Damon Knight - Orbit 16

He had to force his head down, to force his eyes to see the desk, the wrinkled yellow on white metal. To force his arm up, pull back the sleeve, and decide to act. Only then did his focus return, caught by the jittering watch, and then the office took clear familiar shape again around him. And fear returned.

“Ruth? Would you call the Director’s office again and see if he’s in yet?”

When the Director finally came on the line, he was curt and impatient. He didn’t like to be bothered by petty problems; Lucus knew that.

“It’s really quite urgent. I don’t like to upset your schedule, but I’m afraid it can’t wait until tomorrow, sir.”

“Well, what is it in Math that you can’t handle yourself, Lucus?” His voice was overamplified by the receiver, and there was no comfortable position for it. “If there are problems with funds or payroll, that shouldn’t be handled through my office. I should think you would be able to take care of your own distribution of grants.”

“Well, no, sir, it’s a more important problem than that. It’s research that I feel needs ... uh ... special attention. I mean there seem to be possible . . . possible dangers in publication of certain discoveries.”

“In math, Lucus? You’re exaggerating. What sort of research in math could produce . . . uh, dangers? I mean, you’re surely getting carried away with your formulas, aren’t you?”

“I’d rather not discuss it over the phone, sir. It is of rather . . . of rather Limited Interest.”

“Oh?” Lucus could feel the younger man’s eyebrows rising. “What sort of ‘Limited Interest,’ Dr. Lucus?”

“If I could make an appointment, sir . . .”

“My schedule is terribly busy, Dr. Lucus, and I don’t see how I can fit in another appointment—unless you will tell me the nature of the problem.”

Lucus was not ready for this, not ready to reveal to anyone else the secret that, as far as he knew, he alone shared with Professor Paul David. He had not thought this far. He would have to tell another man the horrible thing that had been discovered, the horrible thing that had lain in wait for discovery all these centuries. His face covered with sweat, his hand sticky against the plastic receiver, he controlled his voice as much as he could and said, “A disproof of Euclid, sir. One of our fundees has produced a proof of the inconsistency of Euclid . . . that Euclid is not true, cannot be true ...”

There was no reply, no sound. He didn’t know if the Director was as shocked as he, or if he was incredulous, unable to believe such a thing. Did he perhaps share Hans’s sense of the cosmic joke of the whole thing? Was he smiling with the chemist’s triumphant smile at the defeat of the abstract theoretician? How would any man react to such knowledge? Lucus decided that the Director did not believe him, that no man could accept such a horrifying conclusion without rigid proof. Surely he himself had spent two days and sleepless nights in the attempt to shake the unshakable conclusion. Finally the voice answered. It was a short answer and made its point perfectly clear.

“Is that all? I think you should be able to clear that up by yourself, Lucus. After all, I don’t know much about math, and I don’t see why you have to bring it to my attention.”

And that was it. He was unimpressed. It meant nothing to him.

“I think, sir, that it is very important that I explain the problem to you in more detail.”

“All right, Lucus, all right. Come by at three, will you? I have an important call on the other line. Sorry, I have to hang up. At three.”

The sigh of resignation in his voice had been almost theatrical. He hated to be bothered with petty departmental problems.

Dr. Lucus cradled his head in his arms on the desk, shaking uncontrollably with the release of tension, still alone in his fear and in his knowledge.

“Don, you’re using strategy again. It’s the same strategy; it’s a textbook play.” Hans Kaefig blew a thick puff of smoke at the stilled Go board. “Blurd your vision a little, Donnie. Come on, find a play that doesn’t have a proverb to go with it.”

Hans leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, cigarette holder rising out of his bushy grey beard like a radius vector tracing minute burning circles in the air. He closed his eyes tight in a pantomime of cogitation. “What you need to do, Donnie, what you need to do is . . .”

Don smiled and fumbled with his pipe. He knew Hans could go on like this all night, fighting his own eternal battle with rational thought out loud, using Don’s career as his battlefield, giving him advice, often self-contradictory, on how to break from the confines of Aristotelean logic and soar like a bird on the soul of his intellect. Or the intellect of his soul. The words varied proportionally to the amount of brandy consumed every Tuesday.

“. . . what you need, Donnie, is to state a theorem without a proof—with no hope of a proof. Write a paper, Don, with ten or twenty wild, impossible theorems and lemmas and corollaries— no proofs . . . absurd theorems. I’ll help you. I’ll give you some ideas, you can rewrite them to sound mathematical. We’ll publish them—inside a year someone will have proved half of them, done all the work, but they’ll all be called Lucus’ Theorem or Kaefig’s Conjecture—and we’ll have it made.”

“Wouldn’t work, Hans. No one would publish them without proof.”

“Well, then—we’ll publish it as a novel. That’s it, a novel. You write the theorems, I’ll write the sex. We’ll call it Propositional Calculus , and start a rumor that it was written under drugs. We can cut the verbs out of all the sentences and make it look all Burroughs-y. That’s the way to do mathematics, Don. Get out of the mainstream . . . underground math . . . subversive topology, that should be your field, luv.”

“Hans, I appreciate your help with my career—”

“It’s only that I pity you—I’m determined to make an artist of you, if you don’t make me into a scientist first.”

“Now have I tried to do that?”

“Oh, you’re subtle, Donnie. You’re subtle. And that’s what I’m not. You can see my plan of action right away. But you—well, you just leave those books lying around open so I’ll sneak a peek. You try to draw me to those dirty pictures: a truncated cube, a stellated dodecawhatsit, two pyramids stuck through each other . . . it’s warping my brain. I go to my studio and find my mind all hung up in your simply connected sets and those tragic asymptotic curves—Tantalus damned to approach without reaching forever. What can I do? You have told me a doughnut is a coffee cup, and I have believed you. I used to paint the city and garbage and reality. Now all I know are points in space. I dream each night of being trapped in Konigsberg, forever recrossing those bridges, while Euler stands by the river and laughs. Oh, don’t deny it, Don. You are slowly turning me into what you are, enveloping me in symbolic logic and set theory. And I keep coming back and asking for more.”

“And why do you come back?” asked Don, finishing off his brandy.

“Ah, you force me to say it! You are my muse, Professor Lucus. Without you my art would die. Without you, my dear friend, I would paint only the city and garbage and reality.”

“Oh ... I thought Mary was your muse.”

“Mary? Of course not. A muse must be unobtainable, mysterious, the artist’s opposite, the soul of what he can never be. You might as well say I am Mary’s muse. After all, she did dedicate a quartet to me. Am I flattered? No. We’re getting divorced this year, or next year—whenever there’s time.”

“You’re not serious, Hans!” Don hated the terrible uncertainty. In fact, he never did know when Hans was serious about any subject.