Weekly Short Story Review: A Subway Named Mobius by A.J. Deutsch

A few years ago I was a very enthusiastic reader of classic science fiction short stories, amassing many collections of "year's best" books.  In one such book, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 12 (1950) (DAW Books, 1984), there appeared A Subway Named Mobius by A.J. Deutsch, an astronomer not known for his writing...at least in the realm of fiction.  Deutsch, who lived from 1918 to 1969, would later be honored for his astronomical work with a moon crater named after him.  But you can all put your telescopes back into storage...the Deutsch crater is on the far side of the moon...

In the mathematical field of topology, the Möbius strip, represented by a strip of paper twisted back on itself and fastened to form a continuous loop, is often given as a seemingly impossible example of an object with only one surface...continue going along the paper and you will eventually cover both "sides".  With A Subway Named Mobius, Deutsch postulated that a sufficiently complicated system, such as the subway in a large city (in his story it's Boston), can also create an apparent physical paradox with the addition of an element that changes its mathematical structure.  And this indeed happens after a new shuttle run is added to the system and one of the trains is discovered to be missing in transit.  Where did it go, how are its passengers, and what will happen to it? The investigators had better find out quickly, for time is running out...

This story is not your typical science fiction tale, for we're not talking about future dystopian societies, alien encounters, or space exporation here: it is this immediacy, this sense that something so bizarre could occur in our own everyday, humdrum lives that gave it such an appeal to me.  And the ending was nothing short of brilliant, making me wonder why Deutsch didn't feel motivated to write more fiction...who knows, maybe they would have honored him with a crater on "our" side!  I noticed that this story is on the Internet on a couple of sites in PDF format.  I don't know whether his copyright expired, but I have a feeling that A Subway Named Mobius has slipped into public domain...so why not Google it and read it for yourself?