Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

A foreign accent. French maybe. “Professor Andray?”

“No. Andret.”

“Professor Meelo Andray?”

“ My -lo An- dret . Who is this, please? I’m working.”

“Congratulations, Professor Andray. I have an important news.”

He pulled his feet together and sat up in the chair.

—

AT CLIP’S, HE closed the side door and crossed to the rear, where one of the tables was hidden behind a pillar. Sure enough, he could see the back of DeWitt Tread’s suit at the bar. But he knew his friend could sit for an entire night without turning away from his glass.

It was a Friday evening. Hay had obviously been surprised by the invitation; but he’d accepted, and now Andret was here for a warm-up. He ordered a double. At exactly the appointed hour, Hay entered, glancing around. He was well dressed, of course. Andret raised a hand and beckoned him to the table.

“Well, well,” Hay said, sliding into the chair across from him. “This should be fun. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“What are you looking for from your life?” said Andret.

“What am I looking for from my what ?” Hay shimmied out of his jacket and hung it on the peg. “How about I start with a drink?”

“Of course. Sorry.”

The waitress arrived and took their order. To Andret, she said, “Another?”

While they waited, Hay started in on a story. As he rambled on, Andret glanced toward the bar, where DeWitt Tread was talking to the man next to him. The other man was of the same ilk as Tread — a maniacal-looking academic in a pilling sport coat — and even from a distance it was clear that the two of them were not much better than bums. Andret was shaken. Was this what he himself looked like when he was here? Tread’s head bobbed when he spoke and sunk slowly toward his chest when he listened. As Andret watched, the bartender leaned over and plucked a bill from Tread’s shirt pocket, then poured.

Hay was looking expectantly across at him. “Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“You asked me what I was looking for from my life.” He tapped the table. “Now tell me what you’re looking for from yours.”

“I’ve been thinking about that a little, Knudson. I had some news recently, and I guess it’s made me philosophical.”

Hay raised his eyebrows. “May I ask what kind of news?”

“Nothing I can reveal at the moment.”

“About the Abendroth conjecture, perhaps?”

“I said I really can’t say. Not now, anyway.”

Hay sipped his drink. “I guess I don’t know what to think then.”

“Of what?”

“Of you, Milo. Sometimes you’re perfectly discreet and charming. Like tonight, for example.”

“Thank you, Knudson.”

“Other times, you insult everyone in the department.”

“ I do?”

“Yes, Milo, you do —with the things you let yourself blurt out.”

“I speak the truth, that’s all.”

“Well, the truth isn’t always what needs to be spoken.”

Andret thought about this.

“Look, Milo, it appears to be good news that you’ve heard, am I right about that much, at least?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought it all the way through. It might be.”

“But look at you — you can’t stop smiling.”

“Is that right?” Milo touched his own face. Yes, Hay was right — it felt different. He must indeed have been smiling.

—

HE NEEDED A signature on some arcane departmental form and finally found Hay in his satellite office, a small, chilly room in the warrens of Fine Hall where Hay worked on his own mathematics. Andret knocked, then pushed the door partway open.

His chairman stood at the far wall, concentrating on something on the desk. From beyond him came the clicking sound of a small machine, like a bicycle with a chipped gear tooth. “Absolutely remarkable,” Hay said, without turning. After a moment, he added, “Come in and take a look, Milo.”

“At what?”

“It’s a TI-99. Come have a peek.”

Andret stepped over. “It’s a 99/8,” Hay said proudly. “The public can’t even get them yet. Not the 8 anyway. Not for a while.”

Andret knew what he was looking at. He’d seen computers before, but large ones, in the engineering department.

“This little machine in front of you is the most powerful portable ever built,” Hay said. “At least for civilian use. Fifteen megabytes of silicon memory. I imagine there’s a general over at the Pentagon who’s got more”—he lowered his bifocals—“but I’m not even sure about that . And it’s damn spectacular for a mathematics department.”

The computers Andret had seen in the engineering building ran the length of the room, their tape spools stuttering behind mirrored panels. This one now was the size of a cereal box. The keyboard looked like one of the slanted beige Selectrics that the secretaries used in the office. From the rear, a cable ran to a TV box on a pedestal. Hay tapped a few keys, and a row of blue letters flickered onto the screen.

“So what?” said Andret. “I’ve seen computers before.”

“Not this small. Not this powerful. And it sits right here on my desk. I could have one in my house if I wanted. This thing is going to change everything .”

“Don’t be so sure, Knudson.”

“My God, Andret. What are you talking about? Don’t be a fool, man. It’s already got a language on it called Pascal — a bit ironic, no? And I can put any other languages on it I want, any time I need to. That’s the beauty of it. I’ve already ordered Fortran and C and Simula.” He smiled mischievously. Then he rummaged in a bag on the desk until he found a thick envelope, covered with stamps. “An old friend of mine at Cambridge just sent me this.”

“And what might that be, Knudson?”

“It happens to be a prototype of the most powerful programming language the world has ever seen, Milo. They’re calling it C++.”

“Sounds like the grades I give around here.”

Hay chuckled perfunctorily. “Listen, Milo — once I get it down, I’ll be able to run any simulation I can think of.” He looked sideways over his glasses. “And soon, I might add, so will any other mathematician.” He smiled now — victoriously, it seemed. “And if you’re not worried about that, my friend — well, you damn well ought to be.”

“I’m not a fool, Knudson. I know these things have potential.”

“ Potential? Are you kidding me? All of us need to get a jump on this right now, before we’re lost in action. Before our whole sorry generation is a casualty of a little box of silicon.”

Andret ran his hand over the dull plastic of the case. “They’re curiosities, Knudson, I’ll give you that much. But I can assure you that there are plenty of things they won’t ever be able to do. And fortunately for our whole sorry generation, abstract mathematics is one of them. Frankly, I prefer the old way.”

Hay glanced at him. Then he opened a cabinet under the counter, from where the chipped-gear clicking grew louder. “Come on, Andret. Stop sounding so goddamn arrogant. Step over here.”

Behind the door was some kind of printer: a pen plotter. A roll of paper was creeping forward, pausing for a pair of styluses that darted in from the sides, depositing ink. From the outfeed slot, a long, multicolored graph was inching its way along the shelf. A trapezoidal plane in red crossing a second-degree algebraic curve in blue, the intersection of the two shapes highlighted in a perfect wet-brown hyperbola that was drying to purple where it curled from the roller.

“Welcome to the future, Milo.”

Andret straightened. “I didn’t realize — I hadn’t known they’d actually gotten this far.” He drew himself to his full height, which slightly exceeded Hay’s. “But for the record, Knudson, I’m still not worried in the least.”