Pursing his lips, Horton hazarded a guess. 'You figured out something about the Trigger and bond energies -'
'Because you and I have to rewrite Pauling. Because the whole fundamental model, the core metaphor, has to change. I know why the Trigger works, Jeffrey. I know what you did right - and why you kept hitting theoretical dead-ends.'
'Well- give, then!'
Brohier looked past Horton to make certain that the office door was closed. 'We were hidebound old farts, Jeffrey - trying to shoehorn our new wonder into the pinched shoe of yesterday's fashions. We weren't thinking nearly radically enough by half. Understandable, really - no reflection on us. I think we've all been fooled into thinking that the revolution has already come and gone, that the CERN system was the paradigm shift we'd been waiting for. But it wasn't the shift - just the tremble beforehand.'
Shaking his head, Horton said exasperatedly, 'I'll be damned if you don't take your own sweet time getting to the point.'
Brohier's eyes widened in indignation - whether mock or real, Horton couldn't discern. 'You keep me waiting for months, and now you begrudge me a few minutes? Arrogant youth. You'll sit there and be quiet for as long as it takes. I have a right to enjoy this.'
'Sorry,' Horton said with a sheepish, lopsided smile.
'I may forgive you,' Brohier said. 'Or I may drag it out another twenty minutes just to spite you. Now, where was I?'
'Paradigm shifts. The fundamentals of the model. Rewriting Pauling.'
'Paradigm shifts,' Brohier echoed. 'Jeffrey, in the CERN model, why is there such a thing as matter?'
'Pardon me?'
Brohier repeated his question.
'I don't think the CERN system says anything about why matter exists,' said Horton, shaking his head. 'All it addresses is how- the matter identity of energy as a collapsed wave function, the stability of the collapsed field state, the asymmetry of the initiating factors for transitions. But that isn't the answer you wanted, is it.'
'No. Look at the picture we physicists have painted. Energy is energy. Matter is energy. What else is there? Forces - which are transmitted by vector bosons, which are particles, and particles are matter, and matter is energy. So why is the universe so complex? Why does it not consist of nothing more than the white light of god, pure and undifferentiated? Why should there be air or stone or tree, desk or wall or me or thee?'
'The Kastenmach equations -'
'Describe how - they do not explain why.'
Horton sat forward in his chair. 'Karl, maybe I'm missing your thrust, but aren't we outside of the realm of science here? I thought teleology was something we fobbed off on the Humanities Department.'
'We're outside the realm of matter-energy physics,' said Brohier, 'but not outside the realm of science.'
'What else is there?'
Brohier's eyes sparkled. 'Now we're asking the right questions. What else, indeed! What is the factor which collapses the primal energy field into so many discrete field states - four forces, a dozen elementary particles, a hundred elements, a hundred thousand compounds? What is the essence of differentiation that allows a drawerful of pencils, a sky full of snowflakes, a beach full of sand grains to exist - with each element of the set retaining its individual character and separate existence, without sacrificing the underlying identity of form?'
'Why, we're talking about the effects of quantum indeterminacy, aren't we? Stochastic variation. It all depends on how complete a description of the subjects you specify. The sand displays unity at certain resolutions, and variation at others.'
'Too subjective. Either there are a billion grains of sand, or there aren't. They exist independent of perception, or because of it. Choose.'
'I'm voting Materialist in this election,' Horton said. His face bore a quizzical expression, and he followed his answer with a question. 'Are you trying to say that what gives them their identity, their existence, is the specification of their properties?'
A satisfied smile crept across Brohier's face. 'Yes, exactly, Jeffrey. The "what else" is information. Information organizes and differentiates energy. It regularizes and stabilizes matter. Information propagates through matter-energy and mediates the interactions of matter-energy. It is the mind of creation, the antidyne to chaos.'
Horton was staring through the floor as he grappled with
Brohier's pronouncement. 'If the universe consists of energy and information,' Horton said slowly, 'then the Trigger somehow alters the information envelope of certain substances -'
'Alters it, scrambles it, overwhelms it, destabilizes it,' Brohier said. 'And crudely, too. The units we're building now are unimaginably wasteful - like hitting a computer with ten thousand volts of lightning to change a few bytes of its programming. It was a fluke, pure serendipity, that somewhere in the smear of informational noise describing your prototype were a few coherent words in the language of resonance mechanics - the new science of matter. You stumbled on the characteristic chemical signature of certain nitrate compounds, which picked your signal out of the air like a ham radio operator finding a voice in the static.'
'But if we can learn to read and write in that language -'
'You see now why I said we need to go back to Pauling and start over.'
The idea was too big, and had snuck up on him too fast. Horton felt his resistance mounting. 'Are we just playing word games here, or do you actually have a representational system worked out?' The inflection of the words conveyed more skepticism than Horton had intended.
'Why, Jeffrey - you wound me. You know it isn't science until you can say it in numbers.'
This time, Horton saw the twinkle, and knew that the affront was pretense. Pushing the sleeves of his sweater up to his elbows, he rose from his chair.
'Good,' he said. 'Let's go to the whiteboard. Show me the math.'
They spent nearly two hours at the giant whiteboard hanging low on the common wall with 115 Fuld. For most of the first hour, Brohier sat in a secretary's chair and rolled back and forth with a fat black marker in hand. For most of the second, Brohier sat in the middle of the office, from where he could see the entire board as a whole, and debated with Horton as the latter edited and annotated the board with a bright red marker.
Finally Horton, too, retreated from the board. He surrendered the red marker to Brohier as he joined him.
'Well?' Brohier prodded. 'What have you decided?'
'I've decided you should buy me dinner,' said Horton. 'An expensive dinner. You can charge it against the prize for your second Nobel.'
'Oh, foo - that kind of talk is extremely premature,' Brohier said with a dismissive wave of his hand. Horton could tell that Brohier was pleased, nonetheless. 'Just tell me that it sings for you.'
It does,' Horton said, resting a hand on Brohier's shoulder. 'I can't find a wrong note. Not that I'm the most critical listener you'll run into. But if it ends as well as it begins - Karl, it's a hell of a piece of work.'
Brohier beamed and patted Horton's hand. 'Thank you, Jeffrey. Now wipe the board, will you? And we'll go find you some dinner.'
The Institute's meal hall was not quite what Horton had had in mind for a celebratory dinner, but he conceded to Brohier that theirs would not be the first such taken there.
'Indeed. Besides,' Brohier assured him, 'there's nothing second-tier about the food here. The Institute takes very good care of our stomachs, as well. Go on, look - tell me the last time you saw a menu like that on campus.'
Horton saw quickly that Brohier was not exaggerating. The entrees - which apparently changed daily, since the menu bore that day's date - spanned five continents and more than a dozen cuisines.
In a replay of Horton and Brohier's last dinner together, while they were waiting for their food, Horton had to endure two introductions and an intrusion. The introductions were to Barbara Glennie-Golden, the round-cheeked grandmotherly Distinguished Visiting Professor in Historical Studies, and Roger Petranoff, the vulture-necked chairman of the mathematics departmen
t.
Neither scholar was anything but polite, but Horton still squirmed as he smiled his way through the encounters. He was too conscious of his own notoriety to relax, and Glennie-Golden's parting words only heightened that sensitivity.
'You know, young man, you've certainly made my field more interesting,' she said, pausing by his chair. The lions of the economics school of historical analysis were sleeping peacefully, thinking that they were at the top of the food chain - and now you've stirred up the hornets of the technology school, and they've been making the lions mighty uncomfortable.'
'And what are you, Barbara - lion or hornet?' asked Brohier.
She laughed. 'I'm the sterile crossbreed.'
The intrusion came in the person of Samuel Bennington-Hastings, an exuberant physics post-doc from Cambridge who looked young enough to make Horton feel old. 'So, you're the legendary Trigger man,' he said, slipping into one of the empty seats at the table. 'Does this mean our secretive Dr Brohier is finally going to let the rest of us play with the new toys?'
Brohier snorted good-naturedly. 'Dr Sam thinks I've been holding out on him.'
'Not at all, sir - on the whole department,' Bennington-Hastings said. 'Dr Brohier asks a thousand questions for every one he answers. When I ask him what's the trick inside the magic box, he just smiles like the Buddha.' He reached across the table and patted Brohier's stomach. 'He's starting to look like the Buddha, too.'
Brohier rapped the young scientist sharply across the knuckles with a spoon, then sent a sheepish look in Horton's direction. 'Since I hurt my hip - it's winter, after all. And the food is good -'
'I just hope you're keeping excellent notes, so Dr Horton doesn't spend the rest of his career deciphering Brohier's Last Theorem. It'd be better still if you'd come with me to the fitness center at sunrise, for Hatha yoga and twenty-five laps. Then you'll live forever - maybe even be famous someday.'
'If I have to get up at sunrise to run laps, Dr Sam, what's the point of living forever? - I think this is our food coming.'
With a wink, Horton leaned toward Bennington-Hastings. 'What you don't understand, Sam, is that Karl here doesn't know what's in the magic box. See, the truth is, I've been carrying him for twenty years. He's only here to spy for me.'
'Oh, splendid, I'm beset by liars on both sides. A fine thing this is for the upward march of science.' He stood up as the waiter reached the table. 'Eat, yes, eat, may your arteries harden to stone and your manhood dangle like an empty snakeskin.'
Brohier laughed heartily. Horton stared after Bennington-Hastings with an uncertain grin and a wondering look. 'What was that? Who was that?'
'Well, Dr Sam would tell you that he's descended from a long, distinguished line of English eccentrics, and that John Cleese is his spirit guide.' Smiling broadly, Brohier shook his head. 'Don't ever tell him, Jeffrey, but I find him a delight. He's a gifted mimic, and completely irreverent. He has half a dozen different characters living in his head, and he'll shift into any one of them without warning - you got a little taste of the one I call Dr Bombay there at the end. But don't underestimate him. Dr Sam tutored me in combinametrics when I first arrived. He's a very bright young man. And I wager he'll be sitting in the center of the front row when we present our paper on resonance mechanics.'
Horton said nothing to that, and it proved the last time either of them spoke of work while there was still food on the table. Instead, Brohier quizzed Horton about his travels, and Horton surprised himself by finding he had entertaining anecdotes to tell about himself.
'Have you kept in touch with Lee and Gordie?' Brohier asked over dessert.
'About as well as I have with you,' Horton confessed. 'How are they doing?'
'As far as I can see, the Annex appears to be on an even keel. It seems as though they cancel out each others' deficiencies as managers.'
That's not what I was asking about.'
'Oh,' said Brohier. 'That. At last report, they were inching toward each other at a pace which makes glaciers seem nimble.'
'Really? That much progress? Whose report was that?'
'Lee's.'
'Ah - the pessimist's version. If we had Gordie's version, we could find the average, and then we'd know what's really going on.'
Brohier snorted. 'I suppose you haven't kept touch with any of the Washington people, either, then.'
'No. I walked away, and they didn't chase me very hard. I didn't even get a Presidential Christmas Card.'
'I don't think Breland sends any,' Brohier said over a quiet smile.
'Just my luck. I should have taken a souvenir when I was up at the White House.'
They'd have you back,' said Brohier. They're not running from this. You have friends there.'
There and where else?'
Brohier grunted. 'You gave up watching the news too soon.'
'Did I? Breland is going to lose big this fall.'
'Probably,' the older man said. He dropped his crumpled napkin on his empty plate. 'But that's politics, Jeffrey. You're not being judged by the same standards. And you shouldn't take on guilt that isn't yours.'
'People are still doing horrible things to each other out there, Karl.'
'I know.'
'Some of them made possible by what we gave them,' said Horton. That man in Denver, the one who used the courthouse Trigger as the detonator on his suicide bomb -'
'His choice, Jeffrey.'
'And the two other women he killed?' Horton shook his head. 'I used to watch the news and think, "A Trigger could have saved those people." Now sometimes when I let myself watch, I find I have to think, "A gun could have saved those people."
'Ah. St Paul?' The name evoked a month-old headline of horror - a neighborhood gang rampaging with chains and metal clubs in a Trigger-protected strip mall, killing a seventeen-year-old and severely injuring a dozen other shoppers. The irony was that the LifeShield had been installed in response to an escalating turf war over that mall, a war which had seen half a dozen shootings on or near the property.
'And Birmingham Heights, and Louisville, and South Boston.' Each name carried an echo of a tragic brutal crime.
"This is a period of transition, Jeffrey. Mistakes are going to be made. Anywhere that the gun was an easy answer, people are having to make adjustments, having to address underlying issues. Guns were Band-Aids, and some wounds require more attention than that. You can as easily say that a ninja could have saved those people, and it would be just as true.'
'I don't know,' Horton said. It just seems as though the water gets muddier all the time. People are having second thoughts about whether they wanted this.'
Brohier shook his head vigorously. 'No, no - you're having second thoughts. Look, production has been expanded ten-fold in less than a year, and there's still a six-month waiting list. Do you know the biggest problem the committee's dealing with at the moment? Counterfeit LifeShield signs. They've been popping up all over - people are that eager for the benefits of the Trigger.'
'But if they use it as recklessly as they were using guns -'
'Some will. You have to accept that. My solid-state memory microcards have been used to smuggle documentary films into China and send a million-volume library to Mars. They've also been used to pass child pornography hand to hand, smuggle corporate secrets out of IBM, and hide criminal bookkeeping from the FBI - and those are just a few that I know about.'
'So it's the user, not the tool.'
'Exactly.'
'Remind me why we didn't find this point of view convincing when the tools in question were guns and explosives.'
'Because some tools are too dangerous to give to chimps or children,' said Brohier. 'Because a tool designed to kill when used properly is a threat to everyone, and making more of them doesn't change that - every household having a gun is almost as frightful a prospect as every country having a CBN missile battery. Or ought to be, to anyone with any sense.' He frowned. This melancholy of yours is a byproduct of idleness, Jeffrey. And I know the
cure for it - getting you back to work. Let's talk about where you're going to sleep tonight.'
'Cape May.'
'You're going back to get your things?'
'I'm just going back, Karl. This is your work, not mine.'
There's more than enough to do for two of us. For ten of us,' said Brohier. 'And it doesn't have to be done here - you could work in Columbus, or at the Annex - I may need to go there myself soon to supervise the start of testing.'
Horton shook his head as he pushed back from the table. 'Offer it to someone else. I gave up my claim on the way back from Washington, remember?'
'And I've dutifully kept it in a jar on my desk, waiting for you to get over your funk and ask for it back. What the devil is going on with you, Jeffrey?' Brohier fumed, struggling to his feet and fumbling with his coat.
'I don't want to have this conversation, Karl,' Horton said. 'And it's time for me to go.'
Turning away, Horton started for the exit with long strides. It took a supreme effort for a hobbled Brohier to catch him.
'Jeffrey - Jeffrey - stop,' Brohier said, grabbing for the younger man as they reached the double doors leading to the path back to Fuld Hall. 'You've already missed the last train, so you might as well hold still for this. And, frankly, I think you owe me a little more consideration than you're giving me.'
Looking past Brohier, Horton saw Bennington-Hastings watching curiously from the other end of the short hallway. 'All right. But out there,' he said, jerking his head toward the doors.
They settled on the steps just outside, using the doors and the cold to secure their privacy.
'I'm just trying to understand, Jeffrey,' said Brohier. 'Most people in our field go their entire careers without an opportunity like the one we have. And a lot of them are a damn sight smarter than either of us, just not as lucky. We're looking at a scientific revolution, not just a social one. I don't understand how you can walk away.'
Horton shook his head. I'm just not ready to come back yet.'
'I see,' said Brohier. 'Nothing more to it?'
'No.'
'I see. Well, I'm reassured. I was afraid that you had some silly notion that you weren't worthy to be part of this. I was worried that you might be feeling that you didn't deserve either the acclaim or the blame that you've already received, that you felt the most you could claim for yourself was being the first on the scene of a research accident.