by Don DeLillo
“On the surface,” Nobo said, “just another semi-treacherous entrepreneur.”
“With a rather unsavory associate.”
“Grbk.”
“You know about him?”
“He was mentioned in the latest communication from the freighter. I think they want to impress us with their pureness of heart.”
“Mentioned in what connection?”
“He’s under house arrest aboard the ship.”
“On what charge?”
“Heinousness,” Nobo said.
A slight bland lad entered the compartment. This was Bö (boo). As the Negrito continued to run in place, the young man, head bobbing, whispered something in his ear.
“Chet will see you now,” Nobo said.
“Good.”
“He’s in the west wing.”
“Very good.”
Bö took Softly toward the bow, where they went past the sonar sphere and then made a sharp turn into the other sweptback portion of the submarine. They walked through a series of compartments, all numbered in bright red paint, some resembling rooms in a country cottage.
“Don’t you get depressed?” Softly said. “I mean being under so long.”
“I’d rather be down here than on the surface. Last time we were on the surface I fell overboard. I was surprised when nobody seemed to notice. First I yelled. Then I began to count. I screamed numbers at them. I got all the way to forty-three before Jumulu noticed. It was my instinct to die with a number on my lips rather than a boring plea for help. So tacky and dull. With my degree of heightened self-awareness, it was just about impossible to thrash around out there shouting help, help.”
“Did your life flash before your eyes?”
“My life constantly flashes before my eyes,” Bö said in a voice tenderly bereft of resonance. “I try to pick out interesting moments as they go by. But I can never find any.”
At ninety-two, Chester Greylag Dent was a dusty figure wrapped in an elegant shawl. Once tall and broad, he’d seemed to wear away, his physical presence now limited to a rather fragile central reality. He was nearly transparent, his upper and lower regions beginning to curl toward each other as though to assemble themselves about his navel, that passionate stamp of gestation. He sat in a sprawling deck chair, occupying only one fourth of it, his knees drawn up under the shawl. As Bö left, Softly sat in the other deck chair, this one not equipped with a leg rest. The compartment was otherwise unfurnished but there were books, manuscripts and correspondence scattered everywhere. Dent’s hair was reddish brown with a blond streak through it.
“I think of myself as the Supreme Abstract Commander.”
“Nice to see you again,” Softly said. “It’s been many years.”
“Bit of a lickspittle, that Bö. Still, there’s no better way to fashion an element of depraved antiquity than to have a eunuch aboard.”
“When we first made radio contact with your appointments secretary, using, with special permission, the U.S. Defense Department’s submarine communications system—an interesting setup, by the bye, that utilizes the earth itself as a reflector to bounce radio waves up to the ionosphere—he said you no longer received visitors. So I’m particularly gratified that we were able to arrange a get-together.”
“Besieged for decades,” Dent said. “We rarely surface now. Rarely even move. Jumulu screens all communications.”
“Then you personally have no contact with the outside world,” Softly said.
“I keep a post office box in Newfoundland. But we haven’t surfaced there in a very great while. All these bits and pieces of mail lying about are from five to ten years old. If I haven’t answered them by now, I don’t expect I ever will. Will I?”
“What do you do to pass the time?”
“I think of myself as the Supreme Abstract Commander. That’s what I do.”
“Very good.”
“I also formulate ideas on this and that topic.”
“I thought as much.”
“As you know, I’ve been referred to more than a few times as the greatest man in the world. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because of my books, my speeches, my innovations in so many diverse fields? Is it because I renounced my dual citizenship in order to become stateless? Is it because I returned my academic degrees, my honorary degrees, my medals, my plaques? Is it because I chose to disown my children, my grandchildren, my regius professorships? Is it, do you suppose, because I have always insisted on viewing us not as a collection of races and nationalities but as a group that shares the same taxonomic classification, that of Earth-planet extant? Surely the proclamations of greatness that collect about my name go beyond these factors to include the life choice I’ve made. To suspend myself in the ocean zone of perpetual darkness. To inhabit an environment composed almost solely of tiny sightless feeble-minded creatures palpitating in the ooze. What do you think, Softly?”
“Something to that, I suppose.”
“True greatness always involves a period of complete withdrawal. To withdraw completely is to appeal to the romantic instincts of people. Blind little sluglike organisms. That’s about all you can expect to find down here. Too cold and dark for anything else. I believe this accounts in large measure for the proclamations of my greatness and I would remind you that they come from every quarter of the civilized world.”
Dent’s voice had a whistling sort of tone, very reedy, and it seemed to quicken as he approached the end of a statement, as though the voice were issuing from a tubular conveyance which he feared was about to implode.
“Why have you come, Softly? Make your point. There must be a point you came to make.”
“I’m involved in a project called Logicon. We’re trying to devise a totally logical system of discourse with the idea of using it eventually as an aid in celestial communication.”
“Have you drained the system of meaning?”
“We’re doing that now.”
“Have you established a strict set of rules?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Have you taken measures to safeguard your system of notation from vagueness and self-contradiction?”
“I’m confident we can do that.”
“Have you devised an alternate system to test the original system’s consistency?”
“That’s the problem,” Softly said. “That’s why I’m here. We need a metalogical language to build into our computer-driven machine. We’ll save a tremendous amount of time and labor if we can refer to a source of artificial intelligence that functions on both levels—Logicon and meta-Logicon. Throughout your career you’ve had great success in model-building, in the development of new materials, in advanced design and so forth. This submarine is an obvious example.”
“I’m far too old to help in this matter,” Dent said. “True, I spend some time every day dictating ideas which are then typed, privately printed in our offset room and bound in leather. But my ideas are no longer mathematical in nature and haven’t been for a great many decades. I’ve written extensively on the subject but haven’t actually done mathematics since my twenties. Your problem is essentially mathematical. You need someone able to draw on vast powers of creativity.”
“I’ve got Lown and Bolin.”
Dent yawned and shivered simultaneously.
“Who else?” he said.
“Your fellow laureate Terwilliger.”
“Billy Twillig sat on a pin. How many inches did it go in? Four. One two three four.”
“Nice,” Softly said.
“He can solve your problem, can’t he?”
“He hasn’t been cooperating. He won’t even sit in front of the sun lamp. The others take turns. All but him. Maybe that’s what’s got him down. Lack of sunlight, real or synthetic. There’s a form of depression people suffer in northern regions during the sunless months. It’s called polar hysteria. Maybe that’s what he’s got.”
“Probably he doesn’t like sharing the limelight, that one. I know t
hat one’s work. Original but full of quirks. That kind of mind never succeeds at collaboration. Pride, arrogance, vanity, insecurity. They go together. Ego, instability, fear itself.”
“You have no advice to give me then after all the preparations I made, not to mention the traveling, the search, the descent, all of which, excluding the preparations, have to be repeated in the opposite direction.”
“Arithmetize,” Dent said.
“Arithmetize?”
“The system must reflect the metasystem. Or vice versa. Provide each sign with an integer.”
“An integer?”
“If your electromechanical relay system is a continuous one, you must match it with a discrete-state mechanism. After all, Cauchy played with discrete and continuous groups. He was also a royalist who gave money to the poor.”
“Why bring that up?”
“Balance,” Dent said. “That’s the best I can do. Every invention has an element of balance. Beyond that I have nothing to say except that problems are inevitable. As you well know, the more consistent the system, the less provable its consistency.”
“Who does your shawls?”
“I use this man in Sausalito.”
“You must give me his name,” Softly said.
Dent asked him to ring for the eunuch. There was a buzzer on a panel nearby and Softly pressed it once, wishing he’d never thought of making this trip. Bö soon arrived with a chamber pot. He sat it on the floor next to the old man’s deck chair and then left the compartment.
“This is in the nature of a drill.”
“Of course,” Softly said.
“I have a calculus.”
“A calculus?”
“A stone. A urinary calculus. An abnormal mass in my bladder. Have you ever passed a stone?”
“No.”
“We drill every day. Getting ready for the event itself. The passing of the stone.”
“I hope you’re not in pain.”
Dent seemed to be thinking of something.
“Logic merely fills the gaps,” he said finally. “The main technique is the mathematical technique. Granted, much of mathematics is exceedingly comic. But this only makes us believe in it all the more.”
“My immediate concern is metamathematics.”
“Hilarious,” Dent said.
“A universal logical structure able to speak about itself in metalogical terms.”
“Extremely mirth-provoking.”
The hull groaned loudly. Jumulu Nobo stepped into the compartment and explained that it was time to play rock-paper-scissors. Old Dent liked to play in Japanese. When Nobo, hands behind his back, reached the count of three, Dent thrust a clenched fist out of his shawl. Nobo at the same time flung out his right hand with index and middle fingers extended.
“Ishi!”
“Hasami!”
There was a brief pause.
“Rock breaks scissors,” Dent said.
“I hate to lose.”
“A fact that makes my pleasure even keener.”
Again Nobo counted to three.
“Hasami!”
“Kami!”
The hull groaned. Softly thought of the immense pressure being brought to bear, the shatter-capacity of the sea at this depth.
“Scissors cuts paper,” Dent said.
Softly watched them play for an hour. Finally Dent made a gesture and got to his feet. Nobo picked up the chamber pot and held it just below the old man’s crotch, undoing the single metal clip in Dent’s pajama bottoms with his free hand. A long time passed.
“Stay to dinner, Softly?”
“Must get going, I’m afraid.”
“We’re having hamstring,” Nobo said. “A big favorite back in Oslo, Norway.”
“Really must run,” Softly said.
“Hamstring, maw and rootage.”
Bö led him back around to the escape hatch and unsecured the police lock. Eventually, in the helicopter, Softly noticed a freighter almost directly ahead. He asked the pilot to go down for a closer look. Deck hands were visible here and there but no one of obvious consequence. However, the ship’s name was easy to read, having been lettered on the hull in Day-Glo paint.
Goo Fou Maru
Seagoing Headquarters for
ACRONYM
Operating beyond the 3-, 12- and 48-mile limits
Not subject to international search procedures
Trespassers will be prosecuted
Softly had his briefcase aboard the helicopter and he found an antidepressant inside and swallowed it quickly. A fairly mild rise it gave him, just enough to keep him intact until he reached the ordered dense environment at the bottom of the great excavation.
Maurice Wu in long johns and sweater scrubbed the chrome reflector of his carbide lamp with foaming soap. Then he checked his first-aid kit for bandage roll, tourniquet, sterile gauze compress, one-shot antirabies serum, boric acid solution. He poured some carbide from a gallon can into a small plastic container. He put spare parts for the lamp into an even smaller watertight pouch. Having already polished his wu-fu, he slipped it around his neck. Then he put on kneepads, coveralls, high socks, climbing boots and cotton gloves.
Billy left his cubicle.
In the next unit Mainwaring and Bolin studied a number of documents that the former pulled out of his attaché case, where these papers and others were filed, tabbed and partitioned. Regarding organization in general, Bolin thought of his own tendency to make lists. The best part of list-making was the satisfaction he derived from crossing out each item as it was attended to. In any graded series of human gratifications, he was sure this pleasurable sense, that of business-neatly-completed, would occupy one of the lower orders. Still, it was a constant source of irreducible delight, the crossing-out of things.
Jean Venable stepped over a generator cable and headed onto the path between the rows of cubicles. She saw Billy coming out of the first-aid unit and walked with him back to his quarters.
“Not ill, I hope.”
“Just checking out what they have in there. Not much. I thought I’d walk around a little. See what’s doing.”
“Do you employ certain time-wasting devices to put off the start of another day’s work?”
“No,” he said.
“Do you experience an emotional letdown when you complete a theorem or whatever?”
“Cut it out.”
“Just wondered,” she said.
He realized he was causing a one-man clutter and so he got into bed, dressed in the same pants, shirt, underwear and socks he’d been wearing when he first entered the antrum. Jean arranged herself sidesaddle on the TV table that was supposed to be his desk.
“Come on, slugabed, cheer up.”
“Sure.”
“It finally came to me,” she said. “A beautifully lucid moment.”
“What?”
“Sooner or later I always know when something’s wrong. I knew it was something really basic this time. Then it came to me.”
“What?” he said.
“Lucid but frightening,” she said. “My book.”
“What about it?”
“I’m making it fiction.” she said. “The thing that was wrong was that I didn’t really have a book as things stood. It wasn’t willing itself into me, excuse the metaphysics. It was all very forced. But then I realized what I wanted to do and it was frightening. Fiction. I’m going to write fiction.”
“Why is this frightening?”
“Because I don’t know how to write fiction. I’ll have to make everything up. I’ll have to change everything. About the project. About the people involved. Everything. The sounds, the smells, the touch. The appearance of things and the essence of things.”
“Why the smells?”
“I plan to make strict rules that I plan to follow. Reading my book will be a game with specific rules that have to be learned. I’m free to make whatever rules I want as long as there’s an inner firmness and cohesion, right? Just like m
athematics, excuse the comparison. Let’s see, what else? Don’t tell anyone we’ve had this talk. That’s what I wanted to be sure to remember to tell you.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“If Rob finds out, I go flying out of here headfirst. And I want to stay a while longer. I need technical stuff from Edna and Lester. I need to find out if they can actually do what they’ve set out to do. I need to learn what this new man is like, this man Mainwaring. And meanwhile I’ll be secretly writing and planning and scheming.”
“When Rob sees he’s not getting the book he thinks he’s getting, I don’t want to be around.”
“It’s not really his fault, I suppose. Those occasional rages and flurries of insult and all the rest of it. I suppose if I’d been raised under the same circumstances, I’d not only be temperamental and even hostile at times but most likely I’d be the same size he is. His size, after all, is everything, isn’t it?”
“Raised under what circumstances?”
“Total emotional neglect,” she said. “Rob was abandoned by his parents and raised in a foundling home. According to records he later dug up and examined, he had no organic abnormalities at the time. But see they kept him in a small dark room unattended for hours on end. I’m talking about extended lengths of time. He spat up food and swallowed it again. He suffered from insomnia. Then he lapsed into periods of prolonged sleep. This inhibited his growth hormones with results that are all too obvious.”
“That doesn’t explain why it hurts him to walk.”
“On that subject I have a couple of things to say. His emotional deprivation resulted in all sorts of otherwise unexplained respiratory infections as well as a marked decrease in muscle tone. This could account for his hip trouble.”
