Robert Silverberg - The Asenion Solution

“I have lost interest,” he declared. “Physics is no longer of any importance to me. Why should I concern myself with these issues of the way in which matter is constructed? How tiresome it all is! When one looks at the Parthenon, does one care what the columns are made of, or what sort of scaffolding was needing to put them in place? That the Parthenon exists, and is sublimely beautiful, is all that should interest us. So too with the universe. I see the universe, and it is beautiful and perfect. Why should I pry into the nature of its scaffolding? Why should anyone?”

And with that he resigned his professorship, burned his papers, and retreated to the 33rd floor of an apartment building on Manhattan’s West Side, where he built an elaborate laboratory-greenhouse in which he intended to conduct experiments in advanced horticulture.

“Bromeliads,” said Asenion. “I will create hybrid bromeliads. Bromeliads will be the essence and center of my life from now on.”

Romelmeyer, who had been Asenion’s mentor at Harvard, attributed his apparent breakdown to overwork, and thought that he would snap back in six or eight months. Jantzen, who had had the rare privilege of being the first to read his astonishing dissertation at M.I.T., took an equally sympathetic position, arguing that Asenion must have come to some terrifying impasse in his work that had compelled him to retreat dramatically from the brink of madness. “Perhaps he found himself looking right into an abyss of inconsistencies when he thought he was about to find the ultimate answers,” Jantzen suggested. “What else could he do but run? But he won’t run for long. It isn’t in his nature.”

Burkhardt, of Cal Tech, whose own work had been carried out in the sphere that Asenion was later to make his own, agreed with Jantzen’s analysis. “He must have hit something really dark and hairy. But he’ll wake up one morning with the solution in his head, and it’ll be goodbye horticulture for him. He’ll turn out a paper by noon that will revolutionize everything we think we know about nuclear physics, and that’ll be that.”

But Jesse Hammond, who had played tennis with Asenion every morning for the last two years of his career as a physicist, took a less charitable position. “He’s gone nuts,” Hammond said. “He’s flipped out altogether, and he’s never going to get himself together again.”

“You think?” said Lew Fletcher, who had been almost as close to Asenion as Hammond, but who was no tennis player.

Hammond smiled. “No doubt of it. I began noticing a weird look in his eyes starting just about two years back. And then his playing started to turn weird too. He’d serve and not even look where he was serving. He’d double-fault without even caring. And you know what else? He didn’t challenge me on a single out-of-bounds call the whole year. That was the key thing. Used to be, he’d fight me every call. Now he just didn’t seem to care. He just let everything go by. He was completely indifferent. I said to myself, This guy must be flipping out.”

“Or working on some problem that seems more important to him than tennis.”

“Same thing,” said Hammond. “No, Lew, I tell you—he’s gone completely unglued. And nothing’s going to glue him again.”

That conversation had taken place almost a year ago. Nothing had happened in the interim to change anyone’s opinion. The astounding arrival of plutonium-186 in the world had not brought forth any comment from Asenion’s Manhattan penthouse. The sudden solemn discussions of fantastic things like parallel universes by otherwise reputable physicists had apparently not aroused him either. He remained closeted with his bromeliads, high above the streets of Manhattan.

Well, maybe he is crazy, Fletcher thought. But his mind can’t have shorted out entirely. And he might just have an idea or two left in him—

Asenion said, “Well, you don’t look a whole lot older, do you?”

Fletcher felt himself reddening. “Jesus, Ike, it’s only been eighteen months since we last saw each other!”

“Is that all?” Asenion said indifferently. “It feels like a lot more to me.”

He managed a thin, remote smile. He didn’t look very interested in Fletcher or in whatever it was that had brought Fletcher to his secluded eyrie.

Asenion had always been an odd one, of course—aloof, mysterious, with a faint but unmistakable air of superiority about him that nearly everyone found instantly irritating. Of course, he was superior. But he had made sure that he let you know it, and never seemed to care that others found the trait less than endearing.

He appeared more remote than ever, now, stranger and more alien. Outwardly he had not changed at all: the same slender, debonair figure, surprisingly handsome, even striking. Though rumor had it that he had not left his penthouse in more than a year, there was no trace of indoor pallor about him. His skin still had its rich deep olive coloring, almost swarthy, a Mediterranean tone. His hair, thick and dark, tumbled down rakishly over his broad forehead. But there was something different about his dark, gleaming eyes. The old Asenion, however preoccupied he might have been with some abstruse problem of advanced physics, had nearly always had a playful sparkle in his eyes, a kind of amiable devilish glint. This man, this horticultural recluse, wore a different expression altogether—ascetic, mist-shrouded, absent . His gaze was as bright as ever, but the brightness was a cold one that seemed to come from some far-off star.

Fletcher said, “The reason I’ve come here—”

“We can go into all that later, can’t we, Lew? First come into the greenhouse with me. There’s something I want to show you. Nobody else has seen it yet, in fact.”

“Well, if you—”

“Insist, yes. Come. I promise you, it’s extraordinary.”

He turned and led the way through the intricate pathways of the apartment. The sprawling many-roomed penthouse was furnished in the most offhand way, cheap student furniture badly cared for. Cats wandered everywhere, five, six, eight of them, sharpening their claws on the upholstery, prowling in empty closets whose doors stood ajar, peering down from the tops of bookcases containing jumbled heaps of coverless volumes. There was a rank smell of cat urine in the air.

But then suddenly Asenion turned a corridor and Fletcher, following just behind, found himself staring into what could have been an altogether different world. They had reached the entrance to the spectacular glass-walled extension that had been wrapped like an observation deck around the entire summit of the building. Beyond, dimly visible inside, Fletcher could see hundreds or perhaps thousands of strange-looking plants, some hanging from the ceiling, some mounted along the sides of wooden pillars, some rising in stepped array on benches, some growing out of beds set in the floor.

Asenion briskly tapped out the security-combination code on a diamond-shaped keyboard mounted in the wall, and the glass door slid silently back. A blast of warm humid air came forth.

“Quickly!” he said. “Inside!”

It was like stepping straight into the Amazon jungle. In place of the harsh, dry atmosphere of a Manhattan apartment in midwinter there was, abruptly, the dense moist sweet closeness of the tropics, enfolding them like folds of wet fabric. Fletcher almost expected to hear parrots screeching overhead.

And the plants! The bizarre plants, clinging to every surface, filling every available square inch!

Most of them followed the same general pattern, rosettes of broad shining strap-shaped leaves radiating outward from a central cup-shaped structure deep enough to hold several ounces of water. But beyond that basic area of similarity they differed wildly from one another. Some were tiny, some were colossal. Some were marked with blazing stripes of yellow and red and purple that ran the length of their thick, succulent leaves. Some were mottled with fierce blotches of shimmering, assertive, bewilderingly complicated combinations of color. Some, whose leaves were green, were a fiery scarlet or crimson, or a somber, mysterious blue, at the place where the leaves came together to form the cup. Some were armed with formidable teeth and looked ready to feed on unwary visitors. Some were topped with gaudy spikes of strangely shaped brilliant-hued flowers taller than a man, which sprang like radiant spears from their centers.