Roger's Version (28 page)

I felt sorry for
him
, as I studied the spiky back of his ill-trimmed head. His hair stood up as if he had freshly pulled off his wool cap, releasing its load of static electricity. He said, “I’m all for science, ma’am”—he paused, doubting that the word was adequate for a lady professor, yet unable to think of anything better—“whatever it can show us; I
love
science, and never meant to get into any of”—his gesture was so vague as to seem despairing; it loosely included this room, the sky beyond the basement windows, the five of us—“this divinity business. I was taught I guess the Bible in Sunday school but I’ve never, frankly, paid a lot of close attention to it since. The God it shows us was what the technology, the social awareness of the times was up to but He looks pretty brutal now, all that sacrifice and smiting enemies and
I am What I am
and so forth. I don’t want to knock it but no, I don’t exactly picture a hand coming down into the clay, I don’t know what I picture. I do know at times I feel
I’m
being touched inside and molded, that something is reaching down and touching
me
, but if you want to call that a subjective sensation or a hallucination or hysteria or whatever, I wouldn’t argue; I think a lot of times the words we put on things just show our feelings rather than anything about the
thing
. I mean, some say ‘vision’ and others say ‘hallucination’ and these express opposed opinions about whether or not anything was
there
.”

Closson said, perhaps feeling the boy was floundering and wanting to help him along, “And as Berkeley and Husserl and in his way Wittgenstein among others have indicated, the basic
issue of whether
anything
at all is there or not, and if so what its nature is, is by no means undebatable, it has to do quite a bit with how we define
there. Esse est percipi
,” the old Quaker added in kindly manner, tilting back his big head so that his reptilian wrinkled eyelids leaped in the thick curved glass of his half-spectacles. His brown gums showed in a twitch of a smile.

“I’m not even saying exactly that,” Dale said, twisting in his chair, getting excited in spite of his fatigue, in spite of the terrible drag that Esther’s love and lips, sucking, sucking, had placed upon his body and the movements of his mind. “I’d like to see religion get away from all this hiding inside the human, this sort of cowardly appeal to so-called subjective reality—to wishful thinking, in a way. What I’m trying to offer, since you ask me what I’m trying to offer, is what science is trying to tell us, objectively, in its numbers, since the scientists themselves don’t want to, they want to stay out of it, they want to stay pure. There are these numerical coincidences,” he explained, and he told the committee about ten to the fortieth power, how it recurs in widely varied contexts, from the number of charged particles in the observable universe to the ratio of electrical force to gravitational, not to mention the ratio between the age of the universe and the time it takes light to travel across a proton. He tried to explain the remarkable coincidence whereby the difference between the masses of the neutron and the proton almost equals the mass of the electron, and furthermore whereby this difference times the speed of light squared equals the temperature at which protons and neutrons cease transmuting into one another and the numbers of both in the universe are frozen. Equally marvellous, to him, was another equation, which showed how the temperature at which matter decoupled from radiation equalled that at which the energy density of photons
equalled that of matter, mainly protons. Also, the element carbon, so crucial to the forms of life, is synthesized in stars through an extraordinary set of nuclear resonances that apparently just happen—

Ed Snea, whose ceremonies were all laudably brief, began to interrupt: “Mr.
Koh
-luh, I’m a-wonderin’—”

Jeremy Vanderluyten jumped in heavily. “As I said before, this all seems in the nature of rehash, of eclectic synthesis. Where is the original content that would warrant our financial encouragement and support?”

Dale pulled from the breast pocket of his unaccustomed tweed jacket a wad of computer paper, accordion-folded and with perforations on both sides. I could see from where I sat the paper covered with columns of numbers, masses of gray. “One of the reasons I’m so groggy,” he explained to the panel, with such translucent, care-worn engagingness that Rebecca tilted her bright nose up and Jeremy cast his stern eyes down, “is I was up a lot of last night running some of the universal constants through some random transformations, trying to come up with something for you people.”

“And what might that something be?” Closson asked, rolling his lower lip in a restive, snuff-craving way.

“Something unexpected,” Dale said. “Something more than random.”

His voice had strengthened. He tipped his chin up, facing these inquisitors. We like, it occurred to me, being challenged. That little adrenal rush washes away a lot of problematics and puts our life on the line, where it wants to be. Better see red than be dead. We like a fight because it shoves aside doubt.

Dale unfolded his grotesquely long printout, which tumbled between his knees, and said, “For instance, the speed of
light times Newton’s gravitational constant, both in SI units, of course, and one of them a huge number and the other very tiny, comes out almost exactly to the simple number two—one point nine nine nine five three two six.” He looked up. None of the panel had blinked. “That’s an incredible coincidence,” he explained. “Another unexpected unitary result was that the Hubble constant—that is, the rate at which the galaxies are moving away from one another and the universe is expanding—divided by the charge on the proton, which of course is at the other end of the scale of cosmic constants, comes out to twelve and a half, with no remainder. I got to looking at that, last night about two o’clock, and after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to be these twenty-fours jumping out at me. Two, four; two, four. Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radius yields almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On the positive side, the electromagnetic fine-structure constant times the Hubble radius—that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it—gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces exactly two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another. I began to circle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the printout: here”—he held it up, his piece of striped and striped wallpaper, decorated with a number of scarlet circles—“you can see it’s more than random.”

“I’m not sure I
can
see that,” Jesse Closson said, peering over his half-glasses. Dale held the paper higher and we could all see that his knobby big hands were jerking, shaking. He was holding the universe in those hands.

“Randomness or the lack of it is no kind of category—” Jeremy Vanderluyten began.

“Mah friend,” Ed Snea pronounced, as if calling a jabbering lawn party to order, “what do these interrelations between these numbers
mean?
Aren’t you adding apples and oranges, as they say, and then dividing by grapefruit?”

“These aren’t just numbers, they are the basic physical constants,” Dale told him. “These are the terms of Creation.”

“Oh I
like
that,” Rebecca gushed. She was, I realized, Dale’s first ally on the committee, and he realized it, too.

He turned his head to face her, one on one. “These numbers,” he said intently, with an almost paternal earnestness and yearning for understanding, as the feet flickered over her head, “are the words in which God has chosen to speak. He could have chosen a whole other set, ma’am, but He chose these. Maybe our measurements are still imperfect, maybe my transformations weren’t the most intelligent.… I was getting so tired, and nervous because of this meeting today; there might be a differential equation that would yield something definitive, I just don’t know. But there has to be something here, if anywhere. You don’t like the way the speed of light times the gravitational constant comes out to two?”

“Oh,
I
like it,” Rebecca repeated, with a different emphasis, “but—”

“This is kabbalism,” Jeremy Vanderluyten rumbled. “Numbers can be made to say anything, you fiddle enough. Just to satisfy my curiosity: see if you have a six six six anywhere there.”

Dale, his head moving in little quantum jumps, looked over his printout and announced, “Yes, sir, I certainly do. Not just three sixes but ten of them, right in a row. The Bohr radius divided by the Hubble radius.”

“See,” the black man said. “Now that’s the number of the
Beast, and supposed to mean the end of the world is at hand.”

“Or that two is being divided by three,” Closson said, a pepper of impatience creeping into his bland manner. “These calculations have for me, young man, a certain savor of desperation. As Heidegger might say, your
Versteben
has been overtaken by your
Befindlichkeit
.” The other committee members tittered.

Dale with dignity admitted, “I do feel desperate, sometimes. But then I think, Why should God make it easy for me, what He’s denied to all of mankind up to now? There was a moment,” he said, “last night. I was tired, and I guess exasperated if not desperate, and began to punch commands at random, and in the middle of the garbage I was getting on the screen there flashed suddenly this beautiful number: one point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero, I don’t know how many zeros, maybe ten, and then a one. Now nowhere in nature is a calculation going to yield such an odd amount, one and one-ten-billionth or whatever it was. But the numbers being generated kept scrolling past, and when I tried to go back to it and take a printout, the computation was gone.”

There was a silence. It occurred to me that not once had Dale glanced in my direction. He and Esther must have had an exceptionally hot time yesterday, in the attic. She had been languid and saucy when I returned at five-forty-five; she and Dale and Richie had been bent above the dining-room table like a sentimental Biblical mezzotint under the Tiffany lamp, their three heads forming a triangle, standing Esther’s the apex. They had been working at hexadecimal numbers. “And two D?” Dale had asked. “What would that be, Richie?”

Silence had stretched, while in the kitchen the refrigerator consulted with itself about making more ice.

“Forty-five,” Esther at last had drawled. “Obviously.”

“Your mom’s right,” Dale had said, embarrassed for her. “See, Richie,” he had explained, “the two on the left means two sixteens, so that’s thirty-two, and the D represents—because, remember, we have to assign a letter to the two-digit numbers under sixteen—” He had waited a second, then himself supplied, “Thirteen. Thirty-two plus thirteen makes—?”

“Forty-five,” the child had said in a weak, troubled voice.

“Exactly! See, you’re getting it!”

“About time,” Esther had said languidly, saucily. Her mouth, even under a fresh application of lipstick, had looked chafed, and her green eyes had glowed, I felt, with how far into nature she had tunnelled and rooted a few hours before. That night, last night, in our dark conjugal bed, out of concupiscent momentum she had fumblingly offered to apply some of her filthy tricks to me; I socked her naked shoulder with the heel of my hand and turned my back, protecting what they used to call roguishly, back in Ohio, the family jewels.

Ed was asking Dale, with delicate distaste, the crucial question. “Do you have any other thoughts as to how to use a computer in this search for”—he could not make his lips, beneath his minimal, as it were demythologized, mustache, pronounce the gawky old monosyllable—“the Absolute?”

“Or did this shoot your wad?” Closson crackled, too much a Quaker innocent to know, I think, how vulgar the phrase was.

Rebecca did know, and leaned forward to smooth things over, to mother the young man. “Dale, what did you visualize as the end-product of your researches? A technical paper, or something more inspirational?” She sat back and removed her steel-framed glasses from her long white nose, and this changed her aspect for us. She was a woman—Eve,
Hawwah
, “life.” I felt within me Dale’s heart yearn toward her, a spot of warmth within this chilly trial. She smiled and continued, “What I’m trying to ask is, How could we
use
your theories, to justify a grant?”

Jeremy, still irritated by the lack of respect paid
das moralische Gesetz
, asked, “What you trying to prove, shuffling these numbers around?”

“Sir, I’m trying to give God the opportunity to
speak
,” Dale said, rousing himself to forcefulness. He described to them, more fully than he ever had to me, his notion of making a model of reality along the principles of computer graphics. Shapes, he told the committee, can be subtracted one from another, once they are represented in machine memory as solid primitives, and cross-sections can be computed at any angle, and along any slice, once a few commands are given. In computerized industrial design, such as the making of a die or a mold, negative shapes have an importance equal to that of their positive counterparts; also (and here his expressive hands came into play, elaborately), solid shapes can be created by moving a planar figure along a specified path in space. By making such systems interact, and by injecting local rules for the evolution of these shapes, and by using more global planning algorithms, Dale felt he could simulate our actual world, not in its content so much as in its complexity, at a level that would yield graphical or algorithmic clues to an underlying design, assuming one exists. It was a little like, he said, the common process in computer graphics whereby first a “wire-frame” image of a solid object is generated by vector lines and then, with a simple formula operating on the
z
coördinate, the hidden edges are eliminated, the edges that in the “real” world—that is, the world we experience with our senses—would be hidden by the object’s opacity; theologically speaking, we move through a world with its hidden edges removed, and Dale’s attempt, with the committee’s indispensable support, would be to restore those edges, removing the opacity and giving Creation back the primal transparency in which, since the Fall, only a few mystics and
madmen and, perhaps, children have seen it. Or, if the committee would prefer an analogy from particle physics, his effort would be to subject the macrocosm, transposed into computer graphics, to a process like atom smashing.