Nobody in the physics faculty common room took note that a singularity had just occurred.
He slipped through the door, entirely undetected, and not a soul glanced his way, as he slid against the wall into the room.
Paul Somnevausky, who always positioned himself strategically near the plate of teatime cookies, was somewhere midway through his process of selection. He was not a sociable physicist, and yet he never missed the daily ceremony of the departmental tea, approaching the event with his own axiom of choice. It was his method to go after only the cookies with colored sprinkles, starting with those the most heavily laden and working his way down. A first-year graduate student, who did not know any better, was trying to speak to him of the scattering of particles, while Somnevausky, solemn with indecision, compared the sprinkles of a rainbowed cookie with one monochromatic blue.
The long, pale, elegant figure of Philippe Ledoute, wearing his habitual black turtleneck despite the heat, was sprawled out on a low leather chair, discoursing to the small cluster of graduate students at his feet in his dissipated but tireless voice on his subject of choice: Wittgenstein and Bohr and "the axiom of the unsayable."
"Bohr's statement that the extent to which an unambiguous meaning can be attributed to such an expression as 'physical reality' cannot of course be deduced from a priori philosophical conceptions but must be founded on a direct appeal to experiments and measurements is essentially isomorphic to Wittgenstein's statement that the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know."
Neither Ledoute nor Somnevausky nor any of the others appeared to see him as he entered the common room, where every day the physicists gathered, in the late afternoon, between the last class and the four-thirty seminar. Undetected, he poured himself a cup of tea and did not disappear but stood against the wall and sipped, and it was only then that Justin looked away from Spencer to see that Samuel Mallach was standing nearby.
For years and years he had taught his classes and then fled to his home. He would have sooner taken a gun to his left temple than taken a step into the faculty lounge, where the physicists gathered in the lull of the late afternoon.
Dietrich Spencer had gotten back only that day from his conference on the West Coast, which had been held at the namesake of the bishop who had so despised the very thought of matter. We are all of us ghosts in Bishop Berkeley's ontology.
"I had not expected it to be such an interesting event. It had promised to be very run-of-the-mill."
There was a story, they could all tell it was coming, and even those arranged around Ledoute gave themselves up to attitudes of more or less appreciative receptivity, everybody marching to Spencer's drum, while Samuel Mallach, against the wall, invisibly sipped his tea, holding the saucer in his right hand and the teacup in his left.
"I was to give one of the two invited talks."
It was an attribute of his, as inseparable from him as his incongruous voice, to point out each indication of his professional high standing. An invited talk is a relative honor, although a negligible one to a man of his stature. And yet nothing else would do than to have it explicitly remarked upon.
"I finished my paper and suddenly, before the first question is even posed, there is a man charging up the aisle, demanding the microphone, which nobody is fool enough to yield him. This, of course, does not deter him in the least. The auditorium where I was speaking was rather large. It looked as though it might have seated five hundred, and it was definitely near capacity. Nonetheless, with only his Mephistophelian energy to amplify his voice, he launches into a denunciation of my lecture.
"It is actually a formal little presentation that he gives, almost sounding preassembled, and the major point of it is that I had viciously and maliciously violated Boltzmann's solution for the arrow of time! I had no idea what he was saying, and quite frankly I felt a tiny bit distressed. I couldn't exactly see what my results had to do with Boltzmann's solution, but when someone is so vociferously denouncing one, it can be slightly difficult to think at all. Apparently, he is a notorious Berkeley crank. I remember only his first name because it is Aristotle, and they tell me he had once been a Berkeley graduate student who had flunked his quals or had withdrawn voluntarily—no one is quite sure—but in any case he suffered some sort of discontinuity and is now a little bit crazy. He surfaces now and then for the sole purpose of formally denouncing a physicist for violating Boltzmann's solution to the arrow of time! He can become, I was told, quite melodramatic, especially after a sufficient number of drinks, on the subject of Ludwig Boltzmann and what he calls Boltzmann's 'fatal vision.' His thesis is that Boltzmann was driven to his suicide by the murderous obtuseness of his fellow physicists, who never grasped his solution to the famous problem. Obviously, Aristotle feels that his genius, too, is going indecently undetected. They told me he only shows up for a physicist he thinks of as a big shot, so that I should take it as a tribute.
"In any case, he is railing against me, and frankly, I'm not certain at this point whether he has a point or not. Some of what he said sounded distressingly as if it might possibly make sense. This is something I've often noticed about lunatics, of whom I have known several: they can sound quite convincing, even compelling, but only for very short periods. Sooner or later, they betray themselves.
"I asked him if he might be a little more concrete, and tell me where, exactly, my mistake was made, and he bellowed out that my calculations are rife with errors, that not an equation has been unfudged. Then, of course, I knew the man for what he was. I knew that Aristotle was a confirmed crackpot ... since it had been Justin Childs who had done all my math for me!"
He got the eruption of laughter that he was after, pounding Justin Childs on the back, and before Justin could even reach him, Samuel Mallach had fled from the room, teacup in hand. Dietrich Spencer turned his head on his powerful neck to watch the swift exit with an expression entirely inscrutable.