About the Author
Don DeLillo received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984. He has won the American Book Award, and the 1989 Irish Times, Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel, Libra.
About the Book
Billy Twillig has won the first Nobel Prize ever to be given in mathematics. Set in the near future, this book charts an innocent’s education when Billy is sent to live in the company of 30 Nobel laureates and he is asked to decipher transmissions from outer space.
ALSO BY DON DELILLO
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
Libra
Mao II
Underworld
1
SUBSTRATUM
LITTLE BILLY TWILLIG stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. He boarded the plane. The plane was a Sony 747, labeled as such, and it was scheduled to arrive at a designated point exactly so many hours after takeoff. This much is subject to verification, pebble-rubbed (khalix, calculus), real as the number one. But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one’s perspective, not unlike those imaginary quantities (the square root of minus-one, for instance) that lead to fresh dimensions.
The plane taxied to a remote runway. Billy was strapped into a window seat. Next to him in the aircraft’s five-two-three-two-five seating pattern was a man reading a boating magazine and next to the man were one, two, three little girls. This was as much nextness as Billy cared to explore for the moment. He was fourteen years old, smaller than most people that age. Examined at close range he might be said to feature an uncanny sense of concentration, a fixed intensity that countervailed his noncommittal brown eyes and generally listless manner. Viewed from a distance he gave the impression that he wasn’t entirely at peace with his present surroundings, cagily slouched in his seat, someone newly arrived in this pocket of technology and stale light. The sound of the miniaturized propulsion system grew louder and soon the plane was in the air. Its angle of ascent was severe enough to frighten the boy, who had never been on an airplane before. With Sweden at war, he had received his Nobel Prize in a brief ceremony on a lawn in Pennyfellow, Connecticut, traveling to and from that locale in the back seat of his father’s little Ford.
It was the first Nobel Prize ever given in mathematics. The work that led to the award was understood by only three or four people, all mathematicians, of course, and it was at their confidential urging that the Nobel committee, traditionally at a total loss in this field, finally settled on Twillig, born Terwilliger, William Denis Jr., premature every inch of him, a snug fit in a quart mug.
His father (to backtrack briefly) was a third-rail inspector in the New York subway system. When the boy was seven the elder Terwilliger (known to most as Babe) took him into the subways for the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation. This was, after all, the place where Babe spent nearly half his conscious life. It seemed to him perfectly natural that a father should introduce his lone son to the idea that existence tends to be nourished from below, from the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness. In Babe’s mind there was also a notion that the boy would show him increased respect, having seen the region where he toiled, smelled the dankness and felt the steel. They rode the local for a while, standing at the very front of the first car to get the motorman’s viewpoint. Then they got off and went along a platform in a deserted station in the South Bronx and into a small tool room and down some steps and along a passageway and through a door and onto the tracks, where they walked in silence toward the next station. It was a Sunday and therefore reasonably safe; these were express tracks and no such trains ran on Sunday along this particular line. A local went by, however, one track over, shooting slow blue sparks. In this incandescent shower Billy thought he saw a rat. Wide bend ahead. For comic shock effect, Babe made a series of crazy people’s faces—tongue hanging out, eyes bulging, neck twisted and stiff. Within ten yards of the next station he singled out a key from the ring of many keys he carried and then opened a small door in the blackened wall and led his son into another tool room and then onto the platform. And that was all or almost all. A walk down a stretch of dark track. On the way home they sat in the next-to-last car. A tripping device failed to work and their train, braking late, ran into the rear of a stalled work train. Billy found himself on the floor of the car. Ahead was stunned metal, a buckled frame for bodies intersecting in thick smoke. Then there was a moment of superlunar calm. In this interval, just before he started crying, he realized there is at least one prime between a given number and its double.
The stewardess arrived, driving a motorized food cart. Billy preferred looking out the window to eating. There was nothing to see, just faded space, but the sense of an environment somewhere beyond this pressurized chunk of tubing, a distant whisper of the biosphere, made him feel less constricted. He tried to think in a context of Sumerian gesh-time, hoping to convince himself this would make the journey seem one fourth as long as it really was. That wedge system they used. Powers of sixty. Sixty a vertical wedge. Sixty shekels to a mina. Sixty minas to a talent. Gods numbered one to sixty. He’d recently read (handwriting cunning and urgent) that the sixty-system was about four thousand years old, obviously far from extinct. More clever than most, those Mesopotamians. Natural algebraic capacity. Beady-eyed men in ziggurats predicting eclipse.
He squeezed past the man and his little girl tribe and went back to find the toilet. There were eleven, all in use. As he waited in the passageway between doors he was approached by a large rosy man nearly palpitating with the kind of relentless affability that the experience of travel never fails to induce in some people.
“My mouth says hello.”
“H’o.”
“I’m Eberhard Fearing,” the man said. “Haven’t I seen you in the media?”
“I was on television a couple of times.”
“I was duly impressed. You demonstrated an absolute mastery as I recall. ‘Brilliant’ doesn’t begin to say it. Loved your technical phraseology in particular. Mathematicians are a weird breed. I know because I use them in my work. Planning and procedures. Let’s hear you say a thing or two.”
“I’m not brilliant in person.”
“I want to assure you that I admire your kind of intellect. Hard, cold and cutting, sir. What’s your destination?”
“Not allowed to say.”
“Flying right on through or deplaning along the way?”
“I do not comment.”
“Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“First time in the air.”
“Nervous, is it? Let’s hear some mathematics then. Seriously, what say?”
“I don’t think so for the time being.”
“No room for cunctation in any line of work. But yours especially. Gifts can vanish without warning. Reach sixteen and it’s all gone. Nothing ahead but a completely normative life. Shouldn’t you be smiling?”
“Why?”
“We’re strangers on a plane,” Fearing said. “We’re having a friendly talk about this and that. Calls for smiles, don’t you think? That’s what travel’s all about. Supposed to release all that pent-up friendliness.”
A door opened and from one of the toilets limped an elderly woman with a plum-colored growth behind her left ear. He hesitated before entering the same toilet, afraid she had left behind some unnamable horror, the result of a runaway gland. Old people’s shitpiss. Diseased in this case. Discolored beyond recognition. Possibly unflushed. Finally he stepped in, determined to escape Eberhard Fearing, bolting himself into the stainless-steel compartment and noting in the mirror how unlike himself he looked, neat enough in sport coat and tie but unusually pale and somehow tired, as though this manufactured air were threatening his very flesh, drawing out needed chemicals and replacing them with evil solvents made in New Jersey. Around him at varying heights were slots, nozzles, vents and cantilevered receptacles; issuing from some of these was a lubricated hum that suggested elaborate recycling and a stingy purity, this local sound merely part of a more pervasive vibration, the remote systaltic throb of the aircraft itself.
Cunctation.
Something about that word implied a threat. It wasn’t like a foreign word as much as an extraterrestrial linguistic unit or a vibratory disturbance just over the line that ends this life. Some words frightened him slightly in their intimations of compressed menace. “Gout.” “Ohm.” “Ergot.” “Pulp.” These seemed organic sounds having little to do with language, meaning or the ordered contours of simple letters of the alphabet. Other words had a soothing effect. Long after he’d acquainted himself with curves of the seventh degree he came across a dictionary definition of the word “cosine,” discovering there a beauty no less formal than he’d found in the garment-folds of graphed equations (although there were grounds for questioning the absolute correctness of the definition):
The abscissa of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a two-dimensional coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive; or clockwise if x is negative.
He undid his zipper, bent his knees to rearrange a snarled section of underwear and then slipped his dangle (as he’d been taught to call it) out of his pants. Words and numbers. Writing and calculating. Tablet-houses between two rivers. Dubshar nished. Scribe of counting. How did it go? Aǎ min eǎ limmu ia aǎ imin ussu ilimmu u. Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole. He tapped the underside of his dangle in an effort to influence whatever membranous sac was storing his urine. Oldest known numerals. What had he read in the manuscript? Pre-cuneiform. Marked with tapered stylus on clay slabs. Number as primitive intuition. Number self-generated. Number developing in the child’s mind spontaneously and nonverbally. Whole numbers viewed as the spark of all ancient mathematical ideas. How did it go? “The fact that such ideas consistently outlive the civilizations that give rise to them and the languages in which they are expressed might prompt a speculation or two concerning prehistoric man and his mathematics. What predated the base of sixty? Calendric notations on bone tools? Toes and fingers? Or something far too grand for the modern mind to imagine. Although the true excavation is just beginning, it’s not too early to prepare ourselves for some startling reversals.” Clockwise positive. Counterclockwise negative.
Eventually he managed to dispatch a few feeble drops of urine into what appeared to be a bottomless cistern. Then he washed his hands and combed his hair, using the large teeth of the comb because he believed wide furrows made him look older. A bandage covered a small cut on his thumb and he peeled it off now, sucking briefly at the crude wound and then flushing the bandage down the germless well, imagining for a moment an identical plastic strip floating to the surface of the water that filled a stainless-steel wash basin in a toilet on an airliner above an antipodal point. He double-checked his zipper. For the mirror he poured forth a stereotyped Oriental smile, an antismile really, one he’d learned from old movies on TV. He added a few formal nods and then unlocked the door and eased out of the tiny silver cubicle.
In his seat he rolled his tie carefully all the way up to the knotted part and then watched it drop down again, doing this over and over, using both hands to furl and then timing the release precisely, left and right hand opening at the same instant. After a long time the plane landed for a refueling stop. When they were in the air again he went sideways up the aisle past the toilets and into the rock garden. The area was crowded. He sat in a little sling, trying hard not to stare at this or that woman arranged in the odd deltoid chairs that were scattered about, ladies poised for worldly conversation, and he wondered what there was about high-altitude travel that made them seem so mysterious and available, two stages to contemplate, knees high and tight, bodies partly reclined and set back from the radiant legs. All around him people were solemnly embalmed in their own attitudes of conviviality. They drank and gestured, filling the paths of the rock garden. Occasionally a particular face would collapse toward a kind of wild intelligence so that within the larger block of features a shrunken head appeared, aflame with revelation. Inner levels. Subsets. Underlying layers. In a chair nearby was a woman in her fifties, wide-eyed and petite. She wore a bright frock and her hair was cut straight across the forehead at eyebrow level. For her age she was the cutest woman he’d ever seen. Glancing at the travel folder she was reading, he was able to make out the large type on the front cover.
ANCIENT TREASURES / MODERN PLEASURES
A LIFETIME OF NEW RELATIONSHIPS IN TWELVE FROLICSOME DAYS AND ONE DANGEROUSLY SENSUAL NIGHT
She looked up, smiled and pointed to a plaid shoulder bag that sat drooping between her feet. He tried to respond with an expression that would make her think he had misinterpreted her gesture as a simple greeting that required no further communication.
“Basenji,” she said.
“Translate please.”
“I smuggled him aboard in my bag. Such a good puppy. I’m sure he’d like to say hello to you. ‘Hi, pally. Where ya headed?’”
“I make no reply.”
“You’re not an Amerasian, are you?”
“What’s that?”
“What they used to call war kids,” she said. “GI papa, native mama. They sold for five hundred dollars in Bangkok. ‘And that’s no phony baloney, bub.’ You’re about the right age for an Amerasian. My name’s Mrs. Roger Laporte. ‘Hi, I’m Barnaby Laporte. Whereabouts you go to school, good buddy?’”
She listened to every word of his reply with the eager obedience of someone about to undergo major surgery. When he finished telling her about the Center, she leaned toward the shoulder bag and patted it. In addition to being cute, Mrs. Laporte had a distinct shimmer of kindness about her. It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such a bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same. When she spoke on behalf of the dog, she tucked her head into her body and squeaked. It was the cutest thing about her.
“You must be very lonely,” she said. “Spending all your time with grownups and doing all that research behind closed doors without the sunshine and exercise your body needs for someone your age. Mr. Laporte went to night school.”
He hadn’t clipped his toenails in a while and he realized that when he moved the toes of his right foot up and down, one particularly long nail scratched against the inside of his Orlon-acrylic sock. He passed the time allowing his toenail to catch and scrape, making a tiny growl. He wanted to sit somewhere else but was sure Mrs. Laporte would say something the moment he got to his feet. A man fell out of a hammock, his cocktail glass shattering on one of the rocks in the garden. If the dog’s called Barnaby, did she name her kids Fido and Spot? Her large eyes blinked twice and then she hugged herself and shrugged, smiling in his direction—a series of gestures he readily interpreted as perkiness for its own sake. Of course that left him the problem of figuring out what to do in return.
“So that’s a dog in there you sneaked aboard,” he said. “What happens if it barks?”
“Basenji,” she said.
He found a dark lounge and went inside. Two men sat at a table playing an Egyptian board game. Squares of equal size. Penalties levied. Element of chance. Billy recognized the game; he’d seen it played at the Center by colleagues of his. Numerous geometric pieces. Single bird-shaped piece. He thought of the “number beasts” of that time—animals used to symbolize various quantities. Tadpole equaled one hundred thousand because of the huge swarms that populated the mud when the waters of the Nile retreated after seasonal flooding. Men called rope-stretchers had surveyed the unplotted land, using knots to measure equal units. Taxation and geometry. In the dimness Eberhard Fearing gradually assumed effective form. Legs walking left.
“Good to see you.”
“Right.”
“Absolutely correct.”
“Good.”
He had a passing knowledge of the mathematical texts of the period. Problem of seven people who each have seven cats which each consume seven mice which each had nibbled seven ears of barley from each of which would have grown seven measures of corn. Legs walking left were a plus sign on a papyrus scroll.
“How was the bathroom?” Fearing said.
“I liked it.”
“Mine was first-rate.”
“Pretty nice.”
“Some plane.”
“The size.”
“Exactly,” Fearing said. “You’ve hit on it. I was telling a gal back there all about you. She’d really like to hear you hold forth. What say I get her and make a threesome out of it.”
“I may not be here later.”
“Where will you be?”
“I may have to meet some people.”
“Just tell me where. We’ll have a get-together.”
“I’m not sure they’re aboard,” he said. “See, the thing of it is I’m not sure they’re aboard.”
“In other words you made an appointment beforehand to see these people. Before you even got on the plane.”
“Right.”
“Certain section of the aircraft at a certain time.”
“Near the toilets.”
“And now you’re not even sure they’re aboard.”
“Right.”
“These people of yours.”
“That’s the thing.”
“How many of them?” Fearing said.
“Could be four, could be more.”
“What are they—mathematicians?”
“Some yes, some other.”
“Near the toilets.”
“I just inspected,” Billy said. “They’re not there yet.”
“I admire your intellect, sir. Admire it mightily.”
“I heard that. Good to hear.”
“Because there is no commodity we’re shorter of than intellectual know-how. A man like me understands that. Nice talking to you. Ever find yourself nearby, why, drop on in. I’m near everything. Great churches. A lot of parking. Bring your associates if they ever turn up.”
“They’ll like to come.”
“I use you people in my work.”
The men at the board appeared to be on the verge of sleep. No theoretical reasoning or basic theorems. The practical science of physical arrangement. Sense of mass. Scientists still probing limestone blocks with radar to discover what’s buried in those pyramids. He thought of the obelisk in Central Park and wondered if he’d ever get to examine an actual fragment of sacred writing.
Directions for knowing all dark things.
The plane flew above the weather. He went to sit alone in a rear area behind equipment racks and anticrash icons. A stressless hour passed. Or maybe four such hours. He’d forgotten which motion he was using to stroke through time, minute or gesh. This part of the airplane had apparently not been used for a while. It was dusty and cramped, its true dimensions concealed by an intricate series of partitions. Real plastic here as opposed to the synthetic updated variations in the forward areas. A sort of Old Quarter. He put both feet up on the front of the seat and hunkered, noting the array of digits molded into the chair, a set of individual polymerized bumps located between his shoes—
—such that, rightsided and divided by a scrambled set of its own first three digits, yields a result just one number away from the divisor; such that digits of divisor and result match digits of original array (save one); such that each consecutive number (divisor and result) is the sum of the cubes of its digits. In fact nothing bored him more than playful calculations. Yet his capacity to fathom the properties of the integers was such that he sometimes found himself watching a number unfold to reveal the reproductive structure within. Eberhard Fearing. It was only a partial lie he’d told that travel-happy man. A meeting was scheduled to take place (person or persons unknown), although not at this altitude. He closed his eyes. Jetliner passing through the sphere of vapor, through the blank amalgam of gases, moisture and particulate matter. Bloated metal ritually marked. A loud buzzer sounded.
He calculated with the ease of a coastal bird haunting an updraft. But beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence; the formal balances it maintains, inevitability adjacent to surprise, exactitude to generality; the endless disdain of mathematics for what is slack in the character of its practitioners and what is trivial and needlessly repetitive in their work; its precision as a language; its claim to necessary conclusions; its pursuit of connective patterns and significant form; the manifold freedom it offers in the very strictures it persistently upholds.
Mathematics made sense.
He lowered his feet to the floor, eyes still closed, a circumstance that gave anyone watching enough time to determine what it was that made the boy appear an adept of concentration—simply his physical stillness, the seeming compression of his frame into a more comprehensive object. It was a stillness unaffected by the shifting of his feet and yet completely obliterated the second his eyes came open. This latter act served to release upon the world a presence essentially seriocomic in nature, that of early adolescence trying to conceal itself in a fold of apathy.
The buzzer sounded once more and a light flashed on and off. He returned to his seat. The plane landed to refuel again and this time he was one of the passengers getting off. He made his way through a dense crowd of people, none of whom seemed to be going anywhere or meeting anyone. He wondered if they lived at the airport. Maybe there was no room for them in the city and they came out here to settle, sleeping in oil drums in unused hangars, getting up at sunrise and heading indoors to loiter. He reached his destination, a special boarding gate in an isolated part of the airport. Two men were there to meet him. They’d already collected his suitcase and now led him aboard another plane, much smaller than the first, no other passengers, some space to yawn and sprawl. His escorts were named Ottum and Hof. The flight was relatively short and after the aircraft set down on a deserted landing strip the boy and two men walked to a waiting limousine. Billy had the enormous back seat to himself. As Ottum started the car, his partner turned and pointed to a small sign taped to the folded-over underside of one of the jumpseats.
“We’ll be there in twenty some odd minutes,” Ottum said.
“This a Cadillac, this car?”
“None other.”
“It came almost as a shock to see it. That’s why I ask. Way in the middle of nowhere.”
“No mistaking one of these vehicles,” Hof said. “Custom job from top to bottom. What we call a meticulously customized motor vehicle. It’s a Cadillac all right.”
“The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum said.
Billy had been instructed not to tell anyone where he was going. There wasn’t much he could have said, to Eberhard Fearing or anyone else, even if he’d wanted to. He knew the name of the place but very little about it. Apparently the people in charge were still defining their objectives and therefore did not release information except in minimum trickles. As to the reason his specific presence was considered essential, not a word had been spoken.
“Is this thing bulletproof?”
“Absolutely, top to bottom.”
“I never thought so. I just asked the question because you think of a limousine this big as might as well having all the extras.”
“It’s for the top people,” Hof said.
“Did it ever get shot at?”
“Course not.”
“It’s not a bubbletop, I notice.”
“He notices,” Hof said.
“I heard,” Ottum said.
“Not a bubbletop, he notices.”
“Two terrific sense of humors.”
“Be a kid.”
“I was only talking back.”
“Just be a kid,” Hof said.
He tried to revel in the expensive pleasures of the back seat, toying with gadgets and scraping the soles of his shoes on the edges of the collapsed jumpseats, freeing himself of whatever foreign matter had accumulated there recently.
“I didn’t go through customs.”
“We took care of that,” Hof said. “You’re a special case. It’s a courtesy they extend to special cases.”
They traveled over bad roads on a gray plain. He saw one sign of life, an old man with a counting stalk. Must be for tourists, he thought. In time a sequined point appeared on the seam of land and air.
“Maybe you don’t know it,” Hof said, “but you’re more or less a legend in your own time.”
They were coming to something. He knew immediately it was something remarkable. Rising over the land and extending far across its breadth was a vast geometric structure, not at first recognizable as something designed to house or contain or harbor, simply a formulation, an expression in systematic terms of a fifty-story machine or educational toy or two-dimensional decorative object. The dominating shape seemed to be a cycloid, that elegant curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line, the line in this case being the land itself. His attention was diverted for a moment as the car passed through a field of dish antennas, hundreds of them, surprisingly small every one. Closer now he was able to see that the cycloid was not complete, having no summit or topmost arc, and that wedged inside the figure by a massive V-form steel support was the central element of the entire structure, a slowly rotating series of intersecting rings that suggested a medieval instrument of astronomy.
In all, the structure was about sixteen hundred feet wide, six hundred feet high. Welded steel. Reinforced concrete. Translucent polythylene. Aluminum, glass, mylar, sunstone. He noticed that particular surfaces seemed to deflect natural light, causing perspectives to disappear and making it necessary to look away from time to time. Point line surface solid. Feeling of solar mirage. And still a building. A thing full of people.
Field Experiment Number One.
The car stopped next to some construction equipment. He got out, fascinated most of all by the slowly moving focal component, the structure’s medieval element. Blinding silver on both sides. Streaks and textures elusive in their liquid iridescence. But the huge central sphere, propped by the V-steel, which itself was lodged inside the discontinuous cycloid, was filled with bronze-colored rings and was distinctly three-dimensional, spinning bountifully above him.
“What happens next?” Hof said.
“He goes to his quarters.”
“Sure he doesn’t see Dyne?”
“We take him to his quarters,” Ottum said.
There was no sense of movement on the elevator. Absolutely no vibration. Not the slightest linear ripple across the bottoms of his feet. He might have been at rest or going sideways or diagonally. Not fond of this idea of stationary motion. He wanted to know he was moving and in which direction. He felt he’d been given a restraining medication and then placed in a block of coagulated foam, deprived of the natural language of the continuous.
The two men led him through a series of subcorridors that ended at the mouth of a masonite labyrinth. The reason for this, Ottum said, was “play value.” After going through the maze they reached Billy’s quarters, which Hof referred to as a “canister.” There were no windows. The lighting was indirect, coming from a small carbon-arc spotlight focused on a reflecting plate above it. The walls were slightly concave and paneled in a shimmering material decorated with squares and similar figures, all in shades of the same muted blue and all distorted by the concave topography. The optical effect was such that the room seemed at first to be largely devoid of vertical and horizontal reference points. It was also soundproof, equipped with a “twofold” (or bed-chair unit) and an imposing wall assembly. Ottum explained this last element. It was called a “limited input module” and it consisted of a desk unit, tape recorder, videophone and monitor, temperature controls, calculator, “teleboard screen.” This screen was part of a transmission system that included lasers, self-developing film, location indicators, a piece of chalk, a blackboard and ordinary phone lines; and it recorded and displayed anything written on the blackboard in Space Brain Complex, more than fifty stories straight up. Billy took off his jacket but couldn’t find a closet for it until Hof released a lever in the module.
“See that grill down on the wall there?” Ottum said.
In one corner of the room was a metal grating about two feet square. It was set into the wall, down low, its base side an inch off the floor. Through the network of thin metal bars Billy saw nothing but darkness. He nodded to Ottum, who took a card out of his pocket and read slowly in an official voice.
“The exit point to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture.”
“I have understood.”
“Most people just nod,” Ottum said. “It’s more universal.”
Billy added a nod to his verbal affirmation.
“How long has all this been here?” he said. “The whole big building.”
“Relatively brand new,” Hof said. “Another few days of touching up and that’s it. People are already hard at work. So far everything’s operating as per planned.”
“Except the toilet bowls flush backwards,” Ottum said. “I happened to notice earlier today. The eddy is right to left. Exact opposite of what we’re used to.”
As Billy opened his suitcase, the two men paused at the door.
“He’s supposed to rest now,” Hof said. “First he rests. Then he gets cleaned up. Then he eats and sleeps. Then he sees Dyne.”
“When do I unpack?”
“Does he know he’s supposed to stay away from the construction equipment?” Ottum said. “Maybe he should be told that officially. Does he know it can be dangerous for a kid to get too close to a giant crane?”
“This place has a lot of rules, it’s beginning to look like.”
“Be yourself,” Hof said. “Only don’t go too far.”
He wrote a postcard to his parents in the Bronx, telling them about the bulletproof Cadillac. Then he lay on the twofold, supposedly to rest. Rest, clean, eat, sleep. If he slept now, it would throw everything off. He considered Ottum’s remark about the giant crane. Why did he say “giant”? Why not just “crane”? Weren’t all construction cranes pretty gigantic? He curled into the barely yielding pad of heavy clothlike material. Was it possible Ottum meant a bird? No, not possible. But not impossible either. Okay, if a bird, what kind of bird? A stick-legged silent bird with giant wings that closed over the heads of small sleeping people.
Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.
He felt a cramp in his right foot. The toes bent down and in, locked in that position. Whenever he had this feeling he assumed he’d be lucky ever to walk again. Wondering what he’d do if the cramp began to spread he realized for the first time how truly soundproof the canister was. In his experience all rooms possessed a tone of some kind and he tried now to pick something out of the air, to isolate a measured breath or two, a warp in the monumental calm. Always a danger linked to the science of probing the substratum. In time he forgot he was supposed to be listening intently. He rested along an even line, ending at last this long day’s descent to the surface of fixed things.
2
FLOW
TO BEAR A name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one’s substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source.
“Knowledge,” Byron Dyne said. “The state or fact of knowing. That which is known. The human sum of known things.”
He was a slight man, neatly dressed, his ears, lips and nose giving the impression they had been taken from a much larger person and grafted on to this random face as part of a surgical jest. He sat alongside the main thalamic panel in Gnomonics Complex, an area occupied by rows of consoles. Billy in an ovoid chair tried to pay attention. There was no one else in sight. Photographs of great and near great scientists covered the wall behind Dyne’s head. He smiled experimentally, apparently a habit of his.
“In any case we’re trying to create a sense of planetary community. One people et cetera. Aside from maintenance personnel, everyone here is either a scientist or a scientist-administrator. But we try to look beyond science. A world view. The UN is in New York. The Copenhagen Zoo is in Denmark. We’re right here. The largest solar-heated building in the world.”
“Curve of quickest descent.”
“What’s that?”
“The cycloid.”
“I’m a scientist-administrator myself,” Dyne said. “As such, it’s my pleasure to welcome you. We have in the neighborhood of thirty Nobel laureates here. But none of such unique dimensions. What a vivid little man. World’s foremost radical accelerate. What exactly is your work composed of?”
“Zorgs.”
A dark spot appeared on the floor a few inches from Byron Dyne’s right foot. It seemed to be expanding, a stain of some kind. There was no evidence of wetness, however. Just a shaded area redoubling itself.
“Can you tell me what a zorg is without being technical and boring?”
“It’s pretty impossible to understand unless you know the language. A zorg is a kind of number. You can’t use zorgs for anything except in mathematics. Zorgs are useless. In other words they don’t apply.”
“Microminiaturization.”
“Is that your field?”
“We condense raw data. Those consoles behind you perform the bulk of the job. Five disciplines make up Gnomonics Comp. 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.
“Designed by a woman,” he said finally.
“Good work.”
“The entire concept. The execution.”
“Nice job.”
“Start to finish.”
“What designed by a woman?”
“This entire structure.”
“Big.”
“Inside and out.”
“I like the roominess.”
“Do you know what kind of sphere that is that’s set into the main structure? Armillary sphere, that’s an armillary sphere. Used a lot in the Moslem renaissance. Of course ours is a supermodel. Much larger than anything they dreamed of in those days.”
“Do people work in there?”
“Motion’s so gradual and thing’s so big they have no sense of movement. Sure, it’s a working sphere. Tells time of day and year. Measures tilt of earth’s axis. Measures height of sun. Measures coordinates of a star. Also houses four or five complexes and about six hundred people. This whole operation is self-supporting. Fume sewers and recycling units all over the place. Synthetic food machine-treated on the premises. Not to mention solar heating.”
“You said.”
“Did you see the antenna array on your way in?”
“Telescopes.”
“Each dish contains a reflecting mesh. The entire array comprises what we call a synthesis radio telescope. Were you surprised at the size of each unit?”
“Small in size.”
“It’s the mesh,” Dyne said. “We’ve used unimaginably tiny components in the mesh. Makes gross scanning easier than ever.”
“Where did she put the bathroom?”
“So the combined operation is a sort of clock-radio if you want to look at it that way. Perfectly legitimate way to look at it. Between the armillary sphere and the synthesis telescope, what we have here is a gigantic microminiaturized clock-radio.”
“Is Endor here?”
“Endor is living in a hole in the ground about ten miles east of here.”
“A hole?”
“He refuses to come out,” Dyne said.
The wall continued to darken in all directions. Billy turned and saw the same thing happening behind him and on both sides. Floor and ceiling as well. No immediate danger, the maintenance man had said. Just this tension. This gradual plastic deformation of a solid object into overflowing droves of motion.
“Which way’s the bathroom?” he said.
“The prebriefing is not over.”
“I won’t be long.”
“How long is not long?”
“When I’m finished.”
“Tee-tee or big business?”
“Say again.”
“Number one or number two?” Dyne said.
His mother often called him mommy. It was a case of double imitation. As a small child he naturally mimicked many of the things Faye said and often she responded with loving impersonations of his original facsimile. There was not the slightest mockery intended; she might have been saying junior or bud or skip. It happened, however, to be mommy—an endearment located beyond the southernmost border of messy affection. It wasn’t until he was nearly twelve that he was able to get her out of the habit.
His mother was also responsible for the second of his unwelcome names. The obsessive moviegoing of Faye’s childhood and adolescence had been interrupted only by childhood itself, adolescence itself. Her extravagant attraction to movies was almost an act of violence. She had seen everything made in that period and was content to spend the mellowing years of her motherhood in front of the TV set, viewing the same movies again and again. Constant reader of trade publications and fan magazines, she was familiar with modern theories of promotion and packaging; the star system; mystique, charisma and product appeal; and so, when her own small son early demonstrated that he was no ordinary Bronx boy devoted to street-fighting and venereal entertainment, she instantly began to think in terms of mass audience awareness. This meant a surname less humdrum than Terwilliger. Simply by removing e-r twice, she arrived at Twillig, which had a distinct twinkle to it, perfect for a superstar.
Before his work earned enough money to enable the family to move to a neighborhood just south of Yonkers (laundry rooms, terrace apartments, air conditioning, kids on bikes!), they lived in an old building on Crotona Avenue, Billy, Babe and Faye, wedged between room dividers and other debris, on the fourth floor, overlooking a split-level playground, scene of ritual mutilations. His after-school tutor was Mr. Morphy, a small black man with a likable mustache. He wore the same suit every day for nearly five months, then changed to another for the rest of the academic year.
“I should have listened in school,” Faye said. “I never paid attention. I had IQ to burn but I never listened to what the teachers told me. Realistically I should have paid attention. But I always sat so far back.”
Babe was both rangy and overweight, carrying his excess pounds with daring grandness, an easygoing and somehow apt profusion, his body conveying some of the earned fluency of a former athlete, which he wasn’t in particular, his active involvement in the playing of games being restricted to an occasional round of ace-nine ball with the submafiosi who still clung to these polyglot surroundings, men with excess phlegm in their throats, rueful mortals of the poolroom, finger-biters, masters of deliberate spitting. Babe owned a sawed-off poolstick (for nonsporting purposes) and a large black attack dog. Poolstick in hand he sometimes stood by the window looking down at the boys and girls in the playground across the street. The dancers. The nodders. The actors. The self-styled playboy assassins. He took his hand-weapon with him when he walked the dog. Faye pointed out that if he didn’t have the dog he wouldn’t have to walk it and therefore wouldn’t need a poolstick to protect the walked dog or a dog for the poolstick or either one of them for himself because without the dog he wouldn’t be out there. Billy didn’t like the dog. He had never liked it and did not assign a gender to it. The dog used to push him out of the way and chew on his books. Late one night it appeared at his bedside and seemed about to speak to him. He knew by its expression that it was not likely to produce mere animal babble. If it opened its mouth it would speak. Words, not sounds. Fleshed meaning to replace those familiar growls.
“Go back to bed,” he told the dog.
What he liked most about Mr. Morphy’s visits were the new books the tutor brought along. The sweet clean shock of number theory. The natural undamped resonance of the symbols. Never more nor less than what was meant. Mr. Morphy soft-voiced and utterly dull pointed out one unchallengeable truth after another. Eventually these would lead to Pennyfellow, Connecticut. The Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. Twelve-wintered then he was, already nearly peerless.
When Babe came home from work he opened a bottle of Champale and drank it immediately. The next several took a little longer. Later he’d sometimes grip the poolstick like a baseball bat and assume the batting stances of famous ballplayers of the past. Faye and Billy would be asked to identify the man whose stance he was imitating but neither ever knew and this annoyed Babe to the point where he’d pick up the phone and call his friend from the subways, Izzy Seltzer. He then re-assumed his stance, which Faye would have to describe to Izzy over the phone.
“Okay, legs wide apart, bat up in the air, hips wiggling, a lot of rear end.”
Billy spent a year and a half at Bronx High School of Science. The daily journey wasn’t easy, two long bus rides each way, and most of the ground covered was part of a landscape renowned for incidental violence. Gangs often made raids on the bus. In the afternoon they came out of the sun like Kiowa braves, nine or ten teenage boys, riding the rear bumper, pounding on windows, forcing the back door and improvising scenes of flash-terror. He liked Bronx Science but was glad when the Center offered him a place.
“This isn’t an ordinary dog,” Babe said. “It’s an attack dog. I say the word, this dog lunges. I say the word, everybody better beware. This is a highly trained attack guard dog. With this dog at my side I can go into any neighborhood in the city.”
“K.b.i.s.f.b.,” Faye said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.”
“Nice talk in front of the kid,” he said. “Where’d you hear that?”
“The kid brought it back from Connecticut.”
Many times Faye and Billy stayed up until two or three in the morning, drinking coffee and watching old movies on TV. Across the airshaft a crazy old woman screamed and cursed. He could never make out what she was saying. Some nights he came close to understanding the sense of a particular shriek or the last several words in a long medley of invective. But it always eluded him. Although at times she seemed to be arguing with someone, there was never any voice besides her own. Most of the time she simply screamed a lot of fabricated words. People called her the scream lady. He was afraid of her but wanted to know what she was saying.
Hypertension
Asthma