Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “How are the notes coming along?” Softly said.

  “Accumulating nicely.”

  “They should be ready by now. I want to see them when they’re ready.”

  “I’m changing systems,” she said. “It’s just a question of switching over to this new system. Everything’s in order. It just has to be systemized anew.”

  “Do it up top.”

  “I want to stay.”

  “Edna and Lester won’t like it. They want absolute assurance nobody’s hovering, nobody’s listening, nobody’s otherwise disturbing their concentration.”

  BILATERAL SYMMETRY

  It had been Bolin nonstop for a solid hour. Maybe more, maybe less, hard to tell. Billy thought he saw a light high on the southwest gradient, there and gone, a pale beam shifting. He was in his chair. Lester Bolin was sitting on the ground at the juncture of two partitions. Bolin on bilateral symmetry. Bolin on symbolic notation. Bolin on the subject of uniforms. Team jerseys with LOGICON sewed across the front. His left leg was bent at the knee, the other leg stretched out flat, and he ceased gesturing in accompaniment to his remarks only to raise his left hand from time to time in order to simulate a grooming motion over the scrubby tract above his forehead.

  Exact correspondence of form and constituent arrangement on opposite sides of a dividing line or plane, Softly thought. He rejected the idea, never proposed, that there might be someone or something on the other side of an imaginary median line to match his parts and their relationships and into which he might theoretically flow. He was bundled into his bed, thumb-sucking, trying to stifle the chill that had penetrated his body on the most recent descent. Several blankets and a thick quilt. His thermal jammies. In the kitchen Lester was boiling water for tea. Edna was out near the barrier trying to get the shower to work properly. In cube one, the boy was unwavering in his marsupial sulk. Fill fill fill. Softly thumb-sucking made a series of tiny plectral sounds, as though pinching an inflated balloon. He felt a period of depression coming on. Arrival as scheduled. Activity and high excitement. Then this immense gloom. He consoled himself with the thought that it wouldn’t last long and more pointedly with the clinical knowledge that a person afflicted with cyclothymia, the technical name for this condition, was known, of all things, as a cycloid. How utterly lovely. What depths of stability and equivalence. What splendid Einheit or unity. Day and night of manic-depressive psychosis. Sun, heat, maleness. Moon, shade, femininity. Bless all Celestials and may they dualize forever. Pangs and lobsecs. He took his thumb out of his mouth, stepped from bed, opened the briefcase that held his hand-washables, felt around among the underwear and socks and came up with a small cylindrical inhalator. It was trademarked NorOmCol and had a screw cap, which he removed in some haste. He fitted the device high into his left nostril and squeezed once, I went to a Chinese restaurant to get my laundry back, releasing a colorless vapor. Whoosh. Wonder what a microscopic view would resemble. Noradrenalin transmission appearing on the slide like a neon sea. Cells unable to reabsorb. Active brain, racing pulse. Is this stuff psychoto-mimetic is the question. Or is it “madness”-inhibiting? He put on an old robe and slippers, pondering which came first, state of mind or effect produced by chemical agent, his nostril pleasurably scorched.

  I went to a Chinese restaurant

  To get my laundry back

  They served it up on the half-shell

  Without the usual crack:

  Yan tan hoakery poke

  Bloody hum de dum

  Divy tivy artichoke

  You are it

  He went into the kitchen, where Bolin was pouring tea for Edna Lown, who sat before an ultraviolet lamp. Waving off a cup of tea he circled the table a few times before climbing a stool near the entranceway. Edna wore sun goggles.

  “Laughter,” Bolin said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Ha ha. Just another way of saying ha ha.”

  “Why don’t you simply laugh?”

  “I am laughing. Ha ha. A sound indicating amusement or glee. Middle English ha ha. Old English ha ha.”

  Heterology refers to lack of correspondence between bodily parts, as in structure, arrangement or growth. An adjective is heterological if it denotes something that doesn’t apply to the adjective itself. What about the adjective “heterological”? Is it heterological (this is Softly thinking) or not heterological? Let’s work our way through the successive reflections of this logical dilemma. The mind that makes it to the other side needn’t concern itself with bodily parts and whether they match or not. For isn’t it true, historically (I permit myself to slip, this once, through my own blockade), that people have maintained a fascination for the subplot of erotic potential in small bumpy misproportioned men (not that I wish to exaggerate my own unevenness), perhaps suspecting us of possessing cyclic drives and impulses traceable to our more “natural” state of being; that is, our obvious lack of grace (which means, here, both effortless movement and divine favor, stressing the latter); or believing us capable of providing something deeply feared and longed for, nightmarish fulfillment, incubus asquat on the belly of a sleeping woman.

  “Sign over Spanish barber shops,” Lown said. “Algebrista y sangrador. Bonesetter and bloodletter. Trying to solve the flow.”

  The slope was dark. There were matches and candles in the pack, however. A crack of flame by the light of which a man might refuel a carbide lamp. At her desk Edna removed the heavy glasses she wore and then reached down and unlaced her desert boots. An unspoken sigh rose through her frame. The easeful stress of mellow bodies settling. Eyes closed now. Lips moving: broad-stroked Mayan lips moving slightly. What we conclude must be true in all possible worlds. True false. Tautological contradictory. Easier to reason without a sense of passing time. No systematically recurring event such as sunrise to provide a means of measuring an interval. Rest now rest. Continuous variable. Limit of an infinite sequence. Cut ever nearer the true value. Close in. Klōz in/n/n/n/n. Edna had grown children; that is, sons and daughters now adult, living with husbands, wives and real children in suburban Bellevue or some slight variation thereof. (Where’s gramma, dad? She’s living in a cave, shut up.) This piece of furniture was all that could be scavenged in the way of a desk, being a former chair taken apart and put back together by Lester Bolin inventively rearranging. Despite the constant need for enterprise, the lack of material comfort, she liked it here. This was true work, what her life was all about, a summation, the terminating act of a long career that had often verged on greatness. The careers of each of them—Lester, Rob, herself—had proceeded along fairly similar routes, touching here and there, pausing to curl one inside the other, ever so lightly, never before this close to braiding together in a significant way. The atmosphere of crisis would prompt them to work harder and better. The lack of comfort. The imposed proximity. Rest now rest. It was all so enfolding. Across the fiction of pure space they studied each other intently, parents of their own bodies, listening to the listener, all gravid with formal deduction. She opened her eyes. Maurice Wu. And put her glasses back on. Yes rested well rested. Time to shake off the dross of ordinary language. Maurice Wu squatting in the guano fields. She heard Bolin begin to snore. What she found truly remarkable was the fact that it had taken her so very little time to adapt to these ridiculous living conditions. On a typewriter stand in Bolin’s cubicle was an old Royal portable with a sheet of paper sticking up out of the roller. Set on the ground between the legs of the typewriter stand was a shortwave radio. Next to the stand and the radio was a small plastic desk. On the desk was a framed photograph of Lown and Bolin formally posed on a small lawn on some campus somewhere, each of them half turned toward the camera and half facing the other person, hands behind their backs, Edna’s left leg extended a bit, Lester’s right leg likewise set forward, the photographer’s insistence on balanced composition (whatever the level of humor intended) evident most of all in the centering element of the entire picture, this being a waist-high twin-handl
ed jug of indeterminate markings, each handle pointing (as it were) toward one of the standing figures. Above the radio, the stand, the antique machine, the desk, the photograph, draped across the full length of one partition, was a banner inscribed as follows:

  BREATHE! GLEAM! VERBALIZE! DIE!

  He completed the mixture, relighted the lamp, fitted it once again to the miner’s hat. He put his work gloves back on. He snuffed the candle. He put the candle back in the pack. Getting to his feet he shouldered into the pack and put the hard hat back on his head. Besides the gloves, helmet and pack, he wore coveralls, kneepads, high socks and climbing boots. He carried a canteen and sleeping bag separately from the pack. After several heavy shrugs to redistribute the weight on his back, he began the long passage down the southwest slope to the tired lights at the floor of the antrum.

  ROB DOES A TRICK

  Softly fully dressed went to cube one. He was thinking of Jean Sweet Venable aswarm in bedsheets hundreds of feet straight up. Of her works he had read only The Gobbledygook Cook Book, deeming it serviceably useless; a good example, in other words, of what he expected (and would demand if need be) of her current assignment. He found his protégé in the stiff gleaming chair, sitting with legs crossed, a novel posture for the boy.

  “Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?”

  “Stand on your head.”

  Softly did this, fairly easily, not without first putting a folded towel on the spot where his head would settle. Showing little strain he righted himself. Then he sat on the towel, an act evidently requiring more effort than the headstand did.

  “What else?”

  “That’s enough for now.”

  “I want you to be happy, Willy.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “We need you. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. This is the most important thing any of us has ever attempted. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Let’s trust each other, you and I. A secret pact. Mutual love, trust and brotherhood.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Then why aren’t you cooperating with Edna and Les?”

  “I’m here when they want me.”

  “You have to show a willingness, an enthusiasm. This isn’t some boring homework assignment in junior high. Show something. Make me proud of you.”

  “I’m here for the asking.”

  “You’re a mathematician,” Softly said. “You work till you drop.”

  “That’s pretty much what Endor told me.”

  “Sure, sacrifice.”

  “The hole he’s living in is equipped with a hole of its own.”

  “You have to put yourself on the line, everything forever, and you haven’t been doing that, Willy. Let me tell you why we’re lucky, you and I. Something you’ve never thought of. Size, our size, because of our size we don’t have to pump blood nearly as far as most people. Most people have to pump to much greater heights. We save squillions of miles of blood-pumping effort. Don’t have to worry about high blood pressure or arteries popping open. Cheery news, don’t you think?”

  “Does the outside world know about any of this?”

  “The outside world? What do you mean by the outside world?”

  “The people anywhere but here who might be interested in this project. Do they know what we’re supposed to be doing here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean when you say what we’re supposed to be doing here.”

  “I’ll start with the way it’s been happening up to now.”

  “Sure,” Softly said.

  “The signal from Ratner’s star. The people who tried to figure it out before I got here. Endor leaving for the hole. My getting here. The events. My working on the code. My being told the signals are not coming from Ratner’s star and that it’s all because of a mohole. More events. The second signal the same as the first. Your getting here. The Logicon project.”

  “So what’s the question?”

  “Do they know about this out there? Other people in science? Does anybody know what’s going on here?”

  “Absolutely no one.”

  “How come?”

  “Pressures, because of external pressures,” Softly said. “The last thing we need is a whole bunch of people commenting, jumping up and down, making judgments. The last thing we need is coverage.”

  “Stand on your head,” Billy said.

  When he was seated again Softly took a newspaper clipping out of his wallet. He unfolded it and waited for the boy to reach over and take it.

  “Meant to show you this earlier. Nothing very important. Just thought you’d like to see the kind of company you’ve been keeping.”

  Make Formal Prize Announcements

  STOCKHOLM This year’s Nobel Prizes were made official today after delays owing first to the local outbreak of hostilities and subsequently to internal disputes surrounding the awards for peace, economics and physics. The appropriate Swedish and Norwegian committees jointly released the official list without comment.

  CHEMISTRY—Walter Mainwaring, Canadian; Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corp.; for research in exo-ionic sylphing compounds.

  PHYSIOLOGY/MEDICINE—Cheops Feeley, Kurd; the Cheops Feeley Foundation; Field Experiment Number One; for developmental work in the scar-free implantation of microcomputerized electrodes.

  ECONOMICS—No award.

  PHYSICS—Orang Mohole, Austro-Mongol; Relativity Rethink Priorities Council; Sexscope Gadgeteer Inc. (consultant); Field Experiment Number One (visiting member); for theoretical work in the Moholean structure of the value-dark dimension.

  MATHEMATICS—William Terwilliger Jr., American; Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures; Logicon Project; for studies in zorgal theory.

  PEACE—No award.

  LITERATURE—Chester Greylag Dent, unaffiliated and stateless; for what the Swedish Academy described in its original announcement of the award as “recognition of a near century of epic, piquant disquisitions on the philosophy of logic, the logic of games, the gamesmanship of fiction and prehistory, these early efforts preparing the way for speculative meditations on ‘the unsolvable knot’ of science and mysticism, which in turn led to his famous ‘afterthoughts’ on the ethereally select realms of abstract mathematics and the more palpable subheights of history and biography, every published work of this humanist and polymath reflective of an incessant concern for man’s standing in the biosphere and hand-blocked in a style best characterized as undiscourageably diffuse.”

  “How come they have me down for Logicon? I haven’t been here long enough for any Swedes to know where I am.”

  “They made a routine request for information,” Softly said. “As usual in matters pertaining to you, this material passed across my desk at the Center. All anybody knows about Logicon is the name. I had to account for Lester and Edna being here. Also for our absence from the Center. But nobody knows the actual nature of the project.”

  “But what if I said no I’m not going.”

  “I felt you’d trust me enough to come with me. Trust. Let’s trust each other, Willy. Let’s help each other be.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Incidentally I’m negotiating with Mainwaring. I want to get him here if at all possible.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “First name on the list,” Softly said.

  “Chemistry. Walter Mainwaring. Canadian. Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corp.”

  “He may be the only person in the world who understands the full implications of sylphing.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “You never know, he might come in handy, somebody like that. We’re negotiating now. I want him here badly. He’s the last one I need. The final one-of-a-kind mind.”

  “Edna, Lester, me and him.”

  “Lown, Bolin, Terwilliger, Mainwaring and Wu.”

  “Who’s Wu?”

  “Oriental gent,” Softly said.

  Sooner or later he had to get up and go to the toilet. On his way back he heard his nam
e called. It was Lester Bolin speaking from bed. Billy approached the entranceway of Lester’s cubicle. He saw the banner, the photograph, the typewriter, the radio, the man himself, the narrow bed consisting of canvas stretched on a collapsible frame, the sheets and blankets at one end of the bed, bunched up, supporting Bolin’s head. Lester wore a sport shirt and pajama bottoms.

  “How do you like it down here?” he said. “Like it?”

  “Hate it.”

  “Intensity,” Lester said. “Everything’s so concentrated down here. I’m having a great time. Want to go up with me later? I have some work to do on the model. Sources of power are handier up there. It’ll be computer-driven. Parts will operate electromechanically on instruction from Space Brain. This is preceded and followed by an operation called logic rendering. The result, with luck, will be a control system that speaks Logicon. Of course we have to perfect the language first. That’s our primary job. Take that paper out of the typewriter and look at it.”