OPUS 21 (7 page)

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 overfatigue) 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.LT., 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.

Paul chuckled. "Goody! Go ahead."

"The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason.

He has done so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than his hands that he never looks for--"

"--the steam shovel?"

"Dynamite."

"Ouch!"

I laughed. "Take the
Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."

"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."

"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."

"Sure. And the
Bulletin
has taken up every known means by which people can he told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate--and the debates in the United Nations--has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired--"

"With no result."

"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter--soldiers would control the whole business right now."

"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."

"Do you expect the physicists to he able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain--when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"

"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all.

You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in your
Bulletin
did I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality--and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."

"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."

I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars, psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick--including the tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine. But you think that's still the reason--business."

"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists to contribute. Asked them to speed the work on their science and the science of sociology--

so we'll have a solid technical basis for establishing peace."

"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned superbrain in the barrel has stopped to note for a moment--so far as I'm aware--that the psychologists are 'way ahead of them.

The science of personality--of behavior--of consciousness and instinct--is well along. The psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them why--so far as present evidence indicates--men are going to go right ahead having wars--atomic bombs, germs, and all--into the far, foreseeable future."

"Why?" he asked mildly.

"Oh--because they exploit individualism and never take any responsibility for it.

Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations and fears--add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private level, where they originate."

"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with what we do know?"

"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all of you.

What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"

"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's investigations, we'd still believe the earth was fiat, the sky was a cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval--"

"Yet--when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable degree--set up physics and chemistry and biology--did you boys then turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"

"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."

"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors--ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you--do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method--the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in your
Bulletin
for a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."

"If there were enough psychiatrists, then--we wouldn't have to worry?"

"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."

"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs--they'd all have been burned to death."

"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"

Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."

"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers--who were usually ignorant even of physical science--or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines--and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside--and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."