Superstition

42

She walked with Roger to a bar just off the campus where they'd been a couple of times before. Sam said he'd meet her back at her apartment as soon as he could-probably an hour, maybe two. Roger had offered to accompany her and wait, but she'd said she needed people around her, some semblance of normal life. And a drink.

All the tables were busy, so they sat on stools at the bar.

“It's strange,” she said, “I can't even cry. I'm not in shock, it's worse-something in me just accepts it.”

Roger took a long sip of his scotch and water. “I liked Pete a lot.” There was a tremor in his voice that he suppressed by clearing his throat. “Nice kid. Smart. Straightforward.”

They were silent awhile. Then Joanna said, “What are we going to do?”

When he didn't offer a response, she essayed one herself. “Maybe if we just walked away, gave up trying to destroy him, forgot about him…”

Roger gave a short, faintly sardonic laugh. “Forgetting about Adam Wyatt sounds as easy as not thinking about a rhinoceros for five minutes.”

Again they fell silent amid the busy early evening life going on around them.

“So,” she said eventually, “we just sit here waiting to see who's next. Is that all we can do?”

He drained his glass and signaled the bartender. “What I'm doing is having another drink. You?”

She shook her head.

“The trouble was,” he said, clinking the fresh ice in his newly refilled glass, “we wanted proof.”

She turned to look at him. “Proof?” she asked, waiting for him to expand on the remark.

“We invented somebody who never existed. There's nothing new in that-writers, artists, children do it all the time. But they don't pretend it's any more than that. We did. We looked for proof that this Adam Wyatt we'd dreamed up was real. We made him talk to us, prove he was real.”

“That,” she said, “was the point of the whole experiment.”

He took another long sip of his drink, then kept the glass in his hand, moving it slightly to emphasize a word here and there.

“Every scientist worth his salt knows that if you look hard enough for a proof of something, or even just evidence, you'll find it. For example, we cannot put our hands on our hearts and swear that we're observing subatomic structure in high-energy accelerators and not creating it by looking for it. We start with equations and theories suggesting that certain particles may, sometimes we even say must, exist. Then, because we'll never see these particles-they're not seeable — we look for their tracks in the collision chambers. And sooner or later we see them-like footprints in the snow that people who believe in the yeti say must have been left by the yeti, so that proves the yeti exists.”

He took another long sip of his drink, then looked at her. “We like to pretend that what we observe determines our theory, but it doesn't, not really. Einstein said that in reality it's the theory that decides what we observe. So what are we doing, we scientists? Are we chipping away at a block of stone and discovering some fossil of truth hidden inside it? Or are we carving it like a sculptor? Is the shape we end up with something that's been in the stone all along, or has it come from our imagination?”

He tipped his head back and finished his drink, then looked thoughtfully at his empty glass. “And anyway, what's the difference?”

He caught the bartender's eye for another refill, and glanced at her. “How about you-ready yet?”

“No, thanks.”

She watched as he ordered a double, then she said, “Tell me something, Roger…I've never really understood why you got into all this in the first place, or why you agreed to let your name be used.”

He sipped his fresh drink thoughtfully. “Something interesting has happened to scientists this century. We started out as the champions of reason and logic. We believed that if we just worked diligently enough, observed and measured carefully enough, nature would in the end be forced to yield up her innermost secrets. And they would be logical and rational. They would make perfect sense, because the universe, we believed, made sense. Anything that went against that belief was dismissed as mere superstition. Well, the trouble started right there. The more we learned about nature through the application of this process of reason and logic, the more we found ourselves being forced to abandon the idea that nature makes sense at all.”

She became aware that he was watching her as he paused, checking that she was listening and not growing impatient as she had the other night after Drew and Barry died.

“The idea that we can uncover the truth and find out why things are the way they are goes against all the accumulated evidence of science, of which there's now a great deal. It's not that we can't see what's going on. We can observe and measure with extraordinary precision-enough to calculate the distance between New York and Los Angeles to the thickness of a human hair. That's an example that Dick Feynman liked to use. He also said, repeatedly, that nature was absurd. Even though we know how it behaves, and can predict its behavior accurately enough to use it and accomplish some mightily impressive things with it, we have no idea why it behaves that way. It doesn't make any sense. We know that this happens if we do that. But the idea that there's a logical reason for it turns out to be the biggest superstition of all. In fact it looks more and more like just a childish emotional need to believe that our world has order and meaning and that we're secure in it.”

She thought about this for a while, then said, “I suppose that's why Sam says everybody's superstitious.”

Roger gave a wry smile. “He's right. When we cross our fingers or touch wood, we're reaching out for someplace where things happen the way they're supposed to, where there's order and rules you can play by-the way scientists thought the world was until they looked at it more closely.”

He took another long sip of his drink. Joanna noticed that he'd almost finished it already, his third since they arrived. His thought process seemed perfectly lucid, but he was starting to slur his words a little.

“So what are scientists?” he asked, giving the question a rhetorical flourish. “Surveyors? Stocktakers and clerks? Measuring and recording-ingeniously, I grant you-but nothing more?”

He threw back his head to finish his drink, then banged his glass down on the bar a little harder than necessary. “I suppose,” he said, swiveling to look at her full on, “I suppose that's the reason I signed on. To find out if Sam had anything new to offer. And also because you have terrific legs.”

He flashed her a rakish smile, his spirits revived by the alcohol. “Now,” he said, “how about that other drink that you've been putting off?” He looked around for the bartender.

“I have to go. And Roger, I don't want to sound like your mother, but I don't think you should have much more…”

“There I'm afraid I must disagree with you…Barman…!”

“All right, if you're determined to get drunk, I'll stay.”

“If that's blackmail, you win. Stay right where you are.”

The bartender appeared, smiling, awaiting Roger's order.

“Another large scotch and water, if you will. And…?”

He looked questioningly at Joanna.

“No, really, nothing.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, God, I really have to go. Look, Roger, at least let me arrange for a car-on the magazine-to take you back to Princeton.”

“Whatever you say, my dear. And don't worry-you're not a bit like my mother.”

She took out her phone and called the car service with which the magazine had a permanent account. If Taylor Freestone questioned the expenditure later, she'd pay for the damn thing herself, but she didn't imagine for a second that he would.

“There'll be a car outside in twenty minutes,” she said when she'd finished, and slipped off her stool. “I don't care how blasted you get now, at least I know you'll get back safely-all right?”

“All right, my dear,” he said, planting a kiss on her cheek.

She gave him a hug. “Take care, Roger. See you soon.”

“You bet!”

When she reached the door she paused and looked back. He was watching her and waved cheerfully across the crowded room.

She blew him a kiss, and stepped out into the night.