“Right right right! That’s all right. Why are you—”
“Well, you see where I’m going with this, don’t you? It’s already obvious that this isn’t going to work out for you. If the experiment was destined to be a success—in the future—wouldn’t we have actually seen evidence to that effect here? Now? In the moment when you established Point Zero? Shouldn’t the door to the causality violation chamber have opened? Shouldn’t something—or someone—have come out?”
As Edmund looked up at the towering column of the causality violation chamber in the center of the room, he allowed himself to give free rein to his fantasies. “Like, for instance: the door opens. Three people come out. Holy shit: it’s us, from the future. Me, and you, and Alicia. And the future version of you comes up to you and says, ‘I don’t have much time. But there is another team of duplicates of ourselves right behind us. You must not listen to anything they say. The future of humanity depends on it.’ Then ten seconds later, the door opens again. Here come three more duplicates of ourselves, except they’re wearing burlap sacks and they look like heroin addicts, and they have bar codes tattooed on their foreheads. And this other future version of you comes up to you and says, ‘There are truths that man was not meant to know. You must abandon the attempt to build a causality violation device. The future of humanity depends on it.’ And it’s like: how did this happen? Which of these duplicates should we believe? And our minds get totally blown—pow!
“What I’m saying is that if this experiment was something that was going to pan out, we should have seen something that was, you know, all weird and paradoxical.”
“Let me get this straight,” Alicia said. “That’s something you wanted to happen.”
“Well, no, I didn’t exactly want it to happen. But it would have been an awesome thing to see.”
“With all due respect,” Philip said, in a tone of voice indicating that he didn’t think much respect was due, “I don’t think you understand how the scientific process functions. Science often has a habit of refusing to confirm our suppositions about how the world works. You have a notional model of how things are, and then when you start to try to verify that model, the facts don’t cooperate. So you have to find a new model. That’s what’s interesting! That’s one of the reasons you do science—to find out what your illusions are, to get rid of them, and to find a new, and a better, and a more refined way of seeing the world. You don’t throw in the towel when it turns out that your old way of seeing things is contradicted by the data. That’s not when you stop. That’s when you begin. Don’t you see?”
“Philip,” Edmund said patiently. “Philip. I know what’s going on in your head. I’ve seen people even smarter than you go down this path before. You’ve been thinking about this idea your whole life, and your whole sense of identity is riding on your theory being proven right. And when the evidence starts to say otherwise, when people begin to tell you otherwise, you just ignore them. You go down this dead-end research path by yourself, and you tell yourself that if you pursue this for long enough, then you’ll be able to show everyone how wrong they were. The more people criticize and denigrate you, the sweeter your victory over them is going to be in the end. Be honest. Isn’t that what you’re thinking right now?
“If you want to go down that path, I wish you luck. Maybe it’ll turn out well for you. But I can’t join you. And I can’t throw good money after bad.
“Again, I’m really sorry about this.”
Quietly, Edmund pushed himself off the desk and stood. He waved goodbye to everyone (Rebecca suddenly finding a reason to tickle and fuss with Sean; Alicia giving Edmund a look that could have curdled milk), and, without speaking, he left the lab, its heavy double doors swinging shut behind him.
“Screw him,” Alicia said. “You don’t need him. You can get a grant from a real organization, or, barring that, at least from someone less crazy.”
“I just hope we don’t have to find someone crazier,” said Philip.
14
KNOB CREEK
Once again, Alicia placed Arachne in front of the entrance to the causality violation device. “Beginning run 368,” she said. “The time is…twenty forty and fifteen seconds.”
“Sync with the Boulder clock is exact,” Carson said wearily, eyes on his laptop screen.
Except for the two security guards at the desk out front, Alicia and Carson were the only people in the lab this Friday evening. Philip was out with his wife—on his way out of the office, he had mentioned, with perhaps the slightest bit of resentment, a “date night”—and Dennis had somehow managed to leave the office at five sharp every evening since he’d started as a post-doc, which was the surest sign of all that he wasn’t interested in academia in the long term. He’d quietly confided to Carson that he was already applying for positions in the civil service, one of the last places in American culture where a workweek longer than forty hours was thought to be unconscionable. (“Work to live; don’t live to work,” he’d say: as much as he seemed to enjoy it, the line that doing science offered so much pleasure that it didn’t count as work held little traction with him.)
The robot dutifully began its march toward the open door of the causality violation chamber. One of its legs had a rackety jitter, and it was pulling slightly to the left; soon it’d need to be repaired yet again. In a lab you came to look forward to little repair jobs like that, though: they had clear goals, and clear paths by which those goals could be attained. You were practically guaranteed to get the satisfaction that came from doing something right.
After a gentle nudge in the right direction from Alicia (which Alicia then dutifully noted in her log), Arachne entered the causality violation chamber and the door sealed shut behind it.
Sitting at his desk, Carson’s shoulders slumped slightly and his eyelids fluttered.
“Activating the CVD,” Alicia said. “Carson, you look like hell. What’s going on?”
From the speakers of the little stereo on Alicia’s desk, Nas declared that some unspecified nemesis was a slave to a page in his rhyme book.
“Things haven’t been going so well for me lately,” Carson said. His face looked ashen.
“Sorry to hear that,” said Alicia. “Opening the chamber.” The door swung open, and Arachne limped out.
Alicia checked the time on the robot’s clock. “The time is…twenty-one forty-one and five seconds,” she said. “Carson, what’ve you got.”
“What did you expect me to have? Twenty-one forty-one and five seconds. Sync with the Boulder clock is still exact.”
Carson silently closed his laptop, lifting it and cradling it against his chest, his gaze elsewhere. “You know what?” he said, his voice cracking.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
He held it out in front of him, opened his hands, and let the computer fall. Alicia heard a crack as shards of plastic from its case skittered across the floor.
“Okay,” she said, unfazed. “First things first. Let’s clean that up, and, I don’t know, hide it somewhere, so Philip doesn’t see it until we have a story. Then I’m going to take you out to a bar and get you drunk, and you’re going to tell me what your problem is, and I’m going to solve it.”
Carson’s slight smile was at odds with his downcast eyes. “You’re surprisingly confident about that.”
“You should know better than to be surprised. Come on. Hop to it.”
They went to a bar with good nachos, since they were both really hungry (and at least there was this persistent sign that they were doing exciting science—that even the most mundane chores related to the CVD could make you focus so much that you lost track of time and forgot to eat). Carson sat down in a dim corner at a wooden table with a slight cant, and Alicia went to the bar to get the drinks. While Carson waited he watched the President on the TV mounted over the bar: the volume had been muted, but the captioning that scrolled up the screen suggested that talks had broken down between state official
s and the leaders of the occupying rebels in the Dakotas who were attempting to secede from the Union. Alicia came back with two glasses of ice water, along with smaller glasses filled with a dark amber liquid.
“I asked for a beer,” Carson said.
“This isn’t a beer,” Alicia replied, setting the glasses down. “This is a double shot of Knob Creek single-barrel bourbon. I want to loosen your tongue.” She pushed the shot glass across the table to him. “Drink down half of that and sip the rest.”
She drained half of her own glass by example, and Carson (who may not have wanted to let himself get out-drunk by a woman he outweighed by sixty pounds) did the same, wincing as the booze drew a thin trail of flame down the back of his throat and pooled in his belly.
“Not a whiskey drinker?” Alicia said.
“Not really,” said Carson, suppressing a cough.
“I didn’t know,” Alicia said. “Otherwise I’d have gotten you something lighter and smoother, better for a novice: Basil Hayden’s, or the like. But what’s done is done. Now: talk to me.”
Carson took a moment to get his thoughts together. Then he said, all at once: “The thing is, as sure as I am that we really are doing interesting science, even though it’s hard to find too many physicists who’ll agree, I’m starting to wish I’d never gotten mixed up with something so ambitious. Seriously, when I look at where I am career-wise, and where the rest of my cohort is, and I look at all the time I’ve spent generating null results while they’ve been publishing papers, I wonder where all the time went. Because a lot of the guys I graduated with hopped onto projects that were already up and running: they were working with experiments that had already been designed, or devices that had already been tested, and pretty much all they did was turn a dial on a machine to a setting it hadn’t been turned to before. And that new setting generated a collection of results, and out of the results they got a paper, except before they sent it off they realized they’d be much better off if they split that into three papers, which would be three lines on their CV. Meanwhile.” He threw his hands up. “Here I am.”
“I sympathize. But—and this might be cold comfort—you have to accept that the things you’re worried about aren’t the purest parts of doing science. Hirsch numbers and impact factors and CV lines: that’s all ancillary stuff. And humans worry about things like this because humans aren’t perfect, but these concerns are about reputation, not about knowing. The rational part of your mind tells you that 368 sets of null results are still results, and those results tell you more about the world than you knew before you conducted the experiment. The part of your mind that has an ego, that likes to see your name on shiny things, tells you that a null result is the same as a failure. That part of your mind is wrong. The people who really do fail in science—the ones who give up—are the people who forget that.”
“That’s easy for you to say—you’re the wonder girl who had a paper in Science at twenty-three.”
“Wonder woman,” Alicia said. “And yes.”
“Which means you’re arguing from the privileged perspective of someone who already has a strong reputation: it’s easy for you to dismiss it. Whereas a lot of other young scientists have to deal with the fact that science is done by humans, as you say, and humans aren’t as dispassionate as the scientific method is, and so reputation matters to them. You can see how it’s easy to talk yourself into thinking that gaming the system is the same as doing good science: that you have to do the first if you want to do the second. And that idealism in science is for chumps.”
“I can’t speak for everyone, but the work I’ve done can speak for itself.”
“I know, I know. You really are genuinely brilliant—seriously. And I’m not going to say you’ve been lucky, but I will say that you’ve been very skilled at making your own luck. And that’s fine, and that’s fair, and you deserve it. But when I look at your career so far—and I say this to you out of appreciation, not envy—I see someone who’s going to land on her feet and do well for herself, no matter what. I shouldn’t tell you this—it’s on the edge of something I don’t want any part of, and it’s not my business, but you’re the one who bought me this drink—but Philip is already worrying about what will happen when you leave the lab.”
“Which I’m going to do sooner rather than later. I’ve already got feelers out. Things look promising.”
“Well, from the way he talks about you, it sounds like he thinks the whole project is going to fall apart when you’re gone. And I doubt he talks about me that way, or anyone else in the lab, for that matter.”
“If he doesn’t, that doesn’t have anything to do with your talent, Carson.” Alicia looked directly at him when she said this, though Carson got the distinct impression that she’d rather have looked anywhere else.
“I don’t mean to turn this into a pity party for me,” Carson said. “I’m sure this is the basic self-doubt that any young scientist deals with, at one time or another.”
“This is true,” Alicia said, though Carson thought that what Alicia was thinking was at sharp odds with what she was saying. He was sure that Alicia had never doubted herself in her life, that she had never thought of herself as young in any way, much less a young scientist. Alicia had probably snapped her own umbilical cord and walked out of the delivery room on her own two feet.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m not having that self-doubt. Especially now, when it’ll soon be too late for me to choose another path in life. You know—when you look back on your life, you want it to have the shape of a good story, where each year is better than the one before. You don’t want your story to be one where you hit a plateau and tread water for the rest of your life, and you tell yourself you’re happy because you’re getting by. And I’m not sure the life I’m leading now is one that I’ll be happy with, years from now.”
“Again, I sympathize,” Alicia said. “But this is dangerously close to the pity party you feared. I can tell you this: that one of the strategies young scientists use to cope with the constant threat of failure in their field is to tell themselves that leaving the academy would be the biggest failure of all. The part of your mind that tells you that is also wrong. It may well be the case that you could do more for the world, and be a happier person in the bargain, in another life outside academia, rather than inside it. Just as it is highly likely that my skills make me more suitable for a life in academia than anywhere else. But you have to decide that for yourself.”
“Are you saying that I might not be cut out for this?”
“You’re not hearing what I’m saying. But you will if, and when, it matters.”
Alicia took another drink of her whiskey. “I feel we’re not getting to the root of the matter here, though. This stuff you’re talking about is just an academic’s garden-variety malaise: there’s nothing special about it. It’s not the kind of thing that’d make you think it was a good idea to willfully damage a piece of computer hardware. I am a perceptive person, and I can see that something else is going on that you don’t yet want to talk about. So: more alcohol. Drink the rest of that bourbon—drink it all down, right now; there’s more where that came from—and then you will tell me what the real problem is.”
“I don’t know,” Carson said uneasily, reaching for his glass. “It’s a personal thing, and you and I don’t really talk about…you know, personal stuff much. Things seem to go better at work if we stick to talking about work.”
“Carson, I’m very good with people.”
“You are?”
“Certainly! And I’m certain you’ll find it useful to tell me what’s wrong.” Alicia pointed at the glass in Carson’s hand. “Drink. Talk.”
“So Kate and I broke things off,” Carson said after Alicia placed the second glass of Knob Creek in front of him. Carson looked up and across the bar at the bartender, who subtly smiled and winked—Good luck, tiger.
“Oh, I didn’t realize we were having celebratory, kicking-out-the-jams drinks instead of
consolation, crying-in-your-glass drinks,” Alicia said. “Sixteen-year Scotch of some kind is what I should be buying you. Congratulations.”
“I liked her.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’ve only met her…twice!”
“That was enough. She was so ordinary.”
“Alicia. I liked her. And…you know, usually when something like this happens, you get a warning, right? She floats a trial balloon or something, even if you don’t realize it was a trial balloon until it’s too late: she says that maybe you ought to be doing something differently, or mentions things she wants that it’s apparent you don’t have. But here’s what happened: she called me last Sunday afternoon and asked if she could come over, right then. And I was just cleaning the apartment and I said, sure, whatever. So she came over, and I let her in, and she just stood there in the middle of the living room floor, not saying anything. Didn’t even take off her jacket. I was sitting on the couch and I said, ‘Do you want to sit down?’ And she said, ‘I’m okay here.’ I thought, Well, okay, then.
“So we just made small talk for a little bit, which is weird because one, we had kind of gotten past that small-talk phase of things, and two, she’s still standing in the middle of the floor in her jacket, and then she blurts out all at once, ‘I have something I need to say to you. I don’t—we can’t see each other anymore. I like you and you’re a great guy, but…yeah. I don’t have a good reason for this. I’m sorry. So yeah. That’s it.’
“And I just look at her, and she doesn’t say anything.
“And I say, ‘Kate, what the fuck?’ and she just stands there.
“And I say, ‘Do you at least want to talk about this first? Because this is a hell of a way to end things.’ And she says, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it, I don’t think.’ And she just stands there in her jacket and doesn’t say anything else.
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