"Give an example."

"Depending on the hemisphere, bats fly out of caves in leftward-tending spirals or rightward-tending spirals. Taking the globe as a whole, we see that bilateral symmetry is preserved."

"Where did you meet Rob?"

"The Chinese-American Science Sodality. A few years ago."

"What was he doing there?"

"Rob has a deep interest in things Chinese. He was born in China. Did you know that?"

"He never told me about an event like that."

"In fact his physical condition is a result of something called Chinese gnome disease. This is a crippling illness that was prevalent in a particular area of China for an entire millennium. It attacks the bones and muscles, preventing normal growth in children and reducing adults to a gnomelike state. It wasn't until recently that the cause was found. A lack of certain minerals in the water."

"He never told me that."

"Maybe because you're not Chinese," Wu said. "I'm Chinese."

"What's your field?"

"Prehistory."

"How far back?"

"Practically out the other end."

"Are bats known to be dangerous?"

"Just the opposite," Wu said. "We should do everything we can to see they survive and prosper. This is because their waste material is useful as fertilizer. Maybe you don't know it but the economies of entire countries are based on the export and domestic use of bird droppings. Skirmishes have already taken place between neighboring countries disputing the ownership of coastal islands where millions of sea birds do their shitting. Bats are next. The commercial market for bat guano is already growing. It won't be long, people being what they are, before some individual or group tries to get a monopoly. Of course, going back to your question, you don't want to get bitten by a bat with rabies. If you don't have the antibodies you'll get infected, which means you acquire the consciousness of the animal in question and become antagonistic to water. Crazed bat consciousness. I think about it from time to time when I'm crawling through a bat cave."

Before leaving, Wu reached in his pocket and took out a crumpled letter, saying someone had evidently left it in his cubicle by mistake.

 

Man, woman or child:

 

You have been nominated to be part of our chain. The document you are reading, rest assured, is not an ordinary chain letter. It is unconditionally guaranteed to be effective, having been devised and mailed with the help of computer time-sharing techniques of unprecedented scope and accuracy.

Our mailing list is brutally selective. Only the world's leading intellectuals are part of our chain. These are men and women whose work has been accepted for publication in those leading journals of opinion whose lists of subscribers and contributors are readily available in return for cash considerations.

We have been commissioned by a vast research organization to undertake this project. In the past we did purely abstract work in the area of the world-market money curve. Since moving our operation beyond the legal maritime limit, we have broadened our scope to include actual cash transactions. It is our current conviction that the idea of money must yield eventually to money itself. Money facilitates the exchange of goods and services and is of vital importance to central planners who wish to gain control of specific world-market commodities most in demand at present and likely to continue as such.

Now that you know us better, our immediate concern is that you maintain the chain. This letter has traveled around the world sixteen times. No one has broken the chain. Most chain letters continue to circulate due to the age-old force of superstition. We expect more of the members of our chain. To break the chain is to disrupt nothing less than a mass speculation on the will to exist. We count on your cooperation in this matter.

By now a question has probably occurred to you: "What do I get for maintaining the chain?" There is no simple answer to this question. It would be easy for us to say: "In a matter of days you will receive something wonderful in the mail." We make no such claim, however. The chain is its own justification and reward. The terms of our contract clearly specify that we say no more on the matter.

To maintain the chain, you must draw a straight line through your name where it appears below. Then you must mail this letter to the person whose name has been placed directly below your own:

 

Chester Greylag Dent

 

This letter has been in circulation for years and years. Don't be the one who breaks the chain!

 

Billy noticed the raised seal of a notary public in a lower corner of the page. Below the seal, in diminutive italic type, were the words: Central American Intercorporate Control Combine (formerly Con-

sortium Hondurium), Elux Troxl, prop.

 

INTERVIEW

 

"Who are some of the influences on your work?"

"Softly."

"In what way?" Jean said.

"He shows me how to use what I have. He was a pretty good mathematician himself. He knows how to bring me out."

"Rob's a living influence. What about people long ago? Old masters. The titans."

"Rob explains their work to me. He takes me through it step by step."

"What about Sylvester and Cayley?" she said. "Strong influences? Mild influences? In betweens?"

"Not too many people know about most mathematicians, no matter which century they belong to. How do you know about them?"

"Research."

"I don't see what they have to do with a book on the Logicon project."

"The more I research mathematicians, the more I know about you," Jean said. "I want to know all I can about all the people here. I can't achieve any depth unless I do that. That's why I ask about influences. Was it Sylvester or Cayley who said the best inventions of analysis result from our probings of the continuous as it exists in our own perception of space? Direction. In mathematics, don't you try to build a sense of direction into ideas like space, time and motion? Make it a game, isn't that it, with specific rules that govern every operation."

"We're not allowed to talk about this," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Rob doesn't allow it. He said to skip people in history. He wants me to concentrate on Logicon."

"Is this a formal ban?"

"I'm only telling you what he said."

"We can say what we want, pigsney. Don't let Rob talk you out of anything."

"Would you be interested in some special material for your notes?" he said.

"Absolutely."

"I have a hunch I'm going to die soon."

"More," she said. "More like that. Give me everything you've got."

Not what something really is, Softly thought, but how we think of it. Our struggle to apprehend it. Our need to unify and explain it. Our attempt to peel back experience and reveal the meaning beneath. The task is to attempt a logical design that may or may not duplicate the structure of the thing itself. His desk, unlike the others in the antrum, thrown together and wobbly, was an elaborate sectional apparatus with automatic drawers, a pop-up typewriter, modular shelving and a built-in pencil sharpener that operated on batteries. The desk ran parallel to all but one side of the cubicle, where the entrance was located. The cubicle itself was considerably larger than the other living units, hardly suited to the word "cubicle" in fact. The bed, adorned with huge silk pillows, had little in common with the cots elsewhere in the area. Sweating excessively Softly undid the belts on his leather briefcase, lifted the worn flap and began sifting among bottles, tubes and packets of stimulants, re-laxants, euphoriants, deliriants, sedative-hypnotics, local anesthetics and animal tranquilizers. Among the collection a sample-sized bottle made him smile, containing as it did the high-grade synthetic intensifier he'd given Maurice Wu to chew soon after the latter had first arrived in the antrum. The label included a warning: Insightful experiences may intensify existing psychosis. Far from showing panic reaction, however, Wu had emerged from a period of chills, irregular breathing and slurred speech with a tentative and rather engaging idea about counter-evolution. Softly found what he wanted now. He lifted out a vial, twisted off the cap, removed the cotton packing and shook a capsule into his hand. He swallowed it without water and then got into bed, wearing socks, slippers and his robe. He became drowsy almost at once. His perspiration smelled less tense and septic. Another ephemeral chemical event, he thought. Opiate receptors functioning nicely. Sense data less demanding. He stuck his thumb in his mouth, thinking suddenly of the peculiar demonic genius of street games, the secret vernacular passed down for centuries, the sense in so many games of something fearful transmitted through certain words or the wile of simple touch. He began to vomit calmly. Tag-you're it. What was it but something or someone too evil to be named? Hoodman blind. Hango seek. Skin the cuddy. He raised his head from vomiting position, eyes closed (to avoid seeing the ejected matter), and then leaned back on one of the pillows and thought of the game he and the boy had more or less jointly invented, halfball, a "meaningless formal game" designed to be played almost anywhere-street, pasture, alleyway, an empty green in summer's murmuring dusk. Elements of rounders, baseball, tag, cricket, one o' cat, stickball and children's verse. The task is to work out an abstract scheme which may or may not reflect the composition of the thing itself. Convenient fictions, he thought. Den s?-te, he thought. Water flowing along a gutter on a city street. A figure trying to hail a cab. Umbrella and suitcase. This was Mainwaring, a well-barbered man of middle age-tall, ruddy, fit and trim, emitting an executive scent. He knew the large puddle beyond the curb was an invitation to cab drivers to veer this way and splatter his clothes but he wasn't worried, being certain he could step aside in time and seeing the entire process (from the driver's viewpoint) as an exercise in perceiving functional relations between entities (puddle, figure, vehicle). It was his conviction that taxi drivers are no more than theoreticians of massive insult, delighted by the prospect of splattering or maiming, having no inherent need to think beyond relationships to the literal disfigurement of objects or people. The truly brutal ones were bus drivers. Give a bus driver a nearly empty bus during an off-hour with no one waiting at the designated stops and he'll go smashing down the avenue, pupils dilated, a convulsive hum bubbling up from his throat, Softly opening his eyes, the great painted van careening down on stray dogs, derelicts, children, an interior point system in effect. He dipped the umbrella and a cab stopped just short of the puddle.

"The international airport," Mainwaring said.

"Right or left side of the street."

"Either, I suppose."

"Near corner or far?"

Edna Lown's spectacularly archaic undies were hanging up to dry. Nearby, working, was the woman herself. This happiness puzzled her. Every symbol she wrote in her notebook seemed to possess the resolve of a finished work, an isolated operation neatly free of assumption and shaved of the danger of intuitive reckoning. This work was all there was. Her life had been reduced to a process of selection and refinement. This was merciful, she believed, considering the atmosphere of horror that so often prevailed in the world outside. Nothing in her work was accidental. This is the single theme variously affirmed, tested and modified. She realized she hadn't seen her own face since taking the ramshackle elevator down. The past, the whole chromium world, none of it was more than meek recollection, the negative image of colleagues, family and friends; of university towns, fellowships and travels; of visits to suburban Bellevue. It was puzzling, this happiness she felt, an extended measurement of the textures we're able to achieve beyond the sum total of events that compose our lives. In this hole in the ground Edna knew she lacked nothing, wanted nothing, could easily dismiss all past associations and all prior honors. She lived in the grip of scientific rapture. The complicated longings of the woman who had made her way in the world (through the force of intellect alone) were so subordinate now as to be nearly nonexistent. Ambition, love, friendship, the pleasures of giving and of winning away, the comfort of professional acceptance, the soul's snug glow at the failure of others-all those fitful inclinations, those urgencies and yearnings were so much dead air compared with this simple and total absorption, holism, a state of unqualified being. Edna Lown was entering herself just as surely as if she'd been able to bend her arms into her mouth and swallow them to the shoulders; arms, legs, torso; a bewitchingly comic meditation technique; leaving the head balanced on a cushion, head and skull, abode of the layered brain, everything we are and feel and know; the universe we've made.

The small craft began its vertical descent. Despite the many hours of travel, the plane-changing, the time zones, Mainwaring remained fresh, his hair brushed straight back, faintly gray in places, his jaw seemingly locked into position with cotter pins. Across the aircraft's fuselage was the inscription: OmCopter SkyHop. The entire journey had been made at night. Different parts of different hemispheric nights. One long night. Edna's wet underwear dripped onto a stack of papers she had set on the ground. She read the previous session's notes. These were notes essentially for her own nonspecific use, not the kind of background material she'd given the boy to read and not more immediate work directly applicable to the Logicon project. She'd been jotting down these particular notes and others like them for a number of years, simply to order her thinking, to clarify certain general areas she believed worthy of investigation. It is both silly and useful, she thought, feeling completely relaxed now, very ready, working well ahead of the pencil.

 

f. It is both silly and useful to conclude that human speech derived from the cries of animals.

g. As conjectured, it was specifically the mating calls of animals that directed early men  and women  toward their own variety of speech. Language thus became a communication associated with sexual activity. This connection imparted to language an erotically powerful duplicating property.

h. I'm tempted to say: it also made talking fun. Words became a playful analog of sexual activity.

i. All language is innuendo.

j. We imagine the (primitive) child learning to speak in the arms of its mother. Here we have the essence of play. Mother and child. Language and sexuality.

k. Thus language, classed by gender, is undoubtedly female.

 

Jean Venable sat in her room high above the antrum. Her notes were all over the floor, unreadable, and there were packets of research material stacked under the bed, unread. She was beginning to think Softly had been right when he'd accused her of viewing the whole thing as a lark. If she were to make a prediction she would predict that she was on the verge of something strange. A decision about her book. What it should and shouldn't be. "Strange" in the sense of previously unknown; in the sense of unfamiliar; in the archaic sense of alien or foreign. What kind of rotgut prose would she write about a project she hadn't really been interested in since the very beginning? What was she here for if not to test herself against the dangers of true belief? What good was solitude to a writer if it didn't lead her into something deeper in the way of living and thinking? The fact that she was having nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man seemed to confirm (in an inexplicit way) that she was ready to take a nervous little step into the coiled room she'd seen from time to time mingled with the reflections in a train's dusty windows or in the glass halves of a tenement's outer doors. Sex with Rob was very much a part of the isolation she'd been submerged in since coming here. Not that she didn't enjoy it on "a purely physical level." Softly was an antidote to fantasy. His very dimensions mocked those drowsy episodes she used to devise apart from reality. What were these mental images but fairytales for adults, whimsical tintypes that did little more than confirm the childish appeal of illogical relations (maidens, amphibians etc.)? From her reaction to the blunt-ness of Rob's marred body, his special unalterability, the abrupt initiatives of his sexual nature, she readily inferred that fantasy, her own, had reached its vanishing point, an event that returned sex to those locations she felt it had long abandoned, between the actual legs, in and around the actual mouth, on the breasts and under the testicles and in the hands, on the tongue, in the actual hole. Together they filled a natural space. There was a real feeling of bodies giving out, signs of rashes, skin burns, bruises and teeth marks, her mind distantly aware of chancing the wastes of nonentity, a prospect that forced her to speak her physical involvement, to pant out sounds against this break in the continuity. Funny how she and Rob avoided every preliminary gesture, even a hint of a kiss or nonfunctional caress. Kissing him would have disgusted her. It was his organ of copulation her body craved, the Latinate folds between her legs that stirred him to ithyphallic meter. Funny all right. It made her laugh at past loves, at the banality of the past itself.

 

1. In no time at all we enter the cloud of modern thought. Here the limits of childhood involve the shattering of perspective. This could just as easily be called the formation of perspective.

m. Growing, the child perceives a difference between itself and its class. The child's mother is no longer the sole teacher of "words." The erotic content of language begins to dissolve.

n. The "truth" about language is not available to us. Only play-talk, the lost form of knowledge, can express what is otherwise unspeakable. Is there a connection between these sentences?

o. Play-talk is the natural mode of brute locution. It alone is free of disguise and ambiguity.

p. What do we mean when we say that the function of a logically perfect language is to set severe limits? It's possible we have things backwards. We should ask ourselves whether we are correct in establishing more boundaries or in completely destroying what now stands.

q. Great scientists never fear being slightly wrong; their errors, if such, are total.

r. I'm tempted to say: to pass beyond words as we know them is "to mate."

s. The secret task of logic may be the rediscovery of play.

 

Charming, Edna thought, perhaps a bit wearily, hearing Softly's peculiar footfalls as he went past her cubicle, picturing him in a suit, vest and dark tie, those resplendent little shoes, all of which he was in fact wearing as he made his way to cube one, where Billy was found to be in bed, hands clasped on his head, knees upraised, a general sense of adolescent languor in the air.

 

ROB   TALKS  IN   QUOTES

 

"Where's the ball?" Softly said. "I'm in the mood for some exercise. Some distraction. We all need a little distraction." "What ball?"

"Didn't I see you pick up a rubber ball recently?" "A rubber ball," the boy said. "I brought it in here, I think." "Get it out and cut it in half." "What for in half?"

"You really are socked in, aren't you?" "Halfball, is that it? You want to have a game of halfball." "About time," Softly said. "I don't want to play."

"You love halfball."

"Not in the mood, that's all."

"It's your game," Softly said. "Yours and mine. Get the ball, cut it in half and let's go play. Maurice cleared away an area just beyond the crates. He's cutting down a mop handle now. Jean's going to play too. You like Jean. You and Jean get along. I've taught them the rules. Edna and Les will watch. It's more fun with spectators."

"I thought the fun was over."

"You need a fresh dose."

"Maybe I'll feel like playing later on."

"Wee Willy, hit 'em where they ain't."

"I want to either stay right here in this dirt room or get completely out of the whole place."

"Look, we'll go out on the 'field,' loosen up a bit, play one game of halfball and then you can come back here and 'rest.' Halfball is a beautiful game. You love halfball. It's exactly what you 'need,' some 'exercise,' a period of 'distraction.' So what do you say, hey?"

"I want to stay here."

"Why the sudden obsession with immobility?" Softly said. "What kind of dopey routine is this? Some kind of mystic trance you're falling into?"

"No."

"Because if it is, you know what I have to say to you."

"I know."

"Musjid pepsi kakapo."

"What else?"

"Huwawa djinn."

Billy had always enjoyed the unfamiliar word clusters that Softly used to counteract serious remarks about religion, the supernatural or the fuzzier edges of quantum physics. What he didn't like was his mentor's very occasional tactic of pronouncing certain words as though they warranted quotation marks. The practice seemed to have a source deeper than mere sarcasm. Softly sometimes employed this vocal rebuke, if that's what it was, in circumstances that appeared to be completely unsuitable. He would refer to a table, for instance, as a "table." What sort of inner significance was intended in such a case? It was one thing for Softly to use a sprinkle of emphasis when speaking of someone's "need" for "rest." But when he put quotes around words for commonplace objects, the effect was unsettling. He wasn't simply isolating an object from its name; he seemed to be trying to empty an entire system of meaning.

"If you're not ready to play, are you ready to work?"

"Definitely."

"You'll do whatever Edna and Lester ask?"

"Yes."

"See, I told them you'd come around. And I haven't even had to get mean. My displays of adultism are minor legends wherever children congregate."

"Do I have to play halfball?"

"No," Softly said. "Just give me the rubber ball and I'll have Maury cut it in half."

The game was played on the negative curvature of the small clearing. Softly removed his jacket and tossed it to Lester Bolin, who sat with Edna on a crate. The fey spectacle about to unfold brought to Edna's face a look of delighted expectation laboring to hide the strain that went into its manufacture, as though she were attending a garden party for the criminally insane. Wu cut along the seam of the rubber ball with his penknife, then pocketed one half of the ball and gave the other half to Softly, who began to warm up, being the bunger, or thrower. Jean had a lot of trouble holding on to his deliveries. The ball behaved erratically once or twice (when Softly tossed it end over end) but very smoothly at other times (when he gripped it along the edge and hurled it in a sidearm motion straight in or went three quarters to fashion gracefully breaking slow curves). Wu stood off to the side taking lazy stylized practice cuts with the sawed-off mop handle. The field was marked with rocks and cans set apart from each other in complex patterns. When everyone was finished warming up, Softly addressed the spectators.

"Strict rules add dignity to a game. At specified points in the contest, certain verses have to be recited, certain moves and countermoves have to be made. There are no bases, as in baseball. There is no wicket, as in cricket. However, there are runs, hits, errors and breaks for tea.

In halfball, errors count in the errormaker's favor. Imagine a Scoreboard if you will. Runs, hits, errors. The final result depends on all of these, not just runs. It is the total array of digits that determines the winner. If a player keeps making errors, he adds to his sum. Once his errors get into double figures, the total spills over to the run column. Therefore, you say, it is necessary only to make error after error in order to win. Not so, I reply. For while one player is making errors, his adversary is scoring runs. The errormaker must balance the gains he is making in his error column against the gains he is allowing the other player to make in the run column. I am the bunger. Jeanie is the munch. Maury is the doggero. Normally we'd have a lippit as well but I think we can do without. As the game progresses, we switch positions. The objects scattered on the ground are either skullies or wacks, depending on the situation. The purpose of each will become clear as we go along. Please don't leave until we're ready for tea break. It annoys me no end when people leave before tea break."

Softly, a lefthander, threw some billowing curves to Wu, keeping the ball down and in, mixing in an occasional flutter pitch that he kept hauntingly outside, presumably away from the doggero's power. Finally Wu managed to hit the ball-a weak grounder that spun and wobbled in circles of ever decreasing limits. At this stage the munch and doggero addressed each other.

"What's your trade?"

"Lemonade."

"Where do you ply it?"

"Where we dry it."

"Dry what?"

"Apricot."

 

I  MEET  MAINWARING

 

From his bed, hearing the voices, Billy tried to remember how old he was when they'd invented the game, realizing for the first time that he'd actually had little to do with any of it, that it was almost all Softly's-the rules, the verse, the reliance on connective patterns.

His hands were still clasped on his head. He moved them forward and back, the top of his head shifting with the movement. He liked that feeling. After a while he thought of a scantily clad woman with enormous breasts bazooms boobs titties. She was "scantily clad" only in the sense that he told himself such a condition prevailed; the fact was he couldn't quite picture the flimsy items she was supposed to be wearing. He tried to include himself-that is, an image of himself-in the painted haze. For some reason it was extremely difficult. He didn't really care that much. As long as they let him stay where he was. As long as they didn't force him to be logical. He heard someone moving in the cubicle next to his and went to see who it was. The man unpacking introduced himself as Walter Mainwaring, Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corporation.

"We both have something in common."

"The Nobel Prize," Mainwaring said.

"Right."

"My father was a mathematician. Didn't give me a middle name. Just an initial. X. Idea of a joke, I suppose."

"What are you here for?"

"Rob is eager to know more about sylphing compounds. I'm not sure how he plans to apply this knowledge but I'll be happy to tell him what I can. My latest work involves aspects of mohole identification. Know what that is?"

"No but it sounds funny."

"Things are funny up to a point," Mainwaring said. "Then they aren't funny anymore. Alternate question. Do you know anything about Moholean relativity?"

"I know Mohole the person."

"Mohole's work happens to tie in with sylphing. What this all leads to remains to be seen."

"He wears padded shoulders and swallows greenies."

"I gather Rob's assembling a team. Good. I like teamwork. I believe in teams."

DOGGERO and MUNCH: "Hunger, hunger, let us go forth; the sun, the sun is shining."

BUNGER: "Fall down a well and never tell and I'll let you be born in the morning."

The boy returned to his cubicle and got into bed. Eventually he heard Softly announce the tea break. There was a minor landslide on the north slope. Jean Venable and Maurice Wu remained in the playing area while the others went to the kitchen unit for tea.

"Full name please."

"Maurice Xavier Wu."

"Where did you get the Xavier?"

"My father was a missionary," he said.

"Where?"

"U.S. of A."

"Did you grow up there?"

"Off and on."

"Did you date American girls?"

"Did I date American girls?" he said. "What kind of book are you writing?"

"I try to ask whatever comes into my head," Jean said. "It's a new technique I've been developing. But I think I may abandon it. Nothing but junky things have been coming into my head. Everything's up in the air right now. Don't tell Rob I said that. I'm sort of going through the motions, frankly. But keep it to yourself."

"Maybe we should do this another time," Wu said. "I'm preparing a journey up the slopes. Some caves here and there I'd like to look into. I have to get some supplies together. Then I have to polish my wu-fu."

"Let me ask this one thing," Jean said. "What's your role in the Logicon project?"

"You're not taking notes, I see."

"I'm not taking notes. You're right, aren't you?"

"Maybe by the time I'm back down here, Rob will have some firm plans for me. Don't know yet exactly what's on his mind. In the meantime I'm having a good time seeing the caves."

"What's a wu-fu?"

"It's a medallion I wear around my neck whenever I go into the field. It's a circular thing that has a cluster of bats set into it. Bats with their wings extended. The bats themselves form a sort of circle around a symbol of the tree of life. The Chinese are probably the only people who think of bats in connection with good luck and a long life. Anyway, before I go into the field I like to sit on a mat and polish my wu-fu for exactly seventeen minutes."

"What does that do?"

"Nothing," he said.

"I think I understand."

Jean feared dishevelment. The silken puckers above her shirt cuff. The winning fit of her handsomely tailored pants. It was no joke to imagine what her life would be like without a firm commitment to utter presentableness. She'd been thinking a great deal about dishevelment lately. Increasingly she wondered, thinking of images in the glass halves of tenement doors, in the jigsaw spill of silver that had always seemed to crunch beneath her shoes in the worst parts of town. With each new cycle of wondering came the fear experience, a sensation she tended to characterize not just as fear but as "fear itself." This was the comic element at work. An attempt to overdramatize for comic effect. Jean had always thought of herself as too modern and complex to experience the kind of primal fear that would qualify as "fear itself." She found it difficult to appear pestered much less frightened. The soundly proportioned near neutrality of her figure, her looks, her manner; the supremely intact rightness of it all-these were meant to accompany brilliantly modern inner rifts, spaces and vague negations. But she was beginning to see that somewhere on the edge of these ponderings on the subject of dishevelment was the essence of fear itself. What depths of immense bedraggled dishevelment she feared, and why, it was hard at the moment to say. She had never heard anyone speak of this kind of fear. All around her all her life people recounted episodes that involved fear of heights, fear of depths, fear of slipping away, falling off, dropping into; fear of earth, air, fire, water. Where was fear itself, the backward glance of a woman in unspeakably soiled rags, collector of shopping bags, victim of spells, mumbling to herself in the stale corner of some cafeteria? Fiction, Jean thought, sitting surrounded by her notes, dozens of stunningly disordered pages spread across her bed; fiction, she thought, idly biting the skin on her index finger.

In the kitchen they listened to the water boiling. Bolin still held Softly's jacket, keeping it neatly folded on his lap.

"Dent is terribly, terribly old," Edna Lown said.

"Old Dent," Softly said.

"Too, too old to be of any conceivable help to us."

"Lester-pet, how can he help?"

"I can't perfect the control system without a metalanguage. Logic rendering just won't work. The machine won't be able to render Logi-con or speak Logicon until I figure out how to separate the language as a system of meaningless signs from the language about the language."

"The old problem," Edna said.

"Old Dent," Softly said.

The water boiled furiously.

"Does anybody know how to get in touch with him?" Lester said.

"He has an appointments secretary," Softly said. "The only way to get in touch with old Dent is to try to reach this man known as the appointments secretary."

Bolin poured the water.

"How's our young man doing?" Edna said.

"He promises to work. He'll do whatever you and Lester want. I suggest you begin with the latest notation."

"What about the game?" Lester said.

"What game?"

"Expression of surprise."

"Game, game, what game?"

"The game I'm holding your jacket for. The halfball game. When do we go back and finish?"

"There's no time," Edna said. "Rob's got a lot to do if he really plans to get together with Chester Greylag Dent. Appointments secretary or not, the man's nearly impossible to contact."

"Unlisted number?" Lester said.

 

I  DON'T  FEEL  SO   GOOD

 

Temperate by nature, ever serene in fact, Lester Bolin was not upset by the panting laughter with which Softly responded to his question about an unlisted phone number. He simply dug his shoes into the dirt, glancing toward Edna for some sign of an explanation. His work on the computer-driven control system (known, like the language itself, as Logicon) had been going very slowly. He had constructed a frame to house the wiring and inner mechanisms. As a sort of joke, he had given the frame a box-shaped "head" and cylindrical "torso." The next step was to build a formal language, void of content, into the circuitry. Concurrent with that he had to design an inbred body of statements about this symbolic language; this would be a second form of discourse, less stark, less empty than Logicon itself and therefore able to provide a basis for analysis and description. It would have to be a system that enabled the creators of Logicon to discuss their language in a context other than the language itself and that furthermore allowed the control system's mechanism to make meaningful statements both in Logicon and about Logicon.

Gamete sac gonad scrotum, Billy thought, recalling the sense of confusion he'd felt upon learning that the urethra functioned as the male genital duct, having always believed that organs, ducts, valves and canals ending in the letter a were exclusively female. He felt weak, sweaty and depressed. Once again he clasped his hands on top of his head, moving them forward and back, enjoying the tectonic sensation. After a while he slipped completely under the covers, alone with his own smell.

For this higher kind of calculation, Lester Bolin was using sheet metal, sponge rubber, various plastics; tubes, relays, a tape playback system; timing sources, transistors, a monitor system; any number of electronic components; box-shaped head and cylindrical torso. As a further joke of sorts, he was designing the model in such a way that it would operate only upon insertion of a coin.

 

Chester Greylag Dent lived quietly in his custom-made nuclear-powered submarine, endlessly circling the globe. Of late, however, he'd chosen to hover, first at one thousand feet, the normal test depth for conventional nuclear submarines; then at ten thousand feet, far below the zone of light, just idling there in the dark and cold among deep-lying viperfish and giant eels; then at twenty thousand feet, below all plantlife, below the nodding work of winds and currents; and finally at an incredible thirty-five thousand feet, dead sea creatures drifting down, sponges, gouged-out shells, segmented worms feeding on detritus, fossil imprints in the sediment, the silt itself hundreds of millions of years old, never unsubmerged, the quietest place on earth.

The helicopter in which Robert Hopper Softly dozed was heading oceanward over a cluster of volcanic islands. The craft was equipped with four different submarine-detection systems but because the submarine in question was lying dead at such tremendous depth, the more powerful sonar equipment of a tracking ship had been called into play. After the helicopter set down on a pad at the bow of the tracking vessel, Softly went immediately to a restricted area of the ship for a look at the active acoustic detection monitor. Signals from a huge mass of submerged metal were being received and separated from the background of oceanic noise. Softly proceeded to the afterdeck and stepped into a reinforced deep-diving cylinder that was then lowered into the sea on cables. The cylinder's base was designed to match the shape and size of a submarine's escape hatch. Its descent, which took several hours, was electronically guided by the surface vessel, as were the final maneuvering and coupling. To Softly all motion appeared to be taking place in an aneroid medium, some kind of thick gel. Affixed at last he knocked on the submarine's hatch. It was opened by Jumulu Nobo, an abnormally large Negrito who served as Chester Greylag Dent's appointments secretary. Softly was led through the pantry and wardroom, not without noticing that the hatch was equipped with a long metal police lock and that the bulkheads were wallpapered in cheerful colors and patterns.

"Trouble finding us?"

"Minimal," Softly said.

"Chefs asleep now but I'll be glad to answer any preliminary questions you may have."

They eased into facing chairs in a small compartment outfitted in wicker and equipped with French doors. Nobo wore a maroon jogging suit with matching sneakers. He explained that several of his Malayan forebears, all of exceedingly short stature, had migrated to Louisiana, settling in a town called Oslo, Norway, where, eventually, young Jumulu grew to adolescence and early manhood, the first of his people to exceed four feet in height.

"I wanted to study marine biology," he said. "It sounded so clean, so virtuous. Who could ever claim that a marine biologist was wasting his life? At my disposal would be a mass of remarkably interesting facts about the matchless organisms that populate the oceans of the world. But then I heard a voice. It told me to keep searching. In places like Oslo, Norway, Louisiana, people tend to hear voices. Anyway I kept searching and in time I wandered into the multifaceted presence of the great man himself."

"And here you are."

"I manage with a crew of eleven, a housekeeper and a eunuch. We don't have an easy time of it. But the rewards far outweigh the sacrifices."

"Gratitude for your hospitality obliges me at this point to express amazement at the very existence of a submarine able to reach such depths without breaking apart."

"Chet outlined the basic design himself. I can tell you this much. One, this is not a spindle-hull design. The entire craft is delta-shaped- a pair of sweptback wings or fins without a body proper. Two, we have what we call a flooded outer hull. Sea water enters through small openings. This makes us more pressure-resistant than ordinary underwater craft. Three, the special metals we used for the inner hull make a thoroughly reliable weld."

"I'm impressed."

"We're all very happy with it. Of course, the hull groans from time to time."

"So I notice," Softly said.

"Perfectly normal. No cause for concern. Anticipated in the specifications."

Despite his assurances Nobo himself seemed ill at ease. He kept brushing imaginary dandruff out of his hair and occasionally stuck a finger in his ear and shook it vigorously. He appeared in addition to be a master of the darting glance. Sounds in the hull; the crossing of Softly's legs; static on an intercom nearby-all evoked the swiftest of flinching looks from the appointments secretary. Whether this was his natural manner or a result of being submerged for extended periods was a question that didn't interest Softly, who found himself distracted by the delay in seeing old Dent and therefore failed to take any more than the most casual notice of the details and intimations that weaved through the ensuing chat.

"Did you happen to see a freighter nearby when you were aboard the tracking ship?"

"Don't think so."

"They've contacted us a number of times," Nobo said. "We prefer to ignore them."

"Who are they?"

"The freighter is Liberian. The people aboard apparently represent a Honduran cartel."

"Consortium Hondurium," Softly said. "They came to feel a consortium is more stylish than a cartel, at least in name. So they changed over. In fact they're still changing. Been through several corporate names, I believe. Elux Troxl. I know his work. Interested in abstract economic power."

"Not any more."

"How do you know?"

Nobo got up and began jogging in place, his glance darting to different areas of the compartment.

"According to their messages, they're interested in cornering the guano market. Bat guano as fertilizer. They've apparently located a rich source nearby and they want to lease this vessel and any other vessel in the area in order to help transport whatever they can haul out of the bat caves. They've not only moved their corporate headquarters to a freighter; they've changed their name again."

"What is it?"

"ACRONYM."

"What's it stand for?"

"We were wondering about that," Nobo said.

"Knowing a little about Troxl, I would guess it's probably a combination of letters formed to represent the idea of a combination of letters. Nobody knows Troxl's real name so maybe there's a grubby logic to the whole thing. He excels at time-sharing. He also deals in mailing lists, chain letters, coupon analysis, subscription research, that sort of thing. Really huge companies sometimes hire people like that to undertake tedious but necessary projects. He's a notary public as well, which gives him a sheen of respectability in a fly-by-night sort of way. To my knowledge the only nonabstract professional activity he's ever been associated with involved the fire-bombing of zoos and animal hospitals. This was done to get people to contribute funds. Troxl's fund-raising organization handled the whole thing, of course. The vast outpouring of money went to rebuild the zoos and hospitals in question. The donors' names remained with Troxl. In this way he compiled enormous mailing lists, which he sold to other fund-raisers, to direct mail houses, to test-market organizations, to the subscription departments of various print media and to government agencies. With the money thus amassed he leased time on computers all over the world in order to control the fluctuations of the money curve."

"On the surface," Nobo said, "just another semi-treacherous entrepreneur."

"With a rather unsavory associate."

"Grbk."

"You know about him?"

"He was mentioned in the latest communication from the freighter. I think they want to impress us with their pureness of heart."

"Mentioned in what connection?"

"He's under house arrest aboard the ship."

"On what charge?"'

"Heinousness," Nobo said.

A slight bland lad entered the compartment. This was Bö (boo). As the Negrito continued to run in place, the young man, head bobbing, whispered something in his ear.

"Chet will see you now," Nobo said.

"Good."

"He's in the west wing."

"Very good."

Bö took Softly toward the bow, where they went past the sonar sphere and then made a sharp turn into the other sweptback portion of the submarine. They walked through a series of compartments, all numbered in bright red paint, some resembling rooms in a country cottage.

"Don't you get depressed?" Softly said. "I mean being under so long."

"I'd rather be down here than on the surface. Last time we were on the surface I fell overboard. I was surprised when nobody seemed to notice. First I yelled. Then I began to count. I screamed numbers at them. I got all the way to forty-three before Jumulu noticed. It was my instinct to die with a number on my lips rather than a boring plea for help. So tacky and dull. With my degree of heightened self-awareness, it was just about impossible to thrash around out there shouting help, help."

"Did your life flash before your eyes?"

"My life constantly flashes before my eyes," Bö said in a voice tenderly bereft of resonance. "I try to pick out interesting moments as they go by. But I can never find any."

At ninety-two, Chester Greylag Dent was a dusty figure wrapped in an elegant shawl. Once tall and broad,'he'd seemed to wear away, his physical presence now limited to a rather fragile central reality. He was nearly transparent, his upper and lower regions beginning to curl toward each other as though to assemble themselves about his navel, that passionate stamp of gestation. He sat in a sprawling deck chair, occupying only one fourth of it, his knees drawn up under the shawl. As Bö left, Softly sat in the other deck chair, this one not equipped with a leg rest. The compartment was otherwise unfurnished but there were books, manuscripts and correspondence scattered everywhere. Dent's hair was reddish brown with a blond streak through it.

"I think of myself as the Supreme Abstract Commander."

"Nice to see you again," Softly said. "It's been many years."

"Bit of a lickspittle, that Bö. Still, there's no better way to fashion an element of depraved antiquity than to have a eunuch aboard."

"When we first made radio contact with your appointments secretary, using, with special permission, the U.S. Defense Department's submarine communications system-an interesting setup, by the bye, that utilizes the earth itself as a reflector to bounce radio waves up to the ionosphere-he said you no longer received visitors. So I'm particularly gratified that we were able to arrange a get-together."

"Besieged for decades," Dent said. "We rarely surface now. Rarely even move. Jumulu screens all communications."

"Then you personally have no contact with the outside world," Softly said.

"I keep a post office box in Newfoundland. But we haven't surfaced there in a very great while. All these bits and pieces of mail lying about are from five to ten years old. If I haven't answered them by now, I don't expect I ever will. Will I?"

"What do you do to pass the time?"

"I think of myself as the Supreme Abstract Commander. That's what 1 do."

"Very good."

"I also formulate ideas on this and that topic."

"I thought as much."

"As you know, I've been referred to more than a few times as the greatest man in the world. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because of my books, my speeches, my innovations in so many diverse fields? Is it because I renounced my dual citizenship in order to become stateless? Is it because I returned my academic degrees, my honorary degrees, my medals, my plaques? Is it because I chose to disown my children, my grandchildren, my regius professorships? Is it, do you suppose, because I have always insisted on viewing us not as a collection of races and nationalities but as a group that shares the same taxonomic classification, that of Earth-planet extant? Surely the proclamations of greatness that collect about my name go beyond these factors to include the life choice I've made. To suspend myself in the ocean zone of perpetual darkness. To inhabit an environment composed almost solely of tiny sightless feeble-minded creatures palpitating in the ooze. What do you think, Softly?"

"Something to that, I suppose."

"True greatness always involves a period of complete withdrawal. To withdraw completely is to appeal to the romantic instincts of people. Blind little sluglike organisms. That's about all you can expect to find down here. Too cold and dark for anything else. I believe this accounts in large measure for the proclamations of my greatness and I would remind you that they come from every quarter of the civilized world."

Dent's voice had a whistling sort of tone, very reedy, and it seemed to quicken as he approached the end of a statement, as though the voice were issuing from a tubular conveyance which he feared was about to implode.

"Why have you come, Softly? Make your point. There must be a point you came to make."

"I'm involved in a project called Logicon. We're trying to devise a totally logical system of discourse with the idea of using it eventually as an aid in celestial communication."

"Have you drained the system of meaning?"

"We're doing that now."

"Have you established a strict set of rules?"

"We're working on it."

"Have you taken measures to safeguard your system of notation from vagueness and self-contradiction?"

"I'm confident we can do that."

"Have you devised an alternate system to test the original system's consistency?"

"That's the problem," Softly said. "That's why I'm here. We need a metalogical language to build into our computer-driven machine. We'll save a tremendous amount of time and labor if we can refer to a source of artificial intelligence that functions on both levels-Logicon and meta-Logicon. Throughout your career you've had great success in model-building, in the development of new materials, in advanced design and so forth. This submarine is an obvious example."

"I'm far too old to help in this matter," Dent said. "True, I spend some time every day dictating ideas which are then typed, privately printed in our offset room and bound in leather. But my ideas are no longer mathematical in nature and haven't been for a great many decades. I've written extensively on the subject but haven't actually done mathematics since my twenties. Your problem is essentially mathematical. You need someone able to draw on vast powers of creativity."

"I've got Lown and Bolin."

Dent yawned and shivered simultaneously.

"Who else?" he said.

"Your fellow laureate Terwilliger."

"Billy Twillig sat on a pin. How many inches did it go in? Four. One two three four."

"Nice," Softly said.

"He can solve your problem, can't he?"

"He hasn't been cooperating. He won't even sit in front of the sun lamp. The others take turns. All but him. Maybe that's what's got him down. Lack of sunlight, real or synthetic. There's a form of depression people suffer in northern regions during the sunless months. It's called polar hysteria. Maybe that's what he's got."

"Probably he doesn't like sharing the limelight, that one. I know that one's work. Original but full of quirks. That kind of mind never succeeds at collaboration. Pride, arrogance, vanity, insecurity. They go together. Ego, instability, fear itself."

"You have no advice to give me then after all the preparations I made, not to mention the traveling, the search, the descent, all of which, excluding the preparations, have to be repeated in the opposite direction."

"Arithmetize," Dent said.

"Arithmetize?"

"The system must reflect the metasystem. Or vice versa. Provide each sign with an integer."

"An integer?"

"If your electromechanical relay system is a continuous one, you must match 'it with a discrete-state mechanism. After all, Cauchy played with discrete and continuous groups. He was also a royalist who gave money to the poor."

"Why bring that up?"

"Balance," Dent said. "That's the best I can do, Every invention has an element of balance. Beyond that I have nothing to say except that problems are inevitable. As you well know, the more consistent the system, the less provable its consistency."

"Who does your shawls?"

"I use this man in Sausalito."

"You must give me his name," Softly said.

Dent asked him to ring for the eunuch. There was a buzzer on a panel nearby and Softly pressed it once, wishing he'd never thought of making this trip. Bö soon arrived with a chamber pot. He sat it on the floor next to the old man's deck chair and then left the compartment.

"This is in the nature of a drill."

"Of course," Softly said.

"I have a calculus."

"A calculus?"

"A stone. A urinary calculus. An abnormal mass in my bladder. Have you ever passed a stone?"

"No."

"We drill every day. Getting ready for the event itself. The passing of the stone."

"I hope you're not in pain."

Dent seemed to be thinking of something.

"Logic merely fills the gaps," he said finally. "The main technique is the mathematical technique. Granted, much of mathematics is exceedingly comic. But this only makes us believe in it all the more."

"My immediate concern is metamathematics."

"Hilarious," Dent said.

"A universal logical structure able to speak about itself in metalogical terms."

"Extremely mirth-provoking."

The hull groaned loudly. Jumulu Nobo stepped into the compartment and explained that it was time to play rock-paper-scissors. Old Dent liked to play in Japanese. When Nobo, hands behind his back, reached the count of three, Dent thrust a clenched fist out of his shawl. Nobo at the same time flung out his right hand with index and middle fingers extended.

"Ishi!"

"Hasami!"

There was a brief pause.

"Rock breaks scissors," Dent said.

"I hate to lose."

"A fact that makes my pleasure even keener."

Again Nobo counted to three.

"Hasami!"

"Kami!"

The hull groaned. Softly thought of the immense pressure being brought to bear, the shatter-capacity of the sea at this depth.

"Scissors cuts paper," Dent said.

Softly watched them play for an hour. Finally Dent made a gesture and got to his feet. Nobo picked up the chamber pot and held it just below the old man's crotch, undoing the single metal clip in Dent's pajama bottoms with his free hand. A long time passed.

"Stay to dinner, Softly?"

"Must get going, I'm afraid."

"We're having hamstring," Nobo said. "A big favorite back in Oslo, Norway."

"Really must run," Softly said.

"Hamstring, maw and rootage."

Bö led him back around to the escape hatch and unsecured the police lock. Eventually, in the helicopter, Softly noticed a freighter almost directly ahead. He asked the pilot to go down for a closer look. Deck hands were visible here and there but no one of obvious consequence. However, the ship's name was easy to read, having been lettered on the hull in Day-Glo paint.

 

Goo Fou Maru Seagoing Headquarters for

ACRONYM

Operating beyond the 3-, 12- and 48-mile limits

Not subject to international search procedures

Trespassers will be prosecuted

 

Softly had his briefcase aboard the helicopter and he found an anti-depressant inside and swallowed it quickly. A fairly mild rise it gave him, just enough to keep him intact until he reached the ordered dense environment at the bottom of the great excavation.

 

Maurice Wu in long Johns and sweater scrubbed the chrome reflector of his carbide lamp with foaming soap. Then he checked his first-aid kit for bandage roll, tourniquet, sterile gauze compress, one-shot antirabies serum, boric acid solution. He poured some carbide from a gallon can into a small plastic container. He put spare parts for the lamp into an even smaller watertight pouch. Having already polished his wu-fu, he slipped it around his neck. Then he put on kneepads, coveralls, high socks, climbing boots and cotton gloves.

Billy left his cubicle.

In the next unit Mainwaring and Bolin studied a number of documents that the former pulled out of his attache case, where these papers and others were filed, tabbed and partitioned. Regarding organization in general, Bolin thought of his own tendency to make lists. The best part of list-making was the satisfaction he derived from crossing out each item as it was attended to. In any graded series of human gratifications, he was sure this pleasurable sense, that of business-neatly-completed, would occupy one of the lower orders. Still, it was a constant source of irreducible delight, the crossing-out of things.

Jean Venable stepped over a generator cable and headed onto the path between the rows of cubicles. She saw Billy coming out of the first-aid unit and walked with him back to his quarters.

"Not ill, I hope."

"Just checking out what they have in there. Not much. I thought I'd walk around a little. See what's doing."

"Do you employ certain time-wasting devices to put off the start of another day's work?"

"No," he said.

"Do you experience an emotional letdown when you complete a theorem or whatever?"

"Cut it out."

"Just wondered," she said.

He realized he was causing a one-man clutter and so he got into bed, dressed in the same pants, shirt, underwear and socks he'd been wearing when he first entered the antrum. Jean arranged herself sidesaddle on the TV table that was supposed to be his desk.

"Come on, slugabed, cheer up."

"Sure."

"It finally came to me," she said. "A beautifully lucid moment."

"What?"

"Sooner or later I always know when something's wrong. I knew it was something really basic this time. Then it came to me."

"What?" he said.

"Lucid but frightening," she said. "My book."

"What about it?"

"I'm making it fiction." she said. "The thing that was wrong was that I didn't really have a book as things stood. It wasn't willing itself into me, excuse the metaphysics. It was all very forced. But then I realized what I wanted to do and it was frightening. Fiction. I'm going to write fiction."

"Why is this frightening?"

"Because I don't know how to write fiction. I'll have to make everything up. I'll have to change everything. About the project. About the people involved. Everything. The sounds, the smells, the touch. The appearance of things and the essence of things."

"Why the smells?"

"I plan to make strict rules that I plan to follow. Reading my book will be a game with specific rules that have to be learned. I'm free to make whatever rules I want as long as there's an inner firmness and cohesion, right? Just like mathematics, excuse the comparison. Let's see, what else? Don't tell anyone we've had this talk. That's what I wanted to be sure to remember to tell you."

"I won't."

"Don't say anything."

"I won't say anything."

"If Rob finds out, I go flying out of here headfirst. And I want to stay a while longer. I need technical stuff from Edna and Lester. I need to find out if they can actually do what they've set out to do. I need to learn what this new man is like, this man Mainwaring. And meanwhile I'll be secretly writing and planning and scheming."

"When Rob sees he's not getting the book he thinks he's getting, I don't want to be around."

"It's not really his fault, I suppose. Those occasional rages and flurries of insult and all the rest of it. I suppose if I'd been raised under the same circumstances, I'd not only be temperamental and even hostile at times but most likely I'd be the same size he is. His size, after all, is everything, isn't it?"

"Raised under what circumstances?"

"Total emotional neglect," she said. "Rob was abandoned by his parents and raised in a foundling home. According to records he later dug up and examined, he had no organic abnormalities at the time. But see they kept him in a small dark room unattended for hours on end. I'm talking about extended lengths of time. He spat up food and swallowed it again. He suffered from insomnia. Then he lapsed into periods of prolonged sleep. This inhibited his growth hormones with results that are all too obvious."

"That doesn't explain why it hurts him to walk."

"On that subject I have a couple of things to say. His emotional deprivation resulted in all sorts of otherwise unexplained respiratory infections as well as a marked decrease in muscle tone. This could account for his hip trouble."

"What else?"

"It could be an act," she said.

He picked some lint from the bedsheet and blew it off his fingertip to another part of the same sheet.

"Why would he want to put on an act?"

"Maybe he wants pity. Maybe he thinks it helps him maintain command. People sometimes embellish their afflictions in order to create a specific effect. Maybe he thought child size alone would make him a comic figure. He felt compelled to seek a tragic tone, to gain a more complex kind of attention."

"Anyway this isn't the only story I've heard about Rob's disease. Lester Bolin said it had something to do with his mother's womb being unbalanced, the chemicals not mixing right."

"I don't know anything about his wombhood," Jean said.

"And then Maurice Wu told me that Rob was born in China where he got this so-called gnome disease because of the water having no minerals. So I've been through this before."

"All I've told you I heard from Rob himself. Except for the dislocated hips being an act, of course."

"Which is just a guess."

"They don't seem dislocated when we're in bed," she said.

 

MORE   ON   BATS

 

Everyone was impressed by the confident gleam on Main-waring's face. Everywhere he went in the antrum he carried an attache case full of documents that tended to support what he consistently referred to as "the latest findings."

"It was Gauss who worked out a proof of the binomial theorem in which n is a negative integer," he said. "I don't mean to impinge on the other fellow's area of competence but it seems to me that n may be a vital element in the present scheme of things."

"How so?" Bolin said.

"As you well know, the physical universe tends to provide an arena for the utilization of totally abstract mathematical ideas long after these ideas are developed. Happens time and again. What first appears to be worth preserving solely for its beauty is often found to have direct application to the world of matter, energy and the life processes. So: if Moholean relativity is valid, we may find that the concept of an indefinite number of dimensions is more than a purely abstract piece of Gauss-inspired mathematics. As of this moment, the value-dark dimension continues to be pure theory. What we're doing at Cosmic Techniques, my home base, involves trying to identify an actual mohole. According to Mohole himself, there are moholes numbering n."

"I'd like to hear more about it."

"If you're sure I'm not impinging," Mainwaring said.

"Please keep going."

"My father was a mathematician, you see, so there's a distant affinity."

"My father designed war toys," Bolin said.

"We are presently engaged in sylphing. According to Mohole's theory, wherever there are exo-ionic sylphing compounds, there are moholes. This is why we say a mohole is space-time sylphed. And what we're trying to do is identify areas in space where mohole-trapped particles, X-ray emissions and so on are absorbed by sylphing compounds. On a contour map such an area would take the form of an absorption hole."

Wu checked his backpack for trowel, pocket magnifier, dental pick, brush with soft fine bristles, nylon cord, cable ladder, whistle, dehydrated food, lengths of manila rope, candles, compass, the first-aid kit, the container that held the extra carbide, the pouch that held spare parts for the carbide lamp. He left the pack sitting on his sleeping bag and went across the path to visit Billy.

"See you in a while."

"Don't tell me you're not scared going up there."

"Maybe a little."

"Wading through that stuff."

"The guano."

"You're scared, 1 think."

"The right kind of scared."

"Bat-cave-osis."

"Want to come with me?" Wu said.

"I'm not budging."

"See you in a while."

"Ever see a bat get born?"

"No," Wu said, "but they do it pretty much the way we do. And I guess if you attach nonbat emotions to the event, it's just as happy as human birth and just as sad," thinking that darkness possesses a measure of vestigial light, the yin-influenced veiling of the sun, a unity in this occultation. He'd scrutinized astronomical inscriptions on ancient Chinese oracle bones. He'd written a brief study of the relationship between mathematics and fortune-telling ("techniques of destiny") in early China. He'd toured the temple caves of the Northern Wei dynasty. He'd investigated China's history and tried to analyze the intrinsic rhythms of its language and character. He'd learned the language itself. He'd spent long periods of time in the land itself. From all of this he hoped to gain nothing more than a feudal sense of security. He did not pursue self-identification, a centralized response to one's own distinctness, as much as community, and there it is again, common possession, this including a measure of that, the number one (even if negative and printed in black, as was done by the Sung algebraists) seeking a perfect balance, a positive complementary sun-cut force with which to interlock. What he wanted from that microscopic China in his mind was some affirmation of the fact that he was not alone.

"Why sad?" Billy said.

"The birth of a baby equals the death of a fetus. This experience recreates itself throughout our lives. Wish me luck."

Arithmetize, Softly thought, semihysterically.

Lown and Bolin had a whispered conversation in the former's cubicle. Her desert boots were unlaced and the cigarette she was trying to smoke kept going out. Lester was dressed in a combination of pajamas and golf togs.

"Could it be the other way around?"

"Everything could be the other way around."

"And probably is," she said.

"That's the trouble."

"So go ahead."

"At any rate," Bolin said, "he explained that Mohole's model of the universe is a stellated twilligon with an n-bottomed hole."

"I see."

"This is also called a terminal mohole."

"Sounds ridiculous to me."

"I didn't want to say anything to him."

"Childlike."

"That's what I thought," he said. "That precise idea occurred to me."

"Which isn't to say it's not valid."

"Right-o."

"I suppose metamathematics would sound just as childlike to Main-waring," she said. "And we both know nothing is more valid."

"Better keep your voice down, Edna."

"So go on."

"At any rate," Bolin said, "the whole thing apparently springs from forces that were created in the first split second after the big bang."

"The big bang," she said.

"Because Ratner's star lies within a suspected mohole, which is a fractional part, as I understand it, of the value-dark dimension, meaning no spatial area and no time, it was thought the signal picked up by the synthesis telescope was originating from Ratner's star. But it wasn't."

"This part I already know."

"It was just that the mohole had trapped the signal and sent it our way. Ratner's star is a binary dwarf. Couldn't possibly sustain a planet of any size."

"A binary dwarf," she said.

"Mainwaring and his people are trying to identify an actual mohole at the same time that they attempt to trace the signal to its real source."

"Yes."

"Unpredictable cosmic events are implicit in Moholean relativity."

"Yes," she said.

"If there are moholes, the physical laws in a mohole probably change, depending on the observer, where he is, whether he is moving or at rest, his rate of speed if he is moving."

"I see."

"A mohole has little or nothing in common with a black hole. A mohole is part of the innate texture of space. It is not a singularity, a collapsed object, a gravity pit. It is simply what is out there, numbering n."

"A black hole," she said.

"In the last analysis, moholes are impossible to talk about. What we're really doing is imposing our own conceptual limitations on a subject that defies inclusion within the borders of our present knowledge. We're talking around it. We're making sounds to comfort ourselves. We're trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad."

 

LESTER  TRIES   AGAIN

 

Softly at his desk was in a state of intense excitement. Funny things happening to the tissue at the back of his brain. He kept inserting pencils in the battery-operated sharpener, thinking that the interval aboard the submarine had at least renewed his appreciation of the dedicated tone that obtained in the antrum. It was all beginning to fit together. Wu would have time while artifacting in the dark to develop further his "contralogical" theory of human evolution. Mainwaring appeared to be efficiency, calm and self-assurance incorporated; was clearly making correct probes; might even be inclined to try a bit of synthetic intensifier in the spirit of hale fellows well met. Lown and Bolin were proceeding apace, more or less, lacking only the raw gut power of Terwilliger's methodology, a circumstance which might by this time be completely rectified, hope I hope I hope. What the boy had to overcome was the pain, the dread, the risk involved in being logical. Historical development of the word "boy" might be instructive fun to trace with him some time. Make him aware of the soft treatment he gets around here. Ox, oxhide, he thought. Neck collar, knave, servant. There was Jean. Jean's book fit in. Jean's book would detail the ingredients of their triumph while making no reference to what was really going on. So Jean's book definitely fit in, not to mention Jean herself, chilled silver in the candlelight, pleasant to smell, slow to anger, an easeful creature experience, sidereal distirietion of her left buttock, make of that what I will, snug in the gunnels of her wraparound legs. Women are at their best when [  ] oppressed [  ] undressed. Of course this kind of elegant ideational structure depends in the end on technically precise mathematical language.

We used to crush pieces of chalk with the butt end of wooden guns that had a nail and a rubber band and you could shoot off small pieces of linoleum at each other. We used to fill up socks with the powdered chalk and smash each other on the back. We used to say: "Halloween! Halloween!"

This is where zorgs fit in, the technicality, the precision, the mathematics, the language. Strict rules, Billy thought, feeling tired and limp, watching Lester Bolin come into the cubicle and pull the chair over to the cot and extend a sheet of papet in the general direction of his mouth. He took it and looked at it as Lester waited for him to react. He did not react, however, and after a while Lester got up and went away. What was strange was that Billy, looking at the page, fully realized the beauty of Logicon or at least its potential beauty as seen in the nearly surreal cleanness of its ideography: nothing unnecessary, nothing concealed, a sense of what he instinctively regarded as "extreme Chinese formalism," the mechanical drawing that is the machine.

 

 

 

He got out of bed, took the blanket off the cot and spread it over the TV table. Then he crawled under the table, wedging himself between its plastic legs before proceeding to even out the edges of the blanket so that it completely shrouded the table and the person under the table. He felt foolish but determined. The foolishness of the gesture only strengthened his resolve. He thought of a characteristic of his. Whenever people expected him to like something, he either didn't like it or concealed his liking of it. He supposed he didn't want his feelings to be anticipated by others. But in this case it wasn't his feelings that were the issue, or liking something or disliking it. He didn't really know what the issue was and he was sure no one could tell him. All he knew was that in a very short while he no longer felt foolish.

 

BREATHE! GLEAM! VERBALIZE! DIE!

 

Wu's backpack was stenciled with the letters MXW. He filled a canteen with water from a larger canteen, He reknotted his boots, He was just starting to roll up his sleeping bag when Softly entered his quarters, followed by Mainwaring, Bolin and Lown, Lester's eyes shifting (Mainwaring noticed) as he appraised Wu's cubicle. For one thing there were no chairs. For another there was no cot. There was no desk either and no sign of luggage. Wu dragged the backpack into a corner and sat down on top of it.

"Before you get going," Softly said, "I'd like you to fill these people in."

"Sure," Wu said. "On what?"

"Events."

"You mean events in the field?"

"The field and after the field," Softly said. "These people know nothing about it. They need to be filled in."

"It's like this," Wu said. "We were in Sangkan Ho under the auspices of the Chinese-American Science Sodality. We seemed to be witnessing an unusual thing taking place. After a certain point, the deeper we went the greater the complexity of the tool types, of the culture in general. This is after a certain point. Up to that point, everything was normal. After that point, we found a progressive increase in complexity."

"Interesting," Mainwaring said.

"Everything we found was carefully analyzed. The methods of optical confirmation are very advanced. And we don't anticipate the slightest controversy as to our dating techniques and so on. The controversy we may get will be the culturally based sort of thing that doesn't question the findings but only the implications of the findings. This is simply a case of people not being able to accept revolutionary truths."

"To be expected," Lown said.

"We're in no hurry to publish," Wu said. "There is plenty of work to be done. When Rob no longer needs my services, I'm heading back to the field. It wasn't until I left the field and came here that I first realized the extent of what I'd seen in the field."

"Man more advanced the deeper we dig," Softly said.

"Charming," Bolin said.

Someone using a crayon had written out the number eighteen on the undersurface of the TV table. To read the word he'd had to roll his eyeballs way up. The blanket smelled of stale traffic, the corroborating truth a laboratory of research onanists might produce in their methodical throbbing and desperation for pictures. His body filled the space between the blanket walls. He had never before been so aware of himself as a biological individual. He smelled, he sweated, he ached. Between himself and his idea of himself there was an area of total silence. What would happen if this space could be filled with some aspect of that collective set of traits that enabled him to qualify as a persisting entity? He put his hands under his shirt and rubbed his chest and stomach. He was growing, he was aging. The greater sag of his left testicle, natural as it was, seemed an intimation of some massive dysfunction soon to manifest itself. Death he felt to be anything but senseless. In ways he could not put into words, it appeared to be a perfectly reasonable occurrence. A logical conclusion, in short. But in thinking about it, in preparing (as it were) to evade it, he seemed to lead himself into a series of inexpressible mental states. These were states that weren't so much bleak as negative, lacking some fundamental element. He felt there was something between or beyond, something he couldn't account for, between himself and the idea of himself, beyond the negative mental invention; and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence. That was as far as his thinking went on the subject. There was nowhere else for it to go, he believed. In a while he began to feel better about the site he'd chosen for his life and thought.

Googolplex and glossolalia.

Jean was alone in her room on her bed working a needle and thread. Earlier she had written a number of pages and now she was trying to busy herself into a different line of thinking. She mended this and that. She bit apart thread. She mumbled instructions to herself, not very successfully. The results, that is, were not successful, dangling buttons, loosely stitched seams; the mumbling itself was quite flawless. Oh, well, worship of the body always ends in fascism. Of the body and the body's armor. What had surprised her in the relatively brief time she'd spent at the typewriter was the very direct correlation between writing and memory. Writing, in this case, being of the nonjournalistic type. Memory being not just the faculty of recollection but the power to summon the density of past experience. The author of The Gobbledygook Cook Book (as she sometimes thought of herself) had never before realized the degree of concentration she might succeed in reaching simply by staring into the keys of a typewriter and now and then tapping on one or more. Writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self, the powdery calcium ash waiting to be stirred by a pointed stick. She didn't believe the book she was determined to write would include a great many of her own past experiences, at least not as they occurred in the special trembling weather in which she'd stood. Still, memory might yield the nuance and bone earth necessary to make fictional people. Having herself been a character in someone else's novel, she tried to anticipate the nature of the successive reflections she might eventually have to confront. She sat on the bed, playfully mingling the words "fear itself fear itself fear itself" into the instructions she mumbled concerning needles and threads and a different line of thinking.

He heard someone step into his cubicle, Billy did. Pretty heavy meant probably Bolin. Wu took long sort of bounces. Rob hobbled. Edna Lown with desert boots dragged her feet. Mainwaring, he didn't know how Mainwaring walked but he bet on Lester, judging not only by the weight expressed in those footsteps but the accompanying sound, paper rattling in someone's hand and almost definitely paper being sailed onto his cot, a single sheet, Softly thought, beatific Chinese, lovely how my Lester-pet does his stuff on an old Royal portable, quaint as a puking babe on some far-off plain, if only now the object of our concerted love will blink to indicate his willingness to play.

 

I   LOSE   MY   BREATH

 

When everything was quiet the boy slipped out from under the TV table and without even looking at the bed or the piece of paper on the bed went down the narrow trail of clay and gravel to the barrier nearest his own quarters, where he found among the boulders, crates and oil drums a very large section of heavy canvas which he struggled to dislodge from a numb mound of rubble, finally taking it in tow and heading back to cube one, time to rest, to catch his breath before proceeding to stand on the chair and place the edges of the tarpaulin if that's what it was over the edges of the partitions of his cubicle, getting off the chair to move it several times to new locations until the placement was complete, time to rest and resettle, so that what he had now was a canvas roof with enough material left over to block all but a few inches at the bottom of the entranceway, his immobile home, not that he was foregoing the blanket-shrouded table, oh no, here we go, down and in, the enclosed area's concealed zone's secluded figure.

We used to ring people's bells and run, crossing the street in zigzags, building to building, wedging broken toothpicks into the cracks around the doorbells of people we didn't like or who we thought would probably want to kill us if they could. In the Chinese laundry the old man kept an ax under the counter and what we used to do was pick one person to go stand in the doorway and make meat-cleaving motions with his or her hand until the old man reached under the counter and then you could run but not before you screamed into the store: "Halloween! Halloween!"

He took excessive pleasure in the progress of his fever, luxuriating in the unprecedented smell of his sweat, a chemical stench that led him to credit his body with greater toxic power than he'd believed it to possess. His clothing was drenched, emitting a stink of its own, as did the blanket that hemmed him in and the canvas beyond that. He alternated between chills and periods of dawning warmth, his body at the mercy of these fluctuations, his mind "asleep" in elements of form, in angularity and curvature. Salutary hallucinations. Miner's hat with headlamp. Phlegm deposits in his lungs or someplace. Perseverations. Spitting in the dust. Thinking of bats. Repeating a phrase. There were few things more pleasantly disgusting, he believed, than watching his own spit hit the dust, half quivering with fragments of earth, a tiny spoonful of drool. He curled up tighter, head between his knees, hands in the dirt, happy in his sub-reckonings, his dumbbody whiff, his spittle glisten, the persistent images of pure form, the sense that he was accompanying himself out of some systematic pattern.

Wu put on his miner's hat with headlamp. Across the path Mainwaring sat back in a swivel chair, his legs crossed on top of a small filing cabinet. His umbrella and suitcase were in a corner. His attache case was on its side in the middle of his cot. This will not take long, he thought. This will be handled with dispatch. As such projects go, this one gives promise of being very elegant. It would also seem to lend itself to expeditious performance on all fronts. Promptness, efficient speed, general dispatch. It must be the antrum that gives me this feeling. Compulsion to perform according to standards. Convergence of a number of ideas at a single point. That is undoubtedly what Rob is aiming at. To approach the same point from different directions. To tend toward a definitive conclusion, result or balance. This woman standing here telling me she has been granted permission by "our friend Rob" if it is all right with me, this standing woman, to conduct an interview concerning my particular area of competence. There goes Mr. Wu.

"Sit," he said.

"You were probably warned about a writer on the prowl."

"I don't imagine I have to apologize for the accommodations."

"What is your role in the Logicon project?"

"I'm associated with a firm called Cosmic Techniques. We're in the process of developing an echolocation quantifier, patent pending, and we believe and hope and trust that this device will help us locate that part of the universe where the artificial signals originated. Concurrent with this, we are trying to identify a mohole, something that's never been attempted before."

"Speaking more slowly, would you describe this quantifier in detail?" Jean said.

"Restricted information."

"How do you plan to identify this mohole?"

"Without getting too technical, I would say that the latest findings tend to support the theory that wherever there are moholes, we can expect to turn up a trace of exo-ionic sylphing compounds, or vice versa. With a very stylized computer-generated map of the galaxy and using observations made by the synthesis telescope here and fed to our facilities in Canada-that is, to Cosmic Techniques-we are ready and willing and able to sylph; that is, to locate absorption holes, or places in space where dust, gases, cosmic debris and electromagnetic information are being absorbed by sylphing compounds, as I explained to Mr. Bolin, pleasant man and very capable, I'm sure."

"If I had to put what a mohole is into words, what would I say?"

"You'd have a problem," Mainwaring said.

This sitting woman intent on duplicating what I say, always a partial shock to find someone who thinks enough of fact to get it absolutely right, this woman sitting here at half my age. I have been photographed for the newspapers half a dozen times. I have been interviewed for this and that publication on more than a score of occasions. I have, let's see now, been called on the telephone and asked for my opinion on the latest findings perhaps a dozen times. I belong to this this this this this organization. I have won that that that and that award. I own nineteen dress shirts.

 

t. The codes to language contained in play-talk are the final secrets of childhood.

u. Is it silly to say that there is only one limit to language and that it is crossed, in the wrong direction, when the child is taught how to use words?

v. Does this mean that to break down language into its basic elements is to invent babbling rather than elementary propositions?

w. Is play-talk a form of discourse about language? That the answer is in the affirmative seems undeniable.

x. I'm tempted to say: babbling is metalanguage.

 

Edna Lown was beginning to think of this set of notes as a subpro-fession, her cryptic existence in an alternate system of relationships. Puzzling, isn't it, how I'm beginning to look forward to this scribbling, making time for it, setting aside more immediate things, sneaking it into what's supposed to be an inflexibly tight schedule. It was quiet in the antrum. Lester Bolin was between snore cycles and there was no sound at all except the clear faint measures of water flowing in the distance. There was no reason for Edna to regard her note-taking as a secret occupation and yet she did, thinking of it often while engaged in other tasks or in conversations with Lester and Rob. It's like something I keep behind a closed door, she thought. A bed, she thought. To meet with someone behind a closed door, a man or woman (or woman?) who is not known to any of those who know me. To engage in these meetings between scheduled events. To never change the sheets on the bed behind the door. To barely know the person not known to those who know me. To be in this sense a witness to my own adventure. Wandering, she thought. I am wandering badly. A thing she rarely did in the extreme setting of the excavation. Some fairly large rocks came bouncing down the slope and crashed (judging by the sound) into a sturdy cluster of oil drums. Yes I love it here.

 

y. To maintain that things belong backwards is a facile argument intended to emphasize the difficulties involved in making observations and conducting experiments.

z. Is this always true?

a.  We think we know that a child's intuition of geometry neatly reverses the series of historical developments in this field. Beginning with invariant  spatial  relationships,  the  child  proceeds  to  closed  and  open structures; to the properties of figures extended through space; to the elements of point, line and plane.

b.  To a geometer this is regressive development, or history inside out.

c.  The child knows these things before it knows words.

d.  It may be important to seek connections.

e.  It may be important to ask whether the child's day-to-day geometry, this grasp of certain principles of space and sequence, automatically confers on childlike babbling an element of mystical sophistication.

f.  On the other hand we may be back to facile argument.

g.  What is unexamined and superficial is often "cured" by obsession. This too, of course, suggests the inside-outness of things.

h. Fragmentation.

i. Forced dispersion of a fixed idea.

j. Does the scattering of the fragments of a scientific obsession reflect the physical and mental state of the person seeking to be cured of facile argument?

k. Mathematics.

1. Half-blind Euler pacing at his slate. Lagrange in his despondency pondering the blank spaces in his art.

 

Softly had never set eyes on his own semen. He regarded this fluid not primarily as a transporting medium but as some defensive secretion of the body, a reaction (perhaps) to danger or excessive stress. Danger from what source? The excessive stress of intercourse? He didn't ask these questions in so many words or examine the reasons why this secretion might be defensive. He hated the feel of semen on his thighs or on the sheet beneath him, bleak lick of damp, that adhesive resistance to the possibilities of flow, the chill synthetic stickiness of it. Thinning there in cubic centimeters. Approaching the "appearance" of transparency. Sugar fuel in that plasma to rouse my sperm from its quiescent state. To maintain its fertility. To boost its movement into the female apparatus. But do I know for certain there is sperm in my ejaculate? Noughts and crosses. Shepherd's score. Hopscotch. Cybernetics. Precisely why he avoided the sight of his own semen was another question he didn't ask in so many words. It was a sight to be avoided, that was all. What could you say about your own semen and why you hated the feel of it and avoided the sight of it? It was not a subject to be nudged toward some finished insight. So Softly thought, the same Softly (all too aware of the irony of it all) who believed in the wholesomely promotional idea that sex is not what you do but what you are. This made the fluid in question an ambiguous topic at best.

He left Jean (muttering) on her stomach and took the elevator down to the bottom of the antrum, Jean (on her stomach) not unloved, not unmarked by the incidental menace of this loving, by Softly's roistering maul, good luck to her arms and legs, physically a shade slack, he thought, lacking all in all her customary purpose and zeal, that expressive force through which her body explored some silent ideal of spacelessness, moving now against the sheets to rewarm herself and wearily to clean his nervous semen from that itching patch of lower belly. He went straight from the elevator to the crude shower stall near the barrier. Here he undressed, eyes averted from the center of his body, and stepped with terrible suddenness into what proved to be no more than a trickle of freezing water, enough at any rate to freshen his armpits, crotch and feet. He hurried into his clothes, body taut against the cold, and walked on down to cube one.

There was a dusty tarpaulin draped over the entire cubicle. It covered most of the entranceway as well. Softly leaned way over, lifted the canvas and stepped inside. Moldy gloom. There was a blanket over the plastic table that was supposed to serve as a desk. He assumed the boy was under there. It didn't seem absurd that the boy would be under there. It was sort of Willy's way these days. On the bed was a piece of mail. There was also the chair to be noted. The footlocker. Finally the suitcase. The suitcase was opened, its contents giving every indication of having gone untouched since the time they were first carried down here.

Softly sat in the chair and took one of the small cigars out of the tin he carried in his jacket pocket. He lit it up, squirming further back into the seat. He recalled that Lester Bolin had once told him how boring it was to teach game theory to sophomores. That was a long time ago. That was Lester on the brink. Now he was inescapably within the confines. Prenex normal forms. Recursive undecidability. The pure monadic predicate calculus. A firm foundation for analysis is all that got it going. EXERCISE: Prove that every consistent decidable first-order theory has a consistent decidable complete extension.

 

Uga boo

Uga boo boo uga

 

"That's my cigar smoke you smell. I don't want you to think the place is on fire."

"I'm very calm."

"Calm," Softly said. "Wonder what our young man means by that."

"It's easy to concentrate in here."

"He must be trying to lift the general morale in the place, declaring his readiness to concentrate. On what, of course, remains to be seen. This must be a phase of the polar hysteria syndrome that the experts are not ready to confirm just yet. Utter calmness. Readiness to concentrate."

"What's polar hysteria?"

"He's able to squeak out occasional questions, it would appear. Very encouraging indeed. Sunlessness. That's your problem. Aggravated sun-lessness."

"Keep believing it."

"Any plans for making an appearance sometime in the near or distant future?"

"I'll play it by ear."

"He gives every sign of being alive, at any rate, and in tentative control of his faculties."

"That brings up an interesting point."

"We're all anxious to hear what sort of points are deemed interesting by people who spend their time crouching in shrouded environments."

"You got this whole thing started down here by talking about the tensions going on in the outside world."

"True enough."

"Maybe I'd like to know what's happening lately."

"Things, if anything, are worse," Softly said. "We're getting reports about aggression and counteraggression. The meaning of the term 'counteraggression' defeats me for the moment but I suppose in this kind of situation there's bound to be a certain amount of muddled thinking."

"I'd like the talking to end now."

"Wants to be alone, does he, with his newly discovered sense of calmness? Desires the kind of quiet even blankets and waterproof coverings can't guarantee? Plans to concentrate, does he? Chooses to listen to his circulating blood as it bears tender nutrients through his body? Decides he needs an interval of quiet breathing, right? Intends to invent the nonce word that renders death irrelevant."

"Somebody's getting carried away."

"It's very uncomfortable in here," Softly said. "Do you know that or not? If not, why not? This canvas I find depressing. You've never behaved this way before. I think I'll keep talking just to annoy you."

Immense bedraggled dishevelment.

Because it was possible to get infected without even being bitten. It had been known to happen. There were cases on record. Because of the saliva in the air. Or because of the parasitic insects floating around. Or because of the guano. Or because of the urinous mist surrounding the colony itself. So this possibility alone was reason to think of a bat cave not as a place inhabited by bats, inviting to bats or even swarming with bats but rather as a place that was bat-infested.

Jean Venable wearing a raincoat walked into Softly's cubicle and finding it unoccupied sat down and waited for Rob to return, which eventually he did, Billy's head coming out from under the blanket, Softly moving right past Jean and seating himself formally at the elaborate desk, where he pretended to engage in a series of engrossing tasks, the boy's head withdrawing again, damp wool, the humidity of stilled midnights.