OPUS 21 (8 page)

"Hear, hear!"

"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames--without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fuselages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's, that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance--and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."

"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"

"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization."

He just looked at me.

After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power--yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace.

What is the power, then?"

"Let me guess. Instinct. You see--as an old Wylie reader--"

I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee.

"Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other--you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against each other as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!"

"I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly.

"You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six.

If you had insisted on keeping science free--the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science--even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis--when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots.

Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is--Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years--the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise--your
Bulletin
sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact--and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in--and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own.

Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."

"You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"

"I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion--essentially no different from it--hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful--call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion--so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence.

The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities--but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."

Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."

"I strongly know I damned well do."

There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak-and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution--lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict-

-unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.

' I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."

"Aren't we--and so forth?"

"I want to quit."

"The Lab?"

He nodded. "There is something positively bestial--in the worst sense--about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."

"Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"

"I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now--it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home--after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."

"Why not quit, then?"

"Brink--for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him--I at least pretend.

And I feel loyal."

"Talk it over with him."

"No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission--a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front--from the weapons standpoint--until every tyrant's done for."

"Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."

He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through--I like to fainted with gratitude."

"How much," I asked caustically, "do you want to borrow?" Then I wondered if I ought to lend anybody more money.

He laughed. "Money, a guy like me can always use. Someday, though, I'll take time out and invent a quicker way to make ice cubes, or a better zipper, and get rich and pay you back. I keep a record of the debt on a letter I got from Fermi--a cherished possession."

He would, too, I thought. Get rich and pay back--Ricky. "Hundred bucks?"

"That wasn't why I wanted to see you. But thanks." He fumbled in his mind for some sort of beginning. "Oh, hell," he finally said. "What I want to say can be put in two sentences. And they're the hardest two I ever had to speak. I haven't tried them on anybody yet. But I've got to--with someone. Meaning you. It goes like this." For a full minute he sat there saying nothing. Then he pushed back his rather long chestnut hair and looked at me squarely--with an expression in his eyes that I would remember for a long time, if I had a long time to remember in. ''I'm in love. And the girl's a whore." He turned away from me, after that, and looked toward the window, toward afternoon blue sky into which the sun still pointed. His chin was shaking.

I thought of several responses and picked one carefully.

"All right. It's said--the whole thing. It leaves me fairly undisturbed, Paul."

"I guess you don't understand--don't believe me. I mean it. The girl actually was--

a professional tart. A call girl. What they hold to be a high-class one."

"So I gathered. I've known several cases."

"It--" He swallowed hard a time or two. "Mind if I have another Scotch?"

I shook my head.

He ordered and began once again. "I didn't know it--like a dope--for a long time. I can't even tell whether or not knowing it right off--would have made a difference. I suppose it would. I suppose I'd just have been bitter--because I couldn't afford her. The name's Marcia."

"Nice name."

"Yeah. Look, Phil. It was last winter--after I got back from Eniwetok. Some of the directors of a big corporation where I'd been called in for a conference asked me to a party. Marcia was there. I suppose that the other girls were the same." He looked at his knuckles. "Scratch that. I know they were--now. Nobody said anything about it. Just--big corporation hospitality for people like me, whose advice might make them a few more millions. I sat around drinking cocktails and having a swell time and thinking that the girls had got prettier while I was in the Pacific, working. I didn't know they were to take home--like candy--compliments of the management. And Marcia didn't mention the fact when I asked her if she'd care to ditch the binge and have supper just with me."

"No."

"She merely went. She went--and was charming. You see--she caught onto my naïve assumptions, and she was being paid, and it amused her to be thought of as just an ordinary girl--a debutante, or the like--for whom a smart young physicist was falling like a ton of bricks." He looked at me again. His explanation was coming more easily. "Do you get the picture?"

"She must be bright. As well as attractive."

He nodded. "She has a sense of drama. All I did--feeling suffused that evening with love--was to take her to her apartment and bid her a pleasant good night. She asked me in--sure. Even tried to argue me in. But I was thinking in terms of the long and sentimental pursuit. Or--at least--decorum. Not-the-first-night, baby. That's me.

Gentleman of the old school. I extracted her phone number--it wasn't difficult--and escorted her home, and went out to Brooklyn to my flat--and dreamed into my pipesmoke. Happy me."

He was silent for so long that I said, "And then?"

"I called her up the next afternoon. She was busy." A muscle shaped itself in his temple, twitched, vanished. "So I made a date for another evening. We had dinner and danced around--at the Stork. On dough you lent me. And that evening I accepted the invitation to go into her apartment with her. You see--she wasn't merely diverted by a dope--but she felt she owed me something. Something that corporation had paid for.

Only--"

"It was different for her."

He seemed surprised. "How'd you know?"

"I'm thinking of the difference that would understandably exist between a guy who was paying--and a guy in love with you."

"It upset her."

"So she tried to duck you."

He was still more surprised. "She told me she'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."

"And you waited--"

"--the all-time eager beaver. And phoned. She sounded--odd. She asked me if I'd like to come up to her place for dinner--said she didn't feel like going out. She cooked. I know now that she had planned to tell me--that night. Instead--well, she didn't. She said she worked some as a model--which she had done. She said she had an income--not said, just hinted. I asked her to marry me--around three A.M."

"Just what did she do about that?"

"She cried. Quietly. Told me that she'd taken a fall out of marriage--which was also true. Didn't want to risk it again--not without being sure of the guy. And said there weren't any such guys as--she needed."

"Pretty close to being pretty nice."

Paul answered the door, took the drink, and put his own dollar on Karl's tray. "It went that way for about two months. Then she told me." His ice clinked without his volition. "The whole story--straight out--beginning at dinner one evening in the Waldorf.

The guy she married--a smug, sadistic twirp. Getting divorced. Coming to New York.

Scrimping along on modeling jobs. Running into Hattie Blaine. Ever heard of her?"

Who hadn't? Hattie was madam to Manhattan's upper set. I gave a nod.

"Hattie sold her on the idea--after quite a campaign. Marcia went to work. That was about three years ago. I took her home that night--placidly enough--and went for the walk that lasts till they put out the sidewalks again. Then I phoned Johann I was sick--and got sick, drinking. For a month or so more, I tried the old Presbyterian anodyne: work.

No use."

"Not when you're young."

"Later?"

"It comes with time. Go ahead."

"When I had all but burned out my main bearings, I phoned her. Maybe you won't believe it--but Marcia was going to phone me that evening. We talked it over. She moved to my flat and got a job."

"So?"

"We might get married."

"She want to?"

"She refuses--now. I'm not always certain I want to, myself." He stuck his forefinger into his shoe and tugged at the counter. "And I don't know why. Why I want to marry her. Why I'm uncertain."

"How do your--?" I broke that off.

But he got it. "My friends think she's swell. You gathered she was good-looking.

She's a tall, slender gal with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Quiet. You'd never think--I But I went into that, didn't I? She attended college, in Iowa, for a year--and she likes to read. By that I mean--"

"Nobody else--?"

"Christ, no. They think she's a working gal--which she is, now: a nice friend of mine."

"Someday--" I stopped there--again.

"Yes." His face whitened. "A putty-chinned, overweight lodge brother from Keokuk, just tight enough to miss the stony stare and come up with the big hello. It's happened."

"I see."

"She went home and had hysterics."

"Bring her over."

Paul looked at me thoughtfully. "You are upset."

"Sure. Now.
You
are. So bring her over. Not tonight--or tomorrow night. I'm busy."

"What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."

"Lunch, then. Come around one."

The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids--the kind that wears glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project about five years ahead of his current age--so that he is always in deep water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up--through one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of youth--the aunts, sisters, and female cousins used to argue constantly about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces had come off his teeth.