Roger had been quite surprised when the other boy had calmly explained to the school physician that his good friend Roger had been demonstrating a new wrestling hold when they slipped, so that he accidentally banged his head on the stone portal of the quad. The doctor was skeptical, but he finally entered the explanation in his report.
Later Roger carefully cleaned the book with a towel and sponge, put blotting paper between the wet pages, and even ironed them to remove some of the swelling and wrinkles. But despite his best efforts, the book looked terrible. His tutor, however, seemed not to take much notice when Roger sheepishly returned the book, perhaps because the man was so fascinated by the graphics program that Roger had made using the equations in it.
After that incident, the older boys had called him “Killer Coulton” for a while, but had kept their distance. The “Killer” nickname had stuck, but it took on a new meaning during his years at the public school. Roger became an academic aggressor.
The red-lit image of a brick raised high in the act of braining the enemy, within the convoluted pathways of Roger’s cerebral cortex, had somehow been transmuted into a strategy for success. He sought out what were considered the hardest subjects, particularly in the sciences and math, then ferreted out the tricks and gimmicks that would allow him to understand them better than his classmates, to bludgeon his way to the top of the heap. He consistently outscored the others on examinations, sometimes by such a large margin that it was embarrassing.
The scholarship to Oxford had followed, almost as his due. It was not until he went up to Oxford that he finally managed to shed the “Killer” nickname. Oxford had been good for him in other ways, too. He had learned enough about physics and women there to know that he simply had to learn much more about both.
He set about doing so. He had somehow intuited, through the haze of academic selfsatisfaction that overlay the British academic scene, that diversity was important and that the inbreeding he saw around him might be avoided by moving to another institution where the learning might be different enough to cover the gaps that he sensed in his present state of understanding of physics.
Lincoln Jeffries, his Oxford tutor, had been annoyed when Roger announced that he had decided to take his Ph.D. at Cambridge. Old Linc had carefully explained that such a switch was the sign of a misfit, and that it would seriously compromise Roger’s chances of securing a permanent position at either institution. Line’s implicit assumption that the life of an Oxford don represented the pinnacle of Western civilization had convinced Roger, as much as anything else, that he was making the correct decision.
Roger had put his Cambridge thesis supervisor, a Nobel laureate, on notice from the start that he intended to do a first-rate thesis in theoretical particle physics. And it had happened just that way. Roger had stumbled onto a subtle aspect of quark-gluon interactions that no one had ever looked at before in the right way. His omnivorous plundering of the literature had turned up enough seemingly unrelated clues to show him the direction he needed to proceed. He could actually have finished his thesis in two years, but some unfinished business with a certain young lady who was doing her thesis in medieval history had made him decide to stay the extra year and to do a more thorough job.
The thoroughness had paid off. His thesis research became two papers in Physics Letters, a long review article in Physics Reports, and three invited papers, special invitations to present his work before large audiences at physics conferences at Snowmass, Catania, and Les Houches. These had made something of a splash. Roger had turned down several job offers, including an assistant professorship at Princeton, to take a postdoc job in the CERN Particle Theory Group. And that, along with the other theoretical triumphs which followed, had led to his present job at the SSC, presently the premier high-energy physics laboratory in the world.
Which, the way it looked now, might be as high as his rocket would rise. Roger looked around his new office, the walls already decorated with colorful graphs, cartoons, and travel posters. What the hell was he going to do? This was Wednesday. He was supposed to give a particle theory seminar on Thursday afternoon describing progress on his brilliant new approach to QCD, the technique that in the past weeks had turned to ashes. He had nothing to discuss except a handful of mathematical tricks that hadn’t worked. As he thought about it, he realized that in truth he hadn’t really had a workable idea in many months.
He was good, dammit. He knew that he was good. He was now supposed to be at the peak of his creativity and intellectual power. He was working in theoretical particle physics, the toughest, most competitive, fastest-moving, most intellectually demanding field of endeavor in the history of the human race.
But somehow his timing was off. Of late the ideas that his instincts told him were good, after months of effort, had turned out to be blind alleys. Other ideas that he’d originated and then rejected as obviously flawed had been reinvented later by others, and often those ideas had brought them recognition and even fame.
This job in the SSC Particle Theory Group was supposed to be his stepping-stone to a secure tenured faculty position at a top-of-the-line university or institute in the United States or Europe. But his stepping-stone was rapidly sinking into a quicksand bog.
He looked again at the broken surfaces on his workstation screen. The bloody thing refused to converge. There had to be some way, another trick, if only he were smart enough to find it.
His eyes drifted to his open desk drawer. He could see the black plastic box there. In it he had placed disposable diabetic syringes and the four vials of synaptine. Last night he had on impulse taken them… correction… stolen them from Susan’s laboratory. Even as he was doing it, he’d felt rather surprised at himself, as if it was someone else performing the act. Someone less honest than himself. He wasn’t in the habit of stealing from his friends, after all. He was bloody well not in the habit of stealing from anyone.
But Susan had discovered a drug that promised to significantly raise the level of human intelligence! And she was planning to squander it for years to come on the treatment of hopelessly retarded children and Alzheimer’s patients. She and her colleagues would administer the drug and take careful note of whether the poor souls that received it remembered not to pee their pants or drooled less or recognized one of their relatives unexpectedly. And meantime the rest of humanity, which was barely clever enough to find its shoes in the morning and keep from annihilating itself in the evening, must muddle along as best it could.
He now knew Susan well enough to understand that she was a very stubborn and dedicated woman. There was no way he could persuade her to let him test synaptine on himself as a “volunteer.” He’d hinted at this and had encountered a stone wall, receiving a canned lecture on medical ethics and the strictness and fairness of the rules concerning experimentation on human subjects.
He looked at the black box again. In most human endeavors high intelligence was useful but not really essential. Motivation and persistence worked almost as well, sometimes actually better. Roger remembered the friend at Cambridge who got rent-free rooms for serving as part-time manager of a block of flats. Once he’d had to pick a new maintenance person for the complex from a large number of applicants. So he’d given them all intelligence tests copped from the Psychology Department and selected the applicant with the lowest score. Claimed the person had made the best maintenance super ever.