows, and leaned back on his haunches, laughing quietly. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I was only kidding.”

       “Eat ’em! Eat ’em!” squeaked the mice.

       “So,” repeated the fox, “tell me about this infinity thing.”

       “Well,” said the first duck, “think of the absolutely biggest thing you can think of and infinity is bigger than that.”

       “Yes,” said the second duck, “and it’s so big that we can’t even think about it. Think about THAT!”

       “Well,” said the fox, “if I can’t think about infinity, maybe I can understand it by thinking about its opposite.”

       “What do you mean?” asked the goat.

       “Look at it this way,” counselled the fox. “How many hippos do you see here in the barnyard?”

       All the animals looked around them for several seconds and those who could see the furthest looked clear out to the meadow and beyond. The animals huddled together with the ducks at the center for a while and much murmuring could be heard. After a bit, the huddle broke up and the ducks presented their summation to the fox.

       “None,” they said.

       “So you would agree, then, that there are NOT an infinite number of hippos here in the barnyard? For example, if there were only three, they would be quite apparent, but based on your definition of infinity, if there WERE an infinite number of hippos here, then there would be NOTHING BUT hippos all around us. Correct?”

       “But the absence of an infinite number of hippos doesn’t neccessarily mean that there isn’t a FINITE number of hippos around here SOMEWHERE, does it?”

       Mumbled “no’s” and “I don’t think so’s” emerged from the collective brainpower of the barnyard majority.

       “But if there are NO hippos here—I mean, absolutely NONE AT ALL—then wouldn’t we have discovered the exact opposite of an ‘infinite number of hippos’, my friends? By which we could begin to understand infinity by using NO HIPPOS as a yardstick? Think about it.”

       The animals pondered this. Those who had eyebrows raised them, while those who didn’t turned in circles. There was much murmuring and agitation until the fox spoke up again.

       “Now I’m not suggesting that we start out right here in this barnyard looking for hippos—”

       At this, the hippopotamus who was hiding underneath the tractor in the old wooden shed let out a sigh of relief. He had been there for over two years and it was imperative that he not be found before the time was right.

       “—but for the sake of certainty, don’t you think it would be wise to start checking the outer boundaries of the northeast meadow, slowly working our way back into the barnyard? Only after we have looked everywhere on the farm can we be sure there are no hippos, and only then can we begin to grasp a fundamental method of understanding infinity in all its wonder.”

       The animals nodded and snorted with a general murmur of agreement working its way through the crowd.

       The animals gasped at the thought.

       “Never!” cried the second duck.

       “No fucking way!” said the goat, spitting out an old soup can.

       “To the northeast meadow!” cried the first duck.

       “To the meadow!” cried the animals.

       And off they went.

       The fox, meanwhile, watched the animals go, then sauntered casually over to the hen house, cleaned out all the available eggs that he could find, killed and ate a couple of hens who came back to get their sweaters, then made off to the southwest with his clutch of goodies. On his way, he passed through the rolling hillside of the southwest meadow and came across a herd of hippopotami making their way toward the farm. The herd was very large, and in fact, covered the hillsides as far as he could see. He stopped to talk briefly with their leader, a very large, robust-looking hippo, with pinkish colorings on its skin and a helmet about three sizes too small for its head. The helmet was stencilled with the lettering “Wing Commander Ferney, Third Battalion.”

       “Greetings, fox. How did it go?”

       “Nothing to it,” said the fox. “They’re all out to the northeast and I’ve already collected my share. Nice doin’ business with you.”

       “And agent Carstairs?”

       “Oh yeah—second shed from your left as you go in. Under the tractor.”

       “Thanks, fox. You are a very capable animal. Your scheme with the book went as planned?”

       “Like clockwork, general. Like clockwork.”

       As the fox turned to leave, he glanced once again at the hillsides, covered completely with hippos. In fact, there were hippos as far as he could see, completely obliterating the hillsides to the southwest. He turned to the commander one last time . . .

       “Oh general . . . just one thing. It doesn’t so happen that there is an INFINITE number of you guys, is there?”

       The general turned to look back over his shoulders and scanned the hillsides for what seemed an eternity (actually he couldn’t see clearly for more than four feet, but t hen again, he knew a dramatic moment when he spotted one), then turned back to the fox. “No, fox. There’s just really, really, really a lot of us.”

       “That,” said the fox, “is a good thing to know.” And with that, he was gone.