Alice laughed with delight. “Like the Old West. It sounds quite appropriate for Texas,” she said. Had George deliberately provoked this shoot-out with Jake? Had he expected to win? He certainly hadn’t gone about it in the right way, if he had wanted to win Jake over. Perhaps he had wanted to get Jake to take a position against investigating the Snark.
“We even do it in Geneva, California, and Illinois,” George said. “It is a bit like the Old West, except that the shooting is done with ideas and logic instead of bullets. When there is a controversy, the laboratory director will call a big meeting. The groups in contention select spokesmen who present their best arguments in support of their case. The physicists in the audience ask questions, often very nasty ones. This can go on for many hours or even days. Finally the director, sometimes with the advice of an executive committee, makes the decision. After that decision is made, the question is considered settled, and work goes on.”
Alice was puzzled. “I don’t see what that has to do with Jake and what I just saw,” she said.
“I was coming to that part,” said George. “What you must understand about Jake is that he is the absolute master of the shoot-out. He’s extremely intelligent. He can go into a library with absolutely no knowledge of a technical subject and emerge a few hours later with complete mastery of it. His presentations are flawless. After the first minute, he’ll have an audience of tough-minded physicists eating out of his hand. His responses to hostile questions are lightning-fast and subtly calculated to make the questioner appear absurd, but without any appearance that Jake has ridiculed him. Most of Jake’s adversaries in shoot-outs never know what hit them. Sometimes it’s a few days later before you realize that the other guy in the shoot-out perhaps had a pretty good idea. And by then it’s too late.”
“I don’t understand,” said Alice. “Why don’t the others see through Jake’s tricks?” Had George provoked the confrontation in private to see what Jake’s response would be?
“Because they are not tricks,” said George. “Jake really does want to do the best physics in the world, and he’ll sift through the best ideas available, borrowing or stealing where he can, originating where he must, to come up with the best course of action. He’s really good, Alice. That’s why I and the others put up with the personality quirks that come in the same package with his talents.”
Alice began to see the story possibilities in this revelation. “How did Jake get that way?” she asked.
George smiled. “I’ve known Jake a long time,” he said. “We were at SLAC when the SLC was just coming into operation.”
“SLC?” said Alice.
“The SLAC Linear Collider,” said George. “That was an American attempt to do some quick physics with Z and W bosons and skim off the cream before the LEP Collider at CERN started running in the late 1980s. That didn’t work, but it did get Ph.D.s for me and Jake.
“Anyhow, we knew each other at SLAC. Jake grew up in Taiwan. His family was large and not particularly well off. As a kid he’d collect junk machines and electronics, take them apart, and use the pieces to make things. He liked to make weird electronic gadgets, radios and motion detectors and spark generators. He managed to slip into the United States somehow while he was still in high school and went to the University of Minnesota on scholarships while working at odd jobs in Minneapolis for extra support.
“To understand Jake, you have to realize that a certain style of argumentation involving very fast interchanges is considered a high art in Taiwan. It’s a kind of verbal karate. Jake was probably the smartest kid in Taiwan when he was growing up, and he naturally learned how to outargue anyone he encountered.
“When he was doing his Ph.D. working at SLAC, it must have been a terrible culture shock for him. His haranguing tricks from Taiwan, his oratorical style, and his histrionics didn’t work at SLAC. Everyone just thought he was a crazy Chinese guy and paid no attention to him. But Jake is not stupid. Over a period of time he watched the masters carefully and discovered the key to winning arguments at SLAC, and he began to gain recognition and move up in the pecking order.”
And what was his trick?” asked Alice. “It sounds useful.
“The key to winning arguments at SLAC,” said George, “is to always be right. And to be able to prove that you’re right so conclusively that no one can prevail against you.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. That didn’t sound like a useful trick at all. “But if he’s always right, why do you argue with him?” she asked.
“Because,” said George, “the only time Jake is consistently right is when he’s making a public performance. The rest of the time he’s often wrong. He learns to be right by soliciting arguments from people who, at the time, know more than he does.”
“Then I don’t understand what your argument with him was about,” she said. “It wasn’t a public performance, and he was wrong.”
“With Jake,” said George, “it’s an iterative process, like breaking a horse. You always lose the first argument. But you have to introduce him to the idea and give him time to get used to it. He can’t stop me from looking at the Snark, but I had to let him know about it and that I intend to investigate it, whether he likes it or not.”
“Oh,” said Alice, feeling confused. George lost, but he won?
“Jake isn’t our problem,” said George. “The Snark is. Roger Coulton suggested that the thing might still be around, and now I need to figure out where it might have ended up. Want to watch?”
“Sure,” said Alice.
29
ALICE PUT ON THE MAGIC GLASSES AND SETTLED BACK in the recliner. “I think this ‘telepresence’ business is all just a ruse to allow you to lie around on a soft couch all day while you’re pretending to work,” she said.
“You’re not the first person to suggest that,” said George’s voice in her earphones.
She was getting the hang of adjusting the glasses. George had explained that she would have an independent “body” in the interface, but that her position would be servoed to his so they would move together.
As her eyes adapted to the lower light level, she saw that she was standing at the corner of a magnificent building, a Greek temple that appeared to be filled with amazing statues. She was reminded of the Loggia dei Lanzo on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, but this building was huge. It stretched away as far as the eyes could see. Curiously, over the entry stairway were carved and gilded architectural letters that read LEM DATA ANALYSIS SYSTEM- VIRTUAL DESKTOP — VERSION 2.1 A, followed by a modified quotation from Dante.
George’s voice spoke next to her. “Alice, can you hear me okay?”
“Sure,” she said and turned to see that a wireframe figure with George’s face stood next to her. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“Oh,” George said, laughing. “I should have explained. This is our ‘desktop,’ our locational interface. Pietro, one of the programmers, had a dual college major in computer science and classical art history. One morning I connected to the system, and here it was in all its glory. He took statues from a giant classical sculpture database and used random combinations of statue elements filtered by an ‘aesthetics’ expert system developed by the Harvard Department of Fine Arts.”