Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  Weintraub answered distantly, perhaps mainly out of pity. “Are you familiar with the term ‘effective procedures’—or ‘algorithms’?”

  “I’m not sure,” Craine said. “It’s possible that somewhere—”

  The professor held up his hand. “ ‘Effective procedures’ are what computer programs are built of,” he said. “An effective procedure is, so to speak, a set of rules that tells the player of a game, or a mathematician—or one of these computers—exactly what to do, that is, what the rules allow. Exactly. No fudging, no room for interpretation. A system as tyrannical as instinct to a bee. To put it another way, an effective procedure, an algorithm, is an inflexible, step-by-step way of doing something; for example, it may give the computer what we call a ‘routine’ for finding square roots. By its nature, an effective procedure assumes either the pure play of concepts, as in mathematics, or a determinist universe—you know, Leibnitz’ idea that if we could know where every particle of the universe is and exactly how it’s moving at any given time, we could predict the whole future of the universe.

  “John Furth, as I’ve indicated, doesn’t like the idea of a determined universe. He’s a great believer in liberty, free will—all that. He’s also a great believer in computers, in their place; but he doesn’t want them writing poetry, or replacing the human judicial system, as many computer theorists are convinced they could and should. He doesn’t want them, as he puts it, ‘dehumanizing human beings’—which is to say, persuading us we ought to think lightly of intuition and emotion and be more like machines. Some people would say he exaggerates the danger—it has a suspiciously slogany sound: Dehumanization! But it’s an interesting subject.”

  “I see, yes,” Craine said, eagerly agreeing. (He’d have agreed to anything to keep Weintraub talking.) “He must have been shocked, finding the dead woman in his car.”

  Weintraub bent his head. “He was. I saw him just a few hours afterward. He was gray. Shaky. He looked like a man who’s lost a great amount of blood.”

  “As extreme as that?”

  “It was, believe me! I must say—I don’t mean to be unfeeling, you know—but I was rather surprised. I don’t think, if it were myself … But of course we all react differently to things …”

  “If it were you, you were saying?”

  Weintraub shook his head. “I don’t know. It might have been exactly the same, of course. None of us knows about these kinds of things, do we.”

  “That’s true, of course,” Craine said. “No doubt a terrible shock.”

  Craine, leading, had accidentally brought them to a large storage room—huge cardboard boxes and, under a high window, broken things: chairs, filing cabinets, wire-basket carts, high metal stands of some kind. “This is the storage and junk room,” Craine said, playing guide. He waved his pipe, authoritative.

  Weintraub smiled, then started, with a nod to Craine, toward an alleyway through the cardboard boxes.

  Craine asked, “Tell me, Professor, what’s it all do—the center, computer work? What’s the—what shall I say … What’s going on here, exactly?”

  Again for just an instant Professor Weintraub smiled. “Briefly,” he said, “we create reality. Cup of coffee, Mr. Craine?” Economically, hardly more than a movement of one plump hand—he indicated a brown Mr. Coffee coffee maker, Styrofoam cups, cream and sugar, a group of plastic chairs. Beyond the chairs stood another double door, open, and beyond it another long hallway, offices on each side.

  “Why yes, thank you,” Craine said, and got out his pipe. Though it had been riding in his pocket—he had no recollection of putting it there—it was still smoking. He puffed at it, getting it going.

  Carefully, with gestures as expressionless as his face, Professor Weintraub filled two cups and, at Craine’s direction, added sugar and cream to one.

  “I understand,” Craine said as they moved toward the double door, “Ira Katz has a fairly ambitious project going.”

  “I imagine he does,” Professor Weintraub said. “I’m not personally familiar with it, but all the programs that come through here are ambitious.” He glanced absently into a room where a group of men with loosened ties sat arguing in clouds of cigarette smoke. “It’s all nonsense, really—or practically all nonsense.” His eyes moved left and right, halfheartedly checking the office doors as he and Craine passed with their coffee cups. Except for his legs, the rest of him, as he walked, seemed motionless, floating. “You’re in Bedlam, Mr. Craine.”

  “I see,” Craine said, and waited.

  Professor Weintraub stopped, solemnly raised his cup and drank, then lowered the cup and started walking again. He gestured toward a corridor breaking off to the right. “My office is down this way,” he said. As they moved toward it, he said, “What do we do here. Jesus, what a question!”

  “Let me sketch in what I’m after,” Craine cut in. “I just want to know what kinds of problems come up, anything at all that will help me to get some idea of what it’s like to work here—for insiders, I mean. A programmer like April Vaught. The morale of the place, intrigues, disappointments …”

  Professor Weintraub studied Craine thoughtfully with his slightly bugged gray eyes, then nodded, walking on. Before he’d figured out quite what to say, they’d reached his office. When they were seated, Weintraub at his desk, Craine opposite, Weintraub set his cup down, crossed his legs at the knees, and stared at the line where the wall met the ceiling. Framed in the window behind Weintraub’s head, Craine could see the chimneys of the chemistry building.

  “I myself came into computers,” Weintraub said, “through mathematics. To me, computers are just large, fast calculators. They add, subtract, multiply, and so on; sort things very rapidly, by various criteria; and they remember things infallibly—in other words, they remember and manipulate formal symbols, figure out the values in a particular case of, say, F = ma or E = mc2, to say nothing of equations considerably more complex.”

  Fragment Four

  The minute he spotted her waiting on the porch of her apartment house, Craine knew he was in dutch. He swung the truck into the driveway almost without slowing, then hit the brake and skidded, meaning to let her know he’d been hurrying, it wasn’t his fault that he was late. It was only when he heard the gravel spitting, flying from the tires, that he realized he’d sent the wrong signal: she would assume he was drunk. Nothing could be farther from the truth, in fact. He’d jumped into the truck, turned the ignition, and jerked forward all in one crazy motion, not even thinking of taking the bottle from under the seat where it was hidden. Now as he sat bent hard over the steering wheel, his left foot on the clutch, his right on the brake, staring out the window with widened eyes as if no one could be more surprised by the suddenness of his arrival than he was, he understood that, by crimus, he’d done it this time. If she’d begun to trust him, she was finished with that now. It surprised him that she didn’t turn instantly into the house, or dart down onto the sidewalk and stride away without him. She simply stood there in the porch shadows, small and furious, clutching her armload of books and staring at him, her dark eyes sharp as an Injun’s. He thought of yelling something at her, taking the offensive, and thought in the same mental motion of calling out, Sorry I’m late! He tried to think of some lie—it was true that his watch was undependable, he thought, then backed off from the thought, somehow confused: was it or wasn’t it? And all at once he understood that he’d waited too long, it was too late now to say anything, nothing to do but sit there.

  Suddenly, to his astonishment, she broke free of the pillar she’d been leaning against and came hurrying down the porch steps into the sunlight and over toward his truck. Like an eager servant, he reached over to open the right-hand side door. She climbed in. She met his grin with a black-eyed flash of anger, then turned her face forward, staring out the window, saying nothing. He shifted into reverse and hurriedly, smoothly, let the clutch out.

  “Do you realize what time it is?” he heard her ask, clear as day, th
ough her mouth never moved.

  “Yes I do,” he said crossly. “I got a watch, same as you.”

  She shot a startled look at him, then looked forward again.

  “You’re only maybe fifteen minutes late,” he said. Part of his mind stood back from the rest, pondering the strange possibility that he’d begun to read minds. He asked, “What building’s your class in?”

  “Faner,” she said.

  “English class?”

  “Biology.”

  “I thought Faner was mostly for English,” he said, merely to be talking; he’d never thought one thing or another about what was taught in Faner. The place was too big, he realized on reflection, to be the province of any one department.

  The girl said nothing, still punishing him, or punishing him and thinking. It was interesting, Craine mused, that she’d decided to ride with him in spite of her anger. No real choice, maybe. He was the only ride she had, and it was too far to walk; he’d seen enough to know she was something like obsessive about her schoolwork. Yet that wasn’t all of it. She’d stood there waiting in the shadows of the porch like an orphan, waited some twenty minutes beyond the time he’d said he’d come; and with good argument against it, when he’d come into the driveway like a crazy man, she’d decided, suddenly and sternly, to ride with him. Her skin was brown, slightly golden, as if maybe she’d spent the summer in Florida. He remembered—and thought, the same instant: There it is again, memory, live and healthy, as if it were all half an hour ago—how as a child he’d watched, furtively, those brown, black-haired girls with the Oriental eyes, mysterious to him as midnight. Catholics, Jews … He’d hardly dared speak to them. Once on a hayride, something to do with high school, an Italian girl had kissed him. She wore a perfume called Tabu. Even now when, on rare occasions, the scent touched his nostrils, his chest would go light.

  He slowed for jaywalkers, three boys and two girls. They didn’t even look up, naturally assuming he would slow for them. Aristocrats.

  “Biology,” he said. “You ever read Charles Darwin?”

  Elaine said nothing, though her sternness had changed a little, had just perceptibly relaxed, as if she’d begun to imagine possible excuses for him, or begun to turn her arguments inward, against herself. She looked down at the books on her knees, then back up at the windshield.

  “I went through a Darwin bender once,” Craine said. “Every book I could lay my hands on. You aware that when he went on his Beagle voyage he didn’t go as ship’s naturalist—went as companion to the captain?”

  She said nothing.

  “Very interesting fact. Man named Captain Fitzroy. You see, how it was, in those days, the captain was a man of such high class he couldn’t speak with the crew. Gave the first mate his orders, and that was it. All the rest of the time he was alone, even ate alone. Lot of them went crazy, like Captain Ahab. Very common. Five-year voyage, not a soul to talk to … Very common for captains to commit suicide, in fact—as Captain Fitzroy did, about two weeks after Darwin left him. Slit his throat, if I remember. Very strange world people lived in, back then.”

  Craine squinted, leaning forward, seeing clearly only now, as he told her about it, what a queer world indeed those old-timers had lived in, friendship between the classes as shocking, in fact unthinkable, as Darwin’s ideas about our great-great-grandfathers and the monkeys. He imagined Captain Fitzroy alone on the bridge, hardly more than a boy—twenty-six when he set out, unless that was someone else, some other old tale—his peasant crew on the decking below him, tugging at their forelocks if they happened to meet his eye … the image was so vivid in Craine’s mind that he almost forgot he was driving and had to veer suddenly to the right to avoid a car. When he glanced at Elaine she was looking at him in alarm. He steadied into his lane, pretending nothing had happened, then remembered to bear left for his approaching turn.

  “But that’s not the interesting part,” he continued, pushing in the clutch, then the brake, waiting for his chance, some hint of a break in the two lanes of oncoming traffic. To their left, the campus lay as separate from the town as the world of Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle—buildings, trees, hedges, close-cropped rolling lawns, moss-covered boulder formations hauled in, back in the fifties, on flatbed trucks. Sunlight lay over the campus, the gold-leaved walkways, like grace. “The interesting part is that Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist. Darwin might be his equal in aristocratic blood, but other than that, poor Fitzroy couldn’t have found a man less like himself if he’d tried. Luckily Darwin was sick a lot, which made him keep to his cabin—he was sickly all his life. And also, no doubt, he was there to gather specimens, and he didn’t want to ruin the chance by getting Fitzroy down on him. All the same, they had some battles, as you can imagine.”

  A break came and Craine made his turn, then sped up, almost reckless, making up lost time. Without a word Elaine Glass reached out with both hands, bracing herself on the dashboard. The streets through the campus were inactive, as they always were during class hours. Almost the minute the bell rang, they would clog. On the lawns, in the soft shadows of trees, students sat reading and talking, or lay asleep.

  Craine said, “You can’t help wondering how much influence it had on Darwin’s theory—that knucklehead fundamentalism of Fitzroy’s. Darwin, you know, took a very hard line on the God business. Crossed him right off. Not like Isaac Newton, who could manage both opinions, mechanistic and mystic-theological. Darwin said—softly and politely, as is the aristocratic way—‘No God, brothers. Junk evolving into junk. That’s all.’ ”

  Abruptly, Elaine Glass said, “That’s sick!”

  “Me or Darwin?” Craine asked.

  “Darwin,” she said; but she was censoring herself. The tone was reproach.

  There was no place to park. He pulled halfway up onto the sidewalk alongside Faner, switched off the engine, pulled the brake on, and opened his door. At once, as if materialized from nowhere, as a reprimand, a blind boy appeared and came tapping toward them, walking faster than a person with sight would walk, overcompensating, making trouble. Craine clamped his jaw and got out, let come what might.

  Elaine slammed the door on her side, then saw the blind boy and cried, “Look out for the truck! There’s a truck on the sidewalk!”

  The boy jumped a foot, swinging his head around, first right, then left, convinced he was about to be run over. In panic, his left hand thrown out to the side, the cane in his right tapping rapidly, far ahead of him, he rushed toward the street, felt the curb and spun around and rushed, tapping, toward the wall of the building. Elaine stooped quickly, put her books down, and ran to him. “Let me help you!” He swung his face at her and said something, angry, or so it seemed from where Craine stood. She gave him some answer, calming him—calming both of them—then walked with him, cupping his elbow, around past the truck. When she released his elbow he thanked her and set about explaining something, gesturing with both hands. She nodded, answering, smiling nervously, eagerly. He continued gesturing and explaining—by the wheeling and slashing of his cane in the air, it might have been the woe of existence he was explaining—and Elaine went on smiling and nodding. Craine looked at his watch. Three twenty. This delay too, of course, she would blame on Craine. Rightly, no doubt, from a certain point of view. At last, his explanations concluded, the blind boy turned away from her and, after a last brief hesitation, went tapping down the sidewalk. Elaine turned her head to look reproachfully at Craine, then started for the entrance and the stairway.

  “You forgot your books again,” Craine called.

  She stopped and simply stood there with her back to him. He stepped to the books, scooped them up, and hurried toward her. When she held out her arms for them, he pretended not to notice.

  “Which floor’s your class on?”

  “Second,” she said.

  “We better hurry, you’re twenty minutes late,” he said. He made a slight movement in the direction of the door, then waited. She compressed her lips, then bent her he
ad—in profile, her face was like the face on some ancient coin, Craine thought—and, together, they started for the entrance.

  “Listen, I’m sorry if I wasn’t on time,” he said, not turning to look at her. “I hurried as fast as I could, scout’s honor. I’m also sorry I put the truck where the blind boy could run into it. I really am. Look, Miss Glass, stop being mad at me.”

  “All right,” she said. She glanced at him sideways and, seeing that he was watching her, gave a shrug. “So all right.”

  He reached out ahead of her to open the door, and perhaps against her principles, she stood politely waiting till it was open, then stepped through. “I’m also sorry about the mindless chatter about Darwin,” he said as he started up the stairs behind her.

  “I didn’t mind. It was interesting.” Whether or not she was still angry seemed impossible to tell. Ruefully, he watched how her brown-golden legs took her springing up the stairs—he, Craine, laboring behind her, winded by the time he reached the first-floor landing. By the time they reached the second, where her class was, he was ready to gag, like Royce bent over with an attack of emphysema. She went striding down the hall. He hurried, coughing into his hand, trying to catch up with her. At one of the classroom doors she stopped and stood for a moment with her head bent, listening. Craine went up to her to give her her books, his legs aching, almost trembling, from his climb. She nodded, awkwardly taking the pile.

  She said, meeting his eyes and then looking away, embarrassed, “I should talk to you sometime about that thing we were talking about before, the difference between people and animals, the way we lose touch because of words—remember? I was thinking about what I’ve learned in analysis, and I think—I’m not certain, I mean, but—I think you’re wrong.” She turned from him to look through the little square window into the classroom.