Against the Day (116 page)

   
“Did
I say that?”

“Well
. . .
suppose I do, is that, one, any business of either of you,
two, anything I feel that I must apologize for, two point one—”

“Yash, you are flat correct,” Kit
nodded, “we’re all just nightriders here miles up a posted trail, making pests
of ourselves. Ought to be shot, well, shot at, anyway.”

   
“Günther
may be all you say and worse, but until you experience emotions

the way we women do, you will find in your relations with us
much struggle and little success.”

   
“I
could manage some sniffling maybe, would that help?”

She
was already halfway out the door, scowling over her shoulder in reproof, when
who should come bounding athletically up the stairway but the very Adonis under
discussion, yes Günther von Quassel himself, brandishing a
Hausknochen
in menacing fashion, approaching, as
the stairs brought him to their upper limit, a comparable level of brute rage.
“Now Günni,” she greeted him, “you mustn’t murder Kit, must you?”

   
“What
here is he
doing?
”

   
“I
live here, you oversize bratwurst.”

“Oh.
Ja.
This is true.” He considered. “But Fräulein Yashmeen
. . .
she does
not
live here.”

   
“Say,
Günther, that’s really interesting.”

Günther
gazed at him, for what any but the erotically smitten would have considered far
too long. Yashmeen, meanwhile, playful as Kit seldom saw her, kept snatching
away Günther’s duelingsociety cap and pretending to throw it down the stairs.
Each time he would respond to the prank only after several seconds had gone by,
though with as much alacrity
as if it had just happened.
In fact,
according to Humfried, a disciple of Professor Minkowski, it ought to be
obvious to all that Günther inhabited his own idiomatic “frame of reference,”
in which timediscrepancies like this one were highly important, if not
essential, features. “He is not ‘here,
’ ”
Humfried explained, “not completely. He is slightly
. . .
somewhere else. Enough so, to present some inconvenience
to any who value his company.”

   
“Yeah,
but how many of those could there be?”

   
“Oh
you’re all so horrid,” Yashmeen said.

Günther
meanwhile insisted that Yashmeen’s presence here amounted to an affair of
honor. “Obviously, we must now a duel fight.”

   
“How’s
that?”

   
“You
have insulted me, you have insulted my fiancée—”

   
“Oh,
Günni?”

   
“
Ja,
Liebchen?
”

   
“I’m
not your fiancée, remember? we talked about this?”

“
Egal
was, meine Schatze!
—
meanwhile, Mr. Traverse, as challenged party you shall have the choice of
weapons—how lucky to have provoked your quarrel here, in the dueling
capital of Germany. At my disposal, and yours, are matched pairs of the
Schläger,
the Krummsäbel, the Korbrapier, even, if it should be your vice, the
épée—a weapon which, though not up to German standards, is I am told
quite all the rage now in England—”

“In fact,” said Kit, “I was thinking
more along the lines of, maybe, pistols? I happen to have a couple of Colt
sixshooters we can use—though as for ‘matched,’ well . . .”

“Pistols! Oh, no, no, impulsive,
violent Mr. Traverse—here we do not duel to
kill
,
no! though of course wishing to
maintain the honor of the
Verbindung,
one’s deeper intent is, upon the
face of the other,
to inscribe one’s mark
,
so that a man may then bear for all to see evidence of his
personal bravery.”

   
“Is
that what that is on your face, looks like a Mexican tilde?”

“Unusual, no? Later we worked out the
probable frequency the blade must have been vibrating at, given the restoring
moment, elastic constants, all in the most gentlemanly way, which I am sure
your American gunslinger has no concept of. Oh it is true,
ja,
there do
creep among us certain
desperate maniacs,
who have come away from their
affairs carrying actual
bullet scars
on their faces, but this takes a
degree of indifference to mortality that few of us are blessed with.”

“Are you saying pistols’d be too
dangerous for you, Günni? Where I’m from, when it’s about Honor? why a man’s
pretty much obliged to use a pistol. Blades, that’d be just too—I don’t
know—quiet? mean?
. . .
sneaky,
even?”

Günther’s ears quivered. “Am I to
understand, sir, that you mean thus to classify the German as a subspecies of
some
less valiant race,
is this correct?”

“Wait—I’ve insulted you again?
you’re
. . .
calling me out, twice
now? Well! That sure ups the ante, don’t it? say, if you’re going to get
offended at every little thing, maybe we’d better have all our chambers full,
six shots apiece, what do you think?”

“This
cowboy,
”
Günther in plaintive appeal,
“seems unaware that civilized beings are repelled by the stench of powder.”

“Listen, Porkbarrel, what’s this
really about? I told you it wasn’t going to converge, and it never will.”

   
“There.
Again. Three times, now.”

“Just the same, about halfway
through, you skipped a step. Not to mention in one of your series you grouped
some terms together wrong, reversed sign a couple times, even went and
divided
by zero,
yeah you did, Günni, look, right here, you’re lucky somebody took
the time to read it that close—basic stupid mistakes—”

   
“Four!”

“—and instead of all this
carving on folks, why not consider if this is really the best field of study
for you, if all you want’s your face on a souvenir postcard.”

   
“You
insult Geheimrat Hilbert now!”

   
“At
least he’s got the right hat.”

   
After
repeated consultations with the Prussian dueling bible, a small

brown volume known as the
Ehrenkodex,
Kit, Günther and
their seconds met down by the river, as soon as there was light to see by. It
was one of those profoundly agreeable spring mornings, which more rational
souls might choose to celebrate in some less lethal way. The tanneries had not
quite cranked up to operating speed, and the air still smelled like the
countryside it had passed over. Willows swayed alluringly. Farther off, ruinous
watch towers emerged from the mists. Early bathers came blinking by, wraithlike
and curious. Students in dressinggowns, Tyrolean hats, colored spectacles,
carpet slippers, and exotic pajamas with Oriental prints on them, sleepily
queued up to stake demented wagers with the bookmakers found haunting such
affairs. Now and then someone, edging into consciousness, remembered he was
still wearing his
Schnurrbartbinde,
or nighttime mustachekeeper. Those
principally involved stood around bowing back and forth for a while. A vendor
appeared with a cart carrying a steaming tub brimful of boiled sausages, and
beer arrived as well, both in barrels and in bottles. A photographer set up his
tripod and Zeiss “Palmos Panoram” for any who might wish visual mementoes of
the encounter.

“Very
well, I did divide by zero—once only, mea maxima culpa, no effect on the
result. I did not omit any step where you said I did. You, rather, incapable
appear, of following my argument.”

“Hogwash
Günther, look, between steps, here to here, this function of time, you assume
it’s commutative, just glide on past it, when in fact—”

   
“So?”

   
“You
just can’t make that assumption.”

   
“I
may do as I wish.”

“Not
when this needs a minus sign here
. . . .
”
Thus, despite the restlessness of the crowd, who had been chanting
“
Auf die Mensur!
”
for quite
some time actually, the young men found themselves in yet another mathematical
exchange, which soon bored everyone into wandering away, including Yashmeen,
who had in fact left much earlier, on the eager arm of a graduate
anthropologist visiting from Berlin, who hoped to define here among the dueling
clubs of Göttingen a “controlgroup” for examining the deeper meanings of facial
inscription, especially as practiced among northern tribes of the Andaman
Islands—departing, in fact, to shouts of “Stephanie du Motel!” and rude
whistling, as the community, being fully up to date on the details of the romance,
had found itself divided as to Yashmeen, some regarding her as a brave and
modern young woman, like Kovalevskaia, others as a faithless harlot whose
mission in life was to lure promising mathematicians into premature demise by
duel, as the infamous Mademoiselle du Motel had done to grouptheory godfather
Evariste Galois back in 1832.

·
    
·
    
·

Among the Russian
visitors
to Göttingen
were some of decidedly mystical inclination. Yashmeen recognized them right
away, having met, and on occasion eluded, several at Chunxton Crescent, but
here, farther east, there was no avoiding the momentous events unfolding close
by. By 1906 there were Russians everywhere, flown and fleeing westward, and
many brought copies of young Ouspensky’s book
The Fourth Dimension.

An
unkempt individual with a single name, vaguely Eastern, was observed hanging
around with Humfried and Gottlob. “He’s all right. He’s a Theosophoid, Chong
is. That’s like a Theosophist, only not entirely. He’s here to learn about the
Fourth Dimension.”

   
“The
what?”

   
“And
the others, of course.”

   
“The
other
. . .
?”

   
“Dimensions.
You know, Fifth, Sixth, so on?”

“He
believes Humfried to’ve been his teacher in a previous life,” added Gottlob,
helpfully.

   
“How
odd. There are educators among the invertebrates?”

“But
look here!” cried Yashmeen, “that’s no Chinese Bolshevik—it’s old Sidney,
well blimey if it isn’t old Kensington Sid, with some vegetable dye—I say
Sid! it’s I! old Yashmeen! Cambridge! Professor Renfrew! Remember?”

The
Eastern personage gazed uninformatively back at her—then, seeming to
reach a decision, began to speak with some intensity in a tongue no one could
identify, not even by its languagefamily. More cognizant listeners understood
this as an attempt to distract.

Dr.
Werfner of course had spotted him right away and assumed he’d been sent out as
one of Renfrew’s operatives, as did Yashmeen, who assumed he was there to spy
on her, for he did seem to show an uncommon interest in the Russians who passed
through town. Whenever they sought out Yashmeen to discuss the transtriadic
dimensions, Chong was sure to be there.

“Four
is the first step beyond the space we know,” said Yashmeen. “Dr. Minkowski
suggests a continuum among three dimensions of space and one of time. We can
look at the ‘fourth dimension’ as if it
were
time, but is really
something of its own, and ‘Time’ is only our least imperfect approximation.”

“But
beyond the third,” persisted one of their Russian visitors, “do dimensions
exist as something more than algebraists’ whimsy? Can we be given access to
them in some more than mental way?”

“Spiritual,”
declared Gottlob. As far as anyone could recall, it was the first time he had
ever used the word.

“The
soul?” Humfried said. “The angels? The invisible world? The afterlife? God?” By
the end of this list, he had acquired a smirk. “At Göttingen?”

Kit meanwhile had
begun
to
frequent the Applied Mechanics Institute. Since Prandtl’s recent discovery of
the boundary layer, things over there had been hopping, with intense inquiry
into matters of lift and drag, powered flight poised like a newfeathered bird
at the edge of history. Kit had not thought much about aerodynamics since his
brainless sojourn in the Vibe embrace, when in the course of golfing parties
out on Long Island he had become acquainted with the brambled guttie, a
guttapercha ball systematically roughened away from the perfectly spherical by
molding little knobs all over the surface area. What he could not help noticing
then, even though he was not all that crazy for the game, so inordinately
populated by the likes of Scarsdale Vibe, was a particular mystery of
flight—the undeniable lift of heart in seeing a struck ball—a tee
shot especially—suddenly go into a steep ascent, an exhilarated denial of
gravity you didn’t have to be a golfer to appreciate. There being enough
otherworldliness out on the links already. Finding himself more and more drawn
to the microcosm on the other side of the Bürgerstraße, Kit soon understood
that the brambling of the golfball surface had been a way to keep the boundary
layer from detaching and falling apart into turbulence which would tend to drag
the ball down, denying it its destiny in the sky. When he mentioned this in
conversations at the saloons along the Brauweg frequented by engineering and physics
students, some immediately suggested implications for the Earth, a brambled
spheroid on the grand scale, in its passage through the Æther, being lifted not
in the third dimension but on a euphoric worldline through Minkowski’s
“fourdimensional physics.”