Jeremy Shaffery had a mind a little bit like Einstein’s, although maybe not in the ways that mattered most. When Einstein first realized that light carried mass, he sat down to write a friend about it and described the thought as “amusing and infectious.” Shaffery would have thought that, too, although of course he would not likely have seen the implications of the Maxwell equations in the first place.
Shaffery looked a little bit like Einstein. He encouraged the resemblance, especially in the hair, until his hair began to run out. Since Einstein loved sailing, he kept a sixteen-foot trimaran tied up at the observatory dock. Seasickness kept him from using it much. Among the things he envied Einstein for was the mirror-smooth Swiss lakes, so much nicer than the lower Caribbean in that respect. But after a day of poring over pairs of star photographs with a blink comparator or trying to discover previously unknown chemical compounds in interstellar space in a radio trace, he sometimes floated around the cove in his little yellow rubber raft. It was relaxing, and his wife never followed him there. To Shaffery that was important. She was a difficult woman, chronically p.o.’d because his career was so persistently pointed in the wrong direction. If she had ever been a proper help meet, she wasn’t any more. Shaffery doubted she ever had, remembering that it was her unpleasant comments that had caused him to give up that other hallmark of the master, the violin.
At the stage in Shaffery’s career at which he had become Director of the Carmine J. Nuccio Observatory in the Lesser Antilles, he had begun to look less like Einstein and more like Edgar Kennedy. Nights when the seeing was good he remorselessly scanned the heavens through the 22-inch reflector, hoping against hope for glory. Days when he was not sleeping he wandered through the dome like a ghost, running his finger over desks for dust, filching preserved mushrooms from Mr. Nuccio’s home-canned hoard, trying to persuade his two local assistants to remember to close the dome slit when it rained. They paid little attention. They knew where the muscle was, and that it wasn’t with Shaffery. He had few friends. Most of the white residents couldn’t stand his wife; some of them couldn’t stand Shaffery very well, either. There was a nice old-lady drunk out from England in a tidy white house down the beach, a sort of hippie commune on the far side of the island, and a New York television talk-show operator who just flew down for weekends. When they were respectively sober, unstoned and present, Shaffery sometimes talked to them. That wasn’t often. The only one he really wanted to see much was the tv man, but there were obstacles. The big obstacle was that the tv man spent most of his waking time skin diving. The other obstacle was that Shaffery had discovered that the tv man occasionally laid Mrs. Shaffery. It wasn’t the morality of the thing that bothered him; it was the feeling of doubt it raised in Shaffery’s mind about the other’s sanity. He never spoke to the tv man about it, partly because he wasn’t sure what to say and partly because the man had halfway promised to have Shaffery on his show. Sometime or other.
One must be fair to Shaffery and say that he wasn’t a bad man. Like Frank Morgan, his problem was that he wasn’t a good wizard. The big score always evaded him.
The Einstein method, which he had studied assiduously over many years, was to make a pretty theory and then see if, by any chance, observations of events in the real world seemed to confirm it. Shaffery greatly approved of that method. It just didn’t seem to work out for him. At the Triple A-S meeting in Dallas he read an hour-long paper on his new Principle of Relevance Theory. That was a typical Einstein idea, he flattered himself. He had even worked out simple explanations for the lay public, like Einstein with his sitting on a hot stove or holding hands with a pretty girl. “Relevance Theory,” he practiced smiling to the little wavelets of the cove, “only means that observations that don’t relate to anything don’t exist. I’ll spare you the mathematics because—” self-deprecatory laugh here— “I can’t even fill out my income tax without making a mistake.” Well, he had worked out the mathematics, inventing signs and operators of his own, just like Einstein. But he seemed to have made a mistake. Before the AAAS audience, fidgeting and whispering to each other behind their hands, he staked his scientific reputation on the prediction that the spectrum of Mars at its next opposition would show a slight but detectable displacement of some 150 angstroms toward the violet. The son of a bitch didn’t do anything of the kind. One of the audience was a graduate student at Princeton, hard up for a doctoral thesis subject, and he took a chance on Shaffery and made the observations, and with angry satisfaction sent him the proof that Mars had remained obstinately red.
The next year the International Astrophysical Union’s referees, after some discussion, finally allowed him twenty minutes for a Brief Introduction into the General Consideration of Certain Electromagnetic Anomalies. He offered thirty-one pages of calculations leading to the prediction that the next lunar eclipse would be forty-two seconds late. It wasn’t. It was right on time. At the meeting of the World Space Science Symposium they told him with great regret that overcommitments of space and time had made it impossible for them to schedule his no doubt valuable contribution, and by the time of the next round of conferences they weren’t even sending him invitations any more.
Meanwhile all those other fellows were doing great. Shaffery followed the careers of his contemporaries with rue. There was Hoyle, still making a good thing out of the Steady State Hypothesis and Gamow’s name, still reverenced for the Big Bang, and new people like Dyson and Ehricke and Enzmann coming along with all sorts of ideas that, if you looked at them objectively, weren’t any cleverer than his, Shaffery thought, except for the detail that somehow or other they seemed lucky enough to find supporting evidence from time to time. It did not strike him as fair. Was he not a Mensa member? Was he not as well educated as the successful ones, as honored with degrees, as photogenic in the newsmagazines and as colorfully entertaining on the talk shows? (Assuming Larry Nesbit ever gave him the chance on his show.) Why did they make out and he fall flat? His wife’s theory he considered and rejected. “Your trouble, Jeremy,” she would say to him, “is you’re a horse’s ass.” But he knew that wasn’t it. Who was to say Isaac Newton wasn’t a horse’s ass, too, if you looked closely enough at his freaky theology and his nervous breakdowns? And look where he got.
So Shaffery kept looking for the thing that would make him great. He looked all over. Sometimes he checked Kepler’s analysis of the orbit of Mars with an adding machine, looking for mistakes in arithmetic. (He found half a dozen, but the damn things all canceled each other out, which proves how hard it is to go wrong when your luck is in.) Sometimes he offered five-dollar prizes to the local kids for finding new stars that might turn out to be Shaffery’s Nova, or anyway Shaffery’s Comet. No luck. An ambitious scheme to describe stellar ballistics in terms of analogy with free-radical activity in the enzyme molecules fell apart when none of the biochemists he wrote to even answered his letters.
The file of failures grew. One whole drawer of a cabinet was filled with reappraisals of the great exploded theories of the past—A New Look at Phlogiston, incomplete because there didn’t seem really to be anything to look at when you came down to it; a manuscript called The Flat Earth Reexamined, which no one would publish; three hundred sheets of drawings of increasingly tinier and increasingly quirkier circles to see if the Copernican epicycles could not somehow account for what the planet Mercury did that Einstein had considered a proof of relativity. From time to time he was drawn again to attempting to find a scientific basis for astrology and chiromancy, or predicting the paths of charged particles in a cloud chamber by means of yarrow stalks. It all came to nothing. When he was really despairing, he sometimes considered making his mark in industry rather than pure science, wherefore the sheaf of sketches for a nuclear-fueled car, the experiments on smellovision that had permanently destroyed the nerves of his left nostril, the attempt to preserve some of Mr. Nuccio’s mushrooms by irradiation in his local dentist’s X-ray room. He knew that that sort of thing was not really worthy of a man with all those graduate degrees, but in any event he did no better there than anywhere else. Sometimes he dreamed of what it would be like to run Mount Palomar or Jodrell Bank, with fifty trained assistants to nail down his inspirations with evidence. He was not that fortunate. He had only Cyril and James.