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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: An Irish priest and his mathematician brother discuss the world.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Minds, Machines, and Evolution, 1988
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2006

19 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [22 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [29 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [8 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [154 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [8 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [72 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [79 KB] , hiebook (KML) [77 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [33 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [7 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [9 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [37 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [15 KB]
Words: 2535
Reading time: 7-10 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Patrick and Michael Flynn were twin brothers, the sons of a family doctor who practiced in a sleepy Irish village called Ballaghkelly. The village was little more than a crossroads buried in a huddle of houses and outlying farms, and boasted one church, a school, a few tiny stores, a newsagent's that was also the post office, and three pubs. Little ever happened to change the routine of a typical day in Ballaghkelly. At six o'clock every morning, Willie Maherty's one-horse dray would clatter off on its round of the farms to collect the churns from the previous day's milkings before the day warmed. Twice in the day and once in the evening--exactly when was always a standby topic of conversation if the weather looked settled--the bus from Kilkenny would arrive and depart again. And after nightfall, the farmers would begin gathering in O'Toole's, Mulligan's, and O'Shaughnessy's to nod and murmur over their pints of porter while they reiterated worldly wisdoms that had been handed down from father and grandfather for generations. Life had always been that way, and nobody--in the unlikely event of such a thought entering his head--could have conceived of its being any other.

Patrick was a voracious reader and did brilliantly in school. Kevin Halloran, the schoolmaster, became convinced that the boy was a prodigy and persuaded him to try for a scholarship to study mathematics at the university in Dublin. Patrick was accepted, gained a degree with honors after some years, and then departed to pursue postdoctoral studies in America, which was somewhere across the sea in the opposite direction from England, whichever way that was. Michael, too, was studious, but his vocation lay in a different direction. He left home to train at the Catholic seminary in Maynooth, and shortly after Patrick left for America, Michael was installed as the new parish priest in a town not far from Limerick.