The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth 18

When we got into Dr. Breed’s inner office, I attempted to put my thoughts in order for a sensible interview. I found that my mental health had not improved. And, when I started to ask Dr. Breed questions about the day of the bomb, I found that the public-relations centers of my brain had been suffocated by booze and burning cat fur. Every question I asked implied that the creators of the atomic bomb had been criminal accessories to murder most foul.

Dr. Breed was astonished, and then he got very sore. He drew back from me and he grumbled, “I gather you don’t like scientists very much.”

“I wouldn’t say that, sir.”

“All your questions seem aimed at getting me to admit that scientists are heartless, conscienceless, narrow boobies, indifferent to the fate of the rest of the human race, or maybe not really members of the human race at all.”

“That’s putting it pretty strong.”

“No stronger that what you’re going to put in your book, apparently. I thought that what you were after was a fair, objective biography of Felix Hoenikker — certainly as significant a task as a young writer could assign himself in this day and age. But no, you come here with preconceived notions, about mad scientists. Where did you ever get such ideas? From the funny papers?”

“From Dr. Hoenikker’s son, to name one source.”

“Which son?”

“Newton,” I said. I had little Newt’s letter with me, and I showed it to him. “How small is Newt, by the way?”

“No bigger than an umbrella stand,” said Dr. Breed, reading Newt’s letter and frowning.

“The other two children are normal?”

“Of course! I hate to disappoint you, but scientists have children just like anybody else’s children.”

I did my best to calm down Dr. Breed, to convince him that I was really interested in an accurate portrait of Dr. Hoenikker. “I’ve come here with no other purpose than to set down exactly what you tell me about Dr. Hoenikker. Newt’s letter was just a beginning, and I’ll balance off against it whatever you can tell me.”

“I’m sick of people misunderstanding what a scientist is, what a scientist does.”

“I’ll do my best to clear up the misunderstanding.”

“In this country most people don’t even understand what pure research is.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what it is.”

“It isn’t looking for a better cigarette filter or a softer face tissue or a longer-lasting house paint, God help us. Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country’s doing it. We’re one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research. When most other companies brag about their research, they’re talking about industrial hack technicians who wear white coats, work out of cookbooks, and dream up an improved windshield wiper for next year’s Oldsmobile.”

“But here… ?”

“Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.”

“That’s very generous of General Forge and Foundry Company.”

“Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.

No More Mud 19

“Do you mean,” I said to Dr. Breed, “that nobody in this Laboratory is ever told what to work on? Nobody even suggests what they work on?”

“People suggest things all the time, but it isn’t in the nature of a pure-research man to pay any attention to suggestions. His head is full of projects of his own, and that’s the way we want it.”

“Did anybody ever try to suggest projects to Dr. Hoenikker?”

“Certainly. Admirals and generals in particular. They looked upon him as a sort of magician who could make America invincible with a wave of his wand. They brought all kinds of crackpot schemes up here — still do. The only thing wrong with the schemes is that, given our present state of knowledge, the schemes won’t work. Scientists on the order of Dr. Hoenikker are supposed to fill the little gaps. I remember, shortly before Felix died, there was a Marine general who was hounding him to do something about mud.”

“Mud?”

“The Marines, after almost two-hundred years of wallowing in mud, were sick of it,” said Dr. Breed. “The general, as their spokesman, felt that one of the aspects of progress should be that Marines no longer had to fight in mud.”

“What did the general have in mind?”

“The absence of mud. No more mud.”

“I suppose,” I theorized, “it might be possible with mountains of some sort of chemical, or tons of some sort of machinery…”

“What the general had in mind was a little pill or a little machine. Not only were the Marines sick of mud, they were sick of carrying cumbersome objects. They wanted something little to carry for a change.”

“What did Dr. Hoenikker say?”

“In his playful way, and all his ways were playful, Felix suggested that there might be a single grain of something— even a microscopic grain — that could make infinite expanses of muck, marsh, swamp, creeks, pools, quicksand, and mire as solid as this desk.”

Dr. Breed banged his speckled old fist on the desk. The desk was a kidney-shaped, sea green steel affair. “One Marine could carry more than enough of the stuff to free an armored division bogged down in the everglades. According to Felix, one Marine could carry enough of the stuff to do that under the nail of his little finger.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You would say so, I would say so — practically everybody would say so. To Felix, in his playful way, it was entirely possible. The miracle of Felix — and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere — was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.”

“I feel like Francine Pefko now,” I said, “and all the girls in the Girl Pool, too. Dr. Hoenikker could never have explained to me how something that could be carried under a fingernail could make a swamp as solid as your desk.”

“I told you what a good explainer Felix was…”

“Even so…”

“He was able to explain it to me,” said Dr. Breed, “and I’m sure I can explain it to you. The puzzle is how to get Marines out of the mud — right?”

“Right.”

“All right,” said Dr. Breed, “listen carefully. Here we go.”

Ice-nine 20

“There are several ways,” Dr. Breed said to me, “in which certain liquids can crystallize — can freeze — several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way.”

That old man with spotted hands invited me to think of the several ways in which cannonballs might be stacked on a courthouse lawn, of the several ways in which oranges might be packed into a crate.

“So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.”

He told me about a factory that had been growing big crystals of ethylene diamine tartrate. The crystals were useful in certain manufacturing operations, he said. But one day the factory discovered that the crystals it was growing no longer had the properties desired. The atoms had begun to stack and lock — to freeze — in different fashion. The liquid that was crystallizing hadn’t changed, but the crystals it was forming were, as far as industrial applications went, pure junk.

How this had come about was a mystery. The theoretical villain, however, was what Dr. Breed called “a seed.” He meant by that a tiny grain of the undesired crystal pattern. The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze.

“Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,” he suggested. And he helped me to see that the pattern of the bottom layers of cannonballs or of oranges determined how each subsequent layer would stack and lock. “The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.”

“Now suppose,” chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, “that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs — what we might call ice-one — i s only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two , ice-three , ice-four … ? And suppose,” he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, “that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine — a crystal as hard as this desk — with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees.”

“All right, I’m still with you,” I said.

Dr. Breed was interrupted by whispers in his outer office, whispers loud and portentous. They were the sounds of the Girl Pool.

The girls were preparing to sing in the outer office.

And they did sing, as Dr. Breed and I appeared in the doorway. Each of about a hundred girls had made herself into a choirgirl by putting on a collar of white bond paper, secured by a paper clip. They sang beautifully.

I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing.

The girls sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I am not likely to forget very soon their interpretation of the line:

“The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 460