"Crash priority. Crash." And wandered out of the office looking dazed.
His young men stared at one another in frank astonishment. "Five years," said one, "and—"
"Nix," said another, looking pointedly at me.
Gomez asked brightly: "What goes on anyhow? This is damn funny business, I think."
"Relax, kid," I told him. "Looks as if you'll make out all-"
"Nix," said the nixer again savagely, and I shut up and waited.
After a while somebody came in with coffee and sandwiches and we ate them. After another while the admiral came in with Dr. Mines. Mines was a white-haired, wrinkled Connecticut Yankee. All I knew about him was that he'd been in mild trouble with Congress for stubbornly plugging world government and getting on some of the wrong letterheads. But I learned right away that he was all scientist and didn't have a phony bone in his body.
"Mr. Gomez?" he asked cheerfully. "The admiral tells me that you are either a well-trained Russian spy or a phenomenal self-taught nuclear physicist. He wants me to find out which."
"Russia?" yelled Gomez, outraged. "He crazy! I am American United States citizen!"
"That's as may be," said Dr. Mines. "Now, the admiral tells me you describe the u-v relationship as 'obvious.' I should call it a highly abstruse derivation in the theory of continued fractions and complex multiplication."
Gomez strangled and gargled helplessly trying to talk, and finally asked, his eyes shining: "Por favor, could I have piece paper?"
They got him a stack of paper and the party was on.
For two unbroken hours Gomez and Dr. Mines chattered and scribbled.
Mines gradually shed his jacket, vest, and tie, completely oblivious to the rest of us. Gomez was even more abstracted. He didn't shed his jacket, vest, and tie. He didn't seem to be aware of anything except the rapid-fire exchange of ideas via scribbled formulae and the terse spoken jargon of mathematics. Dr. Mines shifted on his chair and sometimes his voice rose with excitement. Gomez didn't shift or wriggle or cross his legs. He just sat and scribbled and talked in a low, rapid monotone, looking straight at Dr. Mines with his eyes very wide open and lit up like searchlights.
The rest of us just watched and wondered.
Dr. Mines broke at last. He stood up and said: "I can't take any more, Gomez. I've got to think it over-" He began to leave the room, mechanically scooping up his clothes, and then realized that we were still there.
"Well?" asked the admiral grimly.
Dr. Mines smiled apologetically. "He's a physicist, all right," he said.
Gomez sat up abruptly and looked astonished.
"Take him into the next office, Higgins," said the admiral. Gomez let himself be led away, like a sleepwalker.
Dr. Mines began to chuckle. "Security!" he said. "Security!"
The admiral rasped: "Don't trouble yourself over my decisions, if you please, Dr. Mines. My job is keeping the Soviets from pirating American science and I'm doing it to the best of my ability. What I want from you is your opinion on the possibility of that young man having worked out the equations as he claimed."
Dr. Mines was abruptly sobered. "Yes," he said. "Unquestionably he did.
And will you excuse my remark? I was under some strain in trying to keep up with Gomez."
"Certainly," said the admiral, and managed a frosty smile. "Now if you'll be so good as to tell me how this completely impossible thing can have happened—?"
"It's happened before, admiral," said Dr. Mines. "I don't suppose you ever heard of Ramanujan?"
"No."
"Srinivasa Ramanujan?"
"No!"
"Oh. -Well, Ramanujan was born in 1887 and died in 1920. He was a poor Hindu who failed twice in college and then settled down as a government clerk. With only a single obsolete textbook to go on he made himself a very great mathematician. In 1913 he sent some of his original work to a Cambridge, professor. He was immediately recognized and called to England, where he was accepted as a first-rank man, became a member of the Royal Society, a Fellow of Trinity, and so forth."
The admiral shook his head dazedly.
"It happens," Dr. Mines said. "Oh yes, it happens. Ramanujan had only one out-of-date book. But this is New York. Gomez has access to all the mathematics he could hope for and a great mass of unclassified and declassified nuclear data. And—genius. The way he puts things together …he seems to have only the vaguest notion of what a proof should be. He sees relationships as a whole. A most convenient faculty, which I envy him. Where I have to take, say, a dozen painful steps from one conclusion to the next he achieves it in one grand flying leap.
Ramanujan was like that too, by the way—very strong on intuition, weak on what we call 'rigor.'" Dr. Mines noted with a start that he was holding his tie, vest, and coat in one hand and began to put them on.
"Was there anything else?" he asked politely.
"One thing," said the admiral. "Would you say he's—he's a better physicist than you are?"
"Yes," said Dr. Mines. "Much better." And he left.
The admiral slumped, uncharacteristically, at the desk for a long time.
Finally he said to the air: "Somebody get me the General Manager. No, the Chairman of the Commission." One of his boys grabbed the phone and got to work on the call.
"Admiral," I said, "where do we stand now?"
"Eh? Oh, it's you. The matter's out of my hands now since no security violation is involved. I consider Gomez to be in my custody and I shall turn him over to the Commission so that he may be put to the best use in the nation's interest."
"Like a machine?" I asked, disgusted.
He gave me both barrels of his ice-blue eyes. "Like a weapon," he said evenly.
He was right, of course. Didn't I know there was a war on? Of course I did. Who didn't? Taxes, housing shortage, somebody's cousin killed in Korea, everybody's kid brother sweating out the draft, prices sky high at the supermarket. Uncomfortably I scratched my unshaved chin and walked to the window. Foley Square below was full of Sunday peace, with only a single girl stroller to be seen. She walked the length of the block across the street from the Federal Building and then turned and walked back. Her walk was dragging and hopeless and tragic.
Suddenly I knew her. She was the pretty little waitress from the Porto Bello; she must have hopped a cab and followed the men who were taking her Julio away. Might as well beat it, sister, I told her silently.
Julio isn't just a good-looking kid any more; he's a military asset. The Security Office is turning him over to the policy-level boys for disposal.
When that happens you might as well give up and go home.
It was as if she'd heard me. Holding a silly little handkerchief to her face she turned and ran blindly for the subway entrance at the end of the block and disappeared into it.
At that moment the telephone rang.
"MacDonald here," said the admiral. "I'm ready to report on the Gomez affair, Mr. Commissioner."
Gomez was a minor, so his parents signed a contract for him. The job description on the contract doesn't matter, but he got a pretty good salary by government standards and a per-diem allowance too.
I signed a contract too—"Information Specialist." I was partly companion, partly historian, and partly a guy they'd rather have their eyes on than not. When somebody tried to cut me out on grounds of economy, Admiral MacDonald frostily reminded him that he had given his word. I stayed, for all the good it did me.
We didn't have any name. We weren't Operation Anything or Project Whoozis or Task Force Dinwiddie. We were just five people in a big fifteen-room house on the outskirts of Milford, New Jersey. There was Gomez, alone on the top floor with a lot of books, technical magazines, and blackboards and a weekly visit from Dr. Mines. There were the three Security men, Higgins, Dalhousie, and Leitzer, sleeping by turns and prowling the grounds. And there was me.
From briefing sessions with Dr. Mines I kept a diary of what went on.
Don't think from that th
at I knew what the score was. War correspondents have told me of the frustrating life they led at some close-mouthed commands. Soandso-many air sorties, the largest number since January fifteenth. Casualties a full fifteen per cent lighter than expected. Determined advance in an active sector against relatively strong enemy opposition. And so on—all adding up to nothing in the way of real information.
That's what it was like in my diary because that's all they told me. Here are some excerpts: "On the recommendation of Dr. Mines, Mr. Gomez today began work on a phase of reactor design theory to be implemented at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The work involves the setting up of thirty-five pairs of partial differential equations …Mr.
Gomez announced tentatively today that in checking certain theoretical work in progress at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the A.E.C. he discovered a fallacious assumption concerning neutron-spin which invalidates the conclusions reached. This will be communicated to the Laboratory …Dr. Mines said today that Mr. Gomez has successfully invoked a hitherto-unexploited aspect of Min-kowski's tensor analysis to crack a stubborn obstacle toward the control of thermonuclear reactions …"
I protested at one of the briefing sessions with Dr. Mines against this gobbledegook. He didn't mind my protesting. He leaned back in his chair and said calmly: "Vilchek, with all friendliness I assure you that you're getting everything you can understand. Anything more complex than the vague description of what's going on would be over your head.
And anything more specific would give away exact engineering information which would be of use to foreign countries."
"This isn't the way they treated Bill Lawrence when he covered the atomic bomb," I said bitterly.
Mines nodded, with a pleased smile. "That's it exactly," he said. "Broad principles were being developed then—interesting things that could be told without any great harm being done. If you tell somebody that a critical mass of U-two thirty-five or Plutonium goes off with a big bang, you really haven't given away a great deal. He still has millions of man-hours of engineering before him to figure out how much is critical mass, to take only one small point."
So I took his word for it, faithfully copied the communiques he gave me and wrote what I could on the human-interest side for release some day.
So I recorded Gomez's progress with English, his taste for chicken pot pie and rice pudding, his habit of doing his own housework on the top floor and his old-maidish neatness. "You live your first fifteen years in a tin shack, Beel," he told me once, "and you find out you like things nice and clean." I've seen Dr. Mines follow Gomez through the top floor as the boy swept and dusted, talking at him hi their mathematical jargon.
Gomez worked in forty-eight-hour spells usually, and not eating much.
Then for a couple of days he'd live like a human being, grabbing naps, playing catch on the lawn with one or another of the Security people, talking with me about his childhood in Puerto Rico and his youth in New York. He taught me a little Spanish and asked me to catch him up on bad mistakes in English.
"But don't you ever want to get out of here?" I demanded one day.
He grinned: "Why should I, Beel? Here I eat good, I can send money to the parents. Best, I find out what the big professors are up to without I have to wait five-ten years for damn declassifying."
"Don't you have a girl?"
He was embarrassed and changed the subject back to the big professors.
Dr. Mines drove up then with his chauffeur, who looked like a G-man and almost certainly was. As usual, the physicist was toting a bulging briefcase. After a few polite words with me, he and Julio went indoors and upstairs.
They were closeted for five hours—a record. When Dr. Mines came down I expected the usual briefing session. But he begged off. "Nothing serious," he said. "We just sat down and kicked some ideas of his around. I told him to go ahead. We've been—ah—using him very much like a sort of computer, you know. Turning him loose on the problems that were too tough for me and some of the other men. He's got the itch for research now. It would be very interesting if his forte turned out to be creative."
I agreed.
Julio didn't come down for dinner. I woke up in darkness that night when there was a loud bump overhead, and went upstairs in my pyjamas.
Gomez was sprawled, fully dressed, on the floor. He'd tripped over a footstool. And he didn't seem to have noticed. His lips were moving and he stared straight at me without knowing I was there.
"You "all right, Julio?" I asked, and started to help him to his feet.
He got up mechanically and said: "—real values of the zeta function vanish."
"How's that?"
He saw me then and asked, puzzled: "How you got in here, Beel? Is dinnertime?"
"Is four a.m., por dios. Don't you think you ought to get some sleep?" He looked terrible.
No; he didn't think he ought to get some sleep. He had some work to do.
I went downstairs and heard him pacing overhead for an hour until I dozed off.
This splurge of work didn't wear off in forty-eight hours. For a week I brought him meals and sometimes he ate absently, with one hand, as he scribbled on a yellow pad. Sometimes I'd bring him lunch to find his breakfast untouched. He didn't have much beard, but he let it grow for a week—too busy to shave, too busy to talk, too busy to eat, sleeping in chairs when fatigue caught up with him.
I asked Leitzer, badly worried, if we should do anything about it. He had a direct scrambler-phone connection with the New York Security and Intelligence office, but his orders didn't cover anything like a self-induced nervous breakdown of the man he was guarding.
I thought Dr. Mines would do something when he came—call in an M.D., or tell Gomez to take it easy, or take some of the load off by parceling out whatever he had by the tail.
But he didn't. He went upstairs, came down two hours later, and absently tried to walk past me. I headed him off into my room. "What's the word?" I demanded.
He looked me in the eye and said defiantly: "He's doing fine. I don't want to stop him."
Dr. Mines was a good man. Dr. Mines was a humane man. And he wouldn't lift a finger to keep the boy from working himself into nervous prostration. Dr. Mines liked people well enough, but he reserved his love for theoretical physics. "How important can this thing be?"
He shrugged irritably. "It's just the way some scientists work," he said.
"Newton was like that. So was Sir William Rowan Hamilton—"
"Hamilton-Schmamilton," I said. "What's the sense of it? Why doesn't he sleep or eat?"
Mines said: "You don't know what it's like."
"Of course," I said, getting good and sore. "I'm just a dumb newspaper man. Tell me, Mr. Bones, what is it like?"
There was a long pause, and he said mildly: "I'll try. That boy up there is using his brain. A great chess player can put on a blindfold and play a hundred opponents in a hundred games simultaneously, remembering all the positions of his pieces and theirs and keeping a hundred strategies clear in his mind. Well, that stunt simply isn't in the same league with what Julio's doing up there.
"He has in his head some millions of facts concerning theoretical physics. He's scanning them, picking out one here and there, fitting them into new relationships, checking and rejecting when he has to, fitting the new relationships together, turning them upside down and inside out to see what happens, comparing them with known doctrine, holding them in his memory while he repeats the whole process and compares—and all the while he has a goal firmly in mind against which he's measuring all these things." He seemed to be finished.
For a reporter, I felt strangely shy. "What's he driving at?" I asked.
"I think," he said slowly, "he's approaching a unified field theory."
Apparently that was supposed to explain everything. I let Dr. Mines know that it didn't.
He said thoughtfully: "I don't know whether I can get it over to a layman—no offense, Vilchek. Let's put it this way. You know how math comes in waves, and h
ow it's followed by waves of applied science based on the math. There was a big wave of algebra in the middle ages—following it came navigation, gunnery, surveying, and so on.
Then the renaissance and a wave of analysis—what you'd call calculus.
That opened up steam power and how to use it, mechanical engineering, electricity. The wave of modern mathematics since say eighteen seventy-five gave us atomic energy. That boy upstairs may be starting off the next big wave."
He got up and reached for his hat.
"Just a minute," I said. I was surprised that my voice was steady. "What conies next? Control of gravity? Control of personality? Sending people by radio?"
Dr. Mines wouldn't meet my eye. Suddenly he looked old and shrunken.
"Don't worry about the boy," he said.
I let him go.
That evening I brought Gomez chicken pot pie and a nonalcoholic eggnog.-He drank the eggnog, said, "Hi, Beel," and continued to cover yellow sheets of paper.
I went downstairs and worried.
Abruptly it ended late the next afternoon. Gomez wandered into the big first-floor kitchen looking like a starved old rickshaw coolie. He pushed his lank hair back from his forehead, said: "Beel, what is to eat—" and pitched forward onto the linoleum. Leitzer came when I yelled, expertly took Gomez's pulse, rolled him onto a blanket, and threw another one over him. "It's just a faint," he said. "Let's get him to bed."
"Aren't you going to call a doctor, man?"
"Doctor couldn't do anything we can't do," he said stolidly. "And I'm here to see that security isn't breached. Give me a hand."
We got him upstairs and put him to bed. He woke up and said something in Spanish, and then, apologetically: "Very sorry, fellows. I ought to taken it easier."
"I'll get you some lunch," I said, and he grinned.
He ate it all, enjoying it heartily, and finally lay back gorged. "Well," he asked me, "what it is new, Beel?"
"What is new. And you should tell me. You finish your work?"
"I got it in shape to finish. The hard part it is over." He rolled out of bed.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 24