Professor Murphy Hears the Universe

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

It was Professor Murphy who was everyone’s favorite proff. He was an eccentric astrophysicist with the laser sharp wit of Robin Williams and actually in his younger years he might’ve been his doppelgänger. He intrigued us Astro nut wannabes to no end but there was always a twinge of melancholy that seemed to sadden him and caused him to stare in a comatose way out the window. We all knew what it was that caused this as his only daughter Astrid had been kidnapped and murdered three years ago and there were rumors that he could hear her calling his name from just outside the windows or the doors. Where the voice came from no one knew but he did tell us honestly that on one frigid South Dakota night, in a snowstorm, he heard her plaintive voice calling from seemingly a half a mile away and walked for miles until death was very close. His meanderings became legendary and dangerous.

One morning we came to school and saw a very strange form of scribbling on the chalkboard and it seems that professor had been there earlier and then disappeared but what it said chilled us to the bones. “ I call out for you dad, I call out for you to come for me in the snow and climb the dark staircase of particles that you always used to talk about. You were always right about it. There is sound up here it’s just very,very faint. Dark matter or dark energy…..I forget what it was but you always talked about how dark matter has particles that could possibly transmit sound which infuriated your colleagues and superiors as your reputation became that of a conspiracy theorist but you didn’t care. As long as you had me to keep you in good company nothing seem to bother you.” “You always said that the vacuum theory was balderdash and I never knew what that was But I believed nonetheless.
I just want you with me…..it’s very hard waiting with so many here that I can’t hear! There are so many famous people from my history books on this dark staircase and some whisper that we’re in a vacuum and we shouldn’t be able to hear each other. But as long as you’re close enough and can hear somebody whispering you can pretty much make out part of what they’re saying although it’s frustrating.”
“I am privileged, as are we all of for every once in a while we are treated to splashes of Stardust and the Milky Way, Solar and lunar eclipses, comets and meteors showers and moons orbiting the planets which brings tears to my eyes that I’m seeing this without you.”
“My memories hold me fast; you and I riding our horses as the prairie dogs chided us vociferously as only a South Dakota badlands prairie dog could! The badlands were our riding grounds and we were inseparable so I will keep calling for you and long for your voice which was always filled with kindness and never recrimination.”

So you can imagine how we students felt about reading this somewhat terrible and yet beautiful missive on a cold December morning with our professor nowhere to be found. At last he appeared halfway through the scheduled class time with a very disheveled appearance. “I’ve done it guys and gals, I did some calculations all through the night at the behest of my daughter who longs for my voice and I have discovered a way to hear communications through and beyond the void the so-called experts call a vacuum. My daughter is acting as a conduit/as a catalyst so that particles have enough vibrational energy to bring these cosmic communications my way. Now we can all hear, using me as a medium, the stories of antiquity as they really happened not all the claptrap that’s being pushed out to you kids from the establishment. Balderdash!

Well it all seemed to be a little bit hokey to all of us students and we were just glad to have Proff Murph back however it just seemed so improbable what he was proposing. Maybe it was just his mind crushing sadness and yearning to be with his daughter that caused him to hallucinate or something?

He invited us to his house that evening on a star filled sky and promised that we would experience the reality of sound passage through that supposed vacuum. We sat around our favorite professor in front of the fireplace graced with an Astrolobe and a bust of Copernicus and Galileo on the mantle shining with fire light. He suddenly jerked his head up towards the top of the chimney his eyes large as saucers as if he could see something; Just nodding his head and subsequently murmured a few things and laughed a lot and did seem to cry at a certain point until we were shocked to see him clutch his right ear and collapse beside the fireplace. We all encircled him and got him to the hospital quick as a space shuttle!

The next morning we waited in the hospital waiting room (all 24 of us) and the doctor came out looking as grim as grim can be. A tall man with dark skin, kind eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, a red tie with yellow stars and a blue jacket distinguished him but seemed very strange for a doctor. “There’s really no explanation for what I’m about to tell you…Your professor suffered some thing that I in 40 years have never seen so I need to ask; are any of you familiar with the anatomy of the human ear? Since we were all astrophysicist wannabes we kind of sheepishly looked around at each other and shook our heads. “Well your professor has had a catastrophic collapse and for lack of a better word explosion of his external auditory canal…. his eardrum also completely shattered due to some kind of unbelievable high frequency vibrational energy and the three tiny bones called occicles were blown out from their seats and forced into the brain, essentially cutting off neural circulation. Finally I have to say and this really caused me much consternation…The fluid in his inner ear which is called the cochlea had been boiled. What could cause such a thing to happen to your professor? And at just that moment, The nurse came out and announced that Our Professor had passed away due to the extreme pain. Stubbornly he had refused the pain medication’s which we weren’t surprised at all!

Later that evening the news announced that NASA heard a scream for the first time from outer space. It had to be amplified by the biggest speaker ever built in human history and the amplification was something like to the order of X 100. Men and women who were walking in Central Park and other cities had fainted when they heard this. But we all collectively hoped that it was our favorite Proff letting out a scream of delight (The Spanish call it “Grito de Alegria”) or scream of joy/whoop. And that’s the way we thought of it…. nothing more and nothing less.