Her foot is on the pedal and her head is in the stars. Joy was a Bettie Page styled hottie on a mission. After a chance encounter with Nick Joy finds a kindred spirit but is she just too much for him to handle?
Hang on tight, this girl drives as...
"Do you want me to explain it to you or do you just want to see it?"
"Oh no, I want you to explain it. Like why are they where they are in here."
"Okay," she shrugged and walked past her corrugated walled office and pushed back a heavy black curtain revealing another room. She disappeared inside for a moment, then a lamp came on and I could see a bookcase packed full of books along the back wall. I was about to enter when she came back out carrying a spiral notebook and a hefty calculator.
"Ever heard of an AU?"
"No, I've heard of a GU though."
"What's that?"
"Geographically undesirable."
She smirked.
"Stupid. AU is an astronomical unit. It's equal to ninety three million miles, the distance from the Earth to the Sun. You use that because the space you have to measure is so huge. You know it just breaks it down into a manageable unit."
She looked up at me to make sure I was following along. I was.
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"So you start with the sun, in my case it was roughly forty eight inches in diameter, that globe hanging on the telephone pole out there," she pointed to the row of windows along the back wall, all spray-painted green.
I followed her over to the the first window. She twisted the aging metal handle with force but it put up a fight screeching as it finally relented. She then pushed the window out and secured the brace to hold it open. Sure enough across the railroad tracks, almost exact opposite the corner of the building stood an old, weathered gray telephone pole that was no longer carrying lines of any kind but did have an orange glass globe secured from what looked like a piece of old angle iron.
"See, there's my sun. I found it in the trash. I have no idea what it is."
"From there you have to calculate the size of the planets relative to the sun. They are all in these books I have but I jotted them down in this notebook. You then have to scale everything down. If the sun is forty eight inches in diameter then you have to calculate the Earth's size using the same formula."
Joy tapped on her calculator a moment and then showed me the result. I read the numbers aloud.
"Point four three nine four?"
"Yep, about half an inch, and there she is," she said pointing to a tiny blue ball suspended on a single copper wire hanging from the ceiling just behind us.
"They are all mostly styrofoam balls I got at Michael's. I had to shave some of them down. I painted them after covering them with sealing gel. They look cool. It's roughly four hundred and thirty feet from the sun out there."
