Special Deliverance

2

The faculty club was on the top floor of the Student Union. The entire outer wall was a series of plate-glass windows looking out over a placid, well-tended little lake hemmed in by birch and pine.

Lansing and Andy sat at one of the tables next to the wall.

Spaulding lifted his glass and looked over it, speculatively, at Lansing.

“You know,” he said, “I have been thinking the last few days how fortunate it would be if there should be visited upon us another medieval plague such as wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. Or another world war or even a second biblical flood — anything that would force us to start over once again, to erase some of the mistakes that we have made in the last thousand years or so, giving us the opportunity to arrive at some new social and economic principles. A chance to escape from mediocrity, the chance to organize ourselves more sanely. The work-and-wage system has become obsolete, it defeats itself, and still we cling to it…”

“Don’t you think,” Lansing suggested mildly, “that the methods you suggest might prove rather drastic?”

Not meaning to argue by saying it. No one argued with Andy; he simply overrode anyone who tried. He rumbled on and on, in a voice that was just short of a monotone, marshaling his thoughts and cataloguing them, spreading them out for one to see, as one might fan out a deck of playing cards.

Not wanting to argue, not intending to, but entering into the spirit of the game, which required that at certain intervals Andy’s victim or victims murmur some appropriate response.

“One of these days,” said Andy, “we will suddenly realize — I have no thought how such a realization will come about — but we’ll realize that our human effort so far is a futile effort because it is being pushed in the wrong direction. For centuries we have sought for knowledge, pursuing it in the name of reason, in the same reasonable manner as the ancient alchemists pursued their search for a method that would transform base metals into gold. We may find that all this knowledge is a dead end, that beyond a certain point all meaning ceases. In astrophysics we seem to be nearing that point. In a few years more, all the old and solid theories about space and time may collapse to nothing, leaving us standing in the rubble of shattered theories that we then will know are worthless and always have been worthless. There may then exist no reason to make further study of the universe. We may find that there are, in actuality, no universal laws, that the universe may operate on pure randomness, or worse. All this frantic study, all this pursuit of knowledge, not only about the universe but other things as well, has come about because we seek some advantage in it. But let us ask ourselves if we have the right to seek advantage. Basically we may have no right to expect a thing from the universe.”

Lansing played the game. “You seem, this afternoon,” he said, “to be more pessimistic than is your usual style.”

“I am not the first,” said Andy, “to indulge in this brand of pessimism, although mine is pitched from a slightly different viewpoint. There was a school of thinkers, some years ago, who advanced a similar argument. That was at a time when the cosmologists were convinced that we existed in a finite universe. At the moment the cosmological viewpoint is not that rigid. Right now we are undecided what kind of universe we’re in. It may be finite, it may be infinite; no one really knows. It all depends on how much matter there may be in the universe, and estimates of the matter present fluctuate from year to year, if not from month to month. But that’s neither here nor there. At the time, some years ago, when the conviction of a finite universe still obtained, the theory then was that scientific knowledge, based on a finite universe, must itself be finite. That somewhere there was a boundary to the universe and therefore a boundary to knowledge. There was only so much to be learned, and once we learned that much, that was the end of it. If knowledge was advancing and accumulating, doubling every fifteen years, as was estimated at the time, then it was said that it would not take long, perhaps a few centuries at the most, to reach a point at which the limiting factors of a finite universe would call a halt to any further accumulation of knowledge. The men of that day who supported this kind of thinking went so far as to conjure up exponential curves by which they professed to show at what point scientific and technological knowledge would finally reach an end.”

“But you say,” said Lansing, “that a finite universe no longer is an accepted fact — that it may be infinite.”

“You miss the point,” Andy rumbled. “I am not talking about the finiteness or infiniteness of the universe. I simply used it as an example to refute your charge of pessimism on my part. I was trying to explain that under other situations there were those who at times had voiced their own brands of pessimism.

“What I said to start with was that it would be a blessing should we be forced to undergo some catastrophic event that would cause us to change our thinking and to seek another way of life. For we are running down a dead-end street, and, what is more, we are running at full tilt. When we reach the dead end, we are going to pile up. Then we will come crawling, back down that dead-end street, asking ourselves if there had not been a better way to do it. My point is that now, before we hit that dead-end, we should stop right now and ask ourselves that question…”

Andy kept on rumbling, but now Lansing blanked the rumbling out, hearing it only as a continuous mumble without words.

And this was the man, he thought, to whom he had meant to suggest a weekend hike. If he were to suggest it, more than likely Andy would agree, for this weekend his wife was in Michigan for a visit to her parents. On the hike, most probably, Andy would not be able to keep up the barrage of words and argument such as the barrage in which he was now engaged, but he’d talk; he’d talk unendingly, he would never cease his talk. On a hike an ordinary man would enjoy at least a modicum of peace and quiet, but such would not be the case with Andy. For Andy there was no such thing as peace and quiet; there was only roiling thought.

Lansing had thought, as well, that he might ask Alice Anderson to spend the weekend with him, but that had its drawbacks, too. On the last several occasions he had been with her, it had seemed he could detect in her eyes a glint of marital expectation, and that, should it come to a head, could be as disastrous as Andy’s nonstop talking. So scratch the both of them, he thought. He still could take a drive out into the hills. Or he could hole up in his apartment with the fire, the music and the reading. Perhaps, as well, there were a number of other ways in which to find enjoyment in the weekend. He let Andy’s words come in again. “Have you ever given any thought,” Andy was asking, “to historic crisis points?”

“I don’t believe I ever have,” said Lansing. “History is replete with them,” Andy told him. “And upon them, the sum of them, rests the sort of world we have today. It has occurred to me, at times, that there may be a number of alternate worlds…”

“I’m sure of it,” said Lansing, not caring any longer. His friend’s flight into fantasy had left him far behind. Beyond the window, the lake lay half in shadow; evening was closing in. Staring out the window at the lake, Lansing sensed a wrongness. Without knowing what it was, he knew that something had changed. Then slowly it came to him what it was: Andy had stopped talking.

He turned his headland stared at his friend across the table. Andy was grinning at him. “I got an idea,” he said. “Yes?”

“With Mabel gone visiting her folks, why don’t you and I plan something for tomorrow? I know where I can get a couple of football tickets.”

“Sorry,” Lansing said. “I’m all tied up.”