“And still the calculator is not done. Things keep changing; and, with every change, there comes the need to revise the calculations.
“And also keep this in mind: not only does the calculating mechanism work by being arbitrary with regard to some of the values it assigns, it also works despite imperfections in its parts. There are some core parts that keep chugging away but there are other parts, crucial to the mechanism as a whole for its optimal functioning, that have no effect on the appearance of continuity of the operation of the machine were they to malfunction.
“Thus the calculating mechanism may slow down or speed up erratically. It may ignore what it considers most important while putting a lot of emphasis on what it has decided is irrelevant. It can add 2+2 and come up with 5 without having any way of realizing that a mistake has been made.”
The words did not make much sense to him. He was not even sure if the voice came from outside of or inside of his head. And all he wanted to do was sleep. He began twisting and turning. He turned over on his stomach and, by bringing his arms up and around his knapsack, made it an even better pillow than before. He turned his head to the side, closed his eyes, and tried once again to fall asleep.
This time, he dreamed about a circus juggler who juggled a variety of different objects simultaneously: a hatchet, a book, a lighted candle, an inflated ball, a bowling pin, a plate, and a tricycle. He watched amazed. He noticed that each of the objects being juggled rotated around its own center while also rotating around the two centers close to the two ends of the oval that the objects circumscribed.
The juggler is dressed in tight black pants, dancing shoes, and a white shirt with ruffles running down the front of it. There is a pink satiny scarf wrapped loosely around his neck. His hair is black and shiny. He has an upturned mustache. Printed on the front and back of the ruffled shirt he wears are symbols incomprehensible to him. They were symbols like the ones he had been drawing.
The juggler let each of the objects he had been juggling fall to the ground. He then turned to the auditorium—only one person sat in front of him—he (Peter Philby) was that one person. Then the juggler began to make squealing and buzzing and clicking noises that Peter assumed constituted the sounds of a language that he (Peter Philby) had never heard before.
He listened carefully to the sounds, trying very hard to make some sense out of them and convinced that if he tried long enough and hard enough he could. Then, just when that last thought popped into his mind, the sounds suddenly made sense to him. This is what he understood the juggler to say:
“If you have ever experienced being in love, think about the experience you had. You remember. You may look forward to being in love again perhaps even with the same person (assuming the earlier love faded or got broken). But where is the actual experience. Even when you were in the throes of love, you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. It is too unpredictable, to changeable, and too elusive to make it possible for anyone to say ‘I have it.’”
The juggler then bowed and walked to his right until he disappeared behind a curtain. He was followed by a woman who looked very much like Sylvia Ridgeway. Philby thought she might well be her. The woman, whoever she was, was wearing a long white silken robe and carried in her left hand a wand that had colored strips that ran around the sides of the wand on the fat end, the end that she was holding onto.
The woman tapped the narrow end of the wand against a nearby table. Then she got up on the table, pointed upwards with the wand, and said this (again the sounds were at first incomprehensible but changed after a while so that he actually could understand what she was saying):
“Think of a person as an odd collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces. And, however many pieces there are, you come to the realization that there never seemed to be enough pieces actually to be able to make it possible to complete any puzzle.
“Now imagine that, it just so happens, somewhere out there in the world is another person, also a bundle of jigsaw puzzle pieces, whose pieces also do not make a complete puzzle but, it just so happens, the pieces of the one person’s puzzle and the pieces of that other person’s puzzle do fit together to make one complete puzzle. Or maybe it takes three people to do it. Or maybe four. Or maybe one person but at two or three or four different times of his or her life to do it.”
The woman in the silken dress then turned around and began doodling with her wand on the wall behind her. She drew first a little bird, then two stick figures (one dressed in the kind of dress that only female stick figures wear), then a bell, and finally a flower. Then she too took a bow and walked off the stage.
After she left, a very old man who was bald but had a long white beard and mustache crept slowly to the center of the stage. He too made the incomprehensible sounds that shifted ever so gradually into sounds that made sense to him.
The old man leaned on the table that the woman in the silken dress had stood on top of. Tired of making the effort to stand, he sat down on a single chair that was behind the table and spoke while resting his chin on a folded hand.
The old man said, “Think of people as sets of round gears that, as long as they live, are constantly spinning with the gears having varying diameters and with different shapes and arrangements of teeth. And sometimes things come up against and interfere with the spinning of the sprockets in which case the gears slow down, get worn down, and make grating noises. Sometimes gears may stop altogether when something like this happens. Sometimes they may even crack or break apart or fall off of the rods around which they revolve.
“But sometimes, it also happens that gears exist which are perfectly suited for one another and which also exist in the same vicinity and which also come close to one another and, being close, come closer and still closer. And the gears mesh. They also spin at the same speed. They also make sounds that harmonize when spinning. There is no grinding, no slowing down, and no breaking.
“And what gears are these? What do they look like? Why do they spin? Who or what made such gears? Who or what made them spin? And why was all of this done?”
The old man took a deep bow and seemed more to fade away the deeper he bowed. The table, the chair, and the stage also faded away. The dream had ended.
Philby opened his eyes and, at first, wondered where he was. Then he remembered. He remembered landing on the asteroid and entering the small room and getting trapped inside and going downwards and opening a door that led to another and another and another.
He felt the wind and noticed that the wind was more powerful than before though not quite as cold. He noticed that the wind was actually whistling now. A lot of air was coming into the room where he was now from the ramp where he had been earlier. He asked himself: From where does such a wind come?
He wondered: Is it possible for so much air to squeeze through the space that one tiny round window once covered?
He moved the portable stairway that he had used to get up to the level of some of the doors with inscriptions when he was doing his drawing of inscriptions. Now, he moved the stairway so that, sitting on it, he could face the corridor and contemplate the wind. He sat down on the third step from the bottom.
Chapter 22: The Shrieking Wind
He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He didn’t feel too good. He was feeling dizzy and disoriented. Perhaps the wind with its alternating fierceness and mildness had worn him down. Perhaps the soup he had drunk a while before was affecting him. In any case, he was feeling not only dizzy but also slightly nauseous.
He put his hands to his head, and waited for the dizziness and nausea to pass. It was then that he became aware of a high-pitched shrieking sound. It seemed to be accompanying the wind. He felt he had to stop the sound if he was not to become paralyzed by it, but he did not know how to do that. He didn’t even know where it came from or what its source was but presumed it came from one of the round windows.
He decided to go back down the ramp and find the source and perhaps figure out a way to stop or muf
fle the shrieking sound. He would try to get to the round windows, check up on his hunch, and, if his hunch proved accurate, try to figure out a way to stop the wind. Putting his backpack back on his back, he started walking down the corridor that had the two round windows in it.
Just as he suspected, walking was hard. With each step he took, the wind seemed to grow a little stronger. By the time he had taken a few steps, he was dealing with a full blown gale. He had once lived where there was a hurricane, and this was something like that. The wind blew his clothing into him and behind him. It pressed against his cheeks. At one point, debris passed him. He wondered what the debris might have been, not having seen it. Then more debris, flying so quickly he saw nothing more than a blur, grazed his face and stung. He put a finger up to his cheek and saw blood on it.
He got down on his hands and knees, thinking he might get underneath the wind, and, for a while, he did feel a lessening of the pressure and was able to crawl along. But the wind kept getting stronger and stronger. It reached out and up and down. It licked around him, found him, and then started focusing on him.
He crawled harder but was making ever less progress. The time came when, though he crawled as fast as a little bug, he wasn’t getting anywhere. Then he started slipping backwards.
There were some rough spots on the floor, even small cavities in places. He tried grabbing hold of an edge of one of these cavities, but the wind was too strong for him. It pushed him back with such force that his fingers couldn’t catch on anything. He’d slip back, find another place to hold on, lose that grip, and slip back again.
In between the place where the ramp ended and the flat floor of the room beyond it (the room with the stairways and doors) began, there was a very narrow gap. He remembered having noticed it earlier but did not make anything of it. Now, he waited for it to slide under him (or, more accurately, for him to slide over it). He thought its edges might offer him good handholds and footholds.
As he kept being blown back, he’d turn his body so he could also look back. When he saw the gap, he positioned his body and hands so that when he got over the gap he could reach down into it with both hands and grab hold for dear life. He did manage to do that. He held on with his hands while his body straightened out and fluttered up and down from the force of the wind.
Holding on at that place, he noticed the two bottles and the glass that he saw earlier. They managed still to be sitting on the ledge up on the wall on his right. But, then, as he watched, the wind got to them. It blew them sideways. The bottle on the side from where the wind was coming flew into the drinking glass that sat beside it. Then bottle and glass flew into the glass on the far side of the wind. The three glass objects made a strange shrill clattering sound as they crashed into one another and fell down, each going in a different direction as it fell or flew through space.
First the shards of glass from the drinking glass flew out and down at an angle. Then both bottles toppled over. They careened off the ledge at an angle but eventually banged against the floor. Then both bottles shattered, sending pieces of glass in all directions.
When the bottles broke, their contents spilled out. He saw the puddles. Then he felt something wet on his cheek. He touched it. This was not blood. He ducked, afraid that the shards of glass would pass by next and cut him.
Shortly after seeing the bottles break, he felt his legs fly up in the air. He clutched the handholds he had found. When the wind changed direction, his body crashed to the ground. Then the wind picked up again. It picked up his body. He held onto his handhold as well as he could. His knuckles were white. His face was contorted into a terrible grimace now. His hair blew all around him. His jacket whipped and snapped.
Then he heard the sound of something banging behind him; and, despite the obvious difficulty involved in doing so, he looked back behind him and saw that all seven of the doors that lined the walls of the room behind him were flapping open and closed. When they opened, sometimes they opened up so wide their knobs or outer edges banged into the wall of the room or of the space inside. Two of the doors happened to be so close together that they banged into one another.
The sounds he heard varied according to the sizes and shapes of the doors and of the walls against which they crashed.
Whatever was going on, he was having an increasingly difficult time holding on. One hand slipped free at one point and he had to hold on with just one hand until he was able to get the other hand back into the groove and to a place where it could clutch the cement edge.
He listened. What he heard sounded like a band of drummers he once had heard banging way on some street of some city where he had been. He remembered an upturned white bucket in front of them with dollar bills in it. He remembered the drummers sweating but looking joyful while pounding away.
He wondered when or how this wind would ever end. He wondered if the gale might pick up a sheet of plywood from the outside and, by pounding it against the wall, would cover the round windows. Thus the wind would put an end to itself. But nothing like that happened. The wind persisted. It became, if anything, ever stronger.
Then, he saw that bird that he had thought was an owl, the bird that had looked so fixedly at him and had flown from window to window and that had scrambled up against one of the windows and had pushed it slightly open before flying away.
The bird was back now. He saw it far ahead of him. It clawed against the lower edge of the opening where the round window that had fallen out of its frame had been.
It was fighting the wind in its way much as he was fighting it in his way. At some point though, it seemed to lose the battle. It tumbled over and rolled around a couple of times in midair and, in so doing, entered the room with the seven doors.
The bird landed on the floor, looked around, and then managed to fly up into the air. As it rose, it drew its wings tight against its body. It points its head forward. It made its tail feathers go straight back. Then the wind grabbed hold of it and it shot forwards in the direction of the doors. He looked at it as it sailed along. He saw that its eyes were closed.
It moved like a rocket. It was all white except for red tips on its wings and something red streaming behind its head. He turned his head so that he could follow its flight as long as possible and saw it head straight for one of the doorways that kept swinging open and closed. It was one of the round doors—the bottom one. He watched it reach the lower round door just as it swung open. He saw it slightly adjust the direction of its flight so that it would not crash against the door’s frame. He saw it go through the round door and disappear.
Then the door slammed closed. Then, shortly thereafter, the door flew open again with the bird no longer visible. It had been swallowed up by the darkness that lay on the other side of the door.
Soon after that happened, he felt the wind pick up still another notch and, now, it was impossible for him to hold on any longer. Both hands began slipping. One came free and then the second one came free. He felt himself being lifted up higher into the air and, at the same time, being carried backwards. He saw a door beside him. Then all was darkness. Then he heard a banging or clanging sound. He felt as if he was inside of a bell that was rocking back and forth and ringing. Then he was no longer there but falling, falling endlessly, and then hitting bottom where all was dark.
As he lay sore and wounded on the dark ground, he realized that he had been pushed by the wind through one of the doors. But which one had he gone through? He had no way of knowing. And now was lying on the rough ground of some very dark space.
He reached for straps that ran from his shoulders to his thighs but found none. He reached around his back but found no backpack. He realized that somehow, while fighting the wind, he had gotten separated from his backpack and realized that being separated from his backpack might have been the worst part of the ordeal of the wind.
He did not know exactly when or how he had gotten separated from it. He did not know if it too had been picked up by the wind and had been blown
through the same door through which he had been blown or through another door. Or had it remained in the corridor? Or was it blown into some corner of the room with the seven doors?
He tried crawling back to the door through which he had been blown but, when he got to it, found that it was closed and locked. That meant that his only chance of finding his backpack lay in its having been blown through the same door as that through which he had been blown. He did not think, however, that there was much of a chance of that having happened. First he had lost his spacesuit and now his backpack. He felt something on his neck and tried to wipe it away. It was the tongue of despair. He cringed and cowered.
He waited for despair to go away and, when it did, he tried to take stock of what he had lost and of what he still had. He took a mental inventory of the contents of his backpack. His food was in there. A change of clothes was in there. His tools were there. His weapons were there. His notebook and pencils were there: his drawings of the inscriptions that he had spent so much time making and to which he had attached so much importance. He felt sick. He did not know how he could carry on after this loss. “Oh, Sylvia,” he called out. “I’ve lost my notebook. Now what can I do?” He got up after a while and ran through the corridor he had just entered. He ran just a little way and then fell down in a heap, pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs, and whimpered pathetically.
Chapter 23: Terrified Bird
After a while, he felt a little better and calmer—good enough and calm enough to roll over so that his knees and legs were underneath the rest of him. Then he pulled his knees up under himself, pushed his torso up with his arms and hands, raised up one knee and then another, and finally stand upright. He dusted himself off. He checked himself for cuts or bruises but found none. He was sore but intact.
A Theory of Gravity Page 13
