Ratner's Star (4 page)

Field Experiment Number One.

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

“What happens next?” Hof said.

“He goes to his quarters.”

“Sure he doesn't see Dyne?”

“We take him to his quarters,” Ottum said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I have understood.”

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

Billy added a nod to his verbal affirmation.

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

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

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

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

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

“When do I unpack?”

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

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

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

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

Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.

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

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

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

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

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

“Curve of quickest descent.”

“What's that?”

“The cycloid.”

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

“Zorgs.”

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

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

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

“Microminiaturization.”

“Is that your field?”

“We condense raw data. Those consoles behind you perform the bulk of the job. Five disciplines make up Gnomonics Comp. Micromini's the biggest.”

“Can you tell me what's my assignment now?”

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

“When is briefing?”

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

“What dream?”

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

“Space.”

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

“One hundred nations.”

“Good,” he said.

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

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

“What do you want?”

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

“Go away,” he said matter-of-factly.

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

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

“Bulk orders get steak knives thrown in.”

“Totemist,” he said. “Prayer harpy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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