The Gods Themselves (3 page)

The conversion of this notion into reality and the actual establishment of the Electron Pump as an effective energy source proceeded with amazing speed, and every stage of its success enhanced Hallam's prestige.

3

Lament had no reason to doubt the basis of that prestige and it was with a certain hero-worshipfulness (the memory of which embarrassed him later and which he strove—with some success—to eliminate from his mind) that he first applied for a chance to interview Hallam at some length in connection with the history he was planning.

Hallam seemed amenable. In thirty years, his position in public esteem had become so lofty one might wonder why his nose did not bleed. Physically, he had aged impressively, if not gracefully. There was a ponderousness to his body that gave him the appearance of circumstantial weightiness and if his face were gross in its features he seemed able to give them the air of a kind of intellectual repose. He still reddened quickly and the easily bruised nature of his self-esteem was a byword.

Hallam had undergone some quick briefing before Lamont's entrance. He said, "You are Dr. Peter Lamont and you've done good work, I'm told, on para-theory. I recall your paper. On para-fusion, wasn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, refresh my memory. Tell me about it. Informally, of course, as though you were talking to a layman. After all," and he chuckled here, "in a way, I am a layman. I'm just a radiochemist, you know; and no great theoretician, unless you want to count a few concepts now and then."

Lament accepted this, at the time, as a straightforward statement, and, indeed, the speech may not have been as obscenely condescending as he later insisted on remembering it to have been. It was typical, though, as Lament later found out, or at least maintained, of Hallam's method of grasping the essentials of the work done by others. He could talk briskly about the subject thereafter without being overparticular, or particular at all, in assigning credit.

But the younger Lament of the time was rather flattered, and he began at once with that voluble eagerness one experiences in explaining one's own discoveries. "I can't say I did much, Dr. Hallam. Deducing the laws of nature of the para-Universe—the para-laws—is a tricky business. We have so little to go on. I started from what little we know and assumed no new departures that we had no evidence for. With a stronger nuclear interaction, it seems obvious that the fusion of small nuclei would take place more readily."

"Para-fusion," said Hallam.

"Yes, sir. The trick was simply to work out what the details might be. The mathematics involved was somewhat subtle but once a few transformations were made, the difficulties tended to melt away. It turns out, for instance, that lithium hydride can be made to undergo catastrophic fusion at temperatures four orders of magnitude lower there than here. It takes fission-bomb temperatures to explode lithium hydride here, but a mere dynamite charge, so to speak, would turn the trick in the para-Universe. Just possibly lithium hydride in the para-Universe could be ignited with a match, but that's not very likely. We've offered them lithium hydride, you know, since fusion power might be natural for them, but they won't touch it"

"Yes, I know that."

"It would clearly be too risky for them; like using nitroglycerine in ton-lots in rocket engines—only worse."

"Very good. And you are also writing a history of the Pump."

"An informal one, sir. When the manuscript is ready I will ask you to read it, if I may, so that I might have the benefit of your intimate knowledge of events. In fact, I would like to take advantage of some of that knowledge right now if you have a little time."

"I can make some. What is it you want to know?" Hal-lam was smiling. It was the last time he ever smiled
in
Lament's presence.

"The development of an effective and practical Pump, Professor Hallam, took place with extraordinary speed," began Lamont "Once the Pump Project—"

"The Inter-Universe Electron Pump Project," corrected Hallam, still smiling.

"Yes, of course," said Lamont, clearing his throat. "I was merely using the popular name. Once the project started, the engineering details were developed with great rapidity and with little waste motion."

"That is true," said Hallam, with a touch of complacence. "People have tried to tell me that the credit was mine for vigorous and imaginative direction, but I wouldn't care to have you overstress that in your book. The fact is that we had an enormous fund of talent in the project, and I wouldn't want the brilliance of individual members to be dimmed by any exaggeration of my role."

Lamont shook his head with a little annoyance. He found the remark irrelevant. He said, "I don't mean that at all. I mean the intelligence at the other end—the para-men, to use the popular phrase. They started it. We discovered them after the first transfer of plutonium for tungsten; but they discovered us first in order to make the transfer, working on pure theory without the benefit of the hint they . gave us. And there's the iron-foil they sent across—"

Hallam's smile had now disappeared, and permanently. He was frowning and he said loudly, "The symbols were never understood. Nothing about them—"

"The geometric figures were understood, sir. I've looked into it and it's quite clear that they were directing the geometry of the Pump. It seems to me that—"

Hallam's chair shoved back with an angry scrape. He said, "Let's not have any of that, young man. We did the work, not they."

"Yes—but isn't it true that they—"

"That they
what?"

Lamont became aware now of the storm of emotion he had raised, but he couldn't understand its cause. Uncertainly, he said, "That they are more intelligent than we— that they did the real work.
Is
there any doubt of that, sir?"

Hallam, red-faced, had heaved himself to his feet "There is every doubt," he shouted."! will not have mysticism here. There is too much of that. See here, young man," he advanced on the still seated and thoroughly astonished Lamont and shook a thick finger at him, "if your history is going to take the attitude that we were puppets in the hands of the para-men, it will not be published from this institution; or at all, if I have my way. I will not have mankind and its intelligence downgraded and I won't have para-men cast in the role of gods."

Lamont could only leave, a puzzled man, utterly upset at having created harsh feeling where he had wanted only to have good will.

And then he found that his historical sources were suddenly drying up. Those who had been loquacious enough a week earlier now remembered nothing and had no time for further interviews.

Lamont was irritated at first and then a slow anger began to build within him. He looked at what he had from a new viewpoint, and now he began to squeeze and insist where earlier he had merely asked. When he met Hallam at department functions, Hallam frowned and looked through him and Lamont began to look scornful in his turn.

The net result was that Lamont found his prime career as para-theoretician beginning to abort and turned more firmly than ever toward his secondary career as science-historian.

6    (continued)

"That damned fool," muttered Lament, reminiscently. "You had to be there, Mike, to see him go into panic at any suggestion that it was the other side that was the moving force. I look back on it and I wonder—how was it possible to meet him, however casually, and not know he would react that way. Just be grateful you never had to work with him."

"I am," said Bronowski, indifferently, "though there are times you're no angel."

"Don't complain. With your sort of work you have no problems."

"Also no interest. Who cares about my sort of work except myself and five others in the world. Maybe six others —if you remember."

Lamont remembered. "Oh, well," he said.

4

Bronowski's placid exterior never fooled anyone who grew to know him even moderately well. He was sharp and he worried a problem till he had the solution or till he had it in such tatters that he
knew
no solution was possible.

Consider the Etruscan inscriptions on which he had built his reputation. The language had been a living one till the first century a.d., but the cultural imperialism of the Romans had left nothing behind and it had vanished almost completely. What inscriptions survived the carnage of Roman hostility and—worse—indifference were written in Greek letters so that they could be pronounced, but nothing more. Etruscan seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding languages; it seemed very archaic; it seemed not even to be Indo-European.

Bronowski therefore passed on to another language that seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding languages; that seemed very archaic; that seemed not even to be Indo-European—but which was very much alive and which was spoken in a region not so very far from where once the Etruscans had lived.

What of the Basque language? Bronowski wondered. And he used Basque as his guide. Others had tried this before him and given up. Bronowski did not.

It was hard work, for Basque, an extraordinarily difficult language in itself, was only the loosest of helps. Bronowski found more and more reason, as he went on, to suspect some cultural connection between the inhabitants of early northern Italy and early northern Spain. He could even make out a strong case for a broad swatch of pre-Celts filling western Europe with a language of which Etruscan and Basque were dimly-related survivors. In two thousand years, however, Basque had evolved and had become more than a little contaminated with Spanish. To try, first, to reason out its structure in Roman times and then relate it to Etruscan was an intellectual feat of surpassing difficulty and Bronowski utterly astonished the world's philologists when he triumphed.

The Etruscan translations themselves were marvels of dullness and had no significance whatever; routine funerary inscriptions for the most part. The fact of the translation, however, was stunning and, as it turned out, it proved of the greatest importance to Lamont.

—Not at first. To be perfectly truthful about it, the translations had been a fact for nearly five years before Lamont had as much as heard that there were such people, once, as the Etruscans. But then Bronowski came to the university to give one of the annual Fellowship Lectures and Lament, who usually shirked the duty of attending which fell on the faculty members, did not shirk this one.

It was not because he recognized its importance or felt any interest in it whatever. It was because he was dating a graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages and it was either that or a music festival he particularly wanted to avoid hearing. The social connection was a feeble one, scarcely satisfactory from Lament's point of view and only temporary, but it did get him to the talk.

He rather enjoyed it, as it happened. The dim Etruscan civilization entered his consciousness for the first time as a matter of distant interest, and the problem of solving an undeciphered language struck him as fascinating. When young, he had enjoyed solving cryptograms, but had put them away with other childish things in favor of the much grander cryptograms posed by nature, so that he ended in para-theory.

Yet Bronowski's talk took him back to the youthful joys of making slow sense of what seemed a random collection of symbols, and combined it with sufficient difficulty to add great honor to the task. Bronowski was a cryptogram-mist on the grandest scale, and it was the description of the steady encroachment of reason upon the unknown that Lament enjoyed.

All would yet have gone for nothing—the triple coincidence of Bronowski's appearance at campus, Lament's youthful cryptogrammic enthusiasm, the social pressure of an attractive young lady—were it not for the fact that it was the next day that Lamont saw Hallam and placed himself firmly and, as he eventually found, permanently, in the doghouse.

Within an hour of the conclusion of that interview, Lamont determined to see Bronowski. The issue at hand was the very one that had seemed so obvious to himself and that had so offended Hallam. Because it brought down censure on him, Lamont felt bound to strike back—and in connection with the point of censure specifically. The para-men
were
more intelligent than man. Lamont had believed it before in a casual sort of way as something more obvious than vital. Now it had become vital. It must be proved and the fact of it forced down the throat of Hal-lam; sideways, if possible, and with all the sharp corners exposed.

Already Lamont found himself so far removed from his so-recent hero worship that he relished the prospect.

Bronowski was still on campus and Lamont tracked him down and insisted on seeing him.

Bronowski was blandly courteous, when finally cornered.

Lamont acknowledged the courtesies brusquely, introduced himself with clear impatience, and said, "Dr. Bronowski, I'm delighted to have caught you before you left I hope that I will persuade you to stay here even longer."

Bronowski said, "That may not be hard. I have been offered a position on the university faculty."

"And you will accept the position?"

"I am considering it. I think I may."

"You must. You will, when you hear what I have to say. Dr. Bronowski, what is there for you to do now that you've solved the Etruscan inscriptions?"

"That is not my only task, young man." (He was five years older than Lamont.) "I'm an archaeologist, and there is more to Etruscan culture than its inscriptions and more to pre-classical Italic culture than the Etruscans."

"But surely nothing as exciting for you, and as challenging, as the Etruscan inscriptions?"

"I grant you that."

"So you would welcome something even more exciting, even more challenging, and something a trillion times as significant as those inscriptions."

"What have you in mind, Dr.—Lamont?"

"We have inscriptions that are not part of a dead culture, or part of anything on Earth, or part of anything in the Universe. We have something called para-symbols."