"Why, to the blind there are no shadows," Farley said. "Another drink?"
"I think it would be lovely," she had said, and since she could see no
shadows, she had begun to fall in love.
Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley looked up at Phil and smiled. It was
a charming smile and it was as genuine as a guaranteed, ten-carat,
real, honest-to-goodness zircon. "As Katherine has probably told you,"
he said, "what you are doing is completely over my bowed head. I am
enormously impressed and at the same time unable to comprehend."
"I find it hard to comprehend, too," Phil Kaufman said. "And I suppose
that's what leads me on."
"Well, the thing is," Farley continued, "Washington seems to have
gotten wind of it, and you know how they are. They don't like things to
be over their heads."
Phil Kaufman looked at him in astonishment and sat on a lab stool.
"I don't understand. How can they possibly be interested in what I'm
doing? It's purely theoretical research."
"Surely you don't deny that Lisa Meitner's researches began by being
theoretical? And look what _they_ led to. The point is, Kaufman, that I
have been informed that we are about to receive a visit from a man from
the A.E.C. He's arriving here sometime this afternoon."
"But that's absurd! I'm not _doing_ anything to atoms. I'm merely
examining them!"
Katherine frowned when he said this. Phil knew better. Worse yet, so
did she.
"When the A.E.C. hears of somebody working in atomic research," Farley
said, "they want to know what's cooking. I hate you to be subjected to
this, but it won't do any harm to be polite to the fellow and let him,
as it were, look over your shoulder."
"I'm damned if I see why I should!" Phil said. "What does he expect to
do? Classify me?"
* * * * *
Farley laughed placatingly. "I know it seems high-handed, but I think
we all ought to remember there is such a thing as Security."
"Security, my foot!" Phil said. "It was that kind of demented thinking
that caused Germany to lose Lisa Meitner! _And_ Einstein."
"What strikes _me_ as rather odd," Katherine said, "is their sending
someone here on a Sunday. When did you hear about it, Russ?"
"A little while ago. On the phone."
"Curiouser and curiouser."
"He was very polite and apologetic."
"Quite typical," Phil said. "It's the velvet-glove touch."
Farley looked at his wristwatch. "He won't be here for a while, so I
wish you could brief me about the inwardness of what you are doing,
Phil." He'd never used his first name before, and Phil became a little
wary. "I know you can't give me a ten-year course in advanced physics
this afternoon, but--well, I'd like to know what kind of stand to take.
I'll be representing the university, after all."
Phil Kaufman looked down from his perch on the stool at the earnest,
kindly face and wondered what really lay behind it. So far as he could
see, Doctor Farley had no reason to take any stand on the question at
all, except to tell the A.E.C. man to go sit on a tack. If he wanted
to represent the university, let him do it in the name of Academic
Freedom. Phil glanced at Katherine. She was sitting very still and he
had the impression that she was thinking about something else.
"All right, I'll give it a try," he said. "There's an idea that's been
around for quite a while that there is an analogy between the stars and
the atoms."
Doctor Farley's face lighted. "I believe I've heard of it. Back in the
'twenties, by a man called Dunn, wasn't it?"
Phil shook his head. "Twenty years earlier by a man called
Fournier-d'Albe. He wrote a book called _Two New Worlds_, in which he
suggested that the solar systems are actually atoms in some vast cloud
of super-gas. Of course, this notion ignores the celestial absence of
molecular structure--unless you count double stars as molecules--but
it might be accounted for by assuming a high temperature. Then he
said that the newly hypothesized Rutherford model of the atom was a
sub-microscopic solar system, but he didn't stop there.
"The atoms and their electrons, he said, were in turn made up of
sub-atoms and were perhaps populated by sentient beings who looked
through their telescopes and counted the atoms in their vicinity, no
doubt arranging them into constellations. You can carry this imaginary
process in both directions and as far as you like, but are we to decide
arbitrarily that it goes on infinitely? Or is it like Einsteinian
space, finite but unbounded?
"I have asked myself this question and I believe the latter statement
to be in a sense correct, but what does it mean? Well, it means
that if you move further and further into larger universes, you
eventually get to where you started. Not that Big is the same thing
as Small, but that from wherever you happen to be, the ones in the
direction--outward--look successively bigger, while the ones in the
other direction--inward--look successively smaller. Now if there were
some kind of super-telescope that could look beyond our universe of
super-atoms, and beyond the next and so on indefinitely, you would find
yourself staring up through a super-microscope at your own eye."
"Get along with you!" Katherine said. "This is the pipe dream to end
all pipe dreams. Tell us more."
* * * * *
"Well, I'll revise it to this extent," said Phil. "It wouldn't be your
eye that you'd see, any more than you'd see your own face if you looked
far enough across ordinary intergalactic space. You'd see the back of
your head--or, rather, the other side of the Earth--provided there was
nothing in the way."
"And in this case it would be what?" she asked.
"I don't know," Phil said, looking worried. "What is the equivalent of
the back of your head--looked at along the direction of hyper-time?
Could it be that what you saw would not be from behind, but from ...
inside?"
Katherine's beautiful sightless eyes seemed to be turned inward, and
she sat very still. Then she said, "You evoke something in my mind like
the echo of a picture I once knew, and will know again."
Farley looked at her sharply.
"You mean something in your subconscious?" Phil asked.
"Perhaps that's what it is, and yet they say that you try to escape
knowledge of your subconscious--that it frightens you. I am not
frightened, Phil. I feel ... expectant."
"I'd feel more expectant," he said, "if I were quite sure of what I
was doing. The trouble is that while ordinary light could in theory
show you the super-astronomy of the stars and planets that are made up
of atoms consisting of our stars and planets, it won't work the other
way."
"Why not?" Farley wanted to know.
"Wave length. As it is, we have to use an electron microscope to
see the larger molecules; the wave length of visible light is too
coarse-grained to show anything that small. So just try to imagine
how impossible it would be to see the sub-atoms--infra-atoms--that
I'm talking about if one had to rely on ordinary light! The electron
microscope wouldn't help, either. It would be exactly as though some
gigantic, super-researcher were trying to look at one of our molecules
by bombarding it with a shower of planets."
"Then how can you see this 'red shift'?" Katherine asked.
"I can't," he said. "I detect it by a kind of mathematical diagnosis.
It's an inferential process--as most forms of observation are, in
modern physics."
Farley was looking as intelligent as he possibly could, but it was
plain that he was out of his depth. He had heard of the red shift, but
he decided he had better not have it explained.
"There's another thing," Phil said. "The time it would take light to
make the round trip of our Einsteinian finite universe would be so
great--in the order of 4[Greek: pi] x 10^8 years--that not only would
you not see your not-yet born self, but the Earth wouldn't have been
formed either. The light you saw would be that many years out of date.
However, in this case the elapsed time would be hyper-time, and you'd
be there in ordinary time."
* * * * *
Doctor Farley got up and walked to one of the windows and stood looking
out at the observatory across the campus. "Am I to understand then," he
said, "that you are trying to formulate a new atomic theory?"
"Not in the sense of in any way modifying the accepted one," Phil said.
"If I'm right, it will merely be a new way of looking at the Universe
as a whole, and it won't have the slightest effect on anything."
"I should have thought," Katherine said, "that being able to see inside
one's own head would have all sorts of interesting effects." She got
up. "I've got to get back to the house. We've got people coming to
dinner, Russ, and I'd better get things organized. Are you coming?"
"I'll be along in a little while, Katherine," he said. "I want to hear
more of what Kaufman has to say." He refrained from guiding his wife to
the door because of long habit, and again sat down on the couch. After
the door closed, he and Phil listened to her sure footsteps going down
the corridor. They looked at one another a little guardedly.
"You know I'm on your side," Farley said when they could no longer hear
Katherine's footsteps. "Surely you know I don't like this any more than
you do, Phil."
"I suppose you don't."
"You won't mind very much if I ask you a favor, will you?" Farley
said. Having asked a rhetorical question, he seemed to be illogically
waiting for an answer. Phil was unaware of the chess game, but wondered
uneasily what was coming.
"Will you please leave her alone?" Farley said.
"I--" Phil started to say, but Farley held his hand up, palm forward.
"My dear chap, you are one of the most sensitive and kind people I
know. But you are a little thoughtless. You imagine that, because
Katherine is blind, you are doing her a favor by--by giving her
companionship. You feel that her interest in the world can be furthered
by your interest in her. This is not the case. I ask you please to
leave us alone."
"Us?"
"Yes. You put me in the embarrassing position of having to say that
we are very well as we are. I know that Katherine is impressed by
your--your mind, and I know that your sympathy is well-intended, but it
is misplaced. She needs no sympathy."
"Why not?"
Doctor Farley spread his hands, a gesture usually meant to substitute
for words. "Do the strong need sympathy?"
"I think so," Phil said.
Doctor Farley smiled. "Well, then, think of _me_ as the strong one--the
one who needs sympathy as the guardian of something precious. Will you
give me your sympathy?" He smiled still.
Phil realized that when the A.E.C. man came--when any pretext presented
itself--Doctor Farley would throw him to the wolves.
"Katherine is not in love with me," Phil said.
"But are you with her?"
"No. At least ... I don't know."
"Then you are."
"Aren't you being a bit old-fashioned?" Phil said.
* * * * *
Farley had abandoned his usual pose of sitting and looking up. He
looked down at Phil--in fact, he looked down his nose and past his
blond mustache.
"I mean," Phil went on, "I think Katherine ought to be the one to
decide whether she wants to go on seeing me."
"And I disagree."
"And I," Phil said, "shall stop seeing her when--and only when--_she_
wants me to! I refuse to be ordered around like this. We're not doing
anything wrong!"
"I think you're forgetting--"
"I'm forgetting nothing!" Phil interrupted. "You're acting as though I
were having an affair with your wife, and you're trying to pull rank on
me! I don't intend to be browbeaten and threatened!"
"I'm not threatening you, my dear man," Farley said, his eyebrows
raised. "I ask you as a favor, that's all. I think I know my
wife's--mind better than perhaps she does herself. And certainly better
than an outsider can."
"And you regard me as an outsider?" Phil's voice was loud.
"You know perfectly well what I mean!" Farley replied angrily. "You are
not her husband and consequently do not know--"
"I know her a damn sight better than you do, you stuffed shirt!"
Like most blond men, Farley became red very easily. At the moment, he
resembled a tomato with yellow hair. "Why, you little--"
"_Really!_" At the sound of Katherine's voice, they both swung around.
They had been making too much noise to hear her return, and she stood
at the open door. "Isn't this a bit undignified?" she said. "I could
hear you outside."
Farley was breathing heavily. "What brought you back, Katherine?" he
asked, finally.
She walked past them to the psychiatrical sofa and sat on it without
answering the question. She looked as though her mind was on something
else--and then, suddenly, startled and intent.
_Yes! I am here...._
Neither Phil Kaufman nor Russell Farley heard her--they were intent on
avoiding one another's eyes, but they would not have heard her anyway.
* * * * *
Q. You were right. He knows where the Unity is--if not what it is,
yet.
A. Oh, he will.
Q. Are you so sure? And will you at last admit that we are right?
_Unification_--it's the only way ... now.
A. (she has her face toward the electron microscope; her blind eyes
seem to probe it) One cannot impose it on them. What kind of unity
can come from imposition?
Q. And are things to go on as they are?
A. No, it's too late. Things have already changed....
Q. The history of Man has been the history of his integration--from
families to tribes, to communities, to city states, to nations, to
hemispheres, to--what next? Is it to stop here, and the hemispheres
to beat each other down to the tribal or family level?
A. You will be destroyed in the process.
Q. _We?_ In the process of unification?
A. Of course.
Q. And you?
A. I'm always being destroyed.
Q. Ridiculous. Unification can scarcely destroy the Unity.
A. If you unite with Disunity?
Q. The decision has been made: Absorption.
A. By whom? Of whom?
Q. The joining of the collective subconscious to the mutually
antagonistic egos of all men. Freud of Vienna had this as a
goal--you told us that yourself and I quote it back to you.
A. Or the reverse--men's mutually antagonistic egos in combat with
the Unity?
Q. We will take that chance. Now watch--look at the world around
you and you will see a dominion of universal brotherhood, the
moment Unification is imposed!
A. I will look, but is that what I'll see?
Q. Now! Look!
* * * * *
She looked at Phil and then at her husband, who looked back at her
questioningly.
"You were going to say something?" he asked.
She shook her head, and he shrugged his shoulders.
"This business I'm working on--" Phil began, and hesitated.
"Oh, yes. That reminds me," Farley said. "How's the Research
Magnificent?"
"It's beginning to show signs of life," Phil said. "I think I can
detect a sort of fetal pulse."
Dr. Farley blinked his pale eyelashes and nodded. He sat down at the
end of the couch where Phil had been sitting and looked up at him.
"Well," he said, "I just thought I'd drop by and see how you were
doing. I'll never be able to understand it, though."
"I was going to say, do you think the A.E.C. might conceivably be
interested?" Phil said. "After all, it is sort of vaguely connected
with atomic stuff."
"I can't imagine why they would be," Farley said, and glanced at
Katherine. She had gotten up and was standing at the window.
"The sun's going in," she said, "and it looks as though it may rain.
I've got to get back to the house." She turned around with a smile.
"How about having dinner with us tonight, Phil? We've got some people
coming who'd like to meet you. Don't you think that would be nice,
Russ?"
Dr. Farley didn't look as though he thought it would be nice at all,
but he said nothing, and neither did Phil Kaufman.
"If you're coming, you'd better straighten your tie," Katherine said.
"It's under your ear, as usual."