OPUS 21 Page 6

  "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."

  "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 attrac
tive."

  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."