John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Weintraub smiled back a little distantly; Craine could feel the man withdrawing to whatever complex thought Craine’s arrival had interrupted. “I suppose I haven’t given you a very favorable impression of our work,” he said. “The other side, of course, is that for some of us it’s extremely exciting work — I can no more tell you how exciting it is, to a man like myself, to say nothing of a man like Frank Britt …” He reached for the doorknob but then hesitated before turning it, wanting to finish his thought. “I’ve told you how things can go wrong in computer work. But believe me, when they go right—” He opened the door and bowed, letting Craine go first.

As soon as they entered the reception room, they both knew in an instant that something was wrong. The secretaries both looked up at once, with an expression Craine knew but could not place, one that froze him where he stood. In Professor Furth’s office — the door stood open — the young man Craine had seen before somewhere, Dennis Reed, was hunting for something in the books and papers on Furth’s desk, his face solemn, squeezed shut with concentration. There was another man at his left, a gaunt, dishevelled black in glasses and fatigue cap. The minute Dennis Reed saw Craine watching him he jumped to the door and swung it shut. Something in the look of alarm, the way the boy’s head jerked back, the eyes black and beady as a groundhog’s switched on the lost connection. It was the boy who’d been watching him at Tully’s Tome Shop — the frightened fat boy in the oversized red sweater who had been following him later in the street. He felt an impulse to rush to Furth’s door right now and get to the bottom of this, but by the clock on the wall it was nearly five to three, much too late already; he couldn’t get back to Elaine’s even now before three, and he’d said two forty-five. And there was, anyway, this other business, the stillness in the room, like mourning.

“Professor Weintraub,” the blondish secretary was saying, “have you heard?”

“Heard what?” Professor Weintraub asked. He was as still and lightly balanced as if with fright held in as when Craine had first met him.

“Professor Furth’s had an accident, he’s been killed,” she said. “He ran his van over a cliff.”

Weintraub turned his head to look at Craine, then looked past him, hardly registering that Craine was there.

“I’ve got to go,” Craine whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry.”

Weintraub, deep in thought, seemed not to notice.

They had come to a gray metal door at the rear of the stacks. Weintraub opened it and waved Craine through. Ahead of them lay a seemingly endless corridor, offices on each side. Craine could not remember later who the offices belonged to. He could remember, in fact, almost none of it, only the powerful visual effects, the strangeness of it all. He was seeing with innocent eyes, like a child: an office where three men — two blacks and an Oriental — sat poring over a printout with the intense concentration of Chicago anarchists, all three of them wearing hats, on the table all around them coffee cups, pink plastic spoons, and sandwich crusts. Another room, later, high ceilings, flickering fluorescent lights, immense computers humming and pinging, typewriters clattering, on the floor in a corner a bearded young man on an army cot, asleep.

“You’ve no idea where Professor Furth is today?” Craine asked.

“None. I’m sorry. He’s away a lot of course, hunting bugs and glitches in various people’s software, or giving lectures at one university or another. Spends half his time on airplanes, that man, but usually he tells us in advance when he’ll be gone.”

“He’s the general boss here?”

“Technically, yes.”

He’d hit a sensitive spot, he saw, though when he looked Weintraub’s face was as expressionless as ever — slightly bug-eyed, pallid as a professional chess player’s, his curly hair floating along around his balding dome as if the hair and head were of a different dimension from the world they momentarily occupied. “What does he lecture on?” Craine asked.

“Doom, for the most part,” Weintraub said, and smiled. “One of the two favorite subjects of computer men. The other one being how we and only we, by our magic and clearheadedness, are destined to save the world.” He raised one forearm just enough to allow himself to raise an index finger as a beacon. Craine glimpsed for the first time, despite the unearthly, expressionless face — perhaps it was only the shyness of an egghead — that the man had humor in him. Craine chuckled, encouraging, and put his hat on to free himself to work with his pipe.

“Furth, I take it, doesn’t believe that only computer men can save the world.”

“No.”

“And yourself?” Lighting his pipe, Craine slid his eyes at the man.

“Sometimes I’m a little optimistic — usually on Thursdays. For the most part, no.” The hand with which he’d made the beacon went to his belt buckle, caught hold like a bat, and hung there.

“Nevertheless,” Craine said, “you take all this very seriously, I can see.”

“Oh yes, it’s serious. Far more serious than most things — which is not to say better.” He added, as if giving the wrong impression were unethical, “I love it.”

“Tell me, Professor,” Craine said, waving his pipe as if in apology, “were Professor Furth and April Vaught at all close?”

They were passing a bank of computer screens like large television sets, consoles below them, men and women looking up, each at his own screen, with sunken, glowing eyes. There was a curious scent of sweat and raw nerves, also burnt coffee and old hamburger. Panel lights flicked on and off in seemingly meaningless patterns. Weintraub, without Craine’s noticing it, had stopped and stood watching one of the screens, his body as still as some queerly bland figure from a wax museum. The woman at the console below the screen was smoking a cigarette, never touching it with her fingers, her hands poised over the typewriter keys, her eyes narrowed as if with bitchy rage. Clearly she did not know they were there — know any of them were there. “Come on, baby,” she whispered, “you’re in! you’re in!”

Delicately, Weintraub stepped away. “Furth and April Vaught,” he said, picking up the phrase as if from some old, old memory bank. He turned and studied Craine critically, and shook his head. “So far as I know they never spoke to each other. He knew who she was of course; and of course Furth knew Ira …”

“They’re friends, Professor Furth and Ira?”

“Not precisely. When you meet John Furth you’ll see why. He has enemies and allies, not friends.” He smiled dimly. “But they talked some; they had certain common interests. I remember they once had a long discussion on, so to speak, computer poetry — very heated, both on the same side.” He smiled more brightly, recalling it. “Ira took the position that the ‘experience’ communicated in true poetry is unavailable to the computer. I forget his examples — the remembered anguish of adolescent love, that may have been one of them. Or the parent’s feeling when he watches his sleeping child. Furth was delighted. I think he quite literally hit the desk with his fist, he was so pleased with Ira’s argument.”

Craine stood puffing at his pipe, waiting for more. No more came. “What was it about it that pleased him?” he asked at last.

Professor Weintraub glanced at him, then looked at the floor. “Your question’s more complicated than you realize,” he said. He opened another door, nodding Craine through, then came through himself just in time to catch a blond, sallow-looking man in a light blue frock, a sort of lab coat. “Petersen!” Weintraub called. The man stopped abruptly, and Weintraub went up to him, four quick steps, asking some question Craine didn’t hear. They looked together at the blond man’s clipboard, then Weintraub nodded and the man hurried off in the direction he’d been headed before.