The Compass Rose

The Author of the Acacia Seeds

The New Atlantis

Coming back from my Wilderness Week I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings, and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Long Distance coalburner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose on their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it—he was a dry-looking man with a schoolteacherish way of using his hands—and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”

The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”

“They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic. But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific too.”

“Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown, and because those blue stockings had been good warm ones.

He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the new. You can see that that is happening.”

You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.

“I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar melt.”

He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become inhabitable. But climatic factors will not explain the emergence of the new—or, possibly, very old—continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica, and daydreamed about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward the white land went up in a long silence towards the pole.

Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area. It had been a tiresome vacation. The other women in the dormitory were all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organised sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve, the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification Bureau advertisements. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on, saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorised persons. The Forest Ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,” he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from your very hand,” but I didn’t see any. Perhaps because it was the weekly Watch Those Surplus Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d seen a mountain jay I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who knows. Anyhow it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and practised, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and practising the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.

When I came back from my Antarctic expedition the man was reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in it—nothing at all.

Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more busses to send out to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorised persons, and a big neon sign out front saying “Cold Mountain Commune,” and there were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macrame belts and sand-cast candles and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I took the 4:40 GPARTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble too, so I didn’t reach the downtown transfer point until 8:10, and the busses go on a once-an-hour schedule at eight, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten. When I let myself into the apartment I turned on the lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark, and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.

I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.

It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a burglar had got in somehow while I was away, and died. I opened the door so I could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a little closer to the bed.

The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snoring in his throat, and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows, then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.

He woke up while I was standing there over him with the candle in my hand. He laughed and said still half asleep, “Ah, Psyche! from the regions which are holy land.”

Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him not to be there; and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse. If he died there it wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical Association Hospitals; and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon, since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had walked and hitched home from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He almost fell asleep telling me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of clothes and a bath but I didn’t want to wake him. Besides, I was tired too. We lay side by side and his head was on my arm. I don’t suppose that I have ever been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something wider and darker, more like knowledge, more like the night: joy.

In the morning Simon told me something about the Camp, but not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested. And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to come here.”

“But they let you go free!”

He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle—he had a thick beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp—and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me very little, but not much was necessary.

He had lost about twenty pounds. As he only weighted 140 to start with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.

“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going—to have some place to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. It’s just that my back’s seized up, now.”

When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him, and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what else he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: he makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.

It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just with drugs. They save it mostly for the V.I.P.s. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign' contacts.’ ” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

“Simon, were they… are they cruel, or just righteous?”

He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

“Some of them…” he said at last, mumbling.

Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society.

“Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

“Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand—“some of them, there were men like gold there—”

The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

“What have you been playing?” he asked.

“Forrest, Schubert.”

“With the quartet?”

“Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

“Ah, poor Max.”

“It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counsellors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him goodbye. I went instead and got a black-market doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take after they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it that that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily, and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabelled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”

I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved private-enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

“Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address, and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove that two people are married, if you move now and then, and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws, back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the law just as often then as they do now.

When I got home, the FBI had already been there. The computer at the police precinct where I registered Simon’s address must have flashed it right over to the computer at the FBI building. They had questioned Simon for about an hour, mostly about what he had been doing during the twelve days it took him to get from the Camp to Portland. I suppose they thought he had flown to Peking or something. Having a police record in Walla Walla for hitchhiking helped him establish his story. He told me that one of them had gone to the bathroom. Sure enough I found a bug stuck on the top of the bathroom doorframe. I left it, as we figured it’s really better to leave it when you know you have one, than to take it off and then never be sure they haven’t planted another one you don’t know about. As Simon said, if we felt we had to say something unpatriotic we could always flush the toilet at the same time.

I had a battery radio—there are so many stoppages because of power failures, and days the water has to be boiled, and so on, that you really have to have a radio to save wasting time and dying of typhoid—and he turned it on while I was making supper on the Primus. The six-o’clock All-American Broadcasting Company news announcer announced that peace was at hand in Uruguay, the President’s confidential aide having been seen to smile at a passing blonde as he left the 613th day of the secret negotiations in a villa outside Katmandu. The war in Liberia was going well; the enemy said they had shot down 17 American planes but the Pentagon said we had shot down 22 enemy planes, and the capital city—I forget its name, but it hasn’t been inhabitable for seven years anyway—was on the verge of being recaptured by the forces of freedom. The police action in Arizona was also successful. The Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the massed might of the American Army and Air Force, since their underground supply of small tactical nukes from the Weatherpeople in Los Angeles had been cut off. Then there was an advertisement for Fed-Cred cards, and a commercial for the Supreme Court—“Take your legal troubles to the Nine Wise Men!” Then there was something about why tariffs had gone up, and a report from the stock market which had just closed at over 2000, and a commercial for U.S. Government canned water, with a catchy little tune: “Don’t be sorry when you drink—It’s not as healthy as you think—Don’t you think you really ought to—Drink coo-ool, puu-uure U.S.G. Water?”—with three sopranos in close harmony on the last line. Then, just as the battery began to give out and his voice was dying away into a faraway tiny whisper, the announcer seemed to be saying something about a new continent emerging.

“What was that?”

“I didn’t hear,” Simon said, lying with his eyes shut and his face pale and sweaty. I gave him two aspirins before we ate. He ate little, and fell asleep while I was washing dishes in the bathroom. I had been going to practise, but a viola is fairly wakeful in a one-room apartment. I read for a while instead. It was a bestseller Janet had given me when she left. She thought it was very good, but then she likes Franz Liszt too. I don’t read much since the libraries were closed down, it’s too hard to get books; all you can buy is bestsellers. I don’t remember the title of this one, the cover just said Ninety Million Copies in Print!!! It was about small-town sex life in the last century, the dear old 1970s when there weren’t any problems and life was so simple and nostalgic. The author squeezed all the naughty thrills he could out of the fact that all the main characters were married. I looked at the end and saw that all the married couples shot each other after all their children became schizophrenic hookers, except for one brave pair that divorced and then leapt into bed together with a clear-eyed pair of Government-employed lovers for eight pages of healthy group sex as a brighter future dawned. I went to bed then, too. Simon was hot, but sleeping quietly. His breathing was like the sound of soft waves far away, and I went out to the dark sea on the sound of them.

I used to go out to the dark sea, often, as a child, falling asleep. I had almost forgotten it with my waking mind. As a child all I had to do was stretch out and think, “the dark sea… the dark sea…” and soon enough I’d be there, in the great depths, rocking. But after I grew up it only happened rarely, as a great gift. To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?

Max came the next night. I sat on the toilet lid to practise, with the bathroom door shut. The FBI men on the other end of the bug got a solid half hour of scales and double stops, and then a quite good performance of the Hindemith unaccompanied viola sonata. The bathroom being very small and all hard surfaces, the noise I made was really tremendous. Not a good sound, far too much echo, but the sheer volume was contagious, and I played louder as I went on. The man up above knocked on the floor once; but if I have to listen to the weekly All-American Olympic Games at full blast every Sunday morning from his TV set, then he has to accept Paul Hindemith coming up out of his toilet now and then.

When I got tired I put a big wad of cotton over the bug, and came out of the bathroom half deaf. Simon and Max were on fire. Burning, unconsumed. Simon was scribbling formulae in traction, and Max was pumping his elbows up and down the way he does, like a boxer, and saying, “The e-lec-tron emission…” through his nose, with his eyes narrowed, and his mind evidently going light-years per second faster than his tongue, because he kept beginning over and saying, “The e-lec-tron emis-sion…” and pumping his elbows.

Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange as artists. I never could understand how an audience can sit there and look at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his tongue, or a horn player collecting spit, or a pianist like a black cat strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they saw had anything to do with the music.

I damped the fires with a quart of black-market beer—the legal kind is better, but I never have enough ration stamps for beer, I’m not thirsty enough to go without eating—and gradually Max and Simon cooled down. Max would have stayed talking all night, but I drove him out, because Simon was looking tired.

I put a new battery in the radio and left it playing in the bathroom, and blew out the candle and lay and talked with Simon; he was too excited to sleep. He said that Max had solved the problems that were bothering them before Simon was sent to Camp, and had fitted Simon’s equations to (as Simon put it) the bare facts: which means they have achieved “direct energy conversion.” Ten or twelve people have worked on it at different times since Simon published the theoretical part of it when he was twenty-two. The physicist Ann Jones had pointed out right away that the simplest practical application of the theory would be to build a “sun-tap,” a device for collecting and storing solar energy, only much cheaper and better than the U.S.G. Sola-Heetas that some rich people have on their houses. And it would have been simple only they kept hitting the same snag. Now Max has got around the snag.

I said that Simon published the theory, but that is inaccurate. Of course he’s never been able to publish any of his papers, in print; he’s not a Federal employee and doesn’t have a Government clearance. But it did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy’s-dot, that is, just handwritten or hectographed. It’s an old joke that the FBI arrests everybody with purple fingers, because they have either been hectographing Sammy’s-dots, or they have impetigo.

Anyhow, Simon was on top of the mountain that night. His true joy is in the pure math; but he had been working with Gara and Max and the others in this effort' to materialise the theory for ten years, and a taste of material victory is a good thing, once in a lifetime.

I asked him to explain what the sun tap would mean to the masses, with me as a representative mass. He explained that it means we can tap solar energy for power, using a device that’s easier to build than a jar battery. The efficiency and storage capacity are such that about ten minutes of sunlight will power an apartment complex like ours, heat and lights and elevators and all, for twenty-four hours; and no pollution, particulate or thermal or radioactive. “There isn’t any danger of using up the sun?” I asked. He took it soberly—it was a stupid question, but after all not so long ago people thought there wasn’t any danger of using up the earth—and said no, because we wouldn’t be pulling out energy, as we did when we mined and forested and split atoms, but just using the energy that comes to us anyhow: as the plants, the trees and grass and rosebushes, always have done.“You could call it Flower Power,” he said. He was high, high up on the mountain, ski jumping in the sunlight.

“The State owns us,” he said, “because the corporative State has a monopoly on power sources, and there’s not enough power to go round. But now, anybody could build a generator on their roof that would furnish enough power to light a city.”

I looked out the window at the dark city.

“We could completely decentralise industry and agriculture. Technology could serve life instead of serving capital. We could each run our own life. Power is power!… The State is a machine. We could unplug the machine, now. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. But that’s true only when there’s a price on power. When groups can keep the power to themselves; when they can use physical power-to in order to exert spiritual power-over; when might makes right. But if power is free? If everybody is equally mighty? Then everybody’s got to find a better way of showing that he’s right…”

“That’s what Mr. Nobel thought when he invented dynamite,” I said. “Peace on earth.”

He slid down the sunlit slope a couple of thousand feet and stopped beside me in a spray of snow, smiling. “Skull at the banquet,” he said, “finger writing on the wall. Be still! Look, don’t you see the sun shining on the Pentagon, all the roofs are off, the sun shines at last into the corridors of power… And they shrivel up, they wither away. The green grass grows through the carpets of the Oval Room, the Hotline is disconnected for nonpayment of the bill. The first thing we’ll do is build an electrified fence outside the electrified fence around the White House. The inner one prevents unauthorised persons from getting in. The outer one will prevent authorised persons from getting out…”

Of course he was bitter. Not many people come out of prison sweet.

But it was cruel, to be shown this great hope, and to know that there was no hope for it. He did know that. He knew it right along. He knew that there was no mountain, that he was skiing on the wind.

On Saturday night they held a scientific congress in our room. Clara and Max came, of course, and the engineer Phil Drum, and three others who had worked on the sun tap. Phil Drum was very pleased with himself because he had actually built one of the things, a solar cell, and brought it along. I don’t think it had occurred to either Max or Simon to build one. Once they knew it could be done, they were satisfied and wanted to get on with something else. But Phil unwrapped his baby with a lot of flourish, and people made remarks like, “Mr. Watson, will you come here a minute,” and “Hey, Wilbur, you’re off the ground!” and “I say, nasty mould you’ve got there, Alec, why don’t you throw it out?” and “Ugh, ugh, burns, burns, wow, ow,” the latter from Max, who does look a little Pre-Mousterian. Phil explained that he had exposed the cell for one minute at four in the afternoon up in Washington Park during a light rain. The lights were back on on the West Side since Thursday, so we could test it without being conspicuous.

We turned off the lights, after Phil had wired the tablelamp cord to the cell. He turned on the lamp switch. The bulb came on, about twice as bright as before, at its full 40 watts—city power of course was never full strength. We all looked at it. It was a dime-store table lamp with a metallised gold base and a white plasticloth shade.

“Brighter than a thousand suns,” Simon murmured from the bed.

“Could it be,” said Clara Edmonds, “that we physicists have known sin—and have come out the other side?”

“It really wouldn’t be any good at all for making bombs with,” Max said dreamily.

“Bombs,” Phil Drum said with scorn. “Bombs are obsolete. Don’t you realise that we could move a mountain with this kind of power? I mean pick up Mount Hood, move it, and set it down. We could thaw Antarctica, we could freeze the Congo. We could sink a continent. ‘Give me a fulcrum and I’ll move the world.’ Well, Archimedes, you’ve got your fulcrum. The sun.”

“Christ,” Simon said, “the radio, Belle!”

The bathroom door was shut and I had put cotton over the bug, but he was right; if they were going to go ahead at this rate there had better be some added static. And though I liked watching their faces in the clear light of the lamp—they all had good, interesting faces, well worn, like the handles of wooden tools or the rocks in a running stream—I did not much want to listen to them talk tonight. Not because I wasn’t a scientist; that made no difference. And not because I disagreed or disapproved or disbelieved anything they said. Only because it grieved me terribly, their talking. Because they couldn’t rejoice aloud over a job done and a discovery made, but had to hide there and whisper about it. Because they couldn’t go out into the sun.

I went into the bathroom with my viola and sat on the toilet lid and did a long set of sautillé exercises. Then I tried to work at the Forrest trio, but it was too assertive. I played the solo part from Harold in Italy, which is beautiful, but wasn’t quite the right mood either. They were still going strong in the other room. I began to improvise.

After a few minutes in E minor the light over the shaving mirror began to flicker and dim; then it died. Another outage. The table lamp in the other room did not go out, being connected with the sun, not with the twenty-three atomic fission plants that power the Greater Portland Area. Within two seconds somebody had switched it off too, so that we shouldn’t be the only window in the West Hills left alight; and I could hear them rooting for candles and rattling matches. I went on improvising in the dark. Without light, when you couldn’t see all the hard shiny surfaces of things, the sound seemed softer and less muddled. I went on, and it began to shape up. All the laws of harmonics sang together when the bow came down. The strings of the viola were the cords of my own voice, tightened by sorrow, tuned to the pitch of joy. The melody created itself out of air and energy; it raised up the valleys, and the mountains and hills were made low, and the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. And the music went out to the dark sea and sang in the darkness, over the abyss.

When I came out they were all sitting there and none of them was talking. Max had been crying. I could see little candle flames in the tears around his eyes. Simon lay fiat on the bed in the shadows, his eyes closed. Phil Drum sat hunched over, holding the solar cell in his hands.

I loosened the pegs, and put the bow and the viola in the case, and cleared my throat. It was embarrassing. I finally said, “I’m sorry.”

One of the women spoke: Rose Abramski, a private student of Simon’s, a big shy woman who could hardly speak at all unless it was in mathematical symbols. “I saw it,” she said. “I saw it. I saw the white towers, and the water streaming down their sides, and running back down to the sea. And the sunlight shining in the streets, after ten thousand years of darkness.”

“I heard them,” Simon said, very low, from the shadow. “I heard their voices.”

“Oh, Christ! Stop it!” Max cried out, and got up and went blundering out into the unlit hall, without his coat. We heard him running down the stairs.“Phil,” said Simon, lying there, “could we raise up the white towers, with our lever and our fulcrum?”

After a long silence Phil Drum answered, “We have the power to do it.”

“What else do we need?” Simon said. “What else do we need, besides power?”

Nobody answered him.

He was with me for twelve days. On January 28th the crats came from the Bureau of Health Education and Welfare and said that since he was receiving unemployment compensation while suffering from an untreated illness, the Government must look after him and restore him to health, because health is the inalienable right of the citizens of a democracy. He refused to sign the consent forms, so the chief Health Officer signed them. He refused to get up, so two of the policemen pulled him up off the bed. He started to try to fight them. The chief Health Officer pulled his gun and said that if he continued to struggle he would shoot him for resisting welfare, and arrest me for conspiracy to defraud the Government. The man who was holding my arms behind my back said they could always arrest me for unreported pregnancy with in-tent to form a nuclear family. At that Simon stopped trying to get free. It was really all he was trying to do, not to fight them, just to get his arms free. He looked at me, and they took him out.

He is in the Federal Hospital in Salem. I have not been able to find out whether he is in the regular hospital or the mental wards.

It was on the radio again yesterday, about the rising land masses in the South Atlantic and the Western Pacific. At Max’s the other night I saw a TV special explaining about geophysical stresses, and subsidence, and faults. The U.S. Geodetic Service is doing a lot of advertising around town; the commonest one is a big billboard that says “It’s Not Our Fault!” with a picture of a beaver pointing to a schematic map that shows how even if Oregon has a major earthquake and subsidence as California did last month, it will not affect Portland, or only the western suburbs perhaps. The news also said that they plan to halt the tidal waves in Florida by dropping nuclear bombs where Miami was. Then they will re-attach Florida to the mainland with landfill. They are already advertising real estate for housing developments on the landfill. The President is staying at the Mile High White House in Aspen, Colorado. I don’t think it will do him much good. Houseboats down on the Willamette are selling for $500,000. There are no trains or busses running south from Portland, because all the highways were badly damaged by the tremors and landslides last week, so I will have to see if I can get to Salem on foot. I still have the rucksack I bought for the Mount Hood Wilderness Week. I got some dry lima beans and raisins with my Federal Fair Share Super Value Green Stamp minimal ration book for February—it took the whole book—and Phil Drum made me a tiny camp stove powered with the solar cell. I didn’t want to take the Primus, it’s too bulky, and I did want to be able to carry the viola. Max gave me a half pint of brandy. When the brandy is gone I expect I will stuff this notebook into the bottle and put the cap on tight and leave it on a hillside somewhere between here and Salem. I like to think of it being lifted up little by little by the water, and rocking, and going out to the dark sea.

Schrodinger’s Cat

As things appear to be coming to some sort of climax, I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast.

On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart. She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together and, by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, “Well what’s wrong with a person trying to express themselves?” The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. “Great legs,” the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. “My wife has great legs.”

A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow tom with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers above their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.

Where?

Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing, but almost anything is worth telling. In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam’s Disease. It is incurable except by total decapitation. I even like to dream when asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven’t wasted seven or eight hours just lying there. Now here I am, lying, here. Hard at it.

Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and cheeping, like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves: rather like fine chicken wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled.

So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving. This grief is with me still. I fear it is part of me, like foot or loin or eye, or may even be myself: for I seem to have no other self, nothing further, nothing that lies outside the borders of grief.

Yet I don’t know what I grieve for: my wife? my husband? my children, or myself? I can’t remember. Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note, and the harmonic rings along the mandolin strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes. Some note keeps playing that makes me want to cry; but what for? I am not certain.

The yellow cat, who may have belonged to the couple that broke up, is dreaming. His paws twitch now and then, and once he makes a small, suppressed remark with his mouth shut. I wonder what a cat dreams of, and to whom he was speaking just then. Cats seldom waste words. They are quiet beasts. They keep their counsel, they reflect. They reflect all day, and at night their eyes reflect. Overbred Siamese cats may be as noisy as little dogs, and then people say, “They’re talking,” but the noise is farther from speech than is the deep silence of the hound or the tabby. All this cat can say is meow, but maybe in his silences he will suggest to me what it is that I have lost, what I am grieving for. I have a feeling that he knows. That’s why he came here. Cats look out for Number One.

It was getting awfully hot. I mean, you could touch less and less. The stove burners, for instance. Now I know that stove burners always used to get hot; that was their final cause, they existed in order to get hot. But they began to get hot without having been turned on. Electric units or gas rings, there they’d be when you came into the kitchen for breakfast, all four of them glaring away, the air above them shaking like clear jelly with the heat waves. It did no good to turn them off, because they weren’t on in the first place. Besides, the knobs and dials were also hot, uncomfortable to the touch.

Some people tried hard to cool them off. The favorite technique was to turn them on. It worked sometimes, but you could not count on it. Others investigated the phenomenon, tried to get at the root of it, the cause. They were probably the most frightened ones, but man is most human at his most frightened. In the face of the hot stove burners they acted with exemplary coolness. They studied, they observed. They were like the fellow in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, who has clapped his hands over his face in horror as the devils drag him down to Hell—but only over one eye. The other eye is busy looking. It’s all he can do, but he does it. He observes. Indeed, one wonders if Hell would exist, if he did not look at it. However, neither he, nor the people I am talking about, had enough time left to do much about it. And then finally of course there were the people who did not try to do or think anything about it at all.

When the water came out of the cold-water taps hot one morning, however, even people who had blamed it all on the Democrats began to feel a more profound unease. Before long, forks and pencils and wrenches were too hot to handle without gloves; and cars were really terrible. It was like opening the door of an oven going full blast, to open the door of your car. And by then, other people almost scorched your fingers off. A kiss was like a branding iron. Your child’s hair flowed along your hand like fire.

Here, as I said, it is cooler; and, as a matter of fact, this animal is cool. A real cool cat. No wonder it’s pleasant to pet his fur. Also he moves slowly, at least for the most part, which is all the slowness one can reasonably expect of a cat. He hasn’t that frenetic quality most creatures acquired—all they did was ZAP and gone. They lacked presence. I suppose birds always tended to be that way, but even the hummingbird used to halt for a second in the very center of his metabolic frenzy, and hang, still as a hub, present, above the fuchsias—then gone again, but you knew something was there besides the blurring brightness. But it got so that even robins and pigeons, the heavy impudent birds, were a blur; and as for swallows, they cracked the sound barrier. You knew of swallows only by the small, curved sonic booms that looped about the eaves of old houses in the evening.

Worms shot like subway trains through the dirt of gardens, among the writhing roots of roses.

You could scarcely lay a hand on children, by then: too fast to catch, too hot to hold. They grew up before your eyes.

But then, maybe that’s always been true.

I was interrupted by the cat, who woke and said meow once, then jumped down from my lap and leaned against my legs diligently. This is a cat who knows how to get fed. He also knows how to jump. There was a lazy fluidity to his leap, as if gravity affected him less than it does other creatures. As a matter of fact there were some localised cases, just before I left, of the failure of gravity; but this quality in the cat’s leap was something quite else. I am not yet in such a state of confusion that I can be alarmed by grace. Indeed, I found it reassuring. While I was opening a can of sardines, a person arrived.

Hearing the knock, I thought it might be the mailman. I miss mail very much, so I hurried to the door and said, “Is it the mail?”

A voice replied, “Yah!” I opened the door. He came in, almost pushing me aside in his haste. He dumped down an enormous knapsack he had been carrying, straightened up, massaged his shoulders, and said, “Wow!”

“How did you get here?”

He stared at me and repeated, “How?”

At this my thoughts concerning human and animal speech recurred to me, and I decided that this was probably not a man, but a small dog. (Large dogs seldom go yah, wow, how, unless it is appropriate to do so.)

“Come on, fella,” I coaxed him. “Come, come on, that’s a boy, good doggie!” I opened a can of pork and beans for him at once, for he looked half starved. He ate voraciously, gulping and lapping. When it was gone he said “Wow!” several times. I was just about to scratch him behind the ears when he stiffened, his hackles bristling, and growled deep in his throat. He had noticed the cat

The cat had noticed him some time before, without interest, and was now sitting on a copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier washing sardine oil off its whiskers.

“Wow!” the dog, whom I had thought of calling Rover, barked. “Wow! Do you know what that is? That’s Schrodinger’s cat!”

“No it’s not, not any more; it’s my cat,” I said, unreasonably offended.

“Oh, well, Schrodinger’s dead, of course, but it’s his cat. I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of it. Erwin Schrodinger, the great physicist, you know. Oh, wow! To think of finding it here!”

The cat looked coldly at him for a moment, and began to wash its left shoulder with negligent energy. An almost religious expression had come into Rover’s face. “It was meant,” he said in a low, impressive tone. “Yah. It was meant. It can’t be a mere coincidence. It’s too improbable. Me, with the box; you, with the cat; to meet—here—now.” He looked up at me, his eyes shining with happy fervor. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he said. “I’ll get the box set up right away.” And he started to tear open his huge knapsack.

While the cat washed its front paws, Rover unpacked. While the cat washed its tail and belly, regions hard to reach gracefully, Rover put together what he had unpacked, a complex task. When he and the cat finished their operations simultaneously and looked at me, I was impressed. They had come out even, to the very second. Indeed it seemed that something more than chance was involved. I hoped it was not myself.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a protuberance on the outside of the box. I did not ask what the box was as it was quite clearly a box.

“The gun,” Rover said with excited pride.

“The gun?”

“To shoot the cat.”

“To shoot the cat?”

“Or to not shoot the cat. Depending on the photon.”

“The photon?”

“Yah! It’s Schrodinger’s great Gedankenexperiment You see, there’s a little emitter here. At Zero Time, five seconds after the lid of the box is closed, it will emit one photon. The photon will strike a half-silvered mirror. The quantum mechanical probability of the photon passing through the mirror is exactly one half, isn’t it? So! If the photon passes through, the trigger will be activated and the gun will fire. If the photon is deflected, the trigger will not be activated and the gun will not fire. Now, you put the cat in. The cat is in the box. You close the lid. You go away! You stay away! What happens?” Rover’s eyes were bright.

“The cat gets hungry?”

“The cat gets shot—or not shot,” he said, seizing my arm, though not, fortunately, in his teeth. “But the gun is silent, perfectly silent. The box is soundproof. There is no way to know whether or not the cat has been shot, until you lift the lid of the box. There is no way! Do you see how central this is to the whole of quantum theory? Before Zero Time the whole system, on the quantum level or on our level, is nice and simple. But after Zero Time the whole system can be represented only by a linear combination of two waves. We cannot predict the behavior of the photon, and thus, once it has behaved, we cannot predict the state of the system it has determined. We cannot predict it! God plays dice with the world! So it is beautifully demonstrated that if you desire certainty, any certainty, you must create it yourself!”

“How?”

“By lifting the lid of the box, of course,” Rover said, looking at me with sudden disappointment, perhaps a touch of suspicion, like a Baptist who finds he has been talking church matters not to another Baptist as he thought, but a Methodist, or even, God forbid, an Episcopalian. “To find out whether the cat is dead or not.”

“Do you mean,” I said carefully, “that until you lift the lid of the box, the cat has neither been shot nor not been shot?”

“Yah!” Rover said, radiant with relief, welcoming me back to the fold. “Or maybe, you know, both.”

“But why does opening the box and looking reduce the system back to one probability, either live cat or dead cat? Why don’t we get included in the system when we lift the lid of the box?”

There was a pause. “How?” Rover barked, distrustfully.

“Well, we would involve ourselves in the system, you see, the superposition of two waves. There’s no reason why it should only exist inside an open box, is there? So when we came to look, there we would be, you and I, both looking at a live cat, and both looking at a dead cat. You see?”

A dark cloud lowered on Rover’s eyes and brow. He barked twice in a subdued, harsh voice, and walked away. With his back turned to me he said in a firm, sad tone, “You must not complicate the issue. It is complicated enough.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. Turning, he spoke pleadingly. “Listen. It’s all we have—the box. Truly it is. The box. And the cat. And they’re here. The box, the cat, at last. Put the cat in the box. Will you? Will you let me put the cat in the box?”

“No,” I said, shocked.

“Please. Please. Just for a minute. Just for half a minute! Please let me put the cat in the box!”

“Why?”

“I can’t stand this terrible uncertainty,” he said, and burst into tears. I stood some while indecisive. Though I felt sorry for the poor son of a bitch, I was about to tell him, gently, No; when a curious thing happened. The cat walked over to the box, sniffed around it, lifted his tail and sprayed a corner to mark his territory, and then lightly, with that marvellous fluid ease, leapt into it. His yellow tail just flicked the edge of the lid as he jumped, and it closed, falling into place with a soft, decisive click.

“The cat is in the box,” I said.

“The cat is in the box,” Rover repeated in a whisper, falling to his knees. “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

There was silence then: deep silence. We both gazed, I afoot, Rover kneeling, at the box. No sound. Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing would ever happen, until we lifted the lid of the box.

“Like Pandora,” I said in a weak whisper. I could not quite recall Pandora’s legend. She had let all the plagues and evils out of the box, of course, but there had been something else, too. After all the devils were let loose, something quite different, quite unexpected, had been left. What had it been? Hope? A dead cat? I could not remember.

Impatience welled up in me. I turned on Rover, glaring. He returned the look with expressive brown eyes. You can’t tell me dogs haven’t got souls.

“Just exactly what are you trying to prove?” I demanded.

“That the cat will be dead, or not dead,” he murmured submissively. “Certainty. All I want is certainty. To know for sure that God does play dice with the world.”

I looked at him for a while with fascinated incredulity. “Whether he does, or doesn’t,” I said, “do you think he’s going to leave you a note about it in the box?” I went to the box, and with a rather dramatic gesture, flung the lid back. Rover staggered up from his knees, gasping, to look. The cat was, of course, not there.

Rover neither barked, nor fainted, nor cursed, nor wept. He really took it very well.

“Where is the cat?” he asked at last

“Where is the box?”

“Here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Here is now.”

“We used to think so,” I said, “but really we should use larger boxes.”

He gazed about him in mute bewilderment, and did not flinch even when the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of a box, letting in the unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars. He had just time to breathe, “Oh, wow!”

I have identified the note that keeps sounding. I checked it on the mandolin before the glue melted. It is the note A, the one that drove the composer Schumann mad. It is a beautiful, clear tone, much clearer now that the stars are visible. I shall miss the cat. I wonder if he found what it was we lost?

Two Delays on the Northern Line