“Strange matter,” suggested Harrison.
“Don’t ask me what it is. I asked him once, and all he did was say quark-quark-quark. You know these scientists.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“In any event,” Carson said, “that, believe it or not, is the scientific term for this theoretical substance our Dr. White Rabbit is in pursuit of. Strange matter. If he can isolate it, it could apparently provide us with energy beyond our wildest dreams.”
“So the occasional explosion—”
“Don’t say that,” Carson warned. “That’s what he says. I talk to him about this destructive tendency of his, and the man is blithe. God, I hate him! Blithe!”
Harrison dared to laugh. “He isn’t that bad, Chip. And he does bring a certain renown to the university.”
“The university,” Carson said coldly, “had a certain renown before Dr. Marlon Philpott first set fire to his kindergarten desk.”
“Well,” Harrison said, “maybe he’ll be more careful from now on.”
“Not a chance.” Carson seemed to have finished his glass of San Gimignano. He touched its rim with a fingertip and the waiter came forward to do the refill as Carson said, “And, this afternoon, I have yet another appointment with yet another insurance agent, resulting from this little peccadillo of our Dr. Philpott’s. A person named Steinberg.” Carson raised a we’re-in-this-together eyebrow, then raised his glass. “You can imagine how I’m looking forward to that.”
Michael Steinberg was everything Carson had expected — Semitic as a rug merchant — except that he was unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. “These kinds of industrial accidents,” he said, clucking like a hen over his forms as he sat hunched in the usually comfortable armchair facing Carson’s large empty desk, “you don’t expect in a nice quiet atmosphere of learning like what you got here. Grayling University, to have explosions.”
Exactly. An understanding response at last; but from what a quarter. Though warmed by the man’s comprehension, Carson knew not to wash the university’s dirty linen in public: “Dr. Philpott is a distinguished member of the faculty. His researches may be a little...” he permitted himself a dry chuckle here “...hair-raising at times, it’s true, but they are necessary.”
“But are they necessary here?” asked the insurance man, tapping his pen in irritating fashion against his packet of forms.
That faint feeling of fellowship sputtered in Carson’s breast, and died. “What do you mean? Of course, they’re necessary here. Here is where Dr. Philpott is a tenured full professor.”
“Forgive me, Dr. Carson,” the man said, ducking his head, blinking behind his black-rimmed spectacles. “This is not the company speaking, you understand, this is only a thought I myself had, at this moment, that could perhaps be of use.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Dr. Philpott is a tenured professor at Grayling University,” Steinberg said, and shrugged. “But does his laboratory have to be physically present at the university? Aren’t there places better suited to such things?”
Carson had no idea what the man was talking about. “Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, an army camp, something like that.” He gestured with his pen toward the window. “There must be some sort of government facility not far from here. You must have friends in Washington.”
“Several,” Carson agreed stiffly. One did not mention one’s influence aloud, and certainly not to Semitic strangers from insurance companies.
“When Dr. Philpott is being a professor,” Steinberg went on, “he is here, on campus, this beautiful campus. When he is being a researcher, he is somewhere else. Twenty miles? Thirty miles away? Some government installation where they know how to deal with explosions.”
All at once, what the man was saying made sense. Carson actually smiled upon him. “Mr. Steinberg,” he said, “you just may have something there.”
Steinberg shrugged. He ducked his head. He smiled his crooked little smile. He said, “And along the way, it could be, I save the company a few dollars.”
Ananayel
Of course, the basis for anti-Semitism is the fear that Jews are clever without restraint. That is, since they are separate from “us” — “we” already consider them separate, so they are — they need have no compunctions in their dealings with “us,” and they are clever. Their cleverness makes them useful — as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so on — but their lack of compunction makes them dangerous. What they might do transmogrifies at once into what they surely are doing, too cleverly for “us” to catch them at it. They are clever, and they have no reason to show “us” mercy; how hateful.
Hodding Cabell Carson has no peers. He accepts orders from above, he delivers orders below. Who could slip the suggestion into his mind, the suggestion I needed placed there? No one in his normal circumference.
It had to be an outsider. It also had to be someone he would see as clever. And it would be best if the person were seen to be making the suggestion altruistically on the surface, but actually for his own advantage.
Humans are quite simple, really. And on to Moscow.
3
Grigor awoke. He almost never needed the alarm these days, though he still routinely set it every night before taking the midnight pill. But he woke these mornings five or seven or nine minutes ahead of the alarm, and lay unmoving in the black darkness while his mind roved. For some reason, he did his best thinking in these brief moments in the dark, just before the four A.M. pill; by the time the alarm sounded, more often than not, he had at least one new joke to write on the notepad beside his bed.
A new five-year plan has been announced. Its goal is to tell the truth about all the other five-year plans.
Yes? No? It was so hard to tell, really. Comedy now seemed not so much about humor as about defining the limits in a world where the limits shifted daily; a situation which was already comic, or at least absurd. The purpose of a joke these days was not to make people laugh at the comedy of it but at the daring of it, at how close the joke teller has come to the very edge of the permitted, in a time when nobody knows what’s permitted. Everything? Hardly.
The alarm buzzed, a discreet low noise, penetrating within this room but not strong enough to disturb any other resident of the complex. Grigor sat up, switched on his bedside light, put the notepad on his knee to jot down the five-year-plan joke for later study in the cold light of day, then got out of bed and padded into the bathroom for water with which to take the pill. He had a much more lavish life here in Moscow than he’d ever had in Kiev. His own private room, well-furnished. His own bathroom, fully equipped, even to a hardly rusted shower. Such luxury!
Our orbiting cosmonaut is on strike. He refuses to land until he’s allotted an apartment as large as his capsule.
Grigor took his pill, used the toilet, then padded back to the bedroom and wrote the cosmonaut line on the notepad. Maybe so, maybe so. It was safer to talk about strikes today than even two or three years ago. Topicality, that was the secret. Dart in when the subject’s safe, use it, be out and gone when the next crackdown comes.
God save Godless Russia. When would that one get its moment? It was one of the first jokes Grigor had ever thought of, and it had scared him so much — still did — that he’d never even written it down. Would he, ever? Would it be said on the television by Boris Boris, ever?