Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

“I don’t know. I don’t know the first thing about the market. I just don’t want to do anything silly.”

Another broker—Nadel, say—would have given her the Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained speech, and, advising her to forget about such old and tired concepts as dividends, would have steered her into an action portfolio—Texas Instruments, Collins Radio, Polaroid, stuff like that. Then he would churn her account every few months, switch Polaroid into Xerox, Texas Instruments into Fairchild Camera, Collins into American Motors, American Motors back into Polaroid, running up fancy commissions for himself and, perhaps, making some money for her, or perhaps losing some. Selig had no stomach for such maneuvers. “This is going to sound stodgy,” he said, “but let’s play it very safe. I’ll recommend some decent things that won’t ever make you rich but that you won’t get hurt on, either. And then you can just put them away and watch them grow, without having to check the market quotations every day to find out if you ought to sell. Because you don’t really want to bother worrying about the short-term fluctuations, do you?” This was absolutely not what Martinson had instructed him to tell new clients, but to hell with that. He got her some Jersey Standard, some Telephone, a little IBM, two good electric utilities, and 30 shares of a closed-end fund called Lehman Corporation that a lot of his elderly customers owned. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t even want to know what a closed-end fund was. “There,” he said. “Now you have a portfolio. You’re a capitalist.” She smiled. It was a shy, half-forced smile, but he thought he detected flirtatiousness in her eyes. It was agony for him not to be able to read her, to be compelled to depend on external signals alone in order to know where he stood with her. But he took the chance. “What are you doing this evening?” he asked. “I get out of here at four o’clock.”

She was free, she said. Except that she worked from eleven to six. He arranged to pick her up at her apartment around seven. There was no mistaking the warmth of her smile as she left the office. “You lucky bastard,” Nadel said. “What did you do, make a date with her? It violates the SEC rules for customer’s men to go around laying the customers.”

Selig only laughed. Twenty minutes after the market opened he shorted 200 Molybdenum on the Amex, and covered his sale a point and a half lower at lunchtime. That ought to take care of the cost of dinner, he figured, with some to spare. Nyquist had given him the tip yesterday: Moly’s a good short, she’s sure to fall out of bed. During the mid-afternoon lull, feeling satisfied with himself, he phoned Nyquist to report on his maneuver. “You covered too soon,” Nyquist said immediately. “She’ll drop five or six more points this week. The smart money’s waiting for that.”

“I’m not that greedy. I’ll settle for the quick three bills.”

“That’s no way to get rich.”

“I guess I lack the gambling instinct,” Selig said. He hesitated. He hadn’t really called Nyquist to talk about shorting Molybdenum. I met a girl, he wanted to say, and I have this funny problem with her. I met a girl, I met a girl. Sudden fears held him back. Nyquist’s silent passive presence at the other end of the telephone line seemed somehow threatening. He’ll laugh at me, Selig thought. He’s always laughing at me, quietly, thinking I don’t see it. But this is foolishness. He said, “Tom, something strange happened today. A girl came into the office, a very attractive girl. I’m seeing her tonight.”

“Congratulations.”

“Wait. The thing is, I was entirely unable to read her. I mean, I couldn’t even pick up an aura. Blank, absolutely blank. I’ve never had that with anybody before. Have you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“A complete blank. I can’t understand it. What could account for her having such a strong screen?”

“Maybe you’re tired today,” Nyquist suggested.

“No. No. I can read everybody else, same as always. Just not her.”

“Does that irritate you?”

“Of course it does.”

“Why do you say of course?”

It seemed obvious to Selig. He could tell that Nyquist was baiting him: the voice calm, uninflected, neutral. A game. A way of passing time. He wished he hadn’t phoned. Something important seemed to be coming across on the ticker, and the other phone was lighting up. Nadel, grabbing it, shot a fierce look at him: Come on, man, there’s work to do! Brusquely Selig said, “I’m—well, very interested in her. And it bothers me that I have no way of getting through to her real self.”

Nyquist said, “You mean you’re annoyed that you can’t spy on her.”

“I don’t like that phrase.”

“Whose phrase is it? Not mine. That’s how you regard what we do, isn’t it? As spying. You feel guilty about spying on people, right? But it seems you also feel upset when you can’t spy.”

“I suppose,” Selig admitted sullenly.

“With this girl you find yourself forced back on the same old clumsy guesswork techniques for dealing with people that the rest of the world is condemned to use all the time, and you don’t like that. Yes?”

“You make it sound so evil, Tom.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just telling you that there’s this girl I can’t read, that I’ve never been up against this situation before, that I wonder if you have any theories to account for why she’s the way she is.”

“I don’t,” Nyquist said. “Not off the top of my head.”

“All right, then. I—”

But Nyquist wasn’t finished. “You realize that I have no way of telling whether she’s opaque to the telepathic process in general or just opaque to you, David.” That possibility had occurred to Selig a moment earlier. He found it deeply disturbing. Nyquist went on smoothly, “Suppose you bring her around one of these days and let me take a look at her. Maybe I’ll be able to learn something useful about her that way.”

“I’ll do that,” Selig said without enthusiasm. He knew such a meeting was necessary and inevitable, but the idea of exposing Kitty to Nyquist produced agitation in him. He had no clear understanding of why that should be happening. “One of these days soon,” he said. “Look, all the phones are lighting up. I’ll be in touch, Tom.”

“Give her one for me,” said Nyquist.

David Selig

Selig Studies 101, Prof. Selig

November 10, 1976

Entropy is defined in physics as a mathematical expression of the degree to which the energy of a thermodynamic system is so distributed as to be unavailable for conversion into work. In more general metaphorical terms, entropy may be seen as the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness. That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.

The great American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics—the law that defines the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system—to chemistry. It was Gibbs who most firmly enunciated the principle that disorder spontaneously increases as the universe grows older. Among those who extended Gibbs’ insights into the realm of philosophy was the brilliant mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who declared, in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, “As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.”