IV

He saw her the first time reflected in a mirror.

— I thought you weren't real.

— Not real?

— I thought you were a painting.

She was staring into a mirror that hung on the landing of the staircase of her house. He had been coming down those stairs, slowly groping his way down the length of their extravagance. Her image was in the mirror and across it light was spilling from a high window, so that he had been struck wide open to confusion, not having even known that she existed.

He had come here that day, to the beautiful house on Bagatelle Road, with a set purpose, to determine whether or not Samuel Mallach was a real thing, correlating to the author of the paper that had been his revelation. And if he were the Samuel Mallach whose hidden variables had accomplished the impossible, he meant to propose, with all the presumption of which he had once been so capable, a kind of collaboration.

It was an audacious plan, considering that he had completed his doctoral degree only the spring before. That had been accomplished in Paradise, California.

Paradise. He remembered that name. And he remembered that Paradise, California, had possessed hothouse beauties by the dozens, striding around with their tennis rackets swinging from their tanned arms, pedaling slowly by on bicycles. They wore pale pink and pale green and pale yellow, and their shining hair was kept from obscuring their bright visions of the world (for to what other visions might such girls be given?) with matching headbands.

The headbands most especially impressed and moved him, for they brought to mind vague notions of the invisible fingers of intentionality that had chosen these bright bits of ribbon, pointing to pathways of cerebration that were so mysteriously remote they might have been traveled by the Ra-worshipping Egyptians.

They made a different light in the Paradise day, those glinting girls, throwing it off as they drifted by. They made a light that struck an imbalance and wild awe wherever it hit, and awed, he thought it might have been that ancient light that was the sight streaming down from the sun god's one eye, although these were sun children of a different sort, of California, daughters of the Paradisian pharaohs, and even so, they were a revelation, in their canted beams and matching headbands.

Either there had not been girls quite like these back in Olympia, New York, or, living there with his two parents, in their perfect solid, he had simply failed to notice.

The girls of Paradise had been a revelation, but the physicists of Paradise had been something less. He had not liked what they said of matter. He had not liked what they said of the world. They had taken the difficulties in the fundamental theory of matter as a license to distort the nature of the real, so that Justin could not help but perceive their views as acts of ontological sabotage: maligning the objectivity of matter and unraveling the rationality of the world.

His sense of betrayal had been cosmic in those days, it had been something awful, the demon logic of the counterfactual chattering hideously through every waking hour of his days and nights.

He had such thoughts as these:

If only he, their only son, had accompanied them that December night, his indifference to their music might have hastened them along. Or perhaps it was rather that they had actually hurried away because Justin was waiting for them at home and alone. Poor Justin, one might have said to the other. Poor Justin, we've abandoned him on his first visit home. Either one of his parents might have said this, the other agreeing— Justin abandoned!—so that, had he but gone with them, they would have stayed the perhaps three or four minutes more that would have given them the rest of their lives.

In short, innumerable factors had conspired to bring about the initial conditions that had determined their deaths on Route 61 in Olympia, New York, and among them had been Justin's absence: a necessary though insufficient constituent of a causal antecedent that was sufficient though not necessary.

He had returned to Paradise Tech four days late after winter break. His roommate, Zeno Wicks, had told him that another day and he would have assumed that Justin was dead. This was most probably a joke on Zeno's part. In Justin's considered judgment, at that time and even later, it was a joke, and as such not really an appropriate invitation for a revelation on the order that was Justin's to give. So, quite logically, he said nothing, waiting for a better moment. He would tell Zeno or someone else, though most probably Zeno, when the moment was better, that he had used those four days to bury his parents. But for the next three and a half years that he and Zeno had lived together, there was never a moment better than that one that had come and gone. The further the event receded from the present moment, the more remote the chance of speaking of it became, though he dreamed of it, dreamed day and night, most especially that a fairy girl would turn to him and speak with the voice of an answering angel, and he would tell her and she would know.

Physics was all that remained from the time before. When Justin thought of physics, then the world seemed like the sort of place that he might know, a universe corresponding to the faculties of his own mind, the logos of his thought joined to the logos of the world. Therefore, Justin thought about physics, and earned a significant reputation, even in a place like Paradise Tech, though there was no one to care all that much when the time came that he was declared the best of his year, and then when the time came that he was declared much better than that.

But Justin had not liked what the Paradisians said about matter, he had not liked what they said of the world: the reckless spin they put on the physics of matter in motion. Olympia had not prepared him, the Olympians had confused his expectations.

There had been no question but that Justin would go to the local college, for he was only sixteen, had barely turned sixteen, when he graduated high school, and very young even for his age, too callow to venture out on his own, to live apart from Cynthia and Jake, none of them even considered it. He lived at home, ate almost every meal at home, a plate of deviled eggs to see him through the long nights of study. He was able to walk to the campus, a long steep climb up from the snuggled town to the modest college laid out sparkling on the hill.

He loved the walk best of all in the winter, through Olympiad endless show of snow. A cause for grumbling among many of the Olympians, for him it was intoxicating, the smell of snow in early morning. At night, in warmer months, after he had finished with his books, and his mother, dreamy-eyed behind the black-framed glasses, had washed and dried and put away the dinner things, the three of them, his father, too, or sometimes just the two of them, would go outside and lie on the untidied lawn, reticulating stars.

He had luxuriated in the palace of his mother's knowledge.

— What do you study?

— Beauty.

— What shall I study?

— The same. In Greek, the word for the universe and for beauty are one: cosmos.

He had been allowed to take his science and math courses at the college even while he was still in high school, his last two years in Ionia County High School, so it was a natural transition to go to Olympia College. It hardly felt like much of a change at all, only the classes got better, the teachers knew more, even though the emphasis at Olympia College had been on practical subjects like agriculture and engineering, and the three-man physics department justified its existence by teaching service courses to students from other departments. Justin had exhausted all the math and physics courses offered by the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, which might have left him up a creek without a paddle, as the chairman of the department, Professor Krebs, had put it.

"We've got to deliver you a paddle, son," said Josiah Krebs, who had no Ph.D., though he did have chickens, six or seven Rhode Island Reds, and a little daughter who looked like a fairy sprite and played her cello each year at the faculty Christmas party. The Rhode Island Reds laid eggs that were brown and very tasty, and he made gifts of them to his favorite faculty wives, among them the charmingly starry-eyed Cynthia Childs, who would devil them for Justin.

Professor Krebs devised a plan of independent study for Justin, and also arranged for him to be able to complete all of the requirements for graduation in three years, so that Justin went off to prestigious Paradise Tech when he had just barely turned nineteen, not altogether prepared for life among the non-Olympians, for the ways in which they slighted reality, for the ways in which they were stupid as only the really smart can be stupid, to subvert the objectivity of matter and unravel the rationality of the world. That was not the sort of thing he had ever once heard from affably agrarian, arguably absurd Professor Krebs, who had taught him quantum mechanics from Merzbacher's text with a certain show of suspicion.

—It's so much cock-a-doodle-do!

Yes, that surely qualifies as suspicion. He had a scrawny neck, Professor Cock-A-Doodle-Do, that he craned upward when he opined, showing the ovoid bulge of his Adam's apple. He was chairman of the Olympian physics department, but he was most proud of all of the powers of his laying hens and of his little girl. At four or five years old she was playing Mozart on a miniature cello.

"You can't really say what it's all about, now can you?" he had demanded of Justin, staring at Schrödinger's equation for the evolution of the wave function, symbolized by psi. Erwin Schrodinger, who had won his Nobel in 1933, had demonstrated that the wave function, a precisely defined mathematical object, completely specifies the state of any quantum mechanical system. So perhaps the most likely answer to Professor Krebs's querulously put question What's it all about? is that quantum mechanics is about the behavior of wave functions. But it had also been Schrodinger who had convincingly argued that because the wave function is stubbornly smeared out over configuration space, the abstract space of all possible configurations of the particles, until the precise moment of its collapse, it therefore resists all attempts to connect up with a world recognizably like our own. Faced with this intractability, formally known as the "measurement problem," many of the luminaries of physics, from Bohr and Heisenberg on down, took the radical step of denying the existence of an independently existing physical world altogether, and, surprisingly, got away with it. In other, i.e. nonscientific, contexts, the difference between those who are committed to an independently existing reality and those who are not is roughly correlated with the distinction between the sane and the psychotic.

"Stop admiring the pretty equations and answer my question," Professor Krebs had scolded. His tone of voice was of the sort to be correlated with a pursing mouth, but since his mouth was virtually lipless, it was difficult to tell. "You just can't say what it's all about, Justin Childs, I know you can't, because I've never heard anyone who could. Not so I've ever been able to understand it, anyway. It works just great as an instrument, it's a gimcrackery piece of machinery for manufacturing predictions. But so far as what it's saying about the world, at least so far as I can make it out, it's so much cock-a-doodle-do."

All the other graduate students at Paradise Tech had come from places far fancier than Olympia. Zeno had gone to the Micomicon Institute of Technology, and the difference between that school and Olympia became obvious to Justin pretty quickly. It was obvious that Zeno had never heard anything like Josiah Krebs declaring quantum mechanics so much cock-a-doodle-do. All during his first semester, Justin had felt like some sort of science hick, like a country cousin who couldn't tell spin up from spin down. It was only after he had returned from burying his two parents in the cemetery at the foot of the hill of Olympia College, almost directly situated on the other side from the steep road he used to climb in early morning to reach the campus, that he had come to realize the treachery of the slicks, elaborating the most convoluted theories in which to speak their nonsense, to say, for example, that measurement creates reality, so that it is sim ply meaningless to ask what's going on when no measurement is taking place.

Justin's father, too, had employed the strong potency of that word, "meaningless," but he had done so responsibly, turning it against only the fabrications of the metaphysicians and not against the world itself, not against the realities of matter, space, and time, and the laws of their causality.

In Paradise, Justin heard such notions as the entire conception of an objective reality, existing though unobserved and unmeasured, has been invalidated by the discoveries of quantum mechanics, so that Justin was enraged. He took the part of reality and was correspondingly incensed. All nonsense is an offense to truth, and this, fumed Justin, was nonsense so extravagant that it did not even succeed in being wrong. Men who ought to have known better had committed stupidity and offended reality, and Justin's outrage knew no bounds, could know no bounds. It was an outrage flowing outward, the vectors of attention turned away from the self and overflowing him altogether, his own personal rage blurring into the rage of a reality that had been slighted, that had been scorned, so that Justin Childs was spread out onto the real in a superposition of unappeasable wrath.

He had not liked what they said about matter. He had not liked what they said of the world.

There had been a great man who had produced an argument claiming to show the impossibility of any hidden variables to fill in the gaps in intelligibility and restore to matter its substance and independent reality—in short its materiality. The other great men had applauded and not bothered to look too closely for flaws. Physicists, in the name of some madness that had eluded him, were suddenly much taken with the idea that matter be irrational. Saul, en route to Damascus, had seen a vision and changed his name.

Pauli. Wolfgang Pauli.

Wolfgang Pauli had said that the quantum theory, complete as it was and wanting nothing more, had revealed the irrational in matter, and Bohr (of Copenhagen) and Heisenberg (of a very bad Berlin) had chattered in parallel lines that met, if not in infinity, in utter obscurity, and von Neumann signed in with a suspect proof, purporting to prove the impossibility of hidden variables.

Was it the baleful influence of the powerful mythologizer in Vienna, throwing the tangle of his myths over language and over mind? Physics must cope not only with the complexity of matter, but also its complexes?

Someday, when glaring Paradise, California, relentlessly sunny, was in the past, Justin planned to think more deeply on these matters, planned to see his way beyond the glare and into the clear. For the time being, his dissertation problem left him precious little time to think, but someday soon he would have the luxury of thinking on these more fundamental matters.

He had missed four days of classes, and had been forced, ever after, to work single-mindedly to make up for all the loss. No one ever missed classes at Paradise Tech. He was conscious of those four days for the rest of his years there, for the rest of his years.

Justin had, in accordance with the physics k la mode, to manipulate the formulas and give no thought to what they might mean. He had done this well, had arrived at some mathematically beautiful results, for his affinity with beauty was strong, because he came to beauty by way of his mother.

— What do you study?

— Beauty.

— What shall I study?

— The same.

His results had impressed the right heads, if for all the wrong reasons, and had secured him a post back east as a junior member at a most important place.

He might never have discovered Mallach's astonishments at all, if not, paradoxically, for his roommate. Zeno Wicks was studying solid-state physics, and had shown no appetite for bottom-feeding on questions of foundations. Zeno had, for the most part, been content to use quantum mechanics as they had all been taught and not to think about what it might actually be saying. However, Zeno's dissertation advisor was Nathan Martin, a Paradisian of the very top tier, not only a first-class researcher, but also reputed to be perhaps the most engaging lecturer in the entire world of physics, and Nathan Martin had a knowledgeable wife, at least for a short while, whom Zeno had met several times when he had visited their home. It had been Mrs. Martin who had mentioned the work of Mallach to Zeno, while her husband, asserting his conjugal rights, had vigorously scoffed. And though the scoffing had come from the very first tier, still Zeno had been moved by Mrs. Martin to seek out the Mallach paper for himself.

Even after Mrs. Nathan Martin was Mrs. Nathan Martin no more, the marriage packet suddenly collapsing and Nathan Martin remarrying with a speed concomitant with his power and reputation, still Zeno had tried to get through the paper. Justin had seen his roommate frowning over it now and again until finally letting it go, and it had gradually sunk lower in the debris lapping round their beds. A few weeks after Justin had completed his dissertation and been offered his prestigious post, he had rather idly fished it out and started to read.

Justin had read Mallach's paper with something like amazement, for in it he saw clearly that the impossible had been done: an objective model for quantum mechanics.

Mallach had formulated a hidden-variable version of quanturn physics that had accomplished wonders for the material world, saved it from the mathemysticians, the kabbalists of Copenhagen, waving their hands and intoning their obfuscations, turning matter into a miserable ghost of itself, suspended in the not-quite-here-not-quite-there of quantum paradox, in which mess they reveled. Mallach's work, Mallachian mechanics as Justin would eventually dub it (though not without demurs from Mallach himself), was the very countercharm to break the vicious spell. (Mallach had not, in the least, objected to the adjectification of his name, but to the word "mechanics." "Call it better 'Mallachian nonmechanics,'" he had said, with his daughter, Dana, nodding approval.)

In Mallach's model, behind the vast thicket of thorny mathematics that spring up in these nethermost regions of physics, there awaited, like some fairy-tale princess, the electron, with real position and real momentum, everything real and existing even when unobserved, as well it should be, and it was this, that is the electron, that was the true value answering to "hidden variable." It was ironic that what should turn out to lie behind the mystery-mongering epithet of "hidden" was the most obvious choice of all, the electron, anointed now with existence.

Everything about Samuel Mallach's paper had been designed to astonish Justin, even the author's university affiliation, which was at the very place to which Justin was himself destined to go in less than six weeks' time. Or, in any case, Mallach had been present at the designated university when he had published his astonishing paper, which was, admittedly, already several decades old.

He must no longer be here, very possibly no longer alive, Justin had concluded after he himself had been teaching at the university for over a month and had heard no mention of Samuel Mallach's name, nor ever once caught a glimpse of him, not having realized that, on his very first day, Mallach had glided noiselessly past him in the department hallway. Justin had been standing there talking with his new chairman, Dietrich Spencer, an impatient man and high-energy physicist, who was, by common report, awaiting with high impatience the immortality distributed in Stockholm.

"Here, look—will you please?—while I explain the few formalities to you," Spencer had demanded of Justin, while at the same time snapping the fingers of his left hand three or four times at his side, a very characteristic gesture, though Justin, of course, had no way yet of knowing this, of knowing that the faculty meetings that Spencer chaired were almost continuously accompanied by this soft, insistent snapping.

It had startled Justin, this peremptory gesture of the fingers. He had thought that he must somehow have managed to anger Dietrich Spencer, and the dim alarm that the man had already set off in him was intensified to the point of sensible discomfort.

Dietrich Spencer seemed a physical energy that was barely compressed into a mass. His head was shaped like a bullet, just as hairless, and his neck and shoulders were powerful and broad. He was a contemporary of Mallach's, the two hired by the department in the very same year, a startling fact to contemplate, for Spencer certainly looked to be a man in the fullness of his prime, and if he wasn't, then it was slightly terrifying to imagine what the prime itself must have been like.

The most alarming feature of all was a long, thin scar that disfigured the left side of Spencer's head, crossing the high brow and ending right above his ear. Graduate students could be induced to believe that it had its origins in a duel, fought, so some embellished, in a suitably Gothic courtyard of Heidelberg. Justin always had difficulty keeping his eye from straying to its spot, that long thin scar, the skin of it unnaturally white.

Spencer had some sort of accent, impossible for Justin to place, though Heidelberg was often mentioned. His accent seemed to meander across the globe, in a voice that was strangely high-pitched for a man of his exaggerated physicality. His inadequate voice was an anomaly mildly reassuring, slightly neutralizing the effect of his compressed energy, the soft suggestion of violence embedded in his scar, in his methodical charm and subdued snapping.

Neither man, neither Spencer nor Mallach, had yielded recognition of the other, and the result had been that Justin, too, had barely noticed the wraithlike progress down the hall, swift and noiseless as it was. Like an electron's manifestation in a cloud chamber, a trail of vapor that appears and is gone, he barely seemed to register, and one was not altogether certain he'd been there at all. They were, in any case, Professor Spencer and Justin, absorbed in more immediate matters—Justin's teaching assignment, the daily teas that he was strongly urged to attend as frequently as possible—than the fugacious trail of a solitary physicist.

A few weeks later, Justin glimpsed the fact of Mallach. He heard someone call out the name, and he turned quickly to catch sight of the hastily receding figure just before it vanished.

Justin considered the possibility, although remote, of two Samuel Mallachs, both of them physicists.

One had published an astonishing paper some several decades before, which Justin had read and reread with something like amazement. The author of the paper had liberated matter from the jittery existence his colleagues had assigned it, of the flitting in and flitting out perhaps suitable for such things as memories and afterimages and ... other dubieties, but not, let us grant, for matter.

And then there was this one, Mallach in the wearied flesh, who wandered the corridors of the department more ghostly than a ghost, avoiding everyone but the undergraduates, who largely avoided him.

He would not meet one's gaze. One could not bend that ray to meet one's own.

He was a burned-out star, they said (when they bothered to speak of him at all), although when he was little older than the twenty-three that Justin then was, Albert Einstein had confided in several colleagues that he regarded Samuel Mallach as his heir apparent. Now, in his black and cold contraction, Mallach instructed undergraduates, and even among these, the department's least favored.

The death of a star is a spectacular event, the most violent in all the cosmos, but Mallach seemed harmless enough (if one were not an undergraduate), mixing talk of photons with songs of Blake, bouncing back and forth between an anguished diffidence and intimations of awful transcendence.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded, with a lunatic's precision. And even so Justin had it in mind to get the truest strain of poetry from him. He and Justin: there was a complementarity there, although that was a word that Justin, on principle, eschewed, for it was a word that had been erected into a mystery religion for physicists. "Complementarity" was the shibboleth of the metaphysics mob, first assembled by Niels Bohr, founder of the "Copenhagen interpretation" and high priest of the quantum occult that had bedarkened the closing years of Einstein. "Complementarity" was the word by which the old Bohr breathed the viral germ of metaphysics into the sacred body of science and pockmarked suffering matter with hideous antinomies.

Metaphysics had broken out like a plague in physics' house. Mallach was, in his own way, as infected with the bug as the old Bohr, but his physics emerged nonetheless miraculously undiseased. He had some access more immediate. He felt the physics within himself, within the muscles of his own body. He told Justin this. He showed him. He danced for him once the movements of light in the two-slit experiment, the experiment that seems to lead paradoxically to the conclusion that light is like both wave and particle and that had been a spark igniting the conceptual explosion that became quantum physics. Mallach had danced away the paradox and Justin had not known whether to laugh or applaud, for the dance was absurd, and the dance was the truth.

Together, he and Justin, complementarily joined, might become the physicist necessary to perform the final reckoning; solve the formidable problem of merging the immiscibles of relativity and quantum truths; in short, show Mallachian mechanics to be Lorentz invariant, yes, and in the showing leap like mad Empedocles into the pouring fire and emerge ... divine.

Justin, after all, possessed the mathematical pyrotechnics; this was acknowledged. This was the talent that had brought him, young as he was, to the attention of the luminous department. There were few physicists who could wield the fire of higher math better than he. Therein lay his singularity of mind.

But Mallach? There was no one, Justin knew this even if others did not, who possessed physical intuitions to compare with his. It was an uncanny process by which he invaded the être intime of matter. It was not mathematical at all, but some quite different form of imagination, more immediate than math. Perhaps he and Justin, together, might clear the remaining hurdle into the dazzle of that last problem's truth, like the ancient who had leaped into the lava.

So smoldering with expectation, Justin had approached the man as he went drifting by in the corridor not far from Spencer's office suite. The door to the outer office was open so that Spencer's thin voice, engorged now on anger, issued out into the hall. He was berating his two secretaries for their "mischief," a sardonic choice of word; it would be difficult to imagine two less mischievous sorts than Della and Joyce.

"Professor Mallach."

He had whirled around, startled into interaction, his face formally composed around a minimalist smile.

"Professor Mallach, I want to introduce myself to you, if I may. I'm Justin Childs."

"Are you one of my students, Mr. Childs?"

"I'm on the faculty here."

"Forgive me. I hadn't been informed. It is Professor Childs, then. Forgive me, forgive me." His voice was soft and halting, with a pronunciation as formal as his smile. "My rudeness was entirely unintended. And what is it that I can do for you, Professor Childs?"

Though he had looked taken aback when the unknown Childs had declared his wish to speak with him on physics, Mallach had quickly agreed to see him, in his home on Bagatelle Road, for he taught his classes and then fled the campus.

"Of course, I would be only too happy to discuss physics with you," though he frowned, and the look in his eyes declared that he was absolutely at a loss. "Come to my home, why don't you? I'm always at home, except when I teach my classes. And you will forgive me for not having known who you are, Professor Childs. I'm out of touch with the affairs of the department."

Mallach had met him at the door. Justin had rung the bell with its melodious ring, and the older physicist had answered the summons, gracious though bewildered, and then had led Justin up the grandeur of the swirling stairs to the small cluttered room that served as Mallach's study. He had books and papers, heaped one upon another. He was always searching through his random heaps, unable to lay his hand on the reference he knew to be there, somewhere concealed in the chaos, mumbling his bafflement aloud—where, my God, where!—though on the few occasions when his daughter tried to induce some order, he grew frantic and sent her away.

There was no other chair there but his own, so that when Mallach asked Justin, please, to take a seat, he had no choice but to remain upright, struck open to wide confusion.

The two of them were standing face-to-face amid the clutter of that study, a disorder that seemed to Justin to work, in some strange way, a process of detachment, removing the room from the interior of the house, which otherwise had the static stateliness of a museum.

A few minutes more of this face-off and Mallach went out to fetch another chair. It was an extremely large house, of whose total number of rooms, Justin, neither then nor ever, had a clear idea, and he quite justifiably wondered whether there might not possibly exist, in one of those ten or twenty or thirty others, two chairs on which two physicists might sit and discuss their science.

In any case, Mallach returned toting a large upholstered chair, which he squeezed inside the crowded space, and the two scientists were now well set up to discuss the nature of the universe, only they did not, so that all that Justin could do, struck open, was to wonder why Mallach had agreed to see him at all.

It seemed to Justin that Mallach was not acquainted with his own work, that he was ill informed on what he had done, which had been, of course, the impossible. At every word Mallach spoke, his mumbly voice barely crossing the threshold of audibility, Justin was shocked anew. The little that was audible was shockingly askew.

Mallach had provided a model for what von Neumann and the others, who sneered at the "reality dogma," had said they had proved impossible. His hidden variables had broken the spell of subjectivity that physicists were trying to cast over the nature of matter, for in Mallach's model, the particles are real things and really exist, with determined positions and trajectories, their velocities expressed by the "guiding equation" in terms of the wave function, the entire configuration in this way evolving in a deterministic motion choreographed by the wave function, which is symbolized by psi.

The little that Mallach was mumbling seemed unintelligible. Justin listened to Mallach discussing the meaning of the wave function, and it was an elaborate lesson in the bizarre.

"I have been thinking recently that perhaps the wave function is more a verb than a noun. Then there would be no such thing as the wave function, and so no such problem as its collapse. The collapse of the wave function would be only a pseudoproblem made up out of syntactical errors."

Justin stared at the mumbling man in stunned dumbfoundment. He wondered: Is this some sort of test? Am I meant to cry out in the sacred name of sound reason and the existence of the material world?

"Perhaps alternatively," Mallach was saying in his faltering manner, "what we learn from the wave function is nothing of the system but only something of the systematizer, just as dream descriptions are only revelatory of the dreamer."

Each query that Justin sent out was lost in the foam Mallach churned up in its wake. Justin spoke, he thought, quite clearly, but Mallach gave him such baffled looks that Justin wondered if the man had lost his hearing and was not yet fluent at reading lips, so little did Justin's words affect the frothy progress, until Justin finally gleaned the truth, and it was this:

Mallach's work, having been declared impossible, had passed unnoticed among men, and now Mallach himself had entirely forgotten it. Justin could barely fathom how that could be, but it seemed that Mallach had lost the memory of his own physics. He had forgotten the illuminations of his own paper securing an objective model for quantum mechanics, barely remembered having published it at all.

"In your formulation, the collapse of the wave function comes about as a consequence strictly of Schrödinger's equation and your own guiding equation. There's no need for artificially invoking any special status for observation."

"I have been thinking that perhaps the Bard ought to be paraphrased to read: We are such dreams as stuff is made of. You see, Professor Childs, then we could assert that stuff comes from the collapse of the dream."

Mallach removed his gaze suddenly from the window out of which he had been staring and looked directly at his visitor, so that Justin, for the first time, took in the physical presence of the man, took in the features of the ruined and handsome face: long and thin, the forehead furrowed and cheeks deeply creased; the nose also narrow and finely formed, except toward its end, where it took an extravagant dip downward toward the long, mournful line of the mouth. His eyebrows were unruly, unwinding coils of stark white hairs embedded in the black and gray, and beneath the anarchy of brows the dark eyes held the intrinsically sorrowful look that comes from being heavily hooded. It is a fact, probably of no significance, that a disproportionate number of men of genuine genius have had such hooded eyes, and these two continued to gaze inquisitively into Justin's own, so that Justin again considered whether he might possibly be the subject of a subtly devised exam. Yes, perhaps it was an advanced form of a test, after all.

"There's no place in your model for metaphors of dreams," he said with slow deliberation, carefully holding Mallach's gaze. "There's stark lucidity, the electron's there. It's all too lucid for metaphors and dreams."

Mallach had continued to stare at him, his smile still formally polite, though his foot had begun quietly to tap out a rhythm of impatience.

"My guiding equation?"

"Yes."

"It is my guiding equation?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean "

"Yes. Why? Have you replaced that with some further formulation?"

Mallach did not answer. From this point on, he said barely another word.

The discussion appeared to do nothing so much as bore him. Properties of matter and energy, of space and of time? The intricate dance of waves and the particles of light?

He seemed impatiently indifferent. His long, thin legs, like those of an improbably colored tropical bird, were crossed, one over the other at the wasted knees, the right elbow was poised on these, and atop the pile the head rested glumly in the cupping right palm.

The supporting foot was tapping distractingly, a little more loudly than before. He had the face of an ascetic after a long penitential fast. His expression, as Justin spoke, suggested that his present visitor was yet one more penance.

He did not meet Justin's gaze again, but looked slightly aslant of him, sending his long sight back out the window.

What was the open book he had placed facedown on his desk? Justin tried to read the title, while also attempting to sketch for Mallach his own promising contributions to his ideas, the logical consequences he saw unfolding from the implicating order that Mallach had shaped.

Justin broached the formidable problem. If Mallach had no more thoughts left in him to give to the sweet possibilities of peer approbation, Justin would gladly make up the lack. What every genuine thinker—every genuine man, in fact—most craves is praise, though the thinker, with more delicate indirection, calls it "recognition."

Mallach was really no different, underneath it all, from anyone else. What, after all, had driven him so near the icy breath of madness (and was he not still mad?) but the enmassed indifference of his peers? Excluded by illogic, the cruel edge in the cold a permanent fixture.

He may be mad, Justin thought, but I'll still get the physics from him.

The head tinkerers, to whom Mallach had been forced to submit in his sadness gone berserk, had been, perhaps, a little too zealous in deracinating the madness, for they had uprooted the genius as well. Or perhaps it was the sadness itself that had sent the memory of his physics into hiding. He was so agreeably content to teach his Physics for Poets because he had some dark idea he'd find his answers there, that hidden away in some symbol-sodden sonnet was the something essential gone astray.

Only Justin, it seemed, still retained the memory of the hidden-variable model, knew that it was possible, knew that it was true. Someone might have been tempted to take advantage of the situation.

Mallach barely heard Justin out that day. He did not even offer to see him down, a violation of the good manners that were all but involuntary to him. But his patience had been visibly worn away by the young man's fearsome tenacity. His foot had audibly tapped out his unrest, and the look in his eyes had declared he was at a loss. Had he said it aloud?

"I do not know what it is you want from me. I cannot fathom what it is you are after. Why don't you go and speak to my daughter? I have a daughter, you know."

Justin had not known.

Mallach's farewell had been hurried and included not a hint of an au revoir. Even before Justin had left the room, Mallach had taken up the book whose reading the visit had clearly interrupted. It was not even a book of physics. It was, as Justin finally saw, the poetry of Yeats.

The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth.

Justin was disgusted. To the mind he then inhabited, a physicist who had forsaken physics was a prophet hiding his face from the one true God. Justin was (he is) an orphan. He knew (he knows) the orphaned state: excluded, forsaken, sick, sick for home, forever sick for a home that will never be again. Still, he did not yet grasp the nature of Mallachian despair.

In fact, Mallach then had seemed the most fortunate of men to Justin, to have accomplished a reconfiguring of reality around his hidden variables.

To reconfigure reality: it is the half of what makes a life decently significant. The other half is the praise of others. Why had Mallach, having secured the half, given up so soon, capitulated to the kabbalists of Copenhagen, turned away from configuring reality to stare instead at pretty words, at fluff of a nonmarshmallow variety?

The love-tales wrought with silken thread.