Ice Water

Mrs. Kerr wheeled the cart in again on the eleventh of February.

She did it the same way, during the passing period, so it would be in and plugged and warm. She had the antenna wire run before anybody sat down. Nobody made a countdown noise.

“We’re going to watch some of this,” she said, “and then chapter twelve.”

It was a hearing. It was men at a long table with nameplates in front of them and other men at a shorter table facing them, and a great deal of water in pitchers, and every so often somebody would say a number with a decimal in it.

It was extremely boring.

By ten minutes in, four people were doing other homework. Two rows back somebody had a paperback inside a folder. Mrs. Kerr let it go. She stood by the cart with her arms folded and watched the whole thing with her chin down, and did not once look at the room to see who was and was not paying attention, which was new.

They went twenty-five minutes like that.

Then one of the men at the shorter table, an old one, off to the side, who had been fidgeting with something in front of him for most of the morning, said he had done a little experiment.

He had a piece of rubber. He had it clamped in a small C-clamp, the kind from a hardware store, and he had put the whole thing in the glass of ice water that was sitting on the table because there were glasses of ice water sitting on every table.

He took it out. He undid the clamp.

He said that when you put pressure on this material for a while, at that temperature, and then take the pressure off, it does not spring back. He said there is no resilience in this particular material at thirty-two degrees. He said he believed that had some significance for our problem.

Then he stopped talking and somebody else said something about the schedule.

The room had gone quiet at some point and nobody had noticed it going.

The kid with the paperback had the paperback down flat.

“That’s it?” somebody said. “That’s what happened?”

Nobody answered, because everybody in the room had understood it and there was nothing to add.

Roz had her wrist turned over on the desk in front of her, and she had been looking at her watch from about the point where the old man reached for the glass.

“Eleven seconds,” she said.

“What?”

“From the glass to putting it down. Eleven seconds.”

She turned her wrist back over.

“That’s how long it took,” she said. “To tell everybody.”

At dinner Gene’s father, who built cabinets and had no opinion on aerospace, watched it again on the news at six, and put his fork down halfway through it, and said the thing that everybody in the country said that week in one form or another.

“Well, why didn’t somebody just show them?”

Nobody at the table argued with him.

Gene’s mother said they must have tried. His father said that if you have got a thing that goes hard in the cold, and you have got a cold morning, then you take the thing and you put it in the cold in front of the man, and that is the end of the conversation, and it takes you a minute.

“You wouldn’t need to say anything,” he said. “That’s the point of it. You wouldn’t have to say one word.”

He picked his fork back up.

It stayed on the news for a long time after that. They ran the eleven seconds the way they had run the seventy-three, over and over, and by the end of the month a lot of people in the country had watched a man take a piece of rubber out of a glass of ice water more times than they could count.