The news from Stockholm had thrust a window of the department wide open, and the external world came pouring in.
There were camera crews roaming the hallways, men and women with pens and pads at the ready, cornering physicists to prod from them a punchy line or two on the ultimate significance of the work of the newly immortalized Dietrich Spencer. Justin emerged from his office to collide with a bristlingly beautiful young woman in a tightly cut and bright red suit, its hemline pulse-quickeningly high across her thighs, who glanced up at the nameplate on the door to ask the surprisingly dishy young man whether he was Professor Childs or only a student.
"I'm Professor Childs," he answered her.
"You look so young to be someone so important." She smiled, showing perfect teeth, while at the same time giving the cameraman a little nod, so that a small red light on his handheld video camera blinked on.
"Could you tell me, Professor Childs, whether you agree that Dietrich Spencer's discoveries in physics cast light on the existence of God, as many are saying."
Justin stared down at the stunning young woman, who was nodding up at him with warm encouragement, and he felt correspondingly stunned. The sweet confidence of her nods disposed him reciprocally toward her, and she seemed not so brittle as a moment before, far more limpid and just as beautiful. He wanted very much to answer her in a way that would please her, if only he knew what it was that she was asking.
"God's existence?" he asked her haltingly. "Who's saying that?"
"Well, apparently not you," she answered, her warm smile going out simultaneously with the little red light on the camera, and her face resetting itself. Justin watched her moving off down the hall in the midst of her technical crew, stopping before the door of Ledoute, who popped out instantaneously and proceeded to opine magnificently on cue.
For the most part, the members of the department mildly enjoyed the distractions invading their halls. Nobody, of course, positively reveled in it like Dietrich Spencer himself, who stepped into the world's glare so masterfully that one might have supposed he had been preparing for it his entire life. The systematic charm that he had been practicing within the academic community for years was now turned up a notch or two and equipped with a high beam of flash, in acknowledgment of the less subtle audience that constituted the world at large. If pretty young roving reporters wanted him to wax eloquent on the subject of the big bang and God, then, by God, wax he would, though the cameramen were careful to keep the snapping left fingers out of view.
"In the beginning there was the big bang, a moment of infinite singularity, into which we cannot probe. Our knowledge begins at ten to the minus thirteen seconds after ground zero; only then can we lift the heavy veil and take a peek. All moments before that one are cloaked from our scientific view, and it remains to others to imagine what lies behind the cognitive curtain: whether it is there that God's hand may be invisibly moving."
The man's compressed energy was undeniably erotic, titillatingly telegenic. He managed to project himself, most especially before the camera, as both sage and rogue, and it was all splendidly effective. When he spoke, as he did for an in-depth interview on BBC i, of the 10 to the 29th degrees centigrade theorized to be the temperature of the very young universe, "far hotter than the interior of any star," he somehow insinuated that there was something primally libidinal in the cosmological situation, so that a viewing don at Oxford was motivated to plod over in her creaking men's shoes to her bookcase, there to lay her hand to a reference that Thomas Hobbes had made to the libido sciendi:
"A lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of carnal pleasure."
Quite.
Justin had not caught a direct glimpse of Spencer since the news had broken over them, sweeping the laureate away on the exuberant wave mechanics of fame. There had been champagne bottles laid out for a week at the departmental tea, but Dietrich had had time to make only one tumultuous appearance there, on the very first day that the word had descended from Stockholm. Justin had not been in the faculty common room that afternoon, having immediately gone to the house on Bagatelle Road, and since that day he had kept to himself, teaching his courses and then fleeing the campus.
The closest Justin had come, in fact, to Spencer, in the ten or so days that had passed since the external world had broken through, was to ride up in the elevator one morning with Spencer's secretary Della, who was looking decidedly prettified and smug, like a husband-proud wife, graciously receiving armloads of the bouquets of plaudits on behalf of her surrogate spouse. Her hair was somehow different—perhaps she had not been a redhead before?—and Justin seemed to remember that prior to Spencer's ascent she had worn glasses.
"Some excitement, huh." She had grinned at Justin, when he had (gallingly) failed to say anything at all to her on how the world had been decisively reconfigured.
Justin had nodded numbly, for he had become permanently benumbed, and she had shrugged her shoulders and hurried away as soon as the elevator doors opened, an enemy now forever.
So it was that Justin was quite unprepared when, in the late afternoon of the late autumn, the laureate himself had knocked at the closed door of Justin's small office.
Justin had been standing with his back to the door, staring out of his window at the grand and Gothic architecture laid out beneath him. A television van that had been parked on a little side road was slowly pulling away, and a little farther down the same road a township police car was just vanishing. Chalked up on the blackboard were the equations Justin had been working on when the news had come from Stockholm, with a little note to the cleaning crew, boxed off in the right-hand corner: DO NOT ERASE!
Today he would return to his interrupted work. He felt a subtle easing in his mind's icy stillness, the tentative life beginning once again to flow, promising the fire that was not far off.
It was so nearly his now to possess, his and Dana's and Mallach's. He would return today to the difficult mathematics, would crack it open to reveal the final form within, diaphanously lit and irresistible, so that Dana and her father would be appeased.
He had no other resources to unseat their unreasonable anger. Logic fell deaf on their ears. He would have to leap into the fire for them, to leap like the ancient madman, summoning all he had in him and even more. He was gathering his strength for the task even now, convincing himself that the solution most certainly lay hidden where he suspected it. For so long as he could be certain that the answer was there, then he knew he could count on his own brain to find it. And then they would love him, they would take him back and be at peace, the three as self-contained as before.
Spencer had entered and closed the door quietly behind him. Justin had turned from the window to face him, neither man saying anything. Justin supposed that Dietrich, too, must be waiting, as Della had, for Justin to offer the appropriate approbatory words. Perhaps he ought to congratulate Dietrich for having discovered God?
"I've some bad news, I'm afraid."
Justin had heard those words before, and he knew exactly what they entailed: the demon logic of the counterfactual let loose once again.
He did not think to question how it was that, of all in the department, Dietrich Spencer had known to single him out as the designated receptor of the bad news. He saw again the township police car, just disappearing down the little side road.
It's both of them, he thought. It's both of them, again.
"Samuel Mallach is dead. He shot himself last night. The police have just been here to inform me."
His mind froze around the first sentence only. He registered that Mallach had died, only that. The second sentence did not enter his awareness at all. He automatically assumed it was a car crash, that was the picture on which his mind seized up. Dana had a car, although her father rarely drove with her. He walked to the university to teach his classes and then home again to Bagatelle Road. It took him approximately seventeen minutes each way, walking at a quick clip, his eyes consistently cast down. He had a curious jittery gait, as if a verbal stutter had been transferred to the legs, extra syllables before each step, but still he always managed to move with relative speed, materializing and then vanishing, like a trail of condensed vapor in a Wilson cloud chamber.
"Only him?"
"What?"
"His daughter?"
"That's right. He has a daughter."
— Dana Mallach.
— His daughter, then.
— Yes, his daughter, yes.
"I haven't seen her since she was a child. You know her, of course."
Justin nodded, knowing by the tense of Spencer's verb that she still lived. He accepted this knowledge with no further reaction to it. He knew: Samuel Mallach had died and Dana had not. He did not even think to question the source and scope of Spencer's apparent knowledge that he was linked to the Mallachs.
Spencer was shaking his scarred and massive head slowly, back and forth, on his powerful neck. He turned suddenly to the blackboard.
"Your work with him?"
"Yes."
"I can't understand a thing you've written there."
"No, it's very new."
"It's unspeakable, monstrous."
Dietrich said it with explosive emphasis, so that Justin was momentarily confused, until the idea came to him that it was not his equations that were being denounced, but Mallach's death.
"Was it Dana who was driving?"
"Driving? Driving when?"
"When he died."
"He died in his house. He shot himself in his house. Actually right outside it, in the back."
The words penetrated this time.
"With a gun?"
"Apparently."
"How did he come to have a gun?"
"It seems he owned one, incredible as that seems. It wasn't like Sam to be so practical. Who would ever have believed he even knew how to load it? He didn't even know where the fuse box in his house was located." He shook his head again on his powerfully thick neck. "I would like to speak with her, with Dana Mallach. I can't go to the house. I promised him I'd never set foot in it again."
Spencer stared at Justin for several moments, his eyes boring into Justin's, although Justin could not keep his own from straying to the place of the long, pale scar. Spencer waited several long moments, perhaps giving Justin the chance to ask a question, as a good professor will do when he has said something that demands clarification. When Justin remained silent, Spencer continued.
"I would like to meet with her. I want to speak at the funeral. It's fitting as the chairman of his department, but I have reasons that go beyond that. But I must speak with her first." Again he stared into Justin's eyes. "Ask her if she would come. Bring her to my home. Do you have a car, Justin?"
"No, but Dana does. Dana has a car."
"Just so long as you don't let her drive, Justin. She'll be too shattered to drive herself." It took a few confused moments for Justin to identify the maddeningly familiar noise as the softly snapping fingers of Dietrich's left hand. "I should never have let Carlotta have the wheel that night."
There it was, then, Justin thought: the final verification, almost gratuitous by now. Justin felt as aloof from the empirical proof as Einstein was said to have been when they brought him the data that had been observed during a solar eclipse, showing that starlight is bent when it passes by the sun at precisely the angle predicted by general relativity. Einstein had already known, and so had Justin. The actual eclipse of the sun was unnecessary when it came. He had known, without being told, and known, as well, to keep his knowledge to himself, because Carlotta Mallach, as unworthy as he had always known her in his deepest heart to be, was the only mother that Dana Mallach would ever have.
"I need to know something from you, Justin, before I see her. I need to know if she knows about her mother and me."
"I don't think so. No, I'm almost certain she doesn't."
"But you do. He told you?"
"No. Never."
"Then how?"
"Inference to the best explanation."
Dietrich Spencer smiled grimly.
"You're a good scientist, Justin. As good at empirical inference as at mathematical deduction. I think some sell you short." His smile evaporated, leaving behind only its grimness. "And did your inference to the best explanation include the fact that Carlotta and I had informed Sam that night that she was leaving him? We were going to come back in the morning and collect the little girl. We had just left him, had almost arrived back at my house, when Carlotta suddenly turned furiously against me. It was completely irrational. The entire scene was incoherent, surreal. She made it sound as if, were it not for me, she and Sam would have lived happily ever after. It was, I suppose, her feelings of guilt that were speaking. She suddenly found she couldn't bear the burden of her decision. Carlotta was never a strong person. Behind all her poses, the truth of her was something entirely different. I don't think I had fully realized that until that night."
Dietrich Spencer had kept his eyes fixed on Justin's face. Justin could not guess what it was that the man was asking of him, for he did seem to be asking something of him. It was difficult to hold that gaze, to keep from looking at the frightful scar. It was impossible.
Justin turned away from Dietrich Spencer's fixed gaze. He looked at the blackboard and suddenly walked over to it, picking up a piece of chalk and replacing a minus sign that had inexplicably been rubbed out.