Ratner's Star (62 page)

“End of statement.”

“Acquired by ACRONYM.”

“Elux Troxl.”

“None other.”

“Or whatever his name is.”

“Guano holdings,” Softly said.

“Right.”

“A nonabstract proponent of actual living shit.”

“Guano stockpiling, price-fixing and eventual distribution,” Mainwaring said. “The whole operation computerized to an extent and level of complexity never before known.”

“I like your outfit, Walt.”

“Rob, since your identification with OmCo is greater than anyone's, I assume you'll also choose to resign. It's best all around. I personally urge it. This is what I honestly think and feel and believe.”

He knows enough to know he doesn't have to lock the closet door. It happens in stages like my pages. Coats, dresses, fabrics, materials, yard goods, cloth. Plenty to do here. Many ways to keep awake. No lack of activities. Touch the cloth, smell the fabric, cover my feet with the sheet. Sleep is no help. The period before sleep is my time of greatest mental helplessness, in fact. Sleep itself is an improvement but not always. The period after sleep is usually not as bad as the period before sleep but there are times when it is worse. Death
is creeping logic. It is creepingly logical. Death and something else. SYNONYMS, she thought:
insanity, lunacy, madness, mania, dementia
. Those nouns denote conditions of mental disability.
Insanity
is a pronounced and usually prolonged condition of mental disorder that legally renders a person not responsible for hĭs or hûr actions.
Lunacy
, a romantic form of
insanity
, can denote derangement relieved intermittently by periods of
madness. Madness
, a more general term, often stresses the crazy side of mental illness.
Mania
refers principally to the excited phase of manic-depressive psychosis and we all know who suffers from that particular disorder, his hyperactive priapic clock ticking to its own internal time.
Dementia
implies irreversible mental deterioration brought on by obsessive thoughts of such organic disorders as death. I could easily easily easily open the door. Or:

They had tea in Softly's quarters for a change. After listening to Mainwaring read his letter of resignation, Softly had decided to switch from a relaxant to a stimulant. He sat among his pillows, cup in hand, and smelled the dark souchong.

“What happens now?”

“You keep working, Lester-pet. You finish the notation.”

“What about Mainwaring and Wu?” Edna Lown said.

“I guess they'll be leaving soon.”

“I have this urge,” Bolin said.

“Tell us, Les.”

“I want to call you Bobby.”

Softly felt his brain racing toward some chemical event of a highly suspect nature. He sipped his tea. Pulse rate. Blink rate. Degree of nausea. Sweatiness of palms. Flushedness of face. He sipped his tea once more. Edna makes good tea if Edna made this tea. But I think it was Lester, who wants to call me Bobby.

“Forget it.”

“Watch my lips,” Bolin said.

“Really, Les, forget it.”

“Watch my lips.”

“All right, I'm watching.”

“Bobby.”

“An experience I wouldn't have missed,” Softly said.

“Were you watching?”

“Very carefully,” Softly said. “What about Edna? Was Edna watching?”

“Intently,” she said.

“Bobby.”

“Forget it,” Softly said.

“I've always had the urge. I don't know why really. Odds are we won't be here much longer. Notation's coming along. So I thought I'd indulge myself once and for all. Indulge the urge. It's kind of fun to say.”

“Bobby,” Edna said.

“Exactly.”

“Bobby, Bobby.”

“I've really enjoyed it here,” Lester said. “Never guessed I'd be able to produce steadily in this kind of isolation. I feel like Kepler in his little black tent. Kepler had this tent he used to carry around with him. Whenever he felt like making some observations, he set it up in a field or wherever. A one-man tent. Small, tight and dark. A tiny hole for his telescope to fit through. He'd sit in the dark and observe. The whole sky pouring through that little hole.”

“Shut up,” Softly said.

Billy nearly tripped on the generator cable. He heard the voices and headed directly for Softly's cubicle. He halted about a yard inside the entrance. The others reacted to his arrival with looks of flinching inquiry. Maybe he'd slipped their minds. (Oh, yeah, him, wonder where he's been.) He watched them, awry in this mild surprise, slowly re-compose themselves, reaching back for faces and manifestations.

“I have deciphered the message,” he said.

“What a charming announcement,” Softly said. “I didn't know you could even get the elevator to move. You have, I assume, been doing some wandering.”

“I went to a few places up there but got lost a lot too, especially coming back.”

“We're glad to see you, really and truly, but no announcements please. I think we've had enough of those.”

“Something may happen at a certain time.”

“Not interested.”

“The pulses are meant to be seen as time on a clock. When it gets that time, I don't know but something may be meant to take place.”

“Look, mister, the message is indecipherable. The only value the signals have is that they got us going on the Logicon project. The message was sent from this part of the galaxy, this solar system, this planet, and it was sent ‘millions' and ‘millions' and ‘millions' of years ago. That's all we have to know about the message. Our remaining task is to frame a reply in a universal cosmic language. It doesn't matter what the reply is. Content is not the issue. So don't go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking. If, by some accident, you have happened upon an interpretation that appears to make a moderate amount of sense from a mathematical viewpoint, we don't want to hear it.”

“So what am I here for?”

“You're here to help Edna and Lester on Logicon,” Softly said. “And if there is a category of nonaccomplishment existing beyond total and contemptible failure, I believe this is where the results of your participation belong.”

“What about before we came down here?”

“That part was a preparation for this part. You needed the background, the activity, the other side of the problem. It's not possible to fulfill a concept unless you set it up properly.”

“Anyway, I broke the code whether you like it or not.”

“You're beginning to sound like some kind of idiot savant.”

“Make remarks.”

“Maybe you'd rather do absurd calculations in your head than something worthwhile, something invaluable to science and the mind.”

“Go ahead, say things, I don't care.”

Edna Lown got up and left, returning a moment later with a fresh cup of tea.

“If this mohole business is true,” she said, “maybe we ought to hear what our young man's got to say.”

She left Softly's quarters again, returning this time with Mainwaring, who could barely contain his eagerness to accept the burden that specialized knowledge entails in times like these.

“Yes,” he said. “It's possible that something extraordinary is going to happen. Where we have space-time sylphed, the level of unpredictability is extremely high, we feel. The laws simply aren't the same. In a sense we're wasting time even discussing it. There's nothing to discuss.”

“Don't talk like that,” Softly said.

Bolin made a proposal. The short-wave radio. If something funny's taking place, somebody somewhere's probably detected it, or the first signs of it, or a partial hint at least. The short-wave radio. An announcement. A bulletin. Something. Anything. It's the quickest way we have to get information.

He jogged down the path to his cubicle. They waited, saying nothing. Lester returned with the radio, set it on a chair and raised the antenna. Then he placed himself in a facing chair. The antenna was enormous, more than twice Bolin's height. He began to turn dials, picking up atmospheric static, moans and cries, ships, taxis, fire engines, beeps from research satellites. Mainwaring edged his way to Billy's side.

“We used zorgs,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“Identifying the mohole.”

“Zorgs are useless.”

“We used them,” Mainwaring said.

“Practically nobody knows what they even are.”

“Softly knows, doesn't he?”

“He's one of the few.”

“Softly explained how we might use zorgs. I briefed my sylphing teams. Without zorgs we would never have found the mohole.”

“Amazement.”

“Except Softly wanted us to use them in tracking back the signal. But we didn't need them for that. We needed them for the mohole.”

“Very amazing.”

Bolin had picked up a newscast that was interrupted seconds later by a bulletin concerning a suspicious person barricaded in a commercial building somewhere.

“A hole is an unoccupied negative energy state,” Mainwaring whispered. “Hole theory involves ‘pair creation,' which is the simultaneous creation of a particle-antiparticle pair. Holes move, just as moholes seem to move, just as a discrete particle can separate itself from a continuously dense array, leaving behind its antiparticle or hole. What Softly pointed out was that zorgs provide a perfect working mathematical model of hole theory.”

“I never thought it.”

“Zorgs allowed us to attack the sylphing problem in ways that were otherwise inconceivable. We had to learn to view zorgs as events rather than numbers, just as particles are events rather than things. The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made mohole identification practically inevitable.”

“Pretty interesting.”

“Things are interesting up to a point,” Mainwaring whispered. “Then they aren't interesting anymore.”

“The idea of zorgs applying.”

“Experience and pure thought. The mind and the world. External reality and independent abstract deduction.”

“How come you're in camouflage?”

“These are jungle fatigues. I've kept them pressed and handy for a good many years. Don't know why really. But this seemed a good time to slip them on.”

Softly motioned for silence.

“Our mobile units are standing by,” the announcer said.

There was a pause.

“This is mobile unit twenty-two,” another voice said. “The barricaded suspect has been exchanging gunfire with the police for several minutes now, every abrupt report echoing clearly in this deserted commercial district, unprofitable relief from the silence that weighs so heavily at this
early hour in the wilderness of cities. From the beginning a police official has been speaking through a bullhorn, his supercharged voice adding a faintly theatrical quality to the proceedings. Mist is settling on the area now, successive webs of condensation. In this grainy weave of near light, every lull between shots is filled with a sheltered sense of bedtime lazing, the feeling we all know of idle security, of high-and-dry privacy—a deception, of course, like any airy moment of disentanglement, but at the same time not a totally false picture of the somewhat muted urgency that prevails here this morning, events unfolding in the embodying harmony of a sonnet. From atop police vehicles the familiar swivel lights range through the haze as the suspect reloads and fires, perhaps aware of the classic nature of his predicament, the energy field he momentarily inhabits, the solitary trance of power, the levels of encounter and isolation he has caused to bring about. The act of sighting down the barrel of that weapon may be the release he has always sought. An ambulance, white with dark trim, purrs sullenly nearby. A marksman in a bulletproof vest raises his weapon and takes aim. This is what it's all about, isn't it, listening audience? A brief seizing brilliance in the immediate air. A death-rendered flash of perfect equilibrium. In the fog and mist of a remote warehouse district, this is mobile control returning you to our studio.”

“Hi, back with traffic, weather, recipes and reviews. This note from the science desk. An unscheduled total eclipse of the sun will probably take place later today, more or less, it says here, on the other side of the world. Some minor delays on airport access roads. Details upcoming. Another water-main break during the night but first I'm being motioned at here, so let's go right now to mobile control.”

“The suspicious person has been calling down a series of unintelligible remarks. He is standing in the window, shouting, now firing, now shouting, a figure somewhat melancholy to contemplate in the tempering medium of this thick rich mist. The official with the bullhorn is shouting back at the suspect. Electric hysteria begins to spread. The police are rapid-firing now, perhaps a dozen marksmen on the street, on rooftops, in doorways and windows. It is evident that the police and the suspicious person have agreed to abandon nominal reality as we pause
here for a test of our clear-signal testing apparatus, a test, a test, this is only a test.”

Softly moved his index finger across his throat, leading Bolin to turn off the radio. They all sat or stood in place.

“Eclipse,” Lown said.

“Just a rumor,” Softly said.

“Maybe it's not unscheduled,” Bolin said. “Maybe it was due all along.”

Mainwaring shook his head.

“Noncognate celestial anomaly.”

“Don't talk like that,” Softly said.

“Is science dead?” Bolin said.

“I would dearly love to know what's going on,” Lown said.

Mainwaring shrugged.

“There's nothing to say. This may be just the beginning. There's nothing any of us can say to clear things up.”