Alex grinned, wiping his eyes. “I… I’ll join you in an hour or so, George. Honestly. I only have to check one simulation and… what’s the matter?”
Suddenly frowning, George shook his head. “Not tonight. You heard what Auntie said. Rest and distraction.”
For the third time that evening, Alex gaped. “You can’t take that crazy old bat seriously!”
George smiled sheepishly, but also nodded. “She is a bit of a ham. But where her authority applies, I obey. We get drunk tonight, white fellow. You and I, now. Whether you cooperate or not.”
Alex had a sudden vision of this massive billionaire holding his head under a beer tap, while he sputtered and fought helplessly. The image was startlingly credible. Another believer, he sighed inwardly. They were everywhere.
“Well… I wouldn’t want to flout tradition…”
“Good.” George slapped Alex on the back once more, almost knocking him over. “And between rounds I’ll tell you how I once substituted for the great Makahuna, back in ’20, when the All Blacks smashed Australia.”
Oh, no. Rugby stones. That’s all I need.
Still, Alex felt a strange relief. He’d been commanded to seek oblivion, and by no less than a spokeswoman for Gaia herself. On such authority — despite his agnosticism — he supposed he could let himself forget for just one night.
Alex had been in pubs all over the world, from the faded elegance of the White Hart, in Bloomsbury, to rickety, fire-trap shanties in Angolan boom towns. There had been that kitschy Russian tourist bistro, near the launch site at Kapustin Yar, where dilute, vitamin-enriched vodka was served in pastel squeeze tubes to background strains of moon muzak… very tacky. He’d even been to the bar of the Hotel Imperial, in Shanghai, just before the Great Big War Against Tobacco finally breached that mist-shrouded last bastion of smoking, driving grumbling addicts into back alleys to nurse their dying habit.
In comparison, the Kai-Keri was as homey and familiar as the Washington, his own local back in Belsize Park. The bitter brown ale was much the same. True, the crowd around the dart board stood closer than in a typical British pub, and Alex had gotten lost during his last two trips to the loo. But he attributed that to the coriolis effect. After all, everything was upside down here in kiwi land.
One thing you wouldn’t see in Britain was this easy fraternizing of the races. From full-blooded Maoris to palefaced, blond pakehas and every shade in between, nobody seemed to notice differences that still occasionally caused riots back home.
Oh, they had names for every pigmentation and nationality, including postage stamp island states Alex had never even heard of. The New Zealand Herald just that morning had run an outraged expose about promotion discrimination against Fijian guest-workers in an Auckland factory. It had sounded unfair, all right… and also incredibly picayune compared with the injustices and bigotries still being perpetrated almost everywhere else, all over the world.
Actually, Alex figured Kiwis fretted over such small-scale imperfections so they wouldn’t feel left out. Harmony was all very good in theory, but in practice it sometimes seemed a bit embarrassing.
Soon after arriving in New Zealand, he had asked Stan Goldman just how far the attitude stretched. How would Stan feel, for instance, if his daughter came home one night and said she wanted to marry a Maori boy?
Alex’s former mentor had stared back in surprise.
“But Alex, that’s exactly what she did!”
Soon he also met George’s family, and the wives and husbands and kids of several Tangoparu engineers. They had all made him feel welcome. None seemed to blame him for the deadly thing that was growing in the Earth’s core.
And you’re not responsible. It’s not your monster.
Again, the reminder helped, a little.
“Drink, Lustig. You’ve fallen behind Stan and me.”
George Hutton was accustomed to getting his way. Dutifully, Alex took a breath and lifted the tapered glass of warm brew. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and put it down again, empty.
When he reopened them, however, the pint had magically resurrected! Was this divine intervention? Or defiance of entropy? The detached portion of Alex’s mind knew someone must have poured another round, presumably from a pitcher that even now existed somewhere outside his diminishing field of vision. Still, it was fun to consider alternatives. A negentropic time-reversal had certain arguments in its favor.
With yet another of his unraveling faculties, Alex listened to Stan Goldman’s recollections from dimly remembered days at the end of the last century.
“I was thinkin’ about becoming a biologist in the late nineties,” his former research advisor said. “That’s where all the excitement was then. Biologists think of those days the way we physicists look back on the early nineteen-hundreds, when Planck an’ Schrodinger were inventing the quantum, and old Albert himself nailed the speed o’ light to the bleeding reference frame… when the basis for a whole science was laid down.
“What a time that must have been! A century’s engineering came out of what those lucky bastards discovered. But by my time it was all lookin’ pretty dumpit boring for physics.”
“C’mon, Stan,” George Hutton protested. “The late nineties, boring? For physics? Wasn’t that when Adler and Hurt completed grand unification? Combinin’ all the forces of nature into one big megillah? You can’t tell me you weren’t excited then!”
Stan brought one spotted hand to his smooth dome, using a paper serviette to dab away spots of perspiration. “Oh, surely. The unification equations were brilliant, elegant. They called it a “theory of everything”… TOE for short.
“But by then field theory was mostly a spectator sport. It took almost mutant brilliance to participate… like you have to be eight feet tall to play pro basketball these days. What’s more, you started hearing talk about closing the books on physics. There were profs who said ‘all the important questions have been answered.’ ”
“That’s why you thought about leaving the field?” George inquired.
Stan shook his head. “Naw. What really had me depressed was that we’d run out of modalities.”
Alex had been pinching his numb cheeks, in search of any feeling. He turned to peer at Stan. “Modalities?”
“Basic ways and means. Chinks in nature’s wall. The lever and the fulcrum. The wheel an’ the wedge. Fire an’ nuclear fission.
“Those weren’t just intellectual curiosities, Alex. They started out as useless abstractions, sure. But, well, do you remember how Michael Faraday answered, when a member of Parliament asked him what use would ever come of his crazy ‘electricity’ thing?”
George Hutton nodded. “I heard about that! Didn’t Faraday ask, um… what use was a newborn baby?”
“That’s one version,” Alex agreed, commanding his head to mimic the approximate trajectory of a nod. “Another story has him answering — ‘I don’t know, sir. But I’ll wagell, er… wager someday you’ll tax it!’ ” Alex laughed. “Always liked that story.”
“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “And Faraday was right, wasn’t he? Look at the difference electricity made! Physics became the leading science, not just because it dealt in fundamentals but also ’cause it opened doors — modalities — offering us powers we once reckoned belonged to gods!”
Alex closed his eyes. Momentarily it seemed he was back in the meeting house, with Auntie Kapur slyly referring to the ways of heavenly beings.
“Grand unification depressed you because it wasn’t practical*.” George asked unbelievingly.
“Exactly!” Stan stabbed a finger toward the big geo-physicist. “So Hurt described how the electroweak force unifies with chromodynamics and gravitation. So what? To ever do anything with the knowledge, we’d need the temperatures and pressures of the Big Bang!”