“FBI, huh? Were you
born
wrapped in a flag?”
“No. I was born to be challenged,” Clive said.
“Locking heads with fugitives,” Seth said. “With the dregs of society. Sounds like a ball.”
“There are two kinds of bad guys. The stupid ones, which make up about 99 percent of the lot, and the brilliant onesâeach single-handedly capable of the damage done by a thousand idiots. I've gone up against some of the sharpest.” He paused. “But there's more to the thrill than raw intelligence.”
“And what would that be?”
“Danger.”
Seth nodded. “Danger.”
“There's no substitute for the thrill of danger. But I think you've already figured that out, haven't you?”
“And the NSA is all about danger.”
“I split my time between being called in on the head-scratching cases and finding that rare breed who can do the same. We have something in common, you and I.”
“Which is why you're interested in convincing an innocent impressionable that pursuing the life of James Bond is far more attractive than sitting in a basement of some laboratory, breaking complex codes,” Seth responded.
“I hadn't thought of it in those exact terms, but your summary does have a ring to it. Still, solving mathematical challenges has its place. The NSA's Mathematical Sciences Program is the world's single largest employer of mathematicians. Cryptology isn't easy work. The halls down in Fort Meade are lined with some of the world's brightest.”
Actually, the thought of possessing the casual confidence of this man who faced him struck Seth as refreshing. Unlike the other sycophant recruiters, Clive seemed more interested in Seth's psyche than in what he could do for the organization.
“All I'm suggesting is that you finish here. Get your doctorate in high-energy physics and wow the world with some new discovery. But when you get boredâand the best always doâyou think about me.”
Clive smiled enigmatically, and Seth couldn't help thinking he just might.
“Do you surf, Clive?”
The man had chuckled. “Seth the surfer. No, I don't surf, but I think I understand why you do. I think it's for the same reasons I do what I do.”
Clive reappeared every six months or so, just long enough to gift Seth with a few tempting morsels before disappearing into his world of secrecy. Seth never seriously thought he would ever follow the path Clive had taken, but he felt a connection to this man who, despite being no intellectual slouch, applied his brilliance to thrill-seeking. The possibilities were enough to help Seth slog through the months of boredom.
Seth received his bachelor's in his second year at Berkeley. He skipped the master's program and was now in the second year of his doctorate. But four years of this stuff was wearing thin, and he was no longer sure he could stomach all the nonsense required to finish after all.
If the graduate dean, the very fellow lecturing at this very moment, Gregory Baaron, would allow him to write his dissertation and be done with it, that would be one thing. But Baaron hadâ
“Perhaps you'd like to tell us, Mr. Border.” Seth blinked and returned his mind to the lecture hall. Baaron was staring over bifocals. “How do you calculate the quantum field between two charged particles?”
Seth cleared his throat. Baaron was one of the leading lights in the field of particle physics and had taught this basic material a hundred times. Much of his work was based on the equation now written on the board. Unfortunately, the equation was wrong. At least by Seth's thinking. But because of Baaron's stake in the matter, the dean would hardly consider, much less accept, the possibility that it was wrong. Even worse, Baaron seemed to have developed a healthy dose of professional jealousy toward Seth.
“Well, that would depend on whether you're doing it by the textbook,” Seth said.
Watch yourself, boy. Tread easy.
“The textbook will suffice,” Baaron said after a moment, and Seth felt a pang of sympathy for the man.
He paraphrased from Baaron's own textbook. “Solve the Lagrangian field equation. That is, apply the principle of least action by defining a quantity called the Lagrangian action, the integral of which is minimized along the actual observed path. The easiest way to set the equation up is to use Feynman diagrams and to insert terms in the action for each of the first-order interactions.” Seth paused. “You studied with Feynman, didn't you? I read his Nobel-winning papers when I was fifteen. Some interesting thoughts.” He paused, thinking he should stop there. But he couldn't. Or just didn't.
“Of course, the whole method is problematic on both conceptual and explanatory levels. The conceptual problem is that the equations seem to say that the reality we observe is just the sum of all possible realities. On an explanatory level, you have to apply the renormalization factors to make the numbers come out right. That's hardly the sign of a really good predictive theory. Putting both problems together, I'm inclined to think the theory's misguided.”
The professor's face twitched. “Really? Misguided? You do realize that the calculations of this method accord well with reality, at least in the world most of us live in.”
“The
calculations
may work, but the implication bothers me. Are we really to believe that of all imaginable futures, the real oneâthe one we actually experienceâis simply the weighted sum of all the others? Is the future merely the product of a simple mathematical formula? I don't think so. Someday this theory might look as outdated as a flat-earth theory.”
That was too much, Seth
. He felt his pulse quicken.
Baaron stared at him for what must have been a full five seconds.
“The principle of least action is widely accepted as a basis for calculation,” he finally said. “And unless you think you've outwitted a few hundred of the most brilliant mathematical minds in the country, I don't think you've got a leg to stand on, Seth.”
The condescension in Baaron's voice, as if the dean were his father commanding him to stand in the corner for questioning his recollection of baseball history, pushed Seth over a foggy cliff. He'd been here before, jumping off the same cliff. Without fail, the experience proved not only unsatisfying, but painful.
The knowledge of this fact didn't stop him.
There were over two hundred stadium seats in the hall, sloping from the podium up to a sound booth, and although only forty were filled, the eyes of every occupant turned Seth's way. He slipped his hands into his pockets and palmed the Super Ball at the bottom of his right pocket.
“To have doubted one's first principles is the mark of a civilized man,” Seth said.
“So now I'm not only outdated, but I'm uncivilized?” Baaron walked to the podium wearing a smirk. “This from a man who hardly knows the difference between a dinner jacket and a tank top. From where I'm standing, your reasoning looks ugly.”
“Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it's not on our side,” Seth said. “Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. People who don't have them can't possibly understand.”
Baaron turned his head. There might have been a barely audible gasp in the auditorium. Seth wasn't sure. Maybe the air-conditioning just came on.
You're digging yourself a grave, Seth.
“Watch your tongue, young man. Just because you have a natural talent does not mean you've conquered ignorance.”
Well, he was already in a hole. “Ignorance. To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the disease of the ignorant. And we all know that nothing is more terrible than ignorance in actionâ”
“You're stepping over the line, Mr. Border. You have a responsibility that comes with your mind. I suggest you keep your wits about you.”
“Wit? He who doesn't lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.”
Someone coughed to cover a chuckle. The professor paused.
“This is quantum field theory, not psychology. You think you're cute, flaunting your questionable wit? Why don't you engage me on the point, boy?”
“I've learned never to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Sir.”
Baaron's face went red. He'd lost his cool with Seth once, when Seth came to class barefoot, dressed in surf shorts, and toting a surfboard. He'd hollowed out the board and cemented his laptop into it so that the whole contraption became his computer. The exchange got ugly when Seth expounded on the superiority of surfing over education before a howling class.
Nobody was howling now.
“I am not someone to toy with,” Baaron said. “We have standards at this institution.”
“Please, sir, don't mistake my simple review of literature as disregard for your authority. I'm merely saying what our most brilliant scholars have said better before me.”
“This has nothing to do with literature.”
“But it does. Rather than tackle your noteworthy intellect with my own, I'm afraid I've stolen from others. In fact, not a word I've spoken has been my own.”
He paused and Baaron just blinked. “The first quote was from Oliver Holmes. Then George Savile from the seventeenth century. Then Amos Bronson Alcott and Gotthold Lessing and finally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” Maybe that would bail him out. “Perhaps you should file a complaint against the lot of them. They are far too imaginative to associate with the tiny minds of this institution anyway.”
Seth took a slow breath. Then again, maybe not.
Graduate Dean Gregory Baaron turned and walked out the side door without another word. No one moved. Seth glanced at the clock on the wallâfive minutes to the hour.
He regretted his words already. Why did he do this? Why hadn't he just answered Baaron's stupid question?
A book slammed closed. One of the students vacated the back row and slipped out the rear entrance. The rest just sat there. Matt Doil, a forty-five-year-old engineer from Caltech, twisted in his chair near the front. He flashed a grin and shook his head.
“You're not serious about the least action principle being outdated, are you?”
The others were looking at him again. He cleared his throat. “Shut up and calculateâwasn't that what Feynman told students who wanted to know what his method really meant?”
They all knew it was.
“Show us,” Doil said.
“Show you what?”
“An alternative.”
Seth considered that. Why not? He'd done as much damage as he could possibly manage already. He might as well redeem himself in some small way.
“Okay.”
He stood, walked to the stage, and picked up a whiteboard marker. It took him thirty seconds to complete a complex calculation he knew they would all understand. He finished the last stroke, stabbed the board with the marker, and turned around. To a student they were glued to him.
“What does this equation tell me about the forces at work on this marker?” He held out the pen between his thumb and forefinger, as if to drop it.
“That when you drop it, it'll bounce,” someone said.
“Or that when you drop it, it'll roll,” Matt said.
“But that's meaningless, isn't it?” Seth said. “What if I decide not to drop the marker? The numbers on the wall behind me tell us that the future is calculable as the sum of all possible futures. But I don't think it is. I think the future's beyond our calculation. And I think the future's singular. That there's only one possible future, namely the future that
will
happen, because it's known by a designer.”
They looked at him with blank stares. Trying to communicate some of the ideas that popped into his head was often more complicated than the ideas themselves. Language had its limits.
“What if I did this?”
He turned, changed several numbers on the board, erased the solution, and extended the equation by eight characters with a new solution. He dropped the marker in the tray and stepped back. It was the first time even he had seen the new equation actually written down.
He cleared his throat. “Makes the world much simpler, but also much more interesting, don't you think?”
“Does that work?” It was Matt.
“I think so,” Seth said. “Doesn't that work?” Of course it did. He turned to the class. They were wide-eyed. Some were writing furiously. Some still didn't get it.
Matt rose, eyes fixed on the board. “You're . . . that
does
work! That's amazing.”
Awkwardness took Seth by the throat. He'd just rewritten a small part of history, and for some reason he felt naked. Abandoned. He had no business being here on this stage for everyone to look at. He belonged in a basement somewhere. Back home in San Diego.
He turned and walked out through the same door Dean Baaron had used.
m
iriam faced Mecca and dropped to her knees in her room while the muezzin's noon prayer call still wavered. It was said that Muhammad disliked the church bells of his day, so he insisted on a vocal call to prayer. Miriam thought he was rightâa bell was far too harsh.
She recited the first sura of the Koran without thinking about the words. She had taken a keen interest in the holy book, at one point thinking to become a
hafiz
, the coveted title of one who'd memorized all 114 suras of the Koran.
Of course, that would have been impossible: She was a woman. But the poetic nature of the Koran was like music to her mind and she found it pleasing. The word
Koran
meant “recitation.” Her faith wasn't compelled to understand the words of the Prophet, but to repeat them. So then, if she could recite as well as a man, couldn't she be a great theologian?
She stood and rearranged the pillows on her bed. Her room was decorated in purple because her father had decided many years ago that it should be, despite Miriam's vocal dislike of the color. Her declaration that he best leave decorating to women with good taste earned her a slap.