Fantastic (magazine)/Volume 8/Number 11/The Reward

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THE REWARD   They all made fun of Geller and his Folly . . . except the slim blonde girl . . . and a faceless entity called Chance.   And here behind this dingy door, Miss Silvers—Well, Diana then—All right, Di! (I am unused to addressing lovely young ladies familiarly, in fact I am unused to lovely young ladies, they rarely register for my courses—even the elementary survey—and you are the first who ever did me the very great honor of coming back afterwards to pay me a visit, an evening visit indeed.) Well, behind this unimpressive door, Di, the least impressive in the whole science building, is Geller's Folly, the last whimsical fling of a professor emeritus, the ridiculous project

​that makes it crystal clear that I am not one of the infinitely competent new nuclear men, but a physicist of the Cavendish breed—a half-mad hobbyist. Yes, that is a typewriter of sorts you hear behind the door—it is part of the Folly. The typist seems to think a lot between bursts, does he not?

Bother, I have left my key at home. We will pass up the Folly, Di. Without regrets. You will remember it better as a trivial mystery, an old man's flaunting boast in a dimly lit corridor, than in its shrunken dull reality.

You really would like to see the Folly? It does have a certain robot fascination. Well, I suppose we can get Olafson's key. He lives in the machine shop except for a brief respite after midnight—and it lacks three hours of that. With your permission, Di, we will descend to Olafson's Hole. This way. Your furs and silks will make a brave shine in his dismal smithy where, a wide-cheeked Alberich, he fashions our brass and steel traps for the molecule. Olafson is a physicist's machinist of the old breed, a dogged perfectionist such as Babbage depended on for building his ill-starred difference machine. Our Swedish Vulcan will be delighted by your presence and perhaps inwardly flustered—I imagine he is as unused to lovely young ladies as I.

But there is one thing that not even you will be able to elicit from Olafson—a smile. Olafson may conceivably have smiled as a baby, but there is no record of it, and he certainly has never smiled since. He is the very embodiment of sullen materialism, an aggregation of solidly packed molecules in which there is no room for the nonsense of spirit. I must confess that I like him that way, for I am a materialist myself, a devoted monist and atheist—I trust I do not shock you. I do not well understand the new young men in my field, who listen to Bach and Bruckner and Bartok, read Kierkegaard and Niebuhr and Dostoyevsky, have themselves psychoanalyzed, and eventually become Unitarians or High Episcopalians. I stand by Haeckel and Haldane, I know that the universe is a meaningless swirl of atoms, though from time to time I have whimsical fancies.

The Folly? Yes, perhaps it is best that I describe it to you now. Then we need steal only a quick glimpse of the actuality, which may leave it a shred of glamor. Besides, it ​will pass the time—as you see, Olafson's Hole is a deep one and the way to it is long.

The Folly is a tiny hermetically sealed chamber filled with air under the constant pressure of one atmosphere. Every five seconds a knife-edged wall descends swiftly through its midst, cutting it into two chambers. In each of these two chambers the pressure of the air is automatically measured with an accuracy of five figures. Then the dividing wall flies up, the Folly becomes one chamber again, and the process is repeated. With Olafson's help I try to keep it operating 24 hours a day. There are occasional breakdowns, but we have had it slashing air and measuring pressure continuously for periods as long as 15 months. It is in its seventh month this time.

Somewhere in my pockets I should have a section of the record it taps out like a veritable stock ticker—I have compromised enough with modern methods to let one of the young men hook on a typewriting device that commits the air pressure measurements to a paper tape. Here it is! See, the left-hand column records the pressures in Chamber A and the right hand column the pressures that simultaneously exist in Chamber B—taking the pressure inside the Folly as unity.

1.00000 .99999 1.00000 1.00000 1.00001

.99999 .99999 1.00000 1.00000 .99999

As you can plainly see, the readings do not differ by more than two ten-thousandths—the Folly's permissable margin of error in measurement. I have yards and yards of such figures, all showing the same boresome invariability. Once I spotted a reading of .99997 and my heart skipped a beat, but the reading was the same in the other chamber—the Folly had merely sprung a slow leak and the air pressure outside was lower.

Well may you ask, Di, even though you did audit the elementary survey . . .you know, I really should remember you, I should remember such a lovely young lady. I am growing old, I fear, and my memory has become an ungallant traitor, while you are exceptionally young to be bothering about alumni reunions and calls on old profs . . . Well may you ask, Di, why I should expect the air pressure in the two chambers ever to differ, why I should have Olafson ​build a machine that goes through such a trivial rigmarole, why in short I should spend my declining years dancing attendance on monotony. The answer is that I am trying to trap Maxwell's demon. Here is Olafson's Hole.

Who is he? Why, as I told you, he is our machinist—Oh, Maxwell's demon. Well, he might be described as the element of the fantastic in the cosmos—the element of the possbile but wildly improbable.

Bother, Olafson has gone off on some errand. He had locked up and hung his "Back in 20 minutes" sign on the door. I fear the Fates are against us, Di, tonight. They do not wish you to see Geller's Folly, and be disillusioned. I am sure of course that they are wiser than we.

You still wish to see it? You are most flattering to an old man. Well, we can confidently wait for Olafson—his 20 minutes never means 21, nor—oddly—19. Better, we'll take a turn around the quadrangle—it is a mild night for January and you have your furs, while I will simply button the cardigan I wear in winter beneath my suit coat. Allow me a moment to scribble a note to Olafson so that he does not go off again. Better, I'll tell him to meet us at the Folly.

How do I expect to trap Max—I mean the fantastic in the Folly? Well . . . You are sure I am not boring you? Yes, I agree that if you wish to see the Folly, it is likely that you wish to understand it. Thank you. Well, in the Folly I have a double handful of air—billions of molecules of several gasses, each moving at thousands of feet a second, endlessly colliding, rebounding from each other and the walls of the Folly hundreds of times a second, a shuffled jumble of particles. The energy of movement of these molecules, of course, adds up to the air pressure—I fear I grow stuffy, Di.

Science does not allow me to predict the behavior of any one of the molecules—as Whitehead puts it, the individual particle is a rare bird—but I am able to make significant predictions about the behavior of the flock. For instance, I can say that at any given moment the chances are overwhelming (I will not trouble you with the figures) that half the molecules are moving predominantly westward and half eastward—and the same for north and south and up and down.

But that, mark you, is only the overwhelming probability. ​It is conceivable, though vastly improbable, that at some given instant, all the molecules (or, more modestly, significantly more than fifty percent) might be moving west. It is a little like the chance of getting thirteen hearts at bridge or a "pat" royal flush at poker—though of course vastly more unlikely than that. The point is that the possibility, however remote, is a real one.

You see, Di, miracles are possible though we might have to wait more than the lifetimes of a thousand universes to see one. Yet, the miracle might come this moment, conceivably. You might unpin that charming half-moon silver brooch at your throat and hold it out, and if all the molecules immediately beneath it chanced to be moving upward at that instant, it would be struck from your hand high into the air! Or across the corridor into my hand, if that chanced to be the whim of the molecule flock. (Here, incidentally, is where Maxwell's demon comes in. The British physicist Clerk Maxwell, simply to illustrate a point about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, hypothesized an invisible spirit with the ability to direct the motion of individual particles.)

Similarly, at some instant all the molecules in the Folly might chance to be in Chamber A when the knife edge comes down. In that case, we would surely know it, for the pressure reading would be twice unity—two—in Chamber A and zero—a vacuum—in Chamber B.

Naturally, I am not looking for any such horrendously spectacular result. The. most I hope for is a reading that shows a barely significant difference. Even at that I am like a roulette player waiting for black to turn up a hundred times running (really a million or a billion times), I am like a bridge player hoping to be dealt thirteen hearts in every hand for, say, three weeks of play.

I am like a gambler tirelessly casting a billion billion dice—the Folly my box—in the hope of one day throwing a billion billion sixes. Note, Di, that I try not to change dice, I try to shake the same molecules each time—that is why the Folly is hermetically sealed. I don't imagine that like an old deck of cards the molecules will develop markings with use and become "readers"—though that is an attractive notion—but I coddle in my mind the ridiculous ​fancy that the same molecular flock, cooped up so long in the Folly, will eventually become bored and frantic and panicky (part of my mind thinks like a pagan infant's) and in their desperation begin to behave irregularly. Some men have suggested that light ages in its passage through space, you know, so why might not molecules go mad from long imprisonment?

I jest, yet from all this you can understand, Di, why younger, sounder, more professional physicists would laugh or shake their heads if I told them of Geller's Folly. I am waiting, on my knees as it were, for an improbability that is for all human purposes an impossibility. To them I must present a ridiculous spectacle. But those younger men, with their easier, more sophisticated, eclectic philosophies, do not comprehend the deep passions of a devoted materialist like myself. Scorning the lie of spirit, believing only in matter, in molecules and other particles, I have a far more fierce and patient desire than they do to understand all that matter is capable of, to know matters' rare and whimsical as well as its everyday behavior. When one of the younger men embraces the Christian faith, especially in its Catholic form, I am tempted to suggest: (again I trust I do not shock you) "Let us subject to chemical analysis this host you consume at mass to learn if there is indeed protoplasm in the transubstantiated wafer and hemoglobin in the wine"—a suggestion which, if I made it, would get me called a blockhead or worse. As I say, they simply no longer understand the true materialist temper.

It is for a related reason that I keep the Folly so carefully under lock and key—a circumstance that I imagine had been puzzling you, Di. Once in an unwise burst of enthusiasm I told my students about the Folly. Instead of receiving the information with bored incomprehension or kindly indulgence, a mischevious cruelty seized them. Attempts were made by doctoring the tape to hoax me into thinking I had achieved fabulous results. Since then I have taken stern precautions and I have told no one about the Folly, no one, at all, except . . .

Oh, let me hold the door for you. Thank you. Ah, the night is refreshingly chill—I see traces of snow in the shadows—and for once Chicago's air seems smog-free, though ​acid and cold. We will let it stream through our beings and blow away the stuffy preoccupations of an old man who has lived too long with molecules.

That's a strange thing, Di, but I just now seemed to smell roses, an abundance of roses. Oh, is it your perfume? No—no, I see that yours is a very different scent though equally delightful. Pardon me if I seem flustered, but I don't know when a young lady has leaned her cheek so close to mine—even in the interests of scientific accuracy. You put the perfume behind the lobe of your ear?—that's charming.

You smelled the roses too? You shared my illusion?—if it was one. Roses in January in Chicago snows—a delightful circumstance. Perhaps a hearse skidded and overset nearby—or don't you enjoy macabre fancies?

In Chicago one must learn to treasure each hint of the marvelous or outlandish—there are few enough of them at best to offset the dismalness of the city, its grime, its stenches, its shrieking, roaring, growling, rumbling tumult that distantly assaults our ears even here in these gray gothic precincts. A grimly lonely city. When I first came here as a fellow (my entire academic life, Di, has been spent in this one institution) it seemed to me that Chicago's loneliness was an almost unbearable continuation, in a darker mode, of the loneliness of my childhood and youth. The whine of its elevated trains and the screech of its streetcars, the angry chug of its taxicabs and the pounding of its presses (augmented now by the drone of its aircraft, even the boom of its jets, and not to mention the heavier minatory sounds that proceed from its railway yards, docks and factory districts)—all these noises became an integral part of my consciousness.

Listen to the Song of Chicago, Di! Listen to the steel tomtoms and rattles of modern primitive man. The more noise the less message, the new men say—I sometimes understand what that means. Listen to the Music of the Spheres, Midwestern style—I might venture to call it the Jazz of the Gears. I wonder if, to more sensitive ears, the molecules in the Folly make any such muted pandemonium? What? Yes, I'll be quiet.

Di, you're right! You're right! It was incredible, but it did happen. For a moment​—no, for several seconds—the sounds of the city became the notes of a great symphony, tragic and darkly majestic. Let us listen again. No, it is gone now. Oh, I suppose it might have been a powerful hi-fi briefly yet smoothly turned up, perhaps in the dormitory there—no, I will not believe that, I will never believe it!—it was the random sounds of the city we heard and for several seconds they became powerful, perfect music. Marihuana, I have read, produces such illusions, but I have never smoked even nicotine. Well, this is becoming a night for wonders! I shall always think you somehow responsible for them, Di.

Di, it occurs to me that what we have just shared the privilege of hearing is an excellent chance example of what I am trying to achieve under laboratory conditions in the Folly. It has been said that if you set a billion monkeys to pounding on a billion typewriters they would eventually write among other things purely by chance the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. There are several catches to that one, especially the length of time represented by the "eventually" and the question of the means of checking the monkey pages for intelligibility and of recognizing and fitting together the fragments. Still, it seems to me that we have here a valid analogy: listen to the random noises of a city long enough and you will eventually catch a section where purely by chance they counterfeit a great unknown symphony. It is another case of waiting for three weeks of thirteen-hearts-hands and—in this case—getting them!

Also it occurs to me that the roses we swore we smelled might conceivably be put in the same or a nearby category. Some physiologists believe that odor is a matter of formula and that various combinations of molecules, some common, some most rare, will produce the same scent when impinging on the receptors in the nasal membrane. Sniff the acrid atmosphere of a city long enough and you will eventually inhale a rare combination of industrial molecules that counterfeits the scent of roses. Oh, what travesties the cruder of my colleagues would make of that notion!

I suppose there must be some humdrum explanation in both cases (though I don't really believe that) but just ​the same I feel extraordinarily exhilarated. You know, Di, I have searched for the miraculous all my life, in my austere fashion—Maxwell's demon is a god of sorts, and how else would any god manifest itself except by bringing about the occurrence of the vastly improbable? Tonight for the first time I believe my desire has achieved fruition or at least the illusion thereof. When I was a child—this is something I have told to very few people, Di, very very few—when I was a child I became enamoured of Greek mythology (Ovid's Metamorphoses was one of my first books) and in my loneliness I peopled the empty lots around my home and the park nearby with the deities and monsters of classic Greece. In a glade in the park (really a bare space behind some bushes) I reared rude altars (little more than shingles with flowers and bright trinkets and assorted childish treasures set on them as offerings) to Pan and Diana.

Yes, Di, to your namesake! To Diana, the slim moon-goddess, the virgin huntress. Much later it occurred to me that here I might have made a mistake (no, not a mistake precisely—I do not blaspheme your namesake, Di) in making my offerings to Diana rather than Venus, for no lovely young lady ever came to share my life. I have always been a votary of the chaste Silver One—Miss Silvers! What a night for coincidences!

Small wonder, really, that I remain celibate, for I was always singularly timid, credulous and inept in my very limited contacts with the opposite sex. Why, I was such a num-noddy in such matters, especially during my college years, that I was once cruelly hoaxed. I was accosted in the dormitory corridors by a slim and very pretty young lady who claimed to be in need of immediate assistance with her costume—a pin for her underskirt was wanted. In fear and secret delight I invited her into my room, where she lingered for an embarrassingly blissfully long time and finally wantonly approached me. A few moments later there was a chorus of laughter from a group of hidden eavesdroppers and the secret was out—the young lady was the "feminine" lead in the all-male Capers, or whatever they called their yearly show.

And that is something I have never told another soul. A distressful anecdote, really, ​with distasteful overtones—I hardly know why I should have burdened you with it. Come, let us return. Here's our doorway again. We have taken rather long, Olafson will have climbed from his Hole and be waiting at the Folly.

Di, why did you touch my cheek? Look up, you say?

Di, that glimmering! What is it? What are they? What are those ghostly figures of ice and fire moving up the sky, those jeweled deities, that heroic procession? I'm frightened, Di, hold me close—no, no, pardon an old man's weakness, but what was it that we saw? I'm shaking still. What was it? Again the impossibly improbable? Look at the multitudinous lights of a city long enough . . .

Di, what's happening tonight? What are you doing?—it is your doing, isn't it? All of a sudden these things are too much for me, too many for me. Why did you come to me tonight? Why did you come back, really? Were you really a student of mine? Is this some last hoax? No, I don't see how, but—

The Folly? We can't go to the Folly now. I feel . . . Yes, I suppose we could, but . . . Very well.

Di! Yes, I'm coming, but the stone, here, by the door—it feels like velvet, like silver velvet! Touch gray stone long enough . . . Di, am I going mad? Wait for me, Di!

Watch out, Di! Watch out for Olafson—I don't think he can see you. Olafson, don't walk into the lady! Olafson, what's happened to you? Olafson!

He moves past us as if we weren't there! And he's smiling, smiling like a man in ecstasy. Do you see that? Olafson is smiling.

What's that that fluttered from his hand? I'll get it. A torn-off scrap of paper—the Folly's last measurements. I'll look at them.

.99999 1.00000 1.00000 .00000 1.00000 .99999

.99999 .99999 .99999 2.00000 .99999 1.00001

Di! Where are you, Di?

Di, who were you?