Ex Nihlo(Jeremy McCool) It was cold. The dull orange moon was high in the eastern sky, half obscured by the wispy fingers of a cloud bank that had come down from the north. Pockets of stars were visible through breaks in the clouds and, in the southern skies, Orion the hunter was lying on his back with his arrows pointing toward heaven.

Highway patrol officer McVeigh was standing next to his patrol motorcycle on the side of the lonely highway, willing himself awake and keeping his radar arm at the ready, the gun resting on the black seat of the bike. No one came down this highway after dark. Beat 18 was known as ‘the sleep number’ among the men of the highway patrol. It was a windy 37 mile stretch of country road that rose and fell over an endless sea of almost unmentionable rolling hills, snaking through farmland and forest. It connected a small town in eastern Kentucky to an even smaller one farther west. It was rare that an officer assigned to graves on the sleep number would see more than a dozen vehicles during his twelve hour shift.

He was jolted into a state of alertness as a pair of headlights came over a distant crest in the road. The vehicle was approaching his position rapidly. His hand jerked the radar gun up, aimed and squeezed the trigger. Numbers whirred across the backlit digital screen and settled at 86. The vehicle was behaving erratically, taking the turns too loosely, hugging the shoulder of the road. He holstered the radar gun and jumped on his bike, turned it around. As the headlights approached, he momentarily shut his eyes to keep from being blinded. He listened to the vehicle pass and then kicked his patrol bike into gear, flipped on the lights and siren, and gave chase.

The vehicle slowed and pulled over into a large clearing on the side of the highway. He could hear the sound of the vehicle’s tires prattling over the gravel and dead grass like the inner workings of a grandfather clock. He parked his bike a score of feet behind it, dismounted, and called his position in on his shoulder radio. He unsheathed his flashlight, probing the vehicle while approaching it. The back seat contained some scribbled on notepads and a briefcase, and what looked like an overnight bag. He walked to the driver’s window, which was already open.

“Well, hello, officer! Brisk evening, isn’t it?”

“Do you know how fast you were going, sir?”

He shined his light into the man’s face. The eyes were not bloodshot or watering. The car had the distinct odor of fish. Red herring, if he’d had to bet.

“Certainly. I believe I was in the high eighties somewhere,” said the man.

“Do you know what the speed limit is on this stretch of highway?”

Beyond the man’s thin face, an open bottle was propped against the passenger seat, half obscured by a brown paper bag.

“I’m afraid I do not, sir. But may I assume that I was exceeding it?”

“You were. License and registration, please.”

As the man rummaged in his glove compartment, the officer stared at the bottle. It was clear with a red slogan near the top. Vodka, he thought. Smirnoff. He took the papers.

“Sir, have you been drinking?” He asked as he examined the driver’s license.

“Why, no, officer. I don’t drink,” replied the man.

“What’s that on your passenger seat?”

The man turned his head and looked where the flashlight was pointing. He looked back to the officer for a moment, a guise of awe on his face, then at the bottle again. He reached out and poked it with his index finger, quickly drawing it back again, as if it might bite him.

“That wasn’t there a minute ago, officer,” the man said.

“Turn off the vehicle and step out, sir.” He took a few steps back to allow the man to exit the car, never removing the beam of his flashlight from the man’s hands. You don’t look at faces. Faces can’t kill you. He turned his head toward his shoulder and depressed the button on his radio. “This is Bravo 1-8. Can I get a Code 9? I’ve got a 502 in progress.”

“Officer,” the man said, “I can assure you that I have not, indeed, been drinking, as you have concluded. That bottle of poison must have appeared next to me on the seat right about the time you began pursuing me. I do not know how else to explain it. It was not there before. It must have just appeared, out of nothing, ex nihlo!”

“Ex nihlo,” said the officer slowly. “That’s a first.”

“I am quite serious, you know. Do you not see what this means? We finally have proof!”

About 80 proof, the officer thought.

“Sir, turn around, face the vehicle, and put your hands behind your back.”

“Officer, I am at a loss,” said the man as he complied. “What has happened is outside of our realm of experience. You and I have just witnessed a first in human history. That bottle was not there whilst I was driving. It has no plausible cause or explanation, don’t you see? Shine your light on it, will you? Maybe it will disappear again, like a quark.”

It has a perfectly plausible explanation, the officer thought as he unhooked the handcuffs from his utility belt. It starts with O’Malley’s liquor store back there in Paint Lick. He cuffed the man’s hands together and sat him down on the hood of the car.

“Gravity,” the man mumbled.

“Excuse me?”

“I suppose it must have something to do with gravity. The cause, I mean. If there is one at all. There does not have to be, you know. It could be dimensional. Ex nihlo. This is a major discovery. I wish that I knew the mechanics behind it.”

The officer once again turned his head. “This is Bravo 1-8. Where’s my Code 9? I need an 11-85 also.”

A small tinny voice came back. “Bravo 2-9er is en route to your location. E.T.A. twelve minutes. Roger the 11-85.”

Twelve minutes. He ordered the man to sit still, walked back to his motorcycle and removed a small black plastic case from the saddle bag. He opened it. Inside were a variety of test tubes and a portable breathalyzer machine. He removed the breathalyzer and walked back to the stopped vehicle. The man was still sitting on the hood, talking excitedly to himself. As the officer conducted his vehicle inventory, he got an unwitting education in string theory, the bizarre behavior of quarks and hadrons, and a detailed introductory course in cosmology. He learned about black holes, event horizons, collapsing stars and red shift theory. He stood next to the man.

“I need to conduct a series of field sobriety tests to help determine if you are intoxicated beyond the legal limit for vehicle operation. Would you be willing to cooperate?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Though it is a waste of time. I told you what happened, officer. Or what must have happened, rather.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer led the man a dozen feet from the vehicle. He told him to tilt his head back and look at the sky, close his eyes, count 30 seconds silently and then say ‘Done’. The man did so, with surprising accuracy and no sign of lost balance. Then he was told to open his eyes wide and let them follow the officer’s finger as the officer shone a light indirectly at his face. The man watched the finger move slowly from one side of his peripheral vision, pause, and then to the other. There was no sign of nystagmus. The man was told to blow hard, like blowing up a balloon, into the breathalyzer machine and he did. The officer put his equipment away and began writing notes on the small Hemingway pad he kept in his breast pocket.

The clouds were parting overhead, a mid-fall breeze slowly pushing them eastward. Out here in the country there were millions of stars. The constellations were obscured by the clutter in their middles. The man looked up at the stars and began counting backwards, his lips moving quickly as the numbers poured from his sputtering mouth. Complicated calculations came spewing out of him, as if the air in front of the vehicle were a vast white board in front of large graduate class. After a few minutes of this, he stopped.

“I have a theory,” he said. “The gravitons were reversed through a miscalculation, a deviance you might say, in the second law of thermodynamics. Instead of beta-decay, there was an opposite reaction. The down quarks turned to up quarks, and the bottle appeared. Or perhaps…perhaps the laws themselves are evolving.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked the officer, as he converted his notes into a report for the D.A.

“I’m not talking about earth at all,” answered the professor. “Perhaps the laws of physics are evolving. Perhaps they’re not as constant as we once believed. We know that the speed of light is not. It had to have happened before, so why not now? The undulating universe hypothesis, perhaps. Yes, that could be. This is a reversion. It’s happening again. We’ve hit the apex.” The professor looked up at the officer, a smile spreading across his face. “It’s a beautiful theory, no?”

“The practice of theory in my field is generally called prejudice,” said the officer. “I try to stick to the facts.”

“But facts are not truth, you must know this. Truth is only found behind the facts, in the substance that holds them all together. In the quarks.”

The officer stifled a yawn and kept writing.

“What do you know about Big Bang cosmology?” Asked the professor.

“Just the basics. There was an explosion and then everything was.”

“Yes, yes, yes, but what caused the explosion? Where did the condensed matter come from?”

“Doesn’t really keep me up at night,” the officer said.

“But it should! It should! The essence of our very existence is wrapped up in the answer to that question. And tonight—well, tonight it happened again. In the passenger seat of my car. A little bang.”

“Where’s my Code 9?” The officer demanded of his shoulder.

“E.T.A. two minutes, Bravo 1-8,” came a staticy voice from his belt.

“Sir, Smirnoff does not spontaneously appear in passenger seats. I’ve been on this job a long time and I’ve never seen it happen.”

“But my theory is a valid syllogism. There was no bottle of liquor on the seat next to me. There was a bottle of liquor on the seat next to me. Therefore, it must have appeared on its own. There was no stimulus, no producing agent, no rationality that I can grasp. No motivating factors. Ex nihlo.”

Now they were in the field of logic, more familiar territory.

“Oh sure, it’s valid. But for the conclusion to be trustworthy, all of the premises have to be true.” He stopped writing and was looking at the professor.

“They are true, I assure you vehemently.”

“Well, a night in the tank will give you some time to work out your theories more precisely. Meanwhile, we’ll see what the lab report and phlebotomist have to say about the truthfulness of your premises. Everything that comes into being has a cause. Your bottle came into being. Therefore, your bottle has a cause. That’s a valid syllogism too. I think that cause is printed on a receipt we’ll find when we search your vehicle and empty your pockets. Occam’s razor says that’s the best explanation.”

“Occam was a fool. Simplicity cannot produce complexity. Simplicity is not always the best explanation in a complex environment.”

“Well, professor, your environment is about to get a lot simpler.”

A patrol car pulled to a stop on the shoulder in front of them. Dust was unsettled and wafted off on the breeze. Officer McVeigh gave his notes to the arresting officer and the NTA that he had written. He then gave a curt nod to the professor as he was maneuvered into the back of the patrol car.

As the patrol car hurried off toward the county hospital for bloodwork, he sat down on the hood of the vehicle to await the coming tow truck. It had been called, and therefore would come. The law of Cause and Effect. He looked up at the stars and wondered at them. He heard cicadas and the ticking of his Casio watch.

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