The Back of Our Heads, Stephen Barr [good novels to read txt] 📗

blind. I should like to say that you have a very nice voice."

She stopped and laughed again. "That's one of the nicest things I've ever had said to me!"

"Do let's ... I mean would you let me...." He floundered, and laughed, too. "Can't we have a drink together? Now?"

"I think it would be lovely," she said.

Later on, he said to her, "You may think this impertinent of me, but you make me envy you. If I were braver, I should wish that I were blind. You actually see more than I do."

Katherine was intrigued. She had been told this before, but always with mystical and pseudo-religious implications. This man, with the attractive voice and smell, had no trace of the mystic.

"Let me tell you a fable to illustrate what I mean," he went on. "There was a man who was born blind, and he went to work as a coal miner because the darkness was no hindrance to him. One day while he was working alone in an unlighted gallery, his sight was miraculously given to him.... He shouted out in amazement and awe, and the other miners came stumbling to him in the total darkness.

"'What is it?' they cried. 'What's the matter?'

"'I can see!' he told them. But they were puzzled, for they had brought no lights.

"'What can you see?' they asked. 'There is nothing to be seen here in the dark.'

"'I see black!' he said. 'In front of my face is blackness—however, at the back of my head, I'm still blind and I see nothing.'"

Katherine was delighted. "I'm not quite sure I understand."

"Why, to the blind there are no shadows," Farley said. "Another drink?"

"I think it would be lovely," she had said, and since she could see no shadows, she had begun to fall in love.

Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley looked up at Phil and smiled. It was a charming smile and it was as genuine as a guaranteed, ten-carat, real, honest-to-goodness zircon. "As Katherine has probably told you," he said, "what you are doing is completely over my bowed head. I am enormously impressed and at the same time unable to comprehend."

"I find it hard to comprehend, too," Phil Kaufman said. "And I suppose that's what leads me on."

"Well, the thing is," Farley continued, "Washington seems to have gotten wind of it, and you know how they are. They don't like things to be over their heads."

Phil Kaufman looked at him in astonishment and sat on a lab stool. "I don't understand. How can they possibly be interested in what I'm doing? It's purely theoretical research."

"Surely you don't deny that Lisa Meitner's researches began by being theoretical? And look what they led to. The point is, Kaufman, that I have been informed that we are about to receive a visit from a man from the A.E.C. He's arriving here sometime this afternoon."

"But that's absurd! I'm not doing anything to atoms. I'm merely examining them!"

Katherine frowned when he said this. Phil knew better. Worse yet, so did she.

"When the A.E.C. hears of somebody working in atomic research," Farley said, "they want to know what's cooking. I hate you to be subjected to this, but it won't do any harm to be polite to the fellow and let him, as it were, look over your shoulder."

"I'm damned if I see why I should!" Phil said. "What does he expect to do? Classify me?"

Farley laughed placatingly. "I know it seems high-handed, but I think we all ought to remember there is such a thing as Security."

"Security, my foot!" Phil said. "It was that kind of demented thinking that caused Germany to lose Lisa Meitner! And Einstein."

"What strikes me as rather odd," Katherine said, "is their sending someone here on a Sunday. When did you hear about it, Russ?"

"A little while ago. On the phone."

"Curiouser and curiouser."

"He was very polite and apologetic."

"Quite typical," Phil said. "It's the velvet-glove touch."

Farley looked at his wristwatch. "He won't be here for a while, so I wish you could brief me about the inwardness of what you are doing, Phil." He'd never used his first name before, and Phil became a little wary. "I know you can't give me a ten-year course in advanced physics this afternoon, but—well, I'd like to know what kind of stand to take. I'll be representing the university, after all."

Phil Kaufman looked down from his perch on the stool at the earnest, kindly face and wondered what really lay behind it. So far as he could see, Doctor Farley had no reason to take any stand on the question at all, except to tell the A.E.C. man to go sit on a tack. If he wanted to represent the university, let him do it in the name of Academic Freedom. Phil glanced at Katherine. She was sitting very still and he had the impression that she was thinking about something else.

"All right, I'll give it a try," he said. "There's an idea that's been around for quite a while that there is an analogy between the stars and the atoms."

Doctor Farley's face lighted. "I believe I've heard of it. Back in the 'twenties, by a man called Dunn, wasn't it?"

Phil shook his head. "Twenty years earlier by a man called Fournier-d'Albe. He wrote a book called Two New Worlds, in which he suggested that the solar systems are actually atoms in some vast cloud of super-gas. Of course, this notion ignores the celestial absence of molecular structure—unless you count double stars as molecules—but it might be accounted for by assuming a high temperature. Then he said that the newly hypothesized Rutherford model of the atom was a sub-microscopic solar system, but he didn't stop there.

"The atoms and their electrons, he said, were in turn made up of sub-atoms and were perhaps populated by sentient beings who looked through their telescopes and counted the atoms in their vicinity, no doubt arranging them into constellations. You can carry this imaginary process in both directions and as far as you like, but are we to decide arbitrarily that it goes on infinitely? Or is it like Einsteinian space, finite but unbounded?

"I have asked myself this question and I believe the latter statement to be in a sense correct, but what does it mean? Well, it means that if you move further and further into larger universes, you eventually get to where you started. Not that Big is the same thing as Small, but that from wherever you happen to be, the ones in the direction—outward—look successively bigger, while the ones in the other direction—inward—look successively smaller. Now if there were some kind of super-telescope that could look beyond our universe of super-atoms, and beyond the next and so on indefinitely, you would find yourself staring up through a super-microscope at your own eye."

"Get along with you!" Katherine said. "This is the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams. Tell us more."

"Well, I'll revise it to this extent," said Phil. "It wouldn't be your eye that you'd see, any more than you'd see your own face if you looked far enough across ordinary intergalactic space. You'd see the back of your head—or, rather, the other side of the Earth—provided there was nothing in the way."

"And in this case it would be what?" she asked.

"I don't know," Phil said, looking worried. "What is the equivalent of the back of your head—looked at along the direction of hyper-time? Could it be that what you saw would not be from behind, but from ... inside?"