Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  I TAKE A SCARY RIDE

  The boy was packed and waiting when Softly arrived in his canister. His pants were pressed and he wore his good sport coat and tie. His fingernails were clean. The part in his hair was nearly straight. His shoes were shined. The mustache was gone. While Softly nosed his way around the room as though they were about to move in rather than vacate, Billy picked up his suitcase and headed toward the door.

  “Not that way.”

  “What other way is there?”

  “Straight down.”

  “Explain please.”

  He watched Softly approach the metal grating located near the base of the wall. This, of course, was the emergency exit point for the whole sector. Softly unclasped the grating and set it on the floor.

  “We can’t go in there except for man-made or natural disaster,” Billy said. “They told me that. I nodded my head to show them I understood their statement. Floods, fires, wars, earthquakes.”

  “Do I get to pick one?”

  “I don’t like going down there for no reason.”

  “There’s an emergency all right. I thought all along this would happen and it has. Cable traffic is heavy beyond belief.”

  “So what is it, some kind of alternate physics situation or the bottom is falling out of space or water doesn’t boil at the boiling point anymore? Because around here that’s the kind of emergency you get.”

  “Tensions,” Softly said.

  “What kind?”

  “The worst kind. International tensions. Mounting international tensions. First there were states of precautionary alert. Then there were enhanced readiness contours. This was followed by maximum arc situation preparedness. We can measure the gravity of events by tracing the increasingly abstract nature of the terminology. One more level of vagueness and that could be it. It’s not just a localized thing either. We’re dealing with global euphemisms now. Exactly how soon it’ll break out depends on when x, representing the hostile will of one set of nations, and y, the opposing block, slip out of equilibrium in terms of capability and restraint coefficients. We could frame any number of cutie-pie equations but we’ve got more important work to do.”

  “So how far down do we go? Is there a basement with a shelter right under here?”

  “We go deeper.”

  “Where they keep the proton accelerators? I think that’s about as far down as the building goes.”

  “Deeper.”

  “I know where. Where the balloon is that they keep in that big room, the balloon for astronomy. That’s about thirteen levels down. Or the Great Hole. We go to the Great Hole, right?”

  “Deeper,” Softly whispered.

  “Deeper than the Great Hole?”

  “What I find most satisfying about this structure is the fact that it comes in more than one part. The first, naturally, is the cycloid. The second is the first in reverse, completely below ground level. Same shape upside down. Same distance down as up. Nothing goes on down there in the sense of official goings-on. It’s nothing more than an excavation. But it fulfills the concept.”

  “I think I’ll stay here.”

  “I call it the antrum. Just a fancy way of saying hole in the ground. I’ve had the floor of the excavation fixed up a bit. Just the bare essentials. And I’ve selected the very best people to help us in our work. Every one a supersavant. It took all the persuasiveness I could muster. I think the world tensions helped. In this kind of chancy muddle everybody agreed the only way to stay intellectually fresh was to put ourselves in a state of total isolation. Consider yourself lucky to be working with these people.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the global phrase-calling.”

  “Follow me down,” Softly said.

  On his hands and knees he backed into the exit hatch. Billy handed down his suitcase and followed. After descending a long metal ladder they had to step over a series of sewer pipes to the edge of a catwalk. It was hard to see, the only light being provided by a dusty bulb. To one side was a stack of beams and thick boards set on sawhorses, all apparently left by workmen. They crossed the catwalk and headed toward another light, avoiding puddles as they went. This time the bulb was inside an open shaft. Softly cranked a lever and eventually a small elevator ascended and stopped, roughly at their level. It was really the frame of an elevator, much of its wiring exposed, no paneling at all, a few yards of hexagonal mesh closing in all but one side. In this lame cage they were lowered into the excavation, a journey that took them through storage and maintenance areas, restricted sectors, down along porous shale and rock, past timber underpinnings and assemblies of masonry and steel that formed support for subtunnels and emergency access routes, the elevator suddenly dropping into open air, free of its shaft, cabling into the darkness of the inverted cycloid, air currents, oscillation, a bucketing descent through drainage showers and rubble-fall, the cage shaking so badly that Billy sought to convince himself there was a pattern to the vibrations and changes of speed, a hidden consistency, all gaps fillable, the organized drift of serial things passing to continuum. Gradually the elevator slowed down, steadying its descent. Then it fitted into its housing, a sort of armored toy-box located on a platform about a dozen feet off the ground. The riders stepped out and walked down makeshift wooden stairs to the very bottom of the vast excavation. An awful lot of trouble, the boy thought, just to fulfill a concept.

  A short distance away was a series of cubicles for working and sleeping. Larger units included a first-aid room, a kitchen, a primitive toilet, some field telephones. Everything was set on a slightly curved surface of clay and rock and there was nothing above but darkness. Oil drums, wooden crates and natural debris were set around the cubicles to keep dislodged rocks from bouncing in. A generator droned nearby. Water dripped, splashed and occasionally cascaded in the distance. It was cool down here but not uncomfortably so. The smell of earth was firm and gripping, mineral-rich, and humid air could be felt on the tongue like the taste of a lead penny.

  “Frightening ride, I freely concede, but better this than a block and tackle descent,” Softly said. “If we ever short-out down here due to flooding, that’ll be next. Up and down we go, sitting in a loop of high-grade rope.”

  In Billy’s cubicle were a cot, a footlocker, a large shiny blocklike chair and a TV table on casters, this last item meant to serve as a desk. The partitions were about twice his height. There was no door, just an entranceway; no ceiling; a clay floor. Softly left him alone to do his unpacking and Edna Lown lowered herself toward a kitchen stool, moving slowly as befitted her bulk, a cigarette aslant at the corner of her mouth. He opened the lone piece of luggage but found that only half his things could be pressed and kneaded into the locker. The rest he left in the suitcase, which remained unclosed at the foot of the bed. Then he sat in the chair, not accustomed to free time, Lown’s blouse littered with pale ash from her cigarette. Softly took his ease across the table, watching her thumb through a sheaf of papers, hair fairly gray and worn in an uneven page-boy cut, clear eyes set in a broad strong face, sedately aging woman, tank-driver of the neo-logistic school, her thumb accelerating the page count now.

  “Where is he?”

  “Cube one.”

  “Will he fold under pressure?”

  “He’s my protégé, Edna.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “Had to talk to someone about some questions bearing on incidental matters related to the project.”

  “We work in absolute privacy, Rob. I won’t give an inch on that. Neither will Lester. This seclusion business was your idea. Now don’t start bending.”

  “Edna-doll.”

  “You’ve got tendencies.”

  “We work without outside interruptions. That was and is my formal promise.”

  “When do we see him?”

  “Anytime you’re ready,” Softly said. “Is that the latest notation work?”

  “I’m not happy with it.”

  “Of course you’re not happy. This
is a revolution in the making. All science, all language wait to be transformed by what we’re doing here. I am the leader. Nobody’s happy until I’m happy and I won’t be happy until we’ve finished what we’ve come to do.”

  The boy did not move when they entered his cubicle. Softly sat on the bed. The woman remained in the entranceway, examining the apathetic figure in the chair. She wore glasses with dark frames and round lenses.

  “We expect this will be a long and intensely productive period for all of us,” she said.

  “I haven’t even shut my suitcase. That’s how long I’m staying.”

  “Events aren’t influenced by one’s wishful application of significance to commonplace objects. Whether your suitcase is opened or closed, we’ll be here quite a while.”

  “This is a lady dentist talking.”

  “Behave yourself, Willy. I told you the fun’s over. Edna Lown is here at my request, my entreaty, my urgent supplication. Learn from this woman.”

  “Naturally I’m familiar with your work,” she said. “I detect a strong computational strain running through it. Not much sense of discrimination. Not much use for logic. Paradoxically yours is the kind of intellect we need. The basis of mathematical thinking is arithmetic. The whole numbers and how we use them. On the other hand the basis of arithmetical thinking is pure logic. We can trace the foundations of arithmetic to a handful of logical propositions. It seems to be the rule for top people to come to mathematical logic only after considerable work in other areas. That’s nice. I like rules, regulations, formats.”

  “It seems to me if I remember correctly they got me here to explain a message from outer space. Do I keep on doing that too or do I just work on this other stuff?”

  “You can play with the code in your spare time,” Softly said. “If you sincerely feel the ARS extants are using a nondecimal system, attack it from that angle. I think what they’re using is what we’re looking for. A universal logical language. Help us develop that and the code will take care of itself.”

  The woman spat a grain of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.

  “Mathematics is a model of precise reasoning, subject only to the requirements of an inner discipline,” she said. “It’s an annex of logic. Nothing more. All the rules of what we call ‘number’ derive from logical propositions. Logic precedes mathematics. And since the fundamental elements of logic have no content, mathematics has no content. Form, it’s nothing but form. It stands on thin air. The symbols we use are everything. What they represent we discard without the slightest misgiving. The focus of our thought, the object of our examination, our analysis, our passion if you will, is the notation itself. And this is what our work will involve to a large extent. It’s nothing you haven’t done before really. The emphasis is on classes rather than numbers. That’s all.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I enjoy listening to my logic-mongers talk,” Softly said. “They make the creation of an artificial language seem anything but difficult. Remember, Willy, the greatest work is both simple and inevitable. That’s my final word for the moment. I’ll leave you with Edna now. See you in a few pangs.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s no day or night down here. The body makes its own time, usually very different from what we’re accustomed to. Waking time we measure in pangs. Hunger pangs. Sleep time we measure in lobsecs. This refers to a Lester Bolin snore cycle. Lester’s Edna’s associate. The average full-length sleep is about half a dozen lobsecs.”

  “Don’t you think that kind of talk offends adolescents?”

  “Willy, if you think Edna is sensible, there’s always Lester to contend with. I remember telling him once how interesting I thought it was that the first use of zero as a number probably took place a great deal earlier than the usual estimates would have it and in Indochina no less, where we can imagine a sort of common abstract boundary between the Taoist concept of emptiness and the Hindu notion of void. He flailed, literally flailed at the air.”

  “Of course, there was Cantor,” the woman said.

  “I’m late for an appointment.”

  “After all the breakdowns, depressions and seizures, after he died, finally, didn’t they find in his papers a statement to the effect that mathematics can’t be explained without a touch of metaphysics?”

  “Juju mama mumblety-peg.”

  “Obviously I agree,” she said. “I just mean it’s curious enough to be interesting, not unlike your emptiness and void. What does our young man think?”

  “If it’s in his papers, I guess that makes it history.”

  “History is full of interesting things,” Softly said. “It has no worthwhile statement to make to us, however, in our current preoccupation. We’re permitted to deduce, at least at the outset, that everything is either a or non-a. What we’re not permitted to do is say that everything is either the Great Wall of China or something else. In our present circumstance we don’t even know the Great Wall exists. We’ve never heard of it. So let’s forget about history.”

  I GET A LITTLE BACKGROUND

  Edna Lown spoke for a time on the possible form an interstellar vocabulary might take. She pointed out that a “grammar” would have to be communicated gradually through the medium of radio signals of different wavelength and duration. It would be a step-by-step operation, the elements of our synthetic language defining themselves as they were transmitted and, we trust, deciphered. There would be no inconsistencies or exceptions to rules. As we formulated our cosmic discourse, basing it on principles of neo-logistic thought, we could make our transmissions increasingly abstract and difficult, assuming, we hope safely, that those on the other end had correctly interpreted previous transmissions. In this way we could progress from “a plus b equals c” all the way to a definition of “truth,” if indeed this word is subject to definition. The radio signals in combination would be the equivalent of a set of ideographic units written in Logicon. Connectives, binding variables, arrays of signs gradually emerge from the radio noise. The concepts of “plus,” “minus,” “equal to,” “is implicit in,” “can be interpreted as” soon accumulate in a solid body of planet Earth knowledge. He sat in the chair listening to her as Softly emerged from the shaft, hurried across the catwalk and headed toward the metal ladder. In her room the young woman sat on her bed trying to make sense of the notes she’d written earlier in the day. She seemed to have trouble expressing anything resembling annoyance or frustration; all such displays were inevitably absorbed by her utter presentableness. Well-tailored pants and shirt. Trim figure. Roundish, soft and overpretty face. Whenever she gestured in the direction of vexation, the act automatically endowed itself with a glow of tomboyish pathos, much too adorable to be taken seriously. Hair coasting over the juncture of jawbone and ear, slightly upcurled, the palest of browns. Eyes overripe with sensibility. Softly was halfway out of his pants before he’d taken a couple of steps into the room.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “What is this, a nuclear holocaust copulation drill?”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  Softly seminude resembled a Roman sculptor’s serious jest. He appeared ludicrous only to the extent that parts of his body were still bound in cloth. Elsewhere nothing was in miniature and it could be maintained, as now he removed the final stretchable sock, that naked he was even more imposing than when fully dressed, his chest fairly broad, his head more closely related in size to the rest of his appendages, an illusion fostered by the balancing factor of his sex organ, a piece of equipment that seemed to hold him together, structural bond and esthetic connective.

  “Rob, I’m kind of busy.”

  “So am I, so am I, but I took time to come up here. You don’t have to undress completely. Just give me something to aim at. A suitable accommodation.”

  “Unfunny,” she said.

  “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  “These notes are all messed up. I can’t read my own notes. How will I ever get a book o
ut of this?”

  SEE LESTER EXIST

  Lester Bolin glanced at the envelope and strolled over to cube one, where his associate was saying that any civilization advanced enough to have constructed an apparatus for receiving radio transmissions from other parts of the universe would most likely be able to interpret any series of messages based on strict logic. In fact the artificial radio source extants would probably have less trouble understanding a message from Earth than we ourselves experience every time we try to decipher fragments of an ancient language found buried somewhere on our own planet. This seeming irony, she said, merely emphasizes the absence of logic in our spoken languages.

  “In any case Logicon is not designed to be spoken. As we go along we’ll doubtless see it reveal an innate resistance to being articulated.”

  “By humans,” Bolin said, standing in the entrance.

  “Lester’s been working on an experimental thing. He believes he can get it to speak Logicon.”

  “Sorry I’m late, all. Cut myself and couldn’t stop the bleeding for the longest time. Isn’t there supposed to be a limit for that sort of thing? Coagulation? Doesn’t blood clot on schedule or something?”

  “How’d you do it?” Billy said.

  “I was opening my mail with a long thin instrument consisting of a flat-edged cutting surface terminating in a handle.”

  “A knife?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “Lester’s notion of a joke,” Edna said. “Lester’s a joker. Except jokes don’t work very well down here. This is dead time. You can’t cut it.”

  Bolin was a large man who gave the impression of being unmade. It wasn’t simply that his clothing fit badly; certain items either missed connections with other items or were connected in the wrong way. The back of one trouser cuff was stuck in his sock. The reckless knot in his tie failed to conceal the fact that his shirt was fastened, starting from the top, with button a in hole b and so on down to his belt buckle. Part of his shirt was tucked into his shorts, the elastic band folded over his belt for an interval of several inches. His hair was thinning up front and he seemed to want to pat it often. Softly took a cigar from the little metal box. Minor rockfall on the north slope. Mushrooms, mosses, algae, phosphorescent fungus. The trancelike sleep of sated bats digesting upside down. Bolin stepped outside a moment, returning with a chair. Edna Lown stood a few feet to one side of the entranceway. The simple act of sitting was for Lester something nearly ceremonial, his rump and thighs settling ever deeper, investigating the chairness beneath them, and Billy felt this was a man intent on compressing every second in order to discover the world-point within, a serious man, look how he enjoys his sitting, watch his scraping feet, see him exist, a man (Softly mused, of sitting men in general) concluding an infinite sequence of states of rest to begin this period of self-limiting motion. Constant temperature, humidity, darkness.