Ratner's Star

Don Delillo

 

 

 

ADVENTURES

Field Experiment Number One

1 SUBSTRATUM

2 FLOW

3 SHAPE

4 EXPANSION

5 DICHOTOMY

6 CONVERGENCE INWARD

7 REARRANGEMENT

8 SEGMENTATION

9 COMPOSITE STRUCTURE

10 OPPOSITES

11 SEQUENCE

12 PAIRS

 

 

 

REFLECTIONS

Logicon Project Minus-One

I  TAKE  A  SCARY  RIDE

I  GET  A  LITTLE  BACKGROUND

SEE  LESTER   EXIST

LESTER TELLS US ABOUT ROB

I  READ   MY  MAIL

BILATERAL  SYMMETRY

ROB  DOES  A  TRICK

Make Formal Prize Announcements

EDNA   GETS  ANNOYED

I   GET  INTERVIEWED  AGAIN

FEMALE  HAIR  DOWN  THERE

INTERVIEW

ROB   TALKS  IN   QUOTES

I  MEET  MAINWARING

I  DON'T  FEEL  SO   GOOD

MORE   ON   BATS

LESTER  TRIES   AGAIN

I   LOSE   MY   BREATH

I  AM  NOT  JUST  THIS

I  TAKE  A  DRINK

SELF-BETTERMENT

SELF-BETTERMENT CRASH PROGRAM

A   LOT   HAPPENS

I   SIT   A   WHILE   LONGER

AN   UNUSUAL   SOUVENIR

I  MAKE  AN  ENTRANCE

A   DESPERATE   MEASURE

THINGS   GO   THE   OTHER  WAY

About   the  Author

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURES

 

Field Experiment Number One

 

 

1 SUBSTRATUM

 

Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. He boarded the plane. The plane was a Sony 747, labeled as such, and it was scheduled to arrive at a designated point exactly so many hours after takeoff. This much is subject to verification, pebble-rubbed (khalix, calculus), real as the number one. But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one's perspective, not unlike those imaginary quantities (the square root of minus-one, for instance) that lead to fresh dimensions.

The plane taxied to a remote runway. Billy was strapped into a window seat. Next to him in the aircraft's five-two-three-two-five seating pattern was a man reading a boating magazine and next to the man were one, two, three little girls. This was as much nextness as Billy cared to explore for the moment. He was fourteen years old, smaller than most people that age. Examined at close range he might be said to feature an uncanny sense of concentration, a fixed intensity that countervailed his noncommittal brown eyes and generally listless manner. Viewed from a distance he gave the impression that he wasn't entirely at peace with his present surroundings, cagily slouched in his seat, someone newly arrived in this pocket of technology and stale light. The sound of the miniaturized propulsion system grew louder and soon the plane was in the air. Its angle of ascent was severe enough to frighten the boy, who had never been on an airplane before. With Sweden at war, he had received his Nobel Prize in a brief ceremony on a lawn in Pennyfellow, Connecticut, traveling to and from that locale in the back seat of his father's little Ford.

It was the first Nobel Prize ever given in mathematics. The work that led to the award was understood by only three or four people, all mathematicians, of course, and it was at their confidential urging that the Nobel committee, traditionally at a total loss in this field, finally settled on Twillig, born Terwilliger, William Denis Jr., premature every inch of him, a snug fit in a quart mug.

His father (to backtrack briefly) was a third-rail inspector in the New York subway system. When the boy was seven the elder Terwilliger (known to most as Babe) took him into the subways for the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation. This was, after all, the place where Babe spent nearly half his conscious life. It seemed to him perfectly natural that a father should introduce his lone son to the idea that existence tends to be nourished from below, from the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness. In Babe's mind there was also a notion that the boy would show him increased respect, having seen the region where he toiled, smelled the dankness and felt the steel. They rode the local for a while, standing at the very front of the first car to get the motorman's viewpoint. Then they got off and went along a platform in a deserted station in the South Bronx and into a small tool room and down some steps and along a passageway and through a door and onto the tracks, where they walked in silence toward the next station. It was a Sunday and therefore reasonably safe; these were express tracks and no such trains ran on Sunday along this particular line. A local went by, however, one track over, shooting slow blue sparks. In this incandescent shower Billy thought he saw a rat. Wide bend ahead. For comic shock effect, Babe made a series of crazy people's faces-tongue hanging out, eyes bulging, neck twisted and stiff. Within ten yards of the next station he singled out a key from the ring of many keys he carried and then opened a small door in the blackened wall and led his son into another tool room and then onto the platform. And that was all or almost all. A walk down a stretch of dark track. On the way home they sat in the next-to-last car. A tripping device failed to work and their train, braking late, ran into the rear of a stalled work train. Billy found himself on the floor of the car. Ahead was stunned metal, a buckled frame for bodies intersecting in thick smoke. Then there was a moment of superlunar calm. In this interval, just before he started crying, he realized there is at least one prime between a given number and its double.

The stewardess arrived, driving a motorized food cart. Billy preferred looking out the window to eating. There was nothing to see, just faded space, but the sense of an environment somewhere beyond this pressurized chunk of tubing, a distant whisper of the biosphere, made him feel less constricted. He tried to think in a context of Sumerian gesh-time, hoping to convince himself this would make the journey seem one fourth as long as it really was. That wedge system they used. Powers of sixty. Sixty a vertical wedge. Sixty shekels to a mina. Sixty minas to a talent. Gods numbered one to sixty. He'd recently read (handwriting cunning and urgent) that the sixty-system was about four thousand years old, obviously far from extinct. More clever than most, those Mesopotamians. Natural algebraic capacity. Beady-eyed men in ziggurats predicting eclipse.

He squeezed past the man and his little girl tribe and went back to find the toilet. There were eleven, all in use. As he waited in the passageway between doors he was approached by a large rosy man nearly palpitating with the kind of relentless affability that the experience of travel never fails to induce in some people.

"My mouth says hello."

"H'o."

"I'm Eberhard Fearing," the man said. "Haven't I seen you in the media?"

"I was on television a couple of times."

"I was duly impressed. You demonstrated an absolute mastery as I recall. 'Brilliant' doesn't begin to say it. Loved your technical phraseology in particular. Mathematicians are a weird breed. I know because I use them in my work. Planning and procedures. Let's hear you say a thing or two."

"I'm not brilliant in person."

"I want to assure you that I admire your kind of intellect. Hard, cold and cutting, sir. What's your destination?"

"Not allowed to say."

"Flying right on through or deplaning along the way?"

"I do not comment."

"Where's your spirit of adventure?"

"First time in the air."

"Nervous, is it? Let's hear some mathematics then. Seriously, what say?"

"I don't think so for the time being."

"No room for cunctation in any line of work. But yours especially. Gifts can vanish without warning. Reach sixteen and it's all gone. Nothing ahead but a completely normative life. Shouldn't you be smiling?"

"Why?"

"We're strangers on a plane," Fearing said. "We're having a friendly talk about this and that. Calls for smiles, don't you think? That's what travel's all about. Supposed to release all that pent-up friendliness."

A door opened and from one of the toilets limped an elderly woman with a plum-colored growth behind her left ear. He hesitated before entering the same toilet, afraid she had left behind some unnamable horror, the result of a runaway gland. Old people's shitpiss. Diseased in this case. Discolored beyond recognition. Possibly unflushed. Finally he stepped in, determined to escape Eberhard Fearing, bolting himself into the stainless-steel compartment and noting in the mirror how unlike himself he looked, neat enough in sport coat and tie but unusually pale and somehow tired, as though this manufactured air were threatening his very flesh, drawing out needed chemicals and replacing them with evil solvents made in New Jersey. Around him at varying heights were slots, nozzles, vents and cantilevered receptacles; issuing from some of these was a lubricated hum that suggested elaborate recycling and a stingy purity, this local sound merely part of a more pervasive vibration, the remote systaltic throb of the aircraft itself.

Cunctation.

Something about that word implied a threat. It wasn't like a foreign word as much as an extraterrestrial linguistic unit or a vibratory disturbance just over the line that ends this life. Some words frightened him slightly in their intimations of compressed menace. "Gout." "Ohm." "Ergot." "Pulp." These seemed organic sounds having little to do with language, meaning or the ordered contours of simple letters of the alphabet. Other words had a soothing effect. Long after he'd acquainted himself with curves of the seventh degree he came across'a dictionary definition of the word "cosine," discovering there a beauty no less formal than he'd found in the garment-folds of graphed equations (although there were grounds for questioning the absolute correctness of the definition):

The abscissa of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a two-dimensional coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive; or clockwise if x is negative.

He undid his zipper, bent his knees to rearrange a snarled section of underwear and then slipped his dangle (as he'd been taught to call it) out of his pants. Words and numbers. Writing and calculating. Tablet-houses between two rivers. Dubshar nished. Scribe of counting. How did it go? Aš nun eš limmu ia aš imin ussu ilimmu u. Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole. He tapped the underside of his dangle in an effort to influence whatever membranous sac was storing his urine. Oldest known numerals. What had he read in the manuscript? Pre-cuneiform. Marked with tapered stylus on clay slabs. Number as primitive intuition. Number self-generated. Number developing in the child's mind spontaneously and nonverbally. Whole numbers viewed as the spark of all ancient mathematical ideas. How did it go? "The fact that such ideas consistently outlive the civilizations that give rise to them and the languages in which they are expressed might prompt a speculation or two concerning prehistoric man and his mathematics. What predated the base of sixty? Calendric notations on bone tools? Toes and fingers? Or something far too grand for the modern mind to imagine. Although the true excavation is just beginning, it's not too early to prepare ourselves for some startling reversals." Clockwise positive. Counterclockwise negative.

Eventually he managed to dispatch a few feeble drops of urine into what appeared to be a bottomless cistern. Then he washed his hands and combed his hair, using the large teeth of the comb because he believed wide furrows made him look older. A bandage covered a small cut on his thumb and he peeled it off now, sucking briefly at the crude wound and then flushing the bandage down the germless well, imagining for a moment an identical plastic strip floating to the surface of the water that filled a stainless-steel wash basin in a toilet on an airliner above an antipodal point. He double-checked his zipper. For the mirror he poured forth a stereotyped Oriental smile, an antismile really, one he'd learned from old movies on TV. He added a few formal nods and then unlocked the door and eased out of the tiny silver cubicle.

In his seat he rolled his tie carefully all the way up to the knotted part and then watched it drop down again, doing this over and over, using both hands to furl and then timing the release precisely, left and right hand opening at the same instant. After a long time the plane landed for a refueling stop. When they were in the air again he went sideways up the aisle past the toilets and into the rock garden. The area was crowded. He sat in a little sling, trying hard not to stare at this or that woman arranged in the odd deltoid chairs that were scattered about, ladies poised for worldly conversation, and he wondered what there was about high-altitude travel that made them seem so mysterious and available, two stages to contemplate, knees high and tight, bodies partly reclined and set back from the radiant legs. All around him people were solemnly embalmed in their own attitudes of conviviality. They drank and gestured, filling the paths of the rock garden. Occasionally a particular face would collapse toward a kind of wild intelligence so that within the larger block of features a shrunken head appeared, aflame with revelation. Inner levels. Subsets. Underlying layers. In a chair nearby was a woman in her fifties, wide-eyed and petite. She wore a bright frock and her hair was cut straight across the forehead at eyebrow level. For her age she was the cutest woman he'd ever seen. Glancing at the travel folder she was reading, he was able to make out the large type on the front cover.

 

ANCIENT TREASURES    /    MODERN PLEASURES

 

A   LIFETIME  OF   NEW  RELATIONSHIPS  IN   TWELVE  FROLICSOME  DAYS AND   ONE  DANGEROUSLY   SENSUAL   NIGHT

 

She looked up, smiled and pointed to a plaid shoulder bag that sat drooping between her feet. He tried to respond with an expression that would make her think he had misinterpreted her gesture as a simple greeting that required no further communication.

"Basenji," she said.

"Translate please."

"I smuggled him aboard in my bag. Such a good puppy. I'm sure he'd like to say hello to you. 'Hi, pally. Where ya headed?' "

"I make no reply."

"You're not an Amerasian, are you?"

"What's that?"

"What they used to call war kids," she said. "GI papa, native mama. They sold for five hundred dollars in Bangkok. 'And that's no phony baloney, bub.' You're about the right age for an Amerasian. My name's Mrs. Roger Laporte. 'Hi, I'm Barnaby Laporte. Whereabouts you go to school, good buddy?' "

She listened to every word of his reply with the eager obedience of someone about to undergo major surgery. When he finished telling her about the Center, she leaned toward the shoulder bag and patted it. In addition to being cute, Mrs. Laporte had a distinct shimmer of kindness about her. It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such a bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same. When she spoke on behalf of the dog, she tucked her head into her body and squeaked. It was the cutest thing about her.

"You must be very lonely," she said. "Spending all your time with grownups and doing all that research behind closed doors without the sunshine and exercise your body needs for someone your age. Mr. Laporte went to night school."

He hadn't clipped his toenails in a while and he realized that when he moved the toes of his right foot up and down, one particularly long nail scratched against the inside of his Orion-acrylic sock. He passed the time allowing his toenail to catch and scrape, making a tiny growl. He wanted to sit somewhere else but was sure Mrs. Laporte would say something the moment he got to his feet. A man fell out of a hammock, his cocktail glass shattering on one of the rocks in the garden. If the dog's called Barnaby, did she name her kids Fido and Spot? Her large eyes blinked twice and then she hugged herself and shrugged, smiling in his direction-a series of gestures he readily interpreted as perkiness for its own sake. Of course that left him the problem of figuring out what to do in return.

"So that's a dog in there you sneaked aboard," he said. "What happens if it barks?"

"Basenji," she said.

He found a dark lounge and went inside. Two men sat at a table playing an Egyptian board game. Squares of equal size. Penalties levied. Element of chance. Billy recognized the game; he'd seen it played at the Center by colleagues of his. Numerous geometric pieces. Single bird-shaped piece. He thought of the "number beasts" of that time-animals used to symbolize various quantities. Tadpole equaled one hundred thousand because of the huge swarms that populated the mud when the waters of the Nile retreated after seasonal flooding. Men called rope-stretchers had surveyed the unplotted land, using knots to measure equal units. Taxation and geometry. In the dimness Eberhard Fearing gradually assumed effective form. Legs walking left.

"Good to see you."

"Right."

"Absolutely correct."

"Good."

He had a passing knowledge of the mathematical texts of the period. Problem of seven people who each have seven cats which each consume seven mice which each had nibbled seven ears of barley from each of which would have grown seven measures of corn. Legs walking left were a plus sign on a papyrus scroll.

"How was the bathroom?" Fearing said.

"I liked it."

"Mine was first-rate."

"Pretty nice."

"Some plane."

"The size."

"Exactly," Fearing said. "You've hit on it. I was telling a gal back there all about you. She'd really like to hear you hold forth. What say I get her and make a threesome out of it."

"I may not be here later."

"Where will you be?"

"I may have to meet some people."

"Just tell me where. We'll have a get-together."

"I'm not sure they're aboard," he said. "See, the thing of it is I'm not sure they're aboard."

"In other words you made an appointment beforehand to see these people. Before you even got on the plane."

"Right."

"Certain section of the aircraft at a certain time."

"Near the toilets."

"And now you're not even sure they're aboard."

"Right."

"These people of yours."

"That's the thing."

"How many of them?" Fearing said.

"Could be four, could be more."

"What are they-mathematicians?"

"Some yes, some other."

"Near the toilets."

"I just inspected," Billy said. "They're not there yet."

"I admire your intellect, sir. Admire it mightily."

"I heard that. Good to hear."

"Because there is no commodity we're shorter of than intellectual know-how. A man like me understands that. Nice talking to you. Ever find yourself nearby, why, drop on in. I'm near everything. Great churches. A lot of parking. Bring your associates if they ever turn up."

"They'll like to come."

"I use you people in my work."

The men at the board appeared to be on the verge of sleep. No theoretical reasoning or basic theorems. The practical science of physical arrangement. Sense of mass. Scientists still probing limestone blocks with radar to discover what's buried in those pyramids. He thought of the obelisk in Central Park and wondered if he'd ever get to examine an actual fragment of sacred writing.

Directions for knowing all dark things.

The plane flew above the weather. He went to sit alone in a rear area behind equipment racks and anticrash icons. A stressless hour passed. Or maybe four such hours. He'd forgotten which motion he was using to stroke through time, minute or gesh. This part of the airplane had apparently not been used for a while. It was dusty and cramped, its true dimensions concealed by an intricate series of partitions. Real plastic here as opposed to the synthetic updated variations in the forward areas. A sort of Old Quarter. He put both feet up on the front of the seat and hunkered, noting the array of digits molded into the chair, a set of individual polymerized bumps located between his shoes-  -such that, rightsided and divided by a scrambled set of its own first three digits, yields a result just one number away from the divisor; such that digits of divisor and result match digits of original array (save one); such that each consecutive number (divisor a,nd result) is the sum of the cubes of its digits. In fact nothing bored him more than playful calculations. Yet his capacity to fathom the properties of the integers was such that he sometimes found himself watching a number unfold to reveal the reproductive structure within. Eber-hard Fearing. It was only a partial lie he'd told that travel-happy man. A meeting was scheduled to take place (person or persons unknown), although not at this altitude. He closed his eyes. Jetliner passing through the sphere of vapor, through the blank amalgam of gases, moisture and particulate matter. Bloated metal ritually marked. A loud buzzer sounded.

He calculated with the ease of a coastal bird haunting an updraft. But beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence; the formal balances it maintains, inevitability adjacent to surprise, exactitude to generality; the endless disdain of mathematics for what is slack in the character of its practitioners and what is trivial and needlessly repetitive in their work; its precision as a language; its claim to necessary conclusions; its pursuit of connective patterns and significant form; the manifold freedom it offers in the very strictures it persistently upholds.

Mathematics made sense.

He lowered his feet to the floor, eyes still closed, a circumstance that gave anyone watching enough time to determine what it was that made the boy appear an adept of concentration-simply his physical stillness, the seeming compression of his frame into a more comprehensive object. It was a stillness unaffected by the shifting of his feet and yet completely obliterated the second his eyes came open. This latter act served to release upon the world a presence essentially seriocomic in nature, that of early adolescence trying to conceal itself in a fold of apathy.

The buzzer sounded once more and a light flashed on and off. He returned to his seat. The plane landed to refuel again and this time he was one of the passengers getting off. He made his way through a dense crowd of people, none of whom seemed to be going anywhere or meeting anyone. He wondered if they lived at the airport. Maybe there was no room for them in the city and they came out here to settle, sleeping in oil drums in unused hangars, getting up at sunrise and heading indoors to loiter. He reached his destination, a special boarding gate in an isolated part of the airport. Two men were there to meet him. They'd already collected his suitcase and now led him aboard another plane, much smaller than the first, no other passengers, some space to yawn and sprawl. His escorts were named Ottum and Hof. The flight was relatively short and after the aircraft set down on a deserted landing strip the boy and two men walked to a waiting limousine. Billy had the enormous back seat to himself. As Ottum started the car, his partner turned and pointed to a small sign taped to the folded-over underside of one of the jumpseats.

 

Please refrain from smoking out of consideration for the driver of this vehicle, who suffers from:

[  ] Hypertension             [  ] Walking pneumonia

[  ] Tuberculosis              [  ] Smoke-related allergies

[x] Asthma                       [  ] Labored breathing

[  ] Bronchial asthma      [x] Other

 

"We'll be there in twenty some odd minutes," Ottum said.

"This a Cadillac, this car?"

"None other."

"It came almost as a shock to see it. That's why I ask. Way in the middle of nowhere."

"No mistaking one of these vehicles," Hof said. "Custom job from top to bottom. What we call a meticulously customized motor vehicle. It's a Cadillac all right."

"The Rolls-Royce of automobiles," Ottum said.

Billy had been instructed not to tell anyone where he was going. There wasn't much he could have said, to Eberhard Fearing or anyone else, even if he'd wanted to. He knew the name of the place but very little about it. Apparently the people in charge were still defining their objectives and therefore did not release information except in minimum trickles. As to the reason his specific presence was considered essential, not a word had been spoken.

"Is this thing bulletproof?"

"Absolutely, top to bottom."

"I never thought so. I just asked the question because you think of a limousine this big as might as well having all the extras."

"It's for the top people," Hof said.

"Did it ever get shot at?"

"Course not."

"It's not a bubbletop, I notice."

"He notices," Hof said.

"I heard," Ottum said.

"Not a bubbletop, he notices."

"Two terrific sense of humors."

"Be a kid."

"I was only talking back."

"Just be a kid," Hof said.

He tried to revel in the expensive pleasures of the back seat, toying with gadgets and scraping the soles of his shoes on the edges of the collapsed jumpseats, freeing himself of whatever foreign matter had accumulated there recently.

"I didn't go through customs."

"We took care of that," Hof said. "You're a special case. It's a courtesy they extend to special cases."

They traveled over bad roads on a gray plain. He saw one sign of life, an old man with a counting stalk. Must be for tourists, he thought. In time a sequined point appeared on the seam of land and air.

"Maybe you don't know it," Hof said, "but you're more or less a legend in your own time."

They were coming to something. He knew immediately it was something remarkable. Rising over the land and extending far across its breadth was a vast geometric structure, not at first recognizable as something designed to house or contain or harbor, simply a formulation, an expression in systematic terms of a fifty-story machine or educational toy or two-dimensional decorative object. The dominating shape seemed to be a cycloid, that elegant curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line, the line in this case being the land itself. His attention was diverted for a moment as the car passed through a field of dish antennas, hundreds of them, surprisingly small every one. Closer now he was able to see that the cycloid was not complete, having no summit or topmost arc, and that wedged inside the figure by a massive V-form steel support was the central element of the entire structure, a slowly rotating series of intersecting rings that suggested a medieval instrument of astronomy.

In all, the structure was about sixteen hundred feet wide, six hundred feet high. Welded steel. Reinforced concrete. Translucent polyethylene. Aluminum, glass, mylar, sunstone. He noticed that particular surfaces seemed to deflect natural light, causing perspectives to disappear and making it necessary to look away from time to time. Point line surface solid. Feeling of solar mirage. And still a building. A thing full of people.

Field Experiment Number One.

The car stopped next to some construction equipment. He got out, fascinated most of all by the slowly moving focal component, the structure's medieval element. Blinding silver on both sides. Streaks and textures elusive in their liquid iridescence. But the huge central sphere, propped by the V-steel, which itself was lodged inside the discontinuous cycloid, was filled with bronze-colored rings and was distinctly three-dimensional, spinning bountifully above him.

"What happens next?" Hof said.

"He goes to his quarters."

"Sure he doesn't see Dyne?"

"We take him to his quarters," Ottum said.

There was no sense of movement on the elevator. Absolutely no vibration. Not the slightest linear ripple across the bottoms of his feet. He might have been at rest or going sideways or diagonally. Not fond of this idea of stationary motion. He wanted to know he was moving and in which direction. He felt he'd been given a restraining medication and then placed in a block of coagulated foam, deprived of the natural language of the continuous.

The two men led him through a series of subcorridors that ended at the mouth of a masonite labyrinth. The reason for this, Ottum said, was "play value." After going through the maze they reached Billy's quarters, which Hof referred to as a "canister." There were no windows. The lighting was indirect, coming from a small carbon-arc spotlight focused on a reflecting plate above it. The walls were slightly concave and paneled in a shimmering material decorated with squares and similar figures, all in shades of the same muted blue and all distorted by the concave topography. The optical effect was such that the room seemed at first to be largely devoid of vertical and horizontal reference points. It was also soundproof, equipped with a "twofold" (or bed-chair unit) and an imposing wall assembly. Ottum explained this last element. It was called a "limited input module" and it consisted of a desk unit, tape recorder, videophone and monitor, temperature controls, calculator, "teleboard screen." This screen was part of a transmission system that included lasers, self-developing film, location indicators, a piece of chalk, a blackboard and ordinary phone lines; and it recorded and displayed anything written on the blackboard in Space Brain Complex, more than fifty stories straight up. Billy took off his jacket but couldn't find a closet for it until Hof released a lever in the module.

"See that grill down on the wall there?" Ottum said.

In one corner of the room was a metal grating about two feet square. It was set into the wall, down low, its base side an inch off the floor. Through the network of thin metal bars Billy saw nothing but darkness. He nodded to Ottum, who took a card out of his pocket and read slowly in an official voice.

"The exit point to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture."

"I have understood."

"Most people just nod," Ottum said. "It's more universal."

Billy added a nod to his verbal affirmation.

"How long has all this been here?" he said. "The whole big building."

"Relatively brand new," Hof said. "Another few days of touching up and that's it. People are already hard at work. So far everything's operating as per planned."

"Except the toilet bowls flush backwards," Ottum said. "I happened to notice earlier today. The eddy is right to left. Exact opposite of what we're used to."

As Billy opened his suitcase, the two men paused at the door.

"He's supposed to rest now," Hof said. "First he rests. Then he gets cleaned up. Then he eats and sleeps. Then he sees Dyne."

"When do I unpack?"

"Does he know he's supposed to stay away from the construction equipment?" Ottum said. "Maybe he should be told that officially. Does he know it can be dangerous for a kid to get too close to a giant crane?"

"This place has a lot of rules, it's beginning to look like."

"Be yourself," Hof said. "Only don't go too far."

He wrote a postcard to his parents in the Bronx, telling them about the bulletproof Cadillac. Then he lay on the twofold, supposedly to rest. Rest, clean, eat, sleep. If he slept now, it would throw everything off. He considered Ottum's remark about the giant crane. Why did he say "giant"? Why not just "crane"? Weren't all construction cranes pretty gigantic? He curled into the barely yielding pad of heavy cloth-like material. Was it possible Ottum meant a bird? No, not possible. But not impossible either. Okay, if a bird, what kind of bird? A stick-legged silent bird with giant wings that closed over the heads of small sleeping people.

Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.

He felt a cramp in his right foot. The toes bent down and in, locked in that position. Whenever he had this feeling he assumed he'd be lucky ever to walk again. Wondering what he'd do if the cramp began to spread he realized for the first time how truly soundproof the canister was. In his experience all rooms possessed a tone of some kind and he tried now to pick something out of the air, to isolate a measured breath or two, a warp in the monumental calm. Always a danger linked to the science of probing the substratum. In time he forgot he was supposed to be listening intently. He rested along an even line, ending at last this long day's descent to the surface of fixed things.

 

2 FLOW

 

To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one's substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source.

"Knowledge," Byron Dyne said. "The state or fact of knowing. That which is known. The human sum of known things."

He was a slight man, neatly dressed, his ears, lips and nose giving the impression they had been taken from a much larger person and grafted on to this random face as part of a surgical jest. He sat alongside the main thalamic panel in Gnomonics Complex, an area occupied by rows of consoles. Billy in an ovoid chair tried to pay attention. There was no one else in sight. Photographs of great and near great scientists covered the wall behind Dyne's head. He smiled experimentally, apparently a habit of his.

"In any case we're trying to create a sense of planetary community. One people et cetera. Aside from maintenance personnel, everyone here is either a scientist or a scientist-administrator. But we try to look beyond science. A world view. The UN is in New York. The Copenhagen Zoo is in Denmark. We're right here. The largest solar-heated building in the world."

"Curve of quickest descent."

"What's that?"

"The cycloid."

"I'm a scientist-administrator myself," Dyne said. "As such, it's my pleasure to welcome you. We have in the neighborhood of thirty Nobel laureates here. But none of such unique dimensions. What a vivid little man. World's foremost radical accelerate. What exactly is your work composed of?"

"Zorgs."

A dark spot appeared on the floor a few inches from Byron Dyne's right foot. It seemed to be expanding, a stain of some kind. There was no evidence of wetness, however. Just a shaded area redoubling itself.

"Can you tell me what a zorg is without being technical and boring?"

"It's pretty impossible to understand unless you know the language. A zorg is a kind of number. You can't use zorgs for anything except in mathematics. Zorgs are useless. In other words they don't apply."

"Microminiaturization."

"Is that your field?"

"We condense raw data. Those consoles behind you perform the bulk of the job. Five disciplines make up Gnomonics Comp. Micro-mini's the biggest."

"Can you tell me what's my assignment now?"

"You've been sent to me for prebriefing. That's what this is. This is prebriefing."

"When is briefing?"

"Right now it's enough for you to know the general reason for Field Experiment Number One. This is the fulfillment of mankind's oldest dream."

"What dream?"

"Knowledge," Dyne said. "Study the planet. Observe the solar system. Listen to the universe. Know thyself."

"Space."

"Outer and inner space. Each bends into the other. There are well over two thousand people living and working here right now. More on the way. One hundred nations are sharing the cost. Single planetary consciousness. Rational approach. World view. How many nations are sharing the cost?"

"One hundred nations."

"Good," he said.

A woman in tweeds entered. Another tentative smile half-inched its way across Byron Dyne's face. Encouraged, the woman approached.

"I'm Mrs. Laudabur of the World Expeditionary Bible Co-Op. They told me to see a Mr. Dyne."

"What do you want?"

"Our Bibles are hand-glued and hand-stitched by refugees. They told me a Mr. Dyne might want to order in bulk."

"Go away," he said matter-of-factly.

"Both testaments," the woman said. "Translated directly from the original tongues. Proofread by captured troops. Persian grain leather."

"We don't need Bibles. We have movies. Anytime we want, we can see Charlton Heston in chains."

"Bulk orders get steak knives thrown in."

"Totemist," he said. "Prayer harpy."

The foreshadowing stain had moved across the floor and started up the wall behind Dyne's head and was now in fact within several inches of a large photograph just to the right of the thalamic panel. Billy recognized the man in the picture. It was Henrik Endor, a celebrated mathematician and astrophysicist. He was bearded, in his sixties, and wore a star pentagram on a chain around his neck. Billy had met him once, briefly, at Rockefeller University, where Endor had described himself as the wizened child of Thales and Heraclitus. His breath had smelled of peanuts.

A workman came in now and told Byron Dyne that the fire-safety system had developed a malfunction. Although there was no immediate danger, many of the walls and floors were filling up with "liquid preventative." The very thickness of the walls was a safeguard, keeping actual moisture from seeping through even if a silhouette effect was evident. As the workman's report neared an end, Mrs. Laudabur started waving a hand in his face.

"Can you direct me to a Mr. Dyne," she said, "because I've got it in my mind that the person I've been speaking to is not the target person and does not have authorization to order in bulk."

During the ensuing remarks Billy strolled through the area, noting that the consoles, sixteen of them, were arranged in such a way that seven were separated from the other nine by an L-shaped partition. This meant that the square of three was derived from the square of four by the presence of this border or carpenter's rule and that if the number of consoles reached twenty-five and if a new partition were erected, isolating nine consoles this time, the result would be the square of four deriving from the square of five, an odd number in every case (seven, nine, so on) determining the split relationship between succeeding square numbers. Never really seized by the need to calculate, he was more apt to be aware of pattern than of brute numeration. Seeing he was alone once more with the scientist-administrator, he made his way back to the chair. Dyad of great and small. In the city of the elect they had passed across the porticos and outer gardens, white-veiled men, initiates in numbers, Dorian dancers, led to cells equipped with slates and ordained to decode the symbol of the twelve-faced universe.

"I'll tell you a secret," Dyne said. "I was never any good in arithmetic."

They'd had to confront the terror of the irrational, this everlasting slit in the divinity of whole numbers. Subdivide the continuous motion of a point. No common measure this side of madness. Ratio of diagonal to side of square. Three segments of a line on Endor's five-rayed star. Nothing corresponds. Something eludes. Screech and claw of the inexpressible.

"To this day it's a mystery to me. The simple common ordinary whole numbers. How they work, how they interconnect, what they imply, what they're made of. The tininess of mathematics, that's another mystery. Micromini's a giant science in comparison."

"I don't think we can talk about it being a mystery. There's no mystery. When you talk about difficulty, that's one thing, the difficulty of simple arithmetic. But mystery, forget about, because that's another subject."

Dyne's smile cut off further discussion on the subject. He coughed into the sleeve of his suit jacket. Billy kind of liked that. It was both regal and sloppy, the sort of thing you'd expect from a serenely detached crackpot aristocrat. The man scanned the area now, eventually centering his attention on some theoretical point in the middle distance.

"Designed by a woman," he said finally.

"Good work."

"The entire concept. The execution."

"Nice job."

"Start to finish."

"What designed by a woman?"

"This entire structure."

"Big."

"Inside and out."

"I like the roominess."

"Do you know what kind of sphere that is that's set into the main structure? Armillary sphere, that's an armillary sphere. Used a lot in the Moslem renaissance. Of course ours is a supermodel. Much larger than anything they dreamed of in those days."

"Do people work in there?"

"Motion's so gradual and thing's so big they have no sense of movement. Sure, it's a working sphere. Tells time of day and year. Measures tilt of earth's axis. Measures height of sun. Measures coordinates of a star. Also houses four or five complexes and about six hundred people. This whole operation is self-supporting. Fume sewers and recycling units all over the place. Synthetic food machine-treated on the premises. Not to mention solar heating."

"You said."

"Did you see the antenna array on your way in?"

"Telescopes."

"Each dish contains a reflecting mesh. The entire array comprises what we call a synthesis radio telescope. Were you surprised at the size of each unit?"

"Small in size."

"It's the mesh," Dyne said. "We've used unimaginably tiny components in the mesh. Makes gross scanning easier than ever."

"Where did she put the bathroom?"

"So the combined operation is a sort of clock-radio if you want to look at it that way. Perfectly legitimate way to look at it. Between the armillary sphere and the synthesis telescope, what we have here is a gigantic microminiaturized clock-radio."

"Is Endor here?"

"Endor is living in a hole in the ground about ten miles east of here."

"A hole?"

"He refuses to come out," Dyne said.

The wall continued to darken in all directions. Billy turned and saw the same thing happening behind him and on both sides. Floor and ceiling as well. No immediate danger, the maintenance man had said. Just this tension. This gradual plastic deformation of a solid object into overflowing droves of motion.

"Which way's the bathroom?" he said.

"The prebriefing is not over."

"I won't be long."

"How long is not long?"

"When I'm finished."

"Tee-tee or big business?"

"Say again."

"Number one or number two?" Dyne said.

 

His mother often called him mommy. It was a case of double imitation. As a small child he naturally mimicked many of the things Faye said and often she responded with loving impersonations of his original facsimile. There was not the slightest mockery intended; she might have been saying junior or bud or skip. It happened, however, to be mommy-an endearment located beyond the southernmost border of messy affection. It wasn't until he was nearly twelve that he was able to get her out of the habit.

His mother was also responsible for the second of his unwelcome names. The obsessive moviegoing of Faye's childhood and adolescence had been interrupted only by childhood itself, adolescence itself. Her extravagant attraction to movies was almost an act of violence. She had seen everything made in that period and was content to spend the mellowing years of her motherhood in front of the TV set, viewing the same movies again and again. Constant reader of trade publications and fan magazines, she was familiar with modern theories of promotion and packaging; the star system; mystique, charisma and product appeal; and so, when her own small son early demonstrated that he was no ordinary Bronx boy devoted to street-fighting and venereal entertainment, she instantly began to think in terms of mass audience awareness. This meant a surname less humdrum than Terwilliger. Simply by removing e-r twice, she arrived at Twillig, which had a distinct twinkle to it, perfect for a superstar.

Before his work earned enough money to enable the family to move to a neighborhood just south of Yonkers (laundry rooms, terrace apartments, air conditioning, kids on bikes!), they lived in an old building on Crotona Avenue, Billy, Babe and Faye, wedged between room dividers and other debris, on the fourth floor, overlooking a split-level playground, scene of ritual mutilations. His after-school tutor was Mr. Morphy, a small black man with a likable mustache. He wore the same suit every day for nearly five months, then changed to another for the rest of the academic year.

"I should have listened in school," Faye said. "I never paid attention. I had IQ to burn but I never listened to what the teachers told me. Realistically I should have paid attention. But I always sat so far back."

Babe was both rangy and overweight, carrying his excess pounds with daring grandness, an easygoing and somehow apt profusion, his body conveying some of the earned fluency of a former athlete, which he wasn't in particular, his active involvement in the playing of games being restricted to an occasional round of ace-nine ball with the sub-mafiosi who still clung to these polyglot surroundings, men with excess phlegm in their throats, rueful mortals of the poolroom, finger-biters, masters of deliberate spitting. Babe owned a sawed-off poolstick (for nonsporting purposes) and a large black attack dog. Poolstick in hand he sometimes stood by the window looking down at the boys and girls in the playground across the street. The dancers. The nodders. The actors. The self-styled playboy assassins. He took his hand-weapon with him when he walked the dog. Faye pointed out that if he didn't have the dog he wouldn't have to walk it and therefore wouldn't need a pool-stick to protect the walked dog or a dog for the1 poolstick or either one of them for himself because without the dog he wouldn't be out there. Billy didn't like the dog. He had never liked it and did not assign a gender to it. The dog used to push him out of the way and chew on his books. Late one night it appeared at his bedside and seemed about to speak to him. He knew by its expression that it was not likely to produce mere animal babble. If it opened its mouth it would speak. Words, not sounds. Fleshed meaning to replace those familiar growls.

"Go back to bed," he told the dog.

What he liked most about Mr. Morphy's visits were the new books the tutor brought along. The sweet clean shock of number theory. The natural undamped resonance of the symbols. Never more nor less than what was meant. Mr. Morphy soft-voiced and utterly dull pointed out one unchallengeable truth after another. Eventually these would lead to Pennyfellow, Connecticut. The Center for the Refinement of Idea-tional Structures. Twelve-wintered then he was, already nearly peerless.

When Babe came home from work he opened a bottle of Champale and drank it immediately. The next several took a little longer. Later he'd sometimes grip the poolstick like a baseball bat and assume the batting stances of famous ballplayers of the past. Faye and Billy would be asked to identify the man whose stance he was imitating but neither ever knew and this annoyed Babe to the point where he'd pick up the phone and call his friend from the subways, Izzy Seltzer. He then reas-sumed his stance, which Faye would have to describe to Izzy over the phone.

"Okay, legs wide apart, bat up in the air, hips wiggling, a lot of rear end."

Billy spent a year and a half at Bronx High School of Science. The daily journey wasn't easy, two long bus rides each way, and most of the ground covered was part of a landscape renowned for incidental violence. Gangs often made raids on the bus. In the afternoon they came out of the sun like Kiowa braves, nine or ten teenage boys, riding the rear bumper, pounding on windows, forcing the back door and improvising scenes of flash-terror. He liked Bronx Science but was glad when the Center offered him a place.

"This isn't an ordinary dog," Babe said. "It's an attack dog. I say the word, this dog lunges. I say the word, everybody better beware. This is a highly trained attack guard dog. With this dog at my side I can go into any neighborhood in the city."

"K.b.i.s.f .b.," Faye said.

"What's that mean?"

"Keep believing it, shit-for-brains."

"Nice talk in front of the kid," he said. "Where'd you hear that?"

"The kid brought it back from Connecticut."

Many times Faye and Billy stayed up until two or three in the morning, drinking coffee and watching old movies on TV. Across the airshaft a crazy old woman screamed and cursed. He could never make out what she was saying. Some nights he came close to understanding the sense of a particular shriek or the last several words in a long medley of invective. But it always eluded him. Although at times she seemed to be arguing with someone, there was never any voice besides her own. Most of the time she simply screamed a lot of fabricated words. People called her the scream lady. He was afraid of her but wanted to know what she was saying.

Faye took him to a department store on Fordham Road for a new suit to wear when he entered the School of Mathematics at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. The University of Chicago wanted him. Caltech wanted him. Princeton was eager to get him. He was even offered a research post in Akademgorodok in the Soviet Union. The final bid came from the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster, The name of the place scared him so much he never even replied. In the end he decided in favor of the Center, one of the best places in the world to do work in pure mathematics.

One night, when the attack dog was still a puppy, Billy overheard a conversation between his mother and father. He was in bed at the time, consciousness slowly dissolving, and their voices brought him back from the sheerest drop.

"He doesn't do anything right."

"He's young, he'll learn."

"He does everything wrong."

"He's little yet, Babe."

"He doesn't listen when I talk. I talk, nothing happens. Best thing is put him to sleep. I'd sell him if I thought I could find somebody dumb enough to buy. We put him in the box and let them turn on the gas."

"No, Babe. N-o, no."

"We put him to sleep, Faye. He's not worth worrying about. They have a box they put them in. It's over in minutes, or maybe longer, depending on how much he weighs."

All children know their parents plot to dispose of them. Black box. Big room. Mad and Dag fitted with other people's faces. This is place without interruption, pinpointless time, motion extending beyond its own surrender to the Outside, and whether an isolated childhood encompasses the whole of "life and death," this converse density, is itself a question too compact to be intelligible, dimension n, containing the total unbroken distance over which a thing extends and the presiding energy that informs it, no "part" separate from any other, continuous being, hole to hole, nourished from below. Baggy gray faces saying ago aga. Mad and Dag with a reel and rhyme. Count to ten to ten. Box with Chinese insides. Gas pumped from exsanguine stomachs. Continued din of popping optic disks. Big T, little w, little i, little 1, little 1, little i, little g. Nourished from below, from below. Hopping Mad and gadabout Dag plotting to dispose. Count to ten to ten to ten to ten.

* * *

In the topiary garden about a dozen people driven outside by the shadow-flow drowsily swung in hammocks, sat on swings and lounged in wicker rockers. Hedges and shrubs were trimmed in animal shapes, such as those of baboons, mandrills and spider monkeys, but in a manner so stylized as to be nearly geometric. There were several large trees at the edges of the garden. Sunlight warmed Billy's face and fashioned precise shadows on the grass. He sat across a picnic quilt from Cyril Kyriakos and Una Braun, both dressed informally, the woman in a wide skirt, her legs stretched evenly across the grass, the man leaning back, body twisted a bit, left leg bent at the knee, a certain austerity in evidence, as though he advocated disciplined picnics. Una was a consulting hydrologist. Cyril had taught transitional logic at universities on four continents. Several other people reclined nearby and one of them soon disengaged herself to take a position just behind Billy and to his right, well placed (he suspected) to study his ear and neck. This was Mimsy Mope Grimmer, an expert on infantile sexuality.

"You're new here," Cyril said.

It seemed he was always new. Newness was his personal curse. He was forever being told that he was new here or there or somewhere. It was an injunction to explain himself, to give his listeners a brief summary of his existence thus far. To be new among adults, however, was not nearly the problem it was when he was with people his own age. The challenge was not as direct here. It could be met with an oblique remark which those assembled would be content to ascribe to shyness.

"All I knew about coming here was I was coming to a place with this name."

"They haven't given you any clues as to what sort of project you'll be involved in?" Una said.

"I find out tomorrow, let's hope."

"I'm not sure any of us knows why we're here," Cyril said. "I have a suspicion we're a bunch of technocrats pretending to be Earthlings or grown-up planetary children. Maybe we shouldn't be here at all. Maybe it's all a great big toy designed for significant play. Enjoy the pork analogue last night?"

"I'm a picky eater, everybody's always saying, so the type of food doesn't make too much difference."

"I think the food's good," Una said. "Everybody thinks it's good. We love the food here. We all really love it."

"I hate overcooked analogue."

"Cyril alone has looked on pork chops rare."

Una mentioned the fact that Cyril's wife Myriad was in the maternity ward at the top of the armillary sphere, many hours overdue. As though to change the subject, Cyril explained his assignment at Field Experiment Number One. He was part of a committee formed to define the word "science." The committee had begun meeting regularly long before a site had even been chosen for the structure itself. It was thought a definition would be agreed upon about the time ground was being broken. But the debate continued to drag on and the definition at present ran some five hundred pages. In addition to his work on the substance of the definition, Cyril headed a subcommittee devoted solely to phrasing.

"Just that one word?" Billy said.

Una was softer than moon daisies, blessed with erotic madonna's eyes, hair of vandyke brown. There was a sundial behind her. Embedded in the grass, it was carved from a limestone block the size of a funeral marker for a pet, its wrought-iron indicator casting an arrow-streak across the calibrated surface of the dial.

"There's never been a satisfactory definition of science," Cyril said. "I'm trying to apply rules of valid argument to the defining procedure. A noteworthy boondoggle thus far. I'll tell you our current problem. Our current problem seems to be whether or not the definition of science should include such manifestations as herb concoctions, venerated emblems, sand-painting, legend-telling, ceremonial chants and so on. There's a distinct methodology to each of these pursuits. Experimentation, observation, identification. Nature is systematically investigated, its data analyzed and applied."

"What is scientific about sand-painting?" Una said.

"A sand-painting represents the journey of a sacred being on behalf of a sick person. The medicine man has to learn to combine sands of many different colors so they'll trickle out of his hands in such precise mixtures that they'll form exactly the right kind of painting on the floor."

"Legend-telling and ceremonial chanting?"

"If a medicine man chants over your body all night and you wake up cured, that's science. At least some of my colleagues so maintain. You have to learn every nuance of hundreds of healing legends and chants. You need thorough knowledge of a great many medicinal herbs. Not only that but you have to be a good dancer."

They were joined by a man with ashes thumb-smudged on his forehead. To Billy's left he sat, white-shoed and affectedly sedate, introduced by Una as J. Graham Hummer, "widely known as the instigator of the MIT language riots" and a member of Cyril's subcommittee on phrasing. Telling time by the sun's shadow. More or less scientific than clock-recorded mean time? A group of people carrying garden chairs advanced across the lawn.

"There are rumors," Hummer said. "Something big's about to be announced. Seriously, the air is rife. Could involve our mathematical friend here."

"The only thing I anticipate right now is more shadow-flooding," Una said.

"No, something's happening. I know rife air when I see it. Something big and not necessarily water-borne."

Cyril: " 'All things are water,' said the Greek."

Una: " 'All things flow,' said the Greeker of the two."

Mimsy Mope Grimmer chose this moment to approach the picnic quilt. She sat very close to Billy, even tapping his wrist with lovely brooding intimacy, as though affirming a solemn connection between her knowledge of infantile sexuality and his particular state of affairs. Despite the melancholy blessedness of the gesture, he continued sneaking looks at Una Braun, whose gentle heat he found enveloping.

"Four to a blanket," Cyril said.

"We want to know about your beautiful wife," Mimsy said. "Tell us when the baby's coming."

"I don't know when but I know how many and what. Siamese quintuplets. Joined at the top of the head. We'll have to roll them to school like a hoop."

"You beast, Cyril. Don't. Awful man."

"The truth is I'd rather she gave birth to a wisteria tree or pair of mittens. Children make me uneasy. They seem the only ones able to escape their set places. They're continuous, you see, and mock us in secret ways. I have a recurring daydream about an afternoon game show on television. 'Abort that Fetus,' it's called. The studio audience is composed of obviously pregnant women, far too far gone for any corrective measures to be taken but a great studio audience nonetheless, keying the theme of the show and rooting very hard for the contestants. The applause light flashes and the master of ceremonies comes suaving out, all hair spray and teeth. He looks at the audience, points a jaded finger and says: 'How would you like to play'-slight pause-'ab-orrrt that feetusss!' The women scream and cry and moan and then the first contestant is brought on."

"Enough," Una said. "More, more than enough."

"All through marriage I thought to avoid childmaking not by the usual means but by trying to separate myself mentally from the implied sublevel process of biological reproduction. My reasoning was that nothing significant happens without a psychic link. A test, then. An attempt to deny a localized point to those transient energies that guide the reproductive cells. Superstitious self-delusion perhaps. But who's to say for sure? In any case I remained a distinct and unconnected entity. Myriad, however, has immanence enough for two. At least that's how I interpret her present condition."

"We await the result," Una said.

She drifted off to sit in a basket swing attached to the lowest branch of a dawn redwood. Hummer went on about rumors and events, wondering aloud how different kinds of significant announcements might affect phrasing in the finished definition of the word "science." Perhaps someone here had discovered a new form of matter. Evidence of a buried continent. Signs of a tenth planet in the solar system. Hands curled, he allowed the ends of his fingers to meet and part perhaps twice every second.

"Tell us about the MIT business," Mimsy said. "I've never heard the details."

"There were no details."

"Did people really throw stones at each other and overturn cars and the like? I mean was there actual killing in the streets?"

"I was simply trying to assert that what there is in common between a particular fact and the sentence that asserts this fact can itself be put into a sentence."

"And this led to rioting?"

"It was simply a question of constructing models and then evaluating the structures. Shallow diagrams and deep diagrams."

"What was the final toll?" Mimsy said.

"There wouldn't have been any problem if I'd been able to arrange total computer access. But somebody named Troxl had leased overlapping time segments on all the area's computers. Elux Troxl. There wouldn't have been a problem if I'd been granted access. A Central American, I believe."

"Where is he now?"

"Hiding."

"In Central America?"

"In Germany," Hummer said. "They're all in Germany, hiding, lots of them."

"When did all this actually happen?" Mimsy said. "I mean the actual killing in the streets."

"It was the year everyone was using the words 'parameter' and 'interface.' But there wouldn't have been any problem if that fellow hadn't monopolized computer time."

Billy was not interested in plotting the orbits of Jovian moons. If Hummer's supposition was correct-that they'd brought him here to calculate a planetary path or the mass of a neo-electron-it was a waste of everybody's time. His kind of mathematics was undertaken solely to advance the art. In time to come, of course, what had been pure might finally be applied. He saw how the virginal circles of Eudoxus had led to a more coherent astronomy, how the conic sections of Apollonius had prefigured the spirit of universal gravitation. The world had its uses, yes; ideas could be rotated to expedient planes. It wasn't his method to test the disposition of the physical universe but this didn't mean he reacted skeptically to those who drove hooks into nature. He considered the case of Archimedes, son of astronomer, floating body, lever adept, nude runner, catapulter, weigher of parabolas, tactician of solar power, sketcher of equations in sand and with fingernail on own body anointed in after-bath olive oil, killed by dreamless Romans.

"Do you ride?" Mimsy said.

"Ride what?"

"Well, see, I was wondering about recreation. What sort of active things you do."

"The usual."

"Golf, watercolors, growing pretty things?"

"That's not usual. Is that usual?"

"I guess it depends," she said.

"In handball there's a thing called a Chinese killer. That's an active thing I do, hit Chinese killers. It's when the ball hits right where the wall meets the ground so that there's no bounce. It's impossible to return a Chinese killer. The ball just skids along the ground, impossible to return. They have courts here? I could show you."

His voice seemed too big for his body. It was rough-edged and fairly deep, delivering every kind of statement with equally sneak bluntness, a dull abrupt impersonal voice that might have belonged to someone who called out names for a living.

"The ball just skids, does it?"

"What kind of sex goes on in a place like this?"

"All sorts, I'd imagine," Mimsy said.

"In universities it gets pretty oral, going by what I hear. I was thinking about this place if it's the same or similar."

"Maybe I should poll the staff."

"Nice bit of imagery," Cyril said.

"I suppose I should have said canvass the members."

"In my case, a good idea, however belated. My luck to cast my lot with a hyperfertile woman. Internal contradictions are at the very center of my life. Hooray for transitional logic. Helps expose the counterexamples that haunt our arguments."

"Wind chimes," Hummer said.

More people came into the garden, indicating the shadow-presence was spreading through the building. Mimsy leaned toward the boy, speaking in a mock whisper.

"How's your genital organization?"

"Remind me to check."

"You're already past your prime, sexually speaking. The golden age is early infancy. Soon after this the corruption of the erotic instinct takes place. In a very short time everything falls apart. The solidarity of opposites is completely shattered. Before you've learned to put two words together, you are mired in an existence full of essential dichotomies. I feel free to speak, since you raised the subject yourself a moment ago."

"For the body to become unafraid," Cyril said, "we need to live beyond the brain and with less talkative genitals."

"Someone's installed wind chimes."

Only the ashes on his forehead marred Hummer's antiseptic manner. Cyril looked toward the eighty-foot redwood, calling to Una Braun.

"Hydromancer, divine us a drink."

"Mere hydrologist," she said. "More's the pity."

"We can't escape our places, don't you see? Our sole hope is silver liquid wishboned from the earth. Otherwise forever fixed, our places in the series. That species of tree was once extinct, you know. Stayed that way for millions of years. Then an intrepid man traveled from a distant land with a handful of living seeds. Now the tree bears cones at opposite ends of the earth. Nourishment comes from unexpected places, doesn't it then, at times?"

"What's that mean?" Hummer said.

"I hope it doesn't mean Eastern mysticism and Western science," Una called.

Mimsy Mope Grimmer bypassed the primroses, stopping to pick a buttercup from a speckled bed. Her place on the grass was taken by Una, legs disappearing under wide skirt, redwood needles clinging here and there.

"Question of perspective," Cyril said. "If we're ever going to reach a definition of the word 'science,' we've got to admit the possibility that what we think of as obscure ritual and superstition may be perfectly legitimate scientific enterprises. Our own view of the very distant past may be the only thing that needs adjusting. This past, after all, continues to live not only in remote cultural pockets but more and more in the midst of our supercivilized urban centers. Simply admit the possibility. That's all I say. Primitive kinship systems are not necessarily antiscientific."

"Phrasing is the element that makes or breaks the definition," Hummer said. "The phrasing is the definition. An analysis of how we say what we are saying is itself a statement of the precise meaning of the word we are defining."

"No definition of science is complete without a reference to terror," Cyril said.

"Explain," Una said.

Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.

"Mysticism's point of departure is awareness of death, a phenomenon that doesn't occur to science except as the ultimate horrifying vision of objective inquiry. Every back door is filled with the terror of death. Mysticism, because it started at that very point, tends to become progressively rational."

"Gabble, hiss, gabble," Hummer said.

For the first time since the "picnic" began, Cyril Kyriakos changed position. He sat upright, legs crossed, and took off his shirt. Then, beginning to speak, he unbuckled a figure-eight harness and proceeded to adjust some locks, rings, cables and joints before removing his left arm from his body. Automatically, Billy looked away even as he continued to stare. Cyril put his shirt back on. He placed the arm and its suspension system across his lap, where the sunlight accentuated the high shine of the plastic laminate material. A small emblem set just below the triceps pad carried the words: A PRODUCT OF OMCO RESEARCH.

"It's been suggested that the logic I espouse isn't rigorous enough to do justice to the sheer dispersion of modern thought. But wasn't Aristotle too lax and Russell too insistent on being all-devouring? Sometimes I think I'd like to relocate, as they say in the business community. Give me algebraic invariants to play around with. Or too, too solid geometry."

Some people in one of the lower gardens were seated in the kind of triangular pattern studied in depth by early believers in the selfhood of numbers. What was ten was also four, triangle and password, tetraktys, holy fourfoldness. Hummer got up and left. Una got up, smiling, and shook out her skirt. Cyril nodded, rising, making ready to go, the woman lifting the quilt, smiling once more at the boy on the grass, while the man, Cyril, headed off now, side by side with Una, the plastic arm in his right hand and held parallel to the ground, glinting a bit, still, as they moved into the distance. Billy heard the wind chimes now, tone surprisingly precise, a sequence of whole-numbered harmonies, music as mathematics whistled into.

Hours later he stood naked in his room looking around for his pajamas, a moldy sock still in his hand. He felt something of himself in the material, a corporeal dampness, the faintest sense of coating, of his own rubbed-off yeast. His fear of the body's fundamental reality had not yet fully disclosed itself. In fact he often occupied himself with thoughts of rot. His own death, wake and burial were recurring themes. Of secondary interest was the putrefaction of his immediate family and then of close relatives and then more distant and then of friends in descending order of importance and finally mere acquaintances, broken down to compost. This was formal rot to be enjoyed on a theoretical level. Equally marvelous were the jams and scabs of his own living body. Excrement worried him a bit. Shitpiss. He did not have reveries about excrement. Not his own and certainly not anyone else's.

There was something about waste material that defied systematic naming. It was as though the many infantile names for fecal matter and urine were concessions to the fact that the real names (whichever these were) possessed a secret power that inhibited all but the most ceremonial utterance. He saw a segment of pajama leg sticking out of a stack of pillowcases and other linen that sat in a basket near the bathroom door. The sock in his hand reminded him of something he'd known for a long time in the vaguest of ways, a sort of accumulated fact; namely, he'd developed a personal stink.

Among the things beyond expression in various cultures have been the names of deities, infernal beings, totemic animals and plants; the names of an individual's blood relatives of the opposite sex (a ban related to incest restrictions); the new name given a boy at his initiation; the names of certain organs of the body; the names of the recently dead; the names of sacred objects, profane acts, leaders of cults, the cults themselves. Double substitutes must be used. Carefully devised code words. Taboo variants. Oaths are duly taken. An entire bureaucracy of curse, scourge and punishment is set up to discourage utterance of the unspeakable. Copyists of manuscripts are prevailed upon to resort to the strictest kind of transliteral deviousness. No writing that touches on the life of a secret subject can itself escape secrecy and in time culthood is conferred on document as well as primary figure. Often more than one person is concealed in the cult leader's generative shadow and the names of none of those who follow can be revealed except as provided by the contextural pattern itself, however primitive its design or childlike its claim to a scientific principle of arrangement.

He dropped the sock and got his pajamas. Before stepping into them he briefly juggled his testicles. This was a bedtime routine he'd lately developed not only for the common monkey sport of fingering those boiled orbs (dimeric witness to virility) but also in earnest celebration of the fact that his left testicle had fully emerged at last, making him not only whole but reassuringly asymmetrical as well, the left drooping a bit lower than the right, as decreed by nature.

Slowly he was getting accustomed to the canister's tenuous perspectives. In his pajamas he examined the components of the limited input module. He knew this was standard equipment for the sector he was in but he had no interest in learning how to work the thing. For whatever it was they wanted he'd need pencil and paper at most.

Someone was outside the door and now a knocking sound was evident, bap bap, a sort of cartoon noise, bap, as of an oval stone dropping on a bald infant's head. He opened the door to see a figure in oversized work clothes. The man listed slightly, giving the impression of being burdened beyond the reach of deepest fatigue, someone who sleeps in subways.

"They know me as Howie in this sector. The fume sewer man. Heard you were worth seeing. Maybe you want me to show you what's what down there, two or three levels down, what they got down where I work down there, fume sewers, evaporators, recyclers, backup spewing filters. You think this is far down. That there is a lot farer. I could take you eight levels down. Nobody goes eight levels down without a red pass."

"I'm supposed to go to bed."

"You're the only kid in this whole place."

"There's another one being born."

"Eight levels down in noise is some racket. Accelerators, storage rings, proton impactors, collision machines, Howie Weeden, always glad to meet a kid."

"They want me to get up early."

"Let's shake hands. People shake hands when they meet. You don't just say nice to meet you, one person, and the other person do nothing. People shake hands."

"I still have wet."

"What's that?"

"I still have wet on my hands from just washing up for the night."

"They told me to come look," Howie said. "They said there's a kid over there worth looking at for the way he adds numbers in his head."

"That's not what I do."

"I have a python in my room. Don't tell anybody. It's my best pet ever. Want to come watch it digest?"

"They have me on a schedule."

"There's a woman takes a bath every night at this time and you can see her in a ceiling reflector if you look through a hole in the wall standing on a bench in the workroom over near the next sector up one level. I'm the only one that knows. I call her the water woman."

"Let's go," Billy said.

He put on his robe and slippers and followed Howie Weeden through the play maze to a red elevator reserved for maintenance personnel. They got off and headed down a long empty corridor. Signs of the shadow-flow were everywhere. Howie moved quickly despite a double shuffle of his right foot.

"If anything happens, grab my tongue," he said.

"I don't understand."

"Just be ready to grab my tongue."

"I want to know why."

"I never had to tell anybody before. They always knew. You tell somebody to grab your tongue, you don't have to say why. Just if I slam out, go for the tongue, that's all I'm saying."

"How often does this happen?"

"More often than not," Howie said.

In the workroom he stood on a bench and put his head to a metal bracket at the juncture of two cement walls. After several minutes he looked at Billy, pointed to a specific perforation in the bracket and then stepped down to the floor. Billy wasn't nearly tall enough to put his eye to the spot in question, so Howie set himself on the bench once more, bunched up on all fours, as the boy climbed up his arched back and found a foot-grip alongside each shoulder blade. His hands were flat against the wall, head twisted, right eye almost in contact with the small vertical slit. There was a hole in the wall, perhaps half an inch in diameter, directly behind this particular level of the bracket and so he found himself peering through two openings, one punched by machine into the metal bracket and the other most likely resulting from crude workmanship or premature erosion of the wall, the sector, the level, the entire structure. Beyond both holes was a ceiling reflector.

"Just remember the tongue," Howie said. "This weight on my back isn't doing my skull trauma any good."

In the tilted mirror he saw Una Braun. Wearing a loosely knotted robe patterned in mellow colors she stood barefoot on pentagonal tile, her body a bit foreshortened by the angle of reflection, combing, combing her hair. Bottles of perfume and baby oil stood on a glass shelf. His knees went weak and he thought he would fall. Both hands were dug into cement, not finger-gripping (he feared she'd hear the scratching) but pressed desperately, palm and heel, into the wall. It was she, Una, about to bathe, undress and bathe, water woman soon to drop her robe and step into that clear and distorting, dense and un-colored element. Varieties of light glanced off the surface borders of air and water, water and glass, glass and oil, the whole room a medium of nonuniform density, these propagating waves graining her body, soon to be rubbed and soaped and misted, transformed in displaceable mass, passing through itself, beauty bare, an unfalsifiable and self-blinding essence, not subject to the judgments of mirrors, what Euclid might have danced to in the summer dusk. Oooo naaa. She stood combing her hair, the big toe of one foot digging idly at the inmost pentacle on a cool blue unit of tile. Now she smiled at a stray thought, a memory of home or long buried song lyric, one hand dropping to the whimsical knot on the robe's sagging belt, perhaps loosening it further, the other hand placing the comb on a shelf.

Do they comb their hair before they take a bath?

She lowered her head for a moment, moving partly out of his line of vision, returning seconds later. When she looked up, she saw him. That very section of wall, mirrored twice in the complex placement of the bathroom's reflecting surfaces, was spread across the ceiling. There was his right eye, magnified.

"Who is that?"

He kicked Howie's shoulder to indicate trouble.

"We're caught," he whispered.

"I heard," Howie said.

"What do we do?"

"Ask for tits and let me know what happens."

She hadn't moved.

"Show me your tits."

The sound of his voice surprised him in its unreal evenness and degree of clarity.

"Billy, is that you? Do I know that voice? It's you, isn't it?"

"Show me your tits please."

"Repulsive person. Wretched little boy."

He kicked Howie again, more urgently this time.

"I tried asking but nothing got shown."

"Ask for thigh."

"You ask."

"Who's up there?"

"You didn't tell me there'd be conversation. I expected to see things without this talk. She knows me by voice."

"Ask for hair," Howie whispered.

"Which area?"

"Below, below."

"You ask this time."

"Maybe, your age, you better stick with titties."

She was still there, evidently defiant.

"Let's have some boobs," he said.

"How very sad. Yes, more than anything, sad. Tragic individual. Sad, sad boy."

"Cheer me up with a quick tit."

He gave Howie a very light kick, as if requesting some confirmation of the brilliance of this wit under pressure.

"Undeniably wretched person."

"Left breast," he said.

"Demean yourself, that's all you do."

"While I'm up here. Some nipple. How can it hurt?"

Howie pushed up.

"Cheeks," he whispered.

"Nothing's getting shown."

"Ask for cheeks and report back."

"She's not showing."

Una left the bathroom in her own time, setting things in order, replacing caps and closing lids; clearly she had no intention of scuttling away like a maiden outraged. There was nothing for him to do but climb down Howie Weeden's back to the bench and floor. The maintenance man studied him crookedly.

"What happened?"

"Gone."

"No bath?"

"Nothing."

"I played a trick," Howie said. "She already finished her bath. When I got up there I heard the water getting sucked out of the tub. I think it's here."

"What's here?"

"I can feel it. It's here. I'm getting ready to slam. The tongue. Prepare to go for the tongue. I'm slamming out."

The boy hurried out of the workroom and got on the nearest elevator. For a long time, in robe and slippers, he walked in and out of arcades, suede sitting rooms, meditation suites, past miniature waterfalls, around ornamental fountains, under arched gardens, through reference libraries, lush saunas, empty game rooms, totally lost, thinking wistfully of his crisp little bed. An unmanned cart marked EMERGENCY LINEN SERVICE went speeding by. All was quiet until he reached a transparent bridge leading to one of the upper sectors of the armillary sphere. The enormous motion of the sphere was audible, a continual muffled utterance less of machinery at work than of overwhelming mass in friction with surrounding air. He entered the sphere and stood just above one of the elliptic bronze rings. Arciform spaces. Flowing motion. To be up so high, turning, contained in material receptive to visible light, was a liquid thrill, the night sky so clear and near and living. As he was swept gradually past the edge of a steel support he saw something pierce the sky, an incandescent object dragging vapor-light behind it and needling in and out of darkness. Aloft too long to be a shooting star, it might have been a snow-maned comet, come sunward to orbit, or a supernova's argon shriek. In other places the sky was tranquil, although nowhere completely still, and he wondered whether the flash he'd seen was part of the process of a star being formed, point of light set within the fiery trigon, that name given to the first, fifth and ninth signs of the ancient zodiac. Twelve equal parts. Thirty-degree arcs. Earth, air, fire, water. Triplicity of fire. Fire's pre-eminence. Equilateral triangle of fire. Men born under new stars are destined to lead revolutions.

Eventually he reached the correct sector. Workmen were placing huge acetylene devices along the walls of the corridor, presumably to keep the shadow-flow from "spilling over." He went to his quarters, sat at the module and began looking through the manuscript he'd had in his possession since leaving the Center to make the journey here. It was a handwritten document given to him by his friend and mentor, Robert Hopper Softly-a work-in-progress detailing Softly's observations on any number of mathematical topics. As he browsed he heard a tiny sound, ibd, and eventually noticed, to his left and just above eye level, that a message was appearing on the teleboard screen, a chalk-scrawl beamed by laser:

 

See me

Earliest a.m.

Space Brain Complex

U.F.O. Schwarz

 

"The teacher of the secret book died between the fire-pillars at Tarentum. Those of his disciples not burned to death were killed by mobs. The mathematical brotherhood was dispersed. What, we ask, did it leave behind? A sense of order in nature. The notion of mathematical proof. The word 'mathematics' itself. But the teaching didn't end, spreading through the Mediterranean, maintained in formal order for over two hundred years. Numbers as the basis of creation. The religious instinct arithmetized to regrettable effect. A dream of water put out by flames."

He went inside to brush his teeth, mis-squirting a strip of toothpaste into the wash basin, where it formed a line and curve resembling a crumpled number four. Directing the tube at the figure he proceeded to close the curve, making line and zero, or ten from four. But sooner or later he would have to stop fooling around and brush his teeth. So he spoke a password to his mouth, tetraktys, and it opened.

 

3 SHAPE

Remarks from Softly's work-in-progress:

"The unattested cadence of the heavens had been based on the circles of Ptolemaic calculations, a format supported by the Polish monk Copernicus. All work on celestial events was superimposed on the mirages of animism, prophecy and the Christian occult. Motive soul drove the planets and it was held that every orbit described a musical scale. The problem of course and solution as well were distinctly mathematical, although not without some hearsay of the empyrean."

When Billy stepped off the elevator he was in Space Brain Complex.

This was a vast computer area, quiet at the moment, no one in sight. In the middle of an open space stood a small office of frosted glass, a cubicle really, and he headed toward it. Sitting inside on a swivel chair was U.F.O. Schwarz, a densely packed individual weighing well over three hundred pounds. Attempting a jaunty sort of greeting he tried to pivot in the chair. Nothing moved, however. Concentrated flesh. Eye slits. Bubblelike hands. The chair was equipped with a footstool, which Schwarz managed to nudge toward the boy, kicking it soccer-style.

"Is that all one computer out there?"

"Space Brain."

"Whose office?"

"Kind of cramped."

"I have the feeling you carry it around with you."

"That's about as funny as a dead kid's toy," Schwarz said. "We're waiting for Nyquist but I guess I can bring you up to date in the meantime. We chose this time and place because we knew we'd have complete privacy. I'm the person who arranged with Professor Softly to bring you out here. Spoke to him in person. Reported certain recent events. He talked at length of your extraordinary abilities."

Schwarz had a glass of orange juice in his right hand. He tilted the glass slightly now, the surface of the liquid assuming an elongate outline. Billy began guessing the large man's weight, keeping the figures to himself.

"What do you know about space?"

"Not much. Maybe even nothing."

"Stars and planets."

"Last night I saw a comet or something. I don't even know what it was. That shows how much I know."

"Doubt it was a major comet," Schwarz said. "One's long gone and the other's not due for a while."

"Pure mathematics is my field."

"We've been contacted by someone or something in outer space."

"I do pure work. A lot of it is so abstract it can't be put on paper or even talked about. I deal with proof and nonproof."

"Beings in outer space. Someone or something. An extraterrestrial civilization."

"What about it?"

"They've contacted us. We picked them up on the synthesis telescope. They transmitted and we received. Pulses. Signals were transmitted in irregular pulses. We happened to be tuned to the right frequency. Space Brain has printed out a tape covered with zeros and ones. Mostly ones. The message was not repeated. This is unfortunate but not disheartening. One hundred and one pulses and gaps. The pulses we interpret as ones. The gaps or pauses as zeros. There are only two gaps. The transmission was fourteen pulses, a gap; twenty-eight pulses, a gap; fifty-seven pulses. Total of one hundred and one information units. One zero one is binary five, which may or may not mean something. One hundred and one is also the lowest three-digit prime. Then we have the arrangement of pulses-fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-seven. Plenty to work with, don't you think? At any rate we are not alone. Something is out there and it is talking to us."

"What is it saying?"

Schwarz paused here, locked into the framework of his petrified baby fat. What was odd about his way of speaking was the fact that nothing moved but his lips. Independent animation. Now, however, he raised the glass to his pouched face and nibbled at its rim. Billy heard a faint metallic tapping coming from well beyond the perimeter of the small office, less faint a moment later, then less again.

"That's our problem. We don't know what the transmission means. Space Brain has printed out hundreds of interpretations without coming up with anything we can call definitive. Dozens of men and women have also failed. Radio astronomers, chemists, exobiologists, mathematicians, physicists, cryptanalysts, paleographers, linguists, computer linguists, cosmic linguists. I'm sure you know Endor. We got Endor here to decode the message. Endor seemed the one man who couldn't fail. Famous the world over. Well versed in all aspects of extraterrestrial communication. A first-rate mathematician. A brilliant astrophysicist. Science prizes hand over fist. He worked at the message for a great many weeks. Then he worked some more. He kept saying it's probably so simple we can't see it. One day he stopped working and just sat in a chair in his room for about seventy-two hours. Finally he went to live in a hole in the ground. That's where he is at latest report. He's living in the ground. He eats plants and worms and refuses to talk to anyone. You're our last hope, it looks like. When Field Experiment Number One became a functioning entity we never in our wildest dreams thought we'd be lucky enough to receive signals from a supercivilization so early in the game and then unlucky enough to be unable to unravel them. We feel certain it's a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality."

"Did you just fart?"

"This is serious," Schwarz said. "Try to pay attention."

"We're in a little room here without any air blowing through."

"This may be the most important day of your life."

"Have some mercy."

"Numerically the transmission is very suggestive. Everyone who's worked on it got off to a great start. But they all fizzled out. After Endor left for the hole, your name came up. All you have to do is tell us what they're saying. We have the capacity to transmit an answer. Pretend you're the imperial mathematician. The emperor and his cousin the bishop want to know the meaning of a new star in the heavens. In the town square the witch-hunters are gathering twigs."

Olin Nyquist tapped on the door frame with the point of his silver cane. He was evidently blind, an angular man with a high forehead and well-honed jutting chin. Small crisp flakes adhered to the inner edge of each eye.

"It's all a question of shape," he said.

He moved to a corner of the office and stood motionless, shoulders wedged between adjoining walls.

"Shape, design, emblematic pattern."

U.F.O. Schwarz explained that Nyquist was an astral engineer in charge of simulation programs for the synthesis radio telescope here. One such program was based on the fact that the dish antennas not only picked up radio emissions but also took galactic photographs as clear and detailed as those taken by optical telescopes. These pictures, already somewhat "artificial," being the result of radio data received, mixed and computer-converted to electrical impulses, were then broken down and stylized even further by Space Brain, which was able to simulate gas outflows, explosions, the expansion of molecular clouds and other observed and probable phenomena. The result was known as the "computer universe."

"In some shape or other we try to find the pictorial link between the universe and our own senses of perception," Nyquist said. "What does the universe look like? A balloon that's expanding? A funnel full of ball bearings? A double helix? A strip of paper twisted and connected in a one-sided ring? Where are we in the universe? We can't see enough of it to say. Some of us think the universe is closed. We think it has positive curvature. We think it pulsates in cycles of expansion and contraction, every beginning and end defined in fire. Of course it wasn't very long ago that the universe was regarded solely in geometric terms. Circles, squares, equilateral triangles. Back far enough, I suppose, people used animal shapes or parts of animals' bodies to explain what sort of design they were part of. A whale's tail perhaps. I never thought I'd see in braille/A cosmos structured like a tail."

"Cracks," Schwarz said.

"Tiny cracks in the model are becoming evident, it seems. There is the problem of absolute velocity. There is the suspicion of matter crossing over to us from elsewhere. There is the lack of cause and effect in the behavior of elementary particles. Certain basic components of our physical system defy precise measurement and definition. Are we dealing with physics or metaphysics? Maybe we need a fundamental reconstruction of our ideas of space and time, or space-time, or space-time sylphed, if the latest theory is to be taken seriously. I plan to introduce sylphing compounds into the computer universe. That may tell us something. What we need at this stage of our perceptual development is an overarching symmetry. Something that constitutes what appears to be- even if it isn't-a totally harmonious picture of the world system. Our naïveté, if nothing else, demands it. Our childlike trust in structural balance."