People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions,
Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on
Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go.
They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always
tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.
I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe--my brother. I thought, We,
the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.
"Sorry--I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks.
Yes--exactly. Keeps you jumping."
"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"
"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.
Paul is the eldest of my nephews--twenty-five now, or perhaps only
twenty-four. His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only
son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and
hectic--continually outraged by the course of human events and
continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do.
Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in
others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a
difference between us of great magnitude. Where I was an interested
but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by
every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured
in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some
degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention
and mastered nothing. He has--as I have--the familial facility for
expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that
when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.
Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me,
still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half
sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother--which
occurred when I was small--she was always a nebulous member of
the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored
dresses--brown, as a rule--and rolled her hair in tight coils, like
rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere
and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote
Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her.
The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became
penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie
village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded
gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a
camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service
for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot--or
within harmonium-shot of it--and she died giving birth to Paul.
Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they
were married by an uncle of mine.
"Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining
human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile
seducer--that atheist, Willy Wilson--she'd be serving her Lord in some
distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The
night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up
the boy in the Master's steps.' I failed her! Willy Wilson insisted on
taking the boy--and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor
Georgianna!
"'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words--excepting for
what she said after the delirium set in."
My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal
hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up--with me holding
her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you
wouldn't believe a girl like that would know. Of course--she meant
Wilson--it's a common befuddlement. But whenever I think of the
language she heaped on that evil man, I know what human torture is!"
It was one of our favorite family stories.
And, needless to say, Georgianna didn't mean Wilson at all. He's still
a good chemistry prof--a husky, redheaded guy whom everybody likes.
Georgianna was cursing her own blood the way people curse the day they
were born--and for sufficient reasons. She had glimpsed--all but too
late--the hypocrisy implicit in Scotch Presbyterianism. The strong,
lucid mind that burned in silence beneath her clumsy exterior had
finally cut through that wall between reason and instinct which men
call Faith. Just before her "delirium" Georgianna had realized that
Willy, not Jesus, had forgiven her (or would forgive her) for deserting
him after their marriage, for working as a farm cook, and (as the
result of over-fatigue) for falling down a back stairs in the ninth
month of her pregnancy, thus bringing about her own demise through
stubbornness and vanity. She had figured out the family--and Willy too.
She got at least one moment of transcendent understanding, and followed
it with two sound hours of profanity--crowding into the racing moments
as many repressed sensations of her life as she had time for. Not a bad
job, on the whole.
After Willy had explained it to me, I'd always wished I'd investigated
Georgianna more attentively.
There hadn't been much chance.
Paul--her son--came in. The one we were so proud of.
Pushed the door open, kicked the book away, and let the automatic
closer snap the lock. He took off a seersucker jacket that had flapped
around his slatty shoulders. He picked up the book and said, "Jesus
Christ. I thought I explained quantum mechanics to you ten years ago!"
He went through my bedroom to the bathroom. A firm, pounding stream.
He kicked the toilet handle, missed, kicked again--and it flushed
resentfully. His jacket had fallen to the floor. When he returned, he
kicked that. It rose in the air and he caught it. He whipped off his
shirt.
"Buy me a drink," he said.
"What?"
"Scotch and soda."
"Order it yourself--and order me a coffee."
He went to the phone. I cut one more line, and then tidied up the
bridge table, stacking things so I could start in quickly where I had
left off.
"I didn't know you were in town," I said.
"I didn't know you were. Took a chance. I had to see a gook who lives
near here--so I stopped in. How's Ricky? Recovered now?"
"Swell."
"What you down for? Cheating?"
"Work."
He considered that, pinching the flared nostrils of a long nose,
peering luminously over his fist, wrinkling his forehead. "It's
possible, anyhow. You're getting pretty old."
"I'm not too old to take you on, Spare-ribs."
His dark eyes twinkled. "No. You're getting oaken, Phil. Late maturing
and frost resistant. Someday, though, I'll be like that myself--and
then you'll be a wizzled shard who goes around feeling young girls.
I'll bring over a pretty one to bait you up, and when you reach for
her, I'll wallop you till they have to put you in an iron lung."
"By God, I believe you will!" I was laughing. "How's physics?"
His face became taut. "Don't you know Congress will crucify you for
merely asking?"
Paul worked for Johann Brink, at the Belleau Lab. For the Atomic Energy
Commission. Brink had picked him from a prepared slate of geniuses at
M.I.T., Caltech, and several other schools. Paul was that good.
I said, "Congress has got one of my arms pinned down already and a hole
in my foot, besides. If you don't want to tell me how physics is--I'll
tell you. Put it this way. There was an atmosphere at Eniwetok you
didn't like--"
"What do you know about that?" he said swiftly.
"I just listen to what Truman says," I answered, "and then I
extrapolate." I shook my head. "It's funny. As soon as anybody has a
dose of military security, he gets the soldier's creed--assumes people
stop thinking because certain thoughts are classified. Everything
about atomic energy is secret, hunh? Well--who has Brink been
seeing, lately? Who was he photographed with? Old man heavy water.
So now you come in here--looking like an underfed caribou with the
wind up--and what must I think? That your little cadre of nuclear
physicists is fooling with the hydrogen-helium cycle and getting
hotter than the rotor in a turbo-jet. You're scared you'll figure out
that one-thousand-times-more-powerful-than-Nagasaki bomb. The atomic
cloudmaker. The continental broom. The universal gene-mangler. Or crack
light metals or separate isotopes by heat. Don't tell me if I've read
your mind, doctor. I would rather be calm in my surmises than fearful
I might say something in my sleep that could be checked. Do you guys
really think it is smart to cause officials to go around positively
announcing that the number of bombs we have in our beloved stockpile
is smaller than anybody who knew the prewar radium production could
figure out? When you discuss atomic 'weapons' in the press--without
specifying--doesn't it seep into the dull heads of us laymen that,
for instance, hot isotopes would make a nifty charge for ordinary
high-explosive bombs--against warships, for example? And can't anybody
make a pile, now--and start the isotopes flowing? Crop-dust cities? And
don't you incessantly talk too much about how long it will be before
you can do thisa and thata? Remember when your spokesmen were telling
us of the inutility of thorium? Cannot we, the plain people, add and
subtract neutrons in our heads? Aren't you protesting too much now
about how long it will be before you can push a couple of hydrogen
atoms into one helium, with great and beneficial new release of energy?"
Paul was unamused. "Someday G2 is going to walk in here and walk out
with you."
"Thought control," I said. "Never worked. Never will. Whenever a nation
uses it, you can know that nation's washed up." The coffee came in--and
the highball. I signed the check and tipped Karl. "Danke schoen," I
said, and turned to Paul again. "G2 came after me long ago. I wrote a
story before the war about uranium bombs and how they would be made
and what they'd do--and it wasn't accepted until 1945. It went to
censorship automatically--and when the censors read it--they hit the
ceiling. Thought there was a leak in the Manhattan District. The only
leak was in their heads. They sent a major out after me--like the
hounds on the tail of Uncle Tom--"
"I recall the escapade," Paul said wearily. "You lead such a harrowing
life, Mr. Wylie. And tell about it over and over."
Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He
was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow
rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a
little: I felt embarrassed.
But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling
his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and
worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And
it surpasses the unbearable."
"How about--tiresome?"
He remembered again--and grinned. "Quid pro quo? Okay. What do you want
to talk about?"
"It," I said. "You. Any damned thing you please."
Paul sipped his highball. And that was another difference. At his age,
I hadn't sipped. I had guzzled. He appeared to be thinking over what he
would like to discuss--as if it were a scientific problem. Finally he
said, "Phil, what's the matter with us?"
"Us who?"
"Physicists."
"Religion," I said.
"The faith of skepticism?" He leered at me. "If all you've got on it is
that old chapter about the law of opposites, never mind."
"Lack of skepticism," I answered.