Ratner's Star (46 page)

He completed the mixture, relighted the lamp, fitted it once again to the miner's hat. He put his work gloves back on. He snuffed the candle.
He put the candle back in the pack. Getting to his feet he shouldered into the pack and put the hard hat back on his head. Besides the gloves, helmet and pack, he wore coveralls, kneepads, high socks and climbing boots. He carried a canteen and sleeping bag separately from the pack. After several heavy shrugs to redistribute the weight on his back, he began the long passage down the southwest slope to the tired lights at the floor of the antrum.

Softly fully dressed went to cube one. He was thinking of Jean Sweet Venable aswarm in bedsheets hundreds of feet straight up. Of her works he had read only
The Gobbledygook Cook Book
, deeming it serviceably useless; a good example, in other words, of what he expected (and would demand if need be) of her current assignment. He found his protégé in the stiff gleaming chair, sitting with legs crossed, a novel posture for the boy.

“Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?”

“Stand on your head.”

Softly did this, fairly easily, not without first putting a folded towel on the spot where his head would settle. Showing little strain he righted himself. Then he sat on the towel, an act evidently requiring more effort than the headstand did.

“What else?”

“That's enough for now.”

“I want you to be happy, Willy.”

“I'm trying.”

“We need you. You wouldn't be here otherwise. This is the most important thing any of us has ever attempted. Otherwise you wouldn't be here. Let's trust each other, you and I. A secret pact. Mutual love, trust and brotherhood.”

“I trust you.”

“Then why aren't you cooperating with Edna and Les?”

“I'm here when they want me.”

“You have to show a willingness, an enthusiasm. This isn't some boring homework assignment in junior high. Show something. Make me proud of you.”

“I'm here for the asking.”

“You're a mathematician,” Softly said. “You work till you drop.”

“That's pretty much what Endor told me.”

“Sure, sacrifice.”

“The hole he's living in is equipped with a hole of its own.”

“You have to put yourself on the line, everything forever, and you haven't been doing that, Willy. Let me tell you why we're lucky, you and I. Something you've never thought of. Size, our size, because of our size we don't have to pump blood nearly as far as most people. Most people have to pump to much greater heights. We save squillions of miles of blood-pumping effort. Don't have to worry about high blood pressure or arteries popping open. Cheery news, don't you think?”

“Does the outside world know about any of this?”

“The outside world? What do you mean by the outside world?”

“The people anywhere but here who might be interested in this project. Do they know what we're supposed to be doing here?”

“I don't know what you mean when you say what we're supposed to be doing here.”

“I'll start with the way it's been happening up to now.”

“Sure,” Softly said.

“The signal from Ratner's star. The people who tried to figure it out before I got here. Endor leaving for the hole. My getting here. The events. My working on the code. My being told the signals are not coming from Ratner's star and that it's all because of a mohole. More events. The second signal the same as the first. Your getting here. The Logicon project.”

“So what's the question?”

“Do they know about this out there? Other people in science? Does anybody know what's going on here?”

“Absolutely no one.”

“How come?”

“Pressures, because of external pressures,” Softly said. “The last thing
we need is a whole bunch of people commenting, jumping up and down, making judgments. The last thing we need is coverage.”

“Stand on your head,” Billy said.

When he was seated again Softly took a newspaper clipping out of his wallet. He unfolded it and waited for the boy to reach over and take it.

“Meant to show you this earlier. Nothing very important. Just thought you'd like to see the kind of company you've been keeping.”

“How come they have me down for Logicon? I haven't been here long enough for any Swedes to know where I am.”

“They made a routine request for information,” Softly said. “As usual in matters pertaining to you, this material passed across my desk at the Center. All anybody knows about Logicon is the name. I had to account for Lester and Edna being here. Also for our absence from the Center. But nobody knows the actual nature of the project.”

“But what if I said no I'm not going.”

“I felt you'd trust me enough to come with me. Trust. Let's trust each other, Willy. Let's help each other be.”

“I'll try.”

“Incidentally I'm negotiating with Mainwaring. I want to get him here if at all possible.”

“Who's that?”

“First name on the list,” Softly said.

“Chemistry. Walter Mainwaring. Canadian. Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corp.”

“He may be the only person in the world who understands the full implications of sylphing.”

“How does that help us?”

“You never know, he might come in handy, somebody like that. We're negotiating now. I want him here badly. He's the last one I need. The final one-of-a-kind mind.”

“Edna, Lester, me and him.”

“Lown, Bolin, Terwilliger, Mainwaring and Wu.”

“Who's Wu?”

“Oriental gent,” Softly said.

Sooner or later he had to get up and go to the toilet. On his way back he heard his name called. It was Lester Bolin speaking from bed. Billy approached the entranceway of Lester's cubicle. He saw the banner, the
photograph, the typewriter, the radio, the man himself, the narrow bed consisting of canvas stretched on a collapsible frame, the sheets and blankets at one end of the bed, bunched up, supporting Bolin's head. Lester wore a sport shirt and pajama bottoms.

“How do you like it down here?” he said. “Like it?”

“Hate it.”

“Intensity,” Lester said. “Everything's so concentrated down here. I'm having a great time. Want to go up with me later? I have some work to do on the model. Sources of power are handier up there. It'll be computer-driven. Parts will operate electromechanically on instruction from Space Brain. This is preceded and followed by an operation called logic rendering. The result, with luck, will be a control system that speaks Logicon. Of course we have to perfect the language first. That's our primary job. Take that paper out of the typewriter and look at it.”

“What does it say?”

“If the word ‘proof' in this context applies only to arrays of sentences that make an assertion about an object language L, then in fact the proof itself, as opposed to the word ‘proof,' shall be evident only in terms of the language M, or metalanguage, in which we draw necessary conclusions about the object language L, this method M also being subject to formal study through investigations carried out in M prime, or meta-metalanguage, the purpose being to preserve selectness by using only those statements that consistently refer to themselves,” Bolin said.

The boy went back to cube one and got into bed. Isochronal rock-falls. Cave openings all along this route. More guano for my artifacting. The caves set into the slopes of the excavation contained a number of
megaderma
, or “false vampires.” These were cannibal bats that rampaged among the roosting species, all of which were covered with tiny bloodsucking insects which themselves provided asylum for even smaller parasitic blood-fleas. Whole lot of sucking going on. Which could be the reason, thought Wu, why medieval gnome-worshippers in the mountains
of central Europe believed that the crystal mixture of hydro-magnesite and water possessed distinct medicinal properties and may have been right, they might, for wasn't it used centuries later to stop the flow of blood? Moon milk. Dehydrating agent and coagulant.

“I don't know what to call you,” he said. “What do you want to be known as?”

“Mrs. Lown.”

“Maybe I'll get out of bed later and come talk to you. Right now I'm in bed.”

“We have work to do.”

“Being in bed is the work I'm doing right now.”

“Don't be smart.”

“I think I have a fever.”

“I'll leave this material on your desk,” she said. “Then I'll come back for it.”

“What's the point of that?”

“I expect you to read it in the meantime.”

“How will you know if I do or not?”

“Really this is childish.”

“I could fake it,” he said.

“You've no reason to behave this way.”

“Okay, I'll read it.”

“We're professionals, after all.”

“I'll read it right away.”

“Please read it,” she said.

“I will.”

“Do you really have a temperature?”

“They're common for my age,” he said. “Growing takes place with a fever.”

“That's quite a stack of reading you've got before you. I'm afraid you have to put up with my handwriting. If your eyes get tired, close them.
As long as your eyes are closed, you might as well sit in front of the radiation lamp Lester Bolin brought on down. It compensates for lack of sunlight. You can borrow my goggles if you promise to return them.”

“What does Lester Bolin want to be known as?”

“Mr. Bolin,” she said.

Once she'd been a character in a novel. How distressingly strange it was. The woman in the book wasn't like her at all, at all. Yet she'd recognized herself immediately. Such essential differences. The name he'd given her. Impossible to think of herself with a name like that. The one word of dialogue he'd written. Nothing at all like something she might say. But she'd seen herself at once. Jean Sweet Venable. The mind of the character was completely unlike her own. The clothing. The body. The mannerisms. A carefully wrought set of individual mannerisms. Carefully. Wrought. But they weren't hers, you know? No resemblance whatever. Still, she'd seen herself at once despite the differing circumstances, setting, dialogue, mind, body, clothing and mannerisms. What was it he'd done to bring her face to face with this representation she tried so forcefully to deny? How did he manage it? Son of a bitch. What did he know? Nothing more than anyone could learn by sleeping with someone. My star-shaped mole. That was the only thing she'd recognized as being literally hers. The character sat in cafeterias. The character was disheveled. She sat at tables still wet, bearing the elliptical traces of a washcloth. People talked to themselves. They pushed food into their mouths with their hands, pecking at their own fingers, never less than watchful of the possibilities of theft and death, poised cunningly over free glasses of water. They all carried shopping bags. The character was surrounded in her cafeterias by men and women with shopping bags and none of them shoppers, none at all, not one. It said so in the book. Collectors. Epicures of refuse. People tired and hungry after days of poking through trash cans. Collectors (talking to themselves, force-feeding) of bottles, cartons, bags, paper cups and other terminal necessities. Those without empty dented milk cartons will learn how foolish they've been when the time comes. Emblematic birthmark on the buttock. This was the only thing, superficial or otherwise, he'd used as perceived. This and her inclination to predict. Jean loved to
make predictions. On marriages, divorces, breakdowns, booms and crashes. It was not these similarities, however, but other things, merely superficial in the book and resembling nothing she'd ever said, done, thought about or looked like, these other things, it was these that impressed on Jean a sense of resemblance between her and the character based on her. How painfully strange it was, searching the pages for signs of her own persona. Surfaces, guise and conscious intentions. The kingship of printed fiction. Its arbitrary power. Its capacity to gain possession of a person or thing by ineradicable prior right. The character had fainting spells. The character sometimes sat all night in doorways. The character's underwear stank. The character was never far from the presence of ugliness, the physically ugly, from the plane of mis-shapenness. She, Jean, carried air-mail stamps in her handbag. She had a shoetree for every shoe. What did he know? How much and how? Son of a bitch bastard.