Chicago
July 1933
“Like, suppose I’m Momentum and you’re Position,” Dick was saying. “Or I’m Energy and you’re Time.”
“Position . . . Time . . . why do I always have to be the boring one?”
That shut him up: something of an achievement.
“Okay . . .” he began, playing for time.
“It’s all right,” she assured him, “momentum and energy are good quantities for you.”
His concerns eased. “Well then! As I was sayin’—though it’s a lot easier to say with noncommutative algebra—tryin’ to peg one of us all alone just don’t work as good as treating us like a complementary pair.”
The sun had found the western skyline during Bohr’s talk, and a Dust Bowl crepuscule was now adding its profound colors to the neon spike of the Havoline Thermometer (79 degrees) and the iridescent-paint train derailment of the fair at large. Ahead of them the soda fountain was a horizontal slit of sanitary white light, now extending all the way from Indiana to Wisconsin, stippled with the high-energy glow of germicidal lamps.
“If you stood still, like the statue gal—”
“Talking about Position again?”
“Yeah, then I’m bouncing around all over the place. And likewise if you show up at a certain time for a date—”
“Who said anything about a date?”
“Settle down, sweetie, this is just a Gedankenexperiment.”
“I know what it is,” she said ambiguously.
“Anyway, if we know everything about Time, we know nothing about Energy.”
“So if I’m to know anything about you, Dick, I need to be as mysterious as possible?”
“Why, yes, that’s exactly right!” he exclaimed, then added, weakly because too late, “And vicey-versey.”
She allowed him to buy her a root-beer float; and true to his theme, as soon as she fixed her position on a stool at the soda fountain, he began fidgeting, frequently catapulting himself, with a vigorous pelvic thrust, from a stool to prowl up and down the counter scavenging straws, towels, saltshakers, and other objects useful in diagramming atomic structure and modeling incident wavefronts. The only way she could get him to sit still was to stand up and move around herself, for example to the ladies’, which caused him to settle on one of three or four nearby stools he’d been laying claim to at various moments in his perambulatory flirtation-cum-physics-seminar.
“This is quantum seating,” he shouted when she came back from freshening up, “and that is classical.” He pointed to a booth along the wall, framed between benches newly upholstered in Walgreens-red stuff fresh from the pleather tanneries of Naugatuck and redolent of synthetic chemistry. “On a bench you can choose any position you want and snuggle up next to your sweetheart like those two lovebirds back there in the corner. But here you have to sit on one stool or another, they’re bolted to the floor, and they keep you in separate orbitals.”
“If you are suggesting that we move to a booth, that is fine, as long as I can sit across from you.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it!” he assured her too hastily. “We can stay here in the quantum section and the Pauli exclusion principle will keep us from occupying the same space.” Probably meant to be reassuring, this remark led to an awkward silence. That was fine with Dawn, who was beginning to feel a bit overstimulated. She sucked on her straw and watched him sliding the tip of his index finger around in a puddle of spilled water on the zinc counter. He was, she realized, doing science. At first she thought he might be drawing more of his math symbols. His finger was too restless for that, though. It would noodle about in one area and then shoot across the counter, drawing a trail of water in its wake, striking smaller outlying pools, shattering or merging them according to the whims of the surface tension that held them together. Another girl might have pouted over his having forgotten she was there. The man in him had forgotten his date and the boy had forgotten his banana split. But she enjoyed the respite and the opportunity to watch him. It wasn’t just that Dick wanted to get to first, second, and third base with her as soon as he could. He most certainly did want that. But he also just liked being with a girl. He needed the steady complement of his crazy energy and veering momentum.
It was a peculiar kind of flirtation. Back in the auditorium, when he’d understood that she’d spied his notebook, he’d been embarrassed. But she had not recoiled, which had emboldened him, and led him on to further gambits.
She was not used to just sitting there being the girl. Her exploits of last summer, on polo fields and urban battlegrounds, had obliged her to act more in the role of lone, dusty Amazon, more Bonnie Parker than Fay Wray, and she expected that there’d be more of that in her future. Her height, peculiar looks, and most of all the extreme irregularities in her personal background meant that chances for soda-fountain courtship of this wholesome and conventional style would be rare in her life, occasioned only when she met a boy as weird as Dick, which happened just about never. So she sipped it slowly through a straw rather than tossing it back.
His eyes fixed on the purple glow of a germicidal lamp. “Thing is that when transitions happen, energy gets emitted, or absorbed,” he said. He slid off his stool and moved to one farther down the bar. “I just soaked up energy, now I’m in a higher state.”
The soda jerk, squirming a towel around the inside of a parfait glass, eyed Dick curiously, then looked at Dawn. “Your date soaks up any more energy, I’ll buy you a Pepsi.”
“Won’t happen,” Dick said, “’cause I can emit radiation and jump back down to the lower orbital.” He sat next to Dawn and glared at the soda jerk, who was twice his size.
“The Bohr atom,” Dawn said, “that’s what you’re getting at.”
“See? If the great man had just come here instead of that auditorium with the paintings of the cows, he coulda explained it easy, just like you.”
“It’s old science. Even I know about it.”
“The ultraviolet catastrophe,” Dick said, his eye wandering back to the lamp. “There’s mercury in that tube. The filament excites the electrons. Mercury’s a big, heavy nucleus, the orbitals are way out in high-energy land—when an electron drops down a few notches,” and his eye traced a little jump from one stool to another, “the light that comes out is high energy. High enough to kill things. Like germs.”
“Why doesn’t it kill us?”
“It just kills stuff on the outside, that it can reach. Stuff that grows back.”
“Like skin?” Her mother had died of melanoma.
“Like skin. Your cornea. Right now it’s killing cells in my retinas.”
“Let’s go somewhere else.”
They walked up the Midway bathed in nonlethal wavelengths from a fairyland of neon tubes, painted bulbs, and gel-tinted spotlights. Dawn had been around enough that she was inured to its particularity, as if every cell in her retinas had been fried, but Dick was new to it, and continually distracted. In spite of this they had something approximating a real conversation. Dick was not from Brooklyn, as she’d guessed, but Far Rockaway, which was technically a part of Queens—though he seemed to feel that this was about as meaningful as saying it was in North America. He was here with his mom and dad and his kid sister, Joanie. They’d loaded up the family car and found a way off of Long Island and joined in with the Chicago-bound torrent of fair-going motorists undeterred by the gloomy slanders of Greyhound ticket clerks. Just now the rest of the family was cooling their heels at a nearby hotel, giving Dick an evening to do as he pleased.
“Well, thank you for spending it with me,” she said.
“I was going to spend it with Niels Bohr,” he returned injudiciously; then, recovering, “but you’re prettier—and he just wanted to talk philosophy.”
“Where do you draw the line between science and philosophy anyhow? I think that’s what he was trying to get at.”
“Okay, yeah. But I mean he wanted to say something that could be written up in the Trib without any equations.” And it was quite clear how he felt about science without equations. “Millikan was there tonight. Compton. Levi-Civita came all the way from Italy—and he oughtn’t to go back, if he knows what’s good for him.”
“I don’t know them.”
“Neither do I, to be honest,” Dick admitted. “I mean, I haven’t read all of their papers yet. But I have an idea what they do. Levi-Civita helps Einstein get his math right. Millikan: local talent, but runs Caltech now. Nobel Prize. First guy to call cosmic rays cosmic. Compton: also local, also Nobel, argues with Millikan about where those cosmic rays come from.”
“The cosmos, surely?”
“Yeah, but why and how? That’s why these guys are forever going up in friggin’ balloons.”