Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  Softly, a lefthander, threw some billowing curves to Wu, keeping the ball down and in, mixing in an occasional flutter pitch that he kept hauntingly outside, presumably away from the doggero’s power. Finally Wu managed to hit the ball—a weak grounder that spun and wobbled in circles of ever decreasing limits. At this stage the munch and doggero addressed each other.

  “What’s your trade?”

  “Lemonade.”

  “Where do you ply it?”

  “Where we dry it.”

  “Dry what?”

  “Apricot.”

  I MEET MAINWARING

  From his bed, hearing the voices, Billy tried to remember how old he was when they’d invented the game, realizing for the first time that he’d actually had little to do with any of it, that it was almost all Softly’s—the rules, the verse, the reliance on connective patterns. His hands were still clasped on his head. He moved them forward and back, the top of his head shifting with the movement. He liked that feeling. After a while he thought of a scantily clad woman with enormous breasts bazooms boobs titties. She was “scantily clad” only in the sense that he told himself such a condition prevailed; the fact was he couldn’t quite picture the flimsy items she was supposed to be wearing. He tried to include himself—that is, an image of himself—in the painted haze. For some reason it was extremely difficult. He didn’t really care that much. As long as they let him stay where he was. As long as they didn’t force him to be logical. He heard someone moving in the cubicle next to his and went to see who it was. The man unpacking introduced himself as Walter Mainwaring, Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corporation.

  “We both have something in common.”

  “The Nobel Prize,” Mainwaring said.

  “Right.”

  “My father was a mathematician. Didn’t give me a middle name. Just an initial. X. Idea of a joke, I suppose.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “Rob is eager to know more about sylphing compounds. I’m not sure how he plans to apply this knowledge but I’ll be happy to tell him what I can. My latest work involves aspects of mohole identification. Know what that is?”

  “No but it sounds funny.”

  “Things are funny up to a point,” Mainwaring said. “Then they aren’t funny anymore. Alternate question. Do you know anything about Moholean relativity?”

  “I know Mohole the person.”

  “Mohole’s work happens to tie in with sylphing. What this all leads to remains to be seen.”

  “He wears padded shoulders and swallows greenies.”

  “I gather Rob’s assembling a team. Good. I like teamwork. I believe in teams.”

  DOGGERO and MUNCH: “Bunger, bunger, let us go forth; the sun, the sun is shining.”

  BUNGER: “Fall down a well and never tell and I’ll let you be born in the morning.”

  The boy returned to his cubicle and got into bed. Eventually he heard Softly announce the tea break. There was a minor landslide on the north slope. Jean Venable and Maurice Wu remained in the playing area while the others went to the kitchen unit for tea.

  “Full name please.”

  “Maurice Xavier Wu.”

  “Where did you get the Xavier?”

  “My father was a missionary,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “U.S. of A.”

  “Did you grow up there?”

  “Off and on.”

  “Did you date American girls?”

  “Did I date American girls?” he said. “What kind of book are you writing?”

  “I try to ask whatever comes into my head,” Jean said. “It’s a new technique I’ve been developing. But I think I may abandon it. Nothing but junky things have been coming into my head. Everything’s up in the air right now. Don’t tell Rob I said that. I’m sort of going through the motions, frankly. But keep it to yourself.”

  “Maybe we should do this another time,” Wu said. “I’m preparing a journey up the slopes. Some caves here and there I’d like to look into. I have to get some supplies together. Then I have to polish my wu-fu.”

  “Let me ask this one thing,” Jean said. “What’s your role in the Logicon project?”

  “You’re not taking notes, I see.”

  “I’m not taking notes. You’re right, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe by the time I’m back down here, Rob will have some firm plans for me. Don’t know yet exactly what’s on his mind. In the meantime I’m having a good time seeing the caves.”

  “What’s a wu-fu?”

  “It’s a medallion I wear around my neck whenever I go into the field. It’s a circular thing that has a cluster of bats set into it. Bats with their wings extended. The bats themselves form a sort of circle around a symbol of the tree of life. The Chinese are probably the only people who think of bats in connection with good luck and a long life. Anyway, before I go into the field I like to sit on a mat and polish my wu-fu for exactly seventeen minutes.”

  “What does that do?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “I think I understand.”

  Jean feared dishevelment. The silken puckers above her shirt cuff. The winning fit of her handsomely tailored pants. It was no joke to imagine what her life would be like without a firm commitment to utter presentableness. She’d been thinking a great deal about dishevelment lately. Increasingly she wondered, thinking of images in the glass halves of tenement doors, in the jigsaw spill of silver that had always seemed to crunch beneath her shoes in the worst parts of town. With each new cycle of wondering came the fear experience, a sensation she tended to characterize not just as fear but as “fear itself.” This was the comic element at work. An attempt to overdramatize for comic effect. Jean had always thought of herself as too modern and complex to experience the kind of primal fear that would qualify as “fear itself.” She found it difficult to appear pestered much less frightened. The soundly proportioned near neutrality of her figure, her looks, her manner; the supremely intact rightness of it all—these were meant to accompany brilliantly modern inner rifts, spaces and vague negations. But she was beginning to see that somewhere on the edge of these ponderings on the subject of dishevelment was the essence of fear itself. What depths of immense bedraggled dishevelment she feared, and why, it was hard at the moment to say. She had never heard anyone speak of this kind of fear. All around her all her life people recounted episodes that involved fear of heights, fear of depths, fear of slipping away, falling off, dropping into; fear of earth, air, fire, water. Where was fear itself, the backward glance of a woman in unspeakably soiled rags, collector of shopping bags, victim of spells, mumbling to herself in the stale corner of some cafeteria? Fiction, Jean thought, sitting surrounded by her notes, dozens of stunningly disordered pages spread across her bed; fiction, she thought, idly biting the skin on her index finger.

  In the kitchen they listened to the water boiling. Bolin still held Softly’s jacket, keeping it neatly folded on his lap.

  “Dent is terribly, terribly old,” Edna Lown said.

  “Old Dent,” Softly said.

  “Too, too old to be of any conceivable help to us.”

  “Lester-pet, how can he help?”

  “I can’t perfect the control system without a metalanguage. Logic rendering just won’t work. The machine won’t be able to render Logicon or speak Logicon until I figure out how to separate the language as a system of meaningless signs from the language about the language.”

  “The old problem,” Edna said.

  “Old Dent,” Softly said.

  The water boiled furiously.

  “Does anybody know how to get in touch with him?” Lester said.

  “He has an appointments secretary,” Softly said. “The only way to get in touch with old Dent is to try to reach this man known as the appointments secretary.”

  Bolin poured the water.

  “How’s our young man doing?” Edna said.

  “He promises to work. He’ll do whatever you and
Lester want. I suggest you begin with the latest notation.”

  “What about the game?” Lester said.

  “What game?”

  “Expression of surprise.”

  “Game, game, what game?”

  “The game I’m holding your jacket for. The halfball game. When do we go back and finish?”

  “There’s no time,” Edna said. “Rob’s got a lot to do if he really plans to get together with Chester Greylag Dent. Appointments secretary or not, the man’s nearly impossible to contact.”

  “Unlisted number?” Lester said.

  I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD

  Temperate by nature, ever serene in fact, Lester Bolin was not upset by the panting laughter with which Softly responded to his question about an unlisted phone number. He simply dug his shoes into the dirt, glancing toward Edna for some sign of an explanation. His work on the computer-driven control system (known, like the language itself, as Logicon) had been going very slowly. He had constructed a frame to house the wiring and inner mechanisms. As a sort of joke, he had given the frame a box-shaped “head” and cylindrical “torso.” The next step was to build a formal language, void of content, into the circuitry. Concurrent with that he had to design an inbred body of statements about this symbolic language; this would be a second form of discourse, less stark, less empty than Logicon itself and therefore able to provide a basis for analysis and description. It would have to be a system that enabled the creators of Logicon to discuss their language in a context other than the language itself and that furthermore allowed the control system’s mechanism to make meaningful statements both in Logicon and about Logicon.

  Gamete sac gonad scrotum, Billy thought, recalling the sense of confusion he’d felt upon learning that the urethra functioned as the male genital duct, having always believed that organs, ducts, valves and canals ending in the letter a were exclusively female. He felt weak, sweaty and depressed. Once again he clasped his hands on top of his head, moving them forward and back, enjoying the tectonic sensation. After a while he slipped completely under the covers, alone with his own smell.

  For this higher kind of calculation, Lester Bolin was using sheet metal, sponge rubber, various plastics; tubes, relays, a tape playback system; timing sources, transistors, a monitor system; any number of electronic components; box-shaped head and cylindrical torso. As a further joke of sorts, he was designing the model in such a way that it would operate only upon insertion of a coin.

  Chester Greylag Dent lived quietly in his custom-made nuclear-powered submarine, endlessly circling the globe. Of late, however, he’d chosen to hover, first at one thousand feet, the normal test depth for conventional nuclear submarines; then at ten thousand feet, far below the zone of light, just idling there in the dark and cold among deep-lying viperfish and giant eels; then at twenty thousand feet, below all plantlife, below the nodding work of winds and currents; and finally at an incredible thirty-five thousand feet, dead sea creatures drifting down, sponges, gouged-out shells, segmented worms feeding on detritus, fossil imprints in the sediment, the silt itself hundreds of millions of years old, never unsubmerged, the quietest place on earth.

  The helicopter in which Robert Hopper Softly dozed was heading oceanward over a cluster of volcanic islands. The craft was equipped with four different submarine-detection systems but because the submarine in question was lying dead at such tremendous depth, the more powerful sonar equipment of a tracking ship had been called into play. After the helicopter set down on a pad at the bow of the tracking vessel, Softly went immediately to a restricted area of the ship for a look at the active acoustic detection monitor. Signals from a huge mass of submerged metal were being received and separated from the background of oceanic noise. Softly proceeded to the afterdeck and stepped into a reinforced deep-diving cylinder that was then lowered into the sea on cables. The cylinder’s base was designed to match the shape and size of a submarine’s escape hatch. Its descent, which took several hours, was electronically guided by the surface vessel, as were the final maneuvering and coupling. To Softly all motion appeared to be taking place in an aneroid medium, some kind of thick gel. Affixed at last he knocked on the submarine’s hatch. It was opened by Jumulu Nobo, an abnormally large Negrito who served as Chester Greylag Dent’s appointments secretary. Softly was led through the pantry and wardroom, not without noticing that the hatch was equipped with a long metal police lock and that the bulkheads were wallpapered in cheerful colors and patterns.

  “Trouble finding us?”

  “Minimal,” Softly said.

  “Chet’s asleep now but I’ll be glad to answer any preliminary questions you may have.”

  They eased into facing chairs in a small compartment outfitted in wicker and equipped with French doors. Nobo wore a maroon jogging suit with matching sneakers. He explained that several of his Malayan forebears, all of exceedingly short stature, had migrated to Louisiana, settling in a town called Oslo, Norway, where, eventually, young Jumulu grew to adolescence and early manhood, the first of his people to exceed four feet in height.

  “I wanted to study marine biology,” he said. “It sounded so clean, so virtuous. Who could ever claim that a marine biologist was wasting his life? At my disposal would be a mass of remarkably interesting facts about the matchless organisms that populate the oceans of the world. But then I heard a voice. It told me to keep searching. In places like Oslo, Norway, Louisiana, people tend to hear voices. Anyway I kept searching and in time I wandered into the multifaceted presence of the great man himself.”

  “And here you are.”

  “I manage with a crew of eleven, a housekeeper and a eunuch. We don’t have an easy time of it. But the rewards far outweigh the sacrifices.”

  “Gratitude for your hospitality obliges me at this point to express amazement at the very existence of a submarine able to reach such depths without breaking apart.”

  “Chet outlined the basic design himself. I can tell you this much. One, this is not a spindle-hull design. The entire craft is delta-shaped—a pair of sweptback wings or fins without a body proper. Two, we have what we call a flooded outer hull. Sea water enters through small openings. This makes us more pressure-resistant than ordinary underwater craft. Three, the special metals we used for the inner hull make a thoroughly reliable weld.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “We’re all very happy with it. Of course, the hull groans from time to time.”

  “So I notice,” Softly said.

  “Perfectly normal. No cause for concern. Anticipated in the specifications.”

  Despite his assurances Nobo himself seemed ill at ease. He kept brushing imaginary dandruff out of his hair and occasionally stuck a finger in his ear and shook it vigorously. He appeared in addition to be a master of the darting glance. Sounds in the hull; the crossing of Softly’s legs; static on an intercom nearby—all evoked the swiftest of flinching looks from the appointments secretary. Whether this was his natural manner or a result of being submerged for extended periods was a question that didn’t interest Softly, who found himself distracted by the delay in seeing old Dent and therefore failed to take any more than the most casual notice of the details and intimations that weaved through the ensuing chat.

  “Did you happen to see a freighter nearby when you were aboard the tracking ship?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “They’ve contacted us a number of times,” Nobo said. “We prefer to ignore them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The freighter is Liberian. The people aboard apparently represent a Honduran cartel.”

  “Consortium Hondurium,” Softly said. “They came to feel a consortium is more stylish than a cartel, at least in name. So they changed over. In fact they’re still changing. Been through several corporate names, I believe. Elux Troxl. I know his work. Interested in abstract economic power.”

  “Not any more.”

  “How do you know?”

  Nobo got up and began jog
ging in place, his glance darting to different areas of the compartment.

  “According to their messages, they’re interested in cornering the guano market. Bat guano as fertilizer. They’ve apparently located a rich source nearby and they want to lease this vessel and any other vessel in the area in order to help transport whatever they can haul out of the bat caves. They’ve not only moved their corporate headquarters to a freighter; they’ve changed their name again.”

  “What is it?”

  “ACRONYM.”

  “What’s it stand for?”

  “We were wondering about that,” Nobo said.

  “Knowing a little about Troxl, I would guess it’s probably a combination of letters formed to represent the idea of a combination of letters. Nobody knows Troxl’s real name so maybe there’s a grubby logic to the whole thing. He excels at time-sharing. He also deals in mailing lists, chain letters, coupon analysis, subscription research, that sort of thing. Really huge companies sometimes hire people like that to undertake tedious but necessary projects. He’s a notary public as well, which gives him a sheen of respectability in a fly-by-night sort of way. To my knowledge the only nonabstract professional activity he’s ever been associated with involved the fire-bombing of zoos and animal hospitals. This was done to get people to contribute funds. Troxl’s fund-raising organization handled the whole thing, of course. The vast outpouring of money went to rebuild the zoos and hospitals in question. The donors’ names remained with Troxl. In this way he compiled enormous mailing lists, which he sold to other fund-raisers, to direct mail houses, to test-market organizations, to the subscription departments of various print media and to government agencies. With the money thus amassed he leased time on computers all over the world in order to control the fluctuations of the money curve.”