On the next night Coverly arranged his life along these lines. He left the computation center at five, cooked supper, bathed and put his son to bed. Then he returned to the computation center with his soft leather copy of Keats and began to translate this, on an electrical typewriter, into binary digits. “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” he began, “the air was cooling, and so very still. . . .” It took him three weeks to get through it all including King Stephen. It was half-past eleven one night when he typed: “To feel forever its soft fall and swell,/Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,/Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,/And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”
Chapter XV
Griza said that if everything went on schedule he would run the tape through late on a Saturday afternoon. He telephoned Coverly on Friday night and told him to come in at four. The tape was stored in Coverly’s office and at four he brought it up to the room where the console stood. He was very excited. He and Griza seemed to be alone in the center. Somewhere an unanswered telephone was ringing. His instructions, converted into binary digits, asked the machine to count the words in the poetry, count the vocabulary and then list those words most frequently used in the order of their usage. Griza put the instructions and the tape into a pair of towers and pulled some switches on the console. He was in that environment where he felt most like himself and swaggered around like a deck hand. Coverly was sweating with excitement. To make some conversation he asked Griza about his mother and his wife but Griza, ennobled by the presence of the console, did not reply. The typewriter began loudly to clatter and Coverly turned. When the machine stopped Griza tore the paper off its rack and passed it to Coverly. The number of words in the poetry came to fifteen thousand three hundred and fifty-seven. The vocabulary was eight thousand five hundred and three and the words in the order of their frequency were: “Silence blendeth grief’s awakened fall/The golden realms of death take all/Love’s bitterness exceeds its grace /That bestial scar on the angelic face/Marks heaven with gall.”
“My God,” Coverly said. “It rhymes. It’s poetry.”
Griza was going around turning off the lights. He didn’t reply.
“But it’s poetry, Griza,” Coverly said. “Isn’t that wonderful? I mean there’s poetry within the poetry.”
Griza’s indifference was implacable. “Yuh, yuh,” he said. “We better get out of here. I don’t want to get caught.”
“But you see, don’t you,” Coverly said, “that within the poetry of Keats there is some other poetry.” It was possible to imagine that some numerical harmony underlay the composition of the universe, but that this harmony embraced poetry was a bewildering possibility and Coverly then felt himself to be a citizen of the world that was emerging; a part of it. Life was filled with newness; there was newness everywhere! “I guess I’d better tell somebody,” Coverly said. “It’s a discovery, you know.”
“Keep cool,” Griza said. “You tell somebody, they’ll know I was using the console on off hours and I’ll get my arse reamed.” He had turned off all the lights and they moved into the corridor. Then at the end of the corridor a door opened and Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the site, came toward them.
Cameron was a short man. He walked with a stoop. His ruthlessness and his brilliance were legendary and Griza and Coverly were frightened. Cameron’s hair was a lusterless black, cut so long that a curl hung over his forehead. His skin was dark and sallow with a fine flush of red at the cheek. His eyes were mournful but it was their brows, their awnings, their hairy settings, that made his appearance seem distinguished and formidable. His brows were an inch thick, brindled with gray and tufted like the pelt of a beast. They looked like structural beams, raised into a position that would support the weight of his knowledge and his authority. We know that heavy eyebrows support nothing, not even thin air, nor are they rooted in the intellect or the heart, but it was his brows that intimidated the two men.
“What’s your name?” he asked. The question was directed at Coverly.
“Wapshot,” he said.
If Cameron had been a recipient of Lorenzo’s bounty, he showed no signs of it.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We’ve just made a word-count of the vocabulary of John Keats,” Coverly said in his most earnest manner.
“Ah, yes,” Cameron said. “I’m interested in poetry myself although it’s not commonly known.” Then, raising his face and giving them a smile that was either gassy or insincere, he recited with practiced expression:
Coverly said nothing and Cameron looked at him narrowly.
“I’ve seen you before?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where.”
“On the mountain.”
“Come to my office on Monday,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Quarter to seven,” Coverly said.
“Have I eaten?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” said Coverly.
“I wonder,” he said, “I wonder.” He went up on the elevator alone.
Chapter XVI
Coverly reported to Cameron’s office on Monday morning. He clearly recalled his first encounter with the old genius. This had been in the mountains, three hundred miles north of Talifer, where Coverly had gone skiing one weekend with some other men from the office. They reached the place late in the afternoon and would have time for only one run before dark. They were waiting for the chair lift when they were asked to step aside. It was Cameron.
He was with two generals and a colonel. They were all much bigger and younger than he. There was an appreciable stir at his arrival but he was, after all, a legendary skier. His contribution to the theory of thermal heat had been worked out from his observation of the molecular action on the base of his skis. He wore fine ski clothes and had a scarlet headband above his famous eyebrows. His eyes were brilliant that afternoon and he moved toward the lift with the preciseness and grace (Coverly thought) of someone who enjoys unchallenged authority. He went up the mountain, followed by his retinue and then by Coverly and his friends. There was a hut or refuge at the summit where they stopped to smoke. There was no fire in the refuge. It was very cold. When Coverly had adjusted his bindings he found that he and Cameron were alone. The others had gone down. The presence of Cameron made Coverly uneasy. Without speaking, without making a sound, he seemed to project around him something as palpable as an electromagnetic field. It was late, it would be dark very soon but all the mountain peaks, all of them buried in snow, still stood in the canted light of day like the gulfs and trenches of an ancient sea bed. What moved Coverly in the scene was its vitality. Here was a display of the inestimable energies of the planet; here in the last light was a sense of its immense history. Coverly knew enough not to speak of this to the doctor. It was Cameron who spoke. His voice was harsh and youthful. “Isn’t it remarkable,” he said, “to think that only two years ago it was generally thought that the heterosphere was divided into two regions.”