range. Thinks he’s a tough character, but he hasn’t got the brains of Lettie … that’s the dumbest of my dogs out there.”
“About the dogs …” began Bremen. He got to his feet, his beer only half-finished.
“Oh, they’ll tear your arm or leg off, all right.” Miz Morgan smiled. “But only on a command from me or if you’re someplace where you shouldn’t be. I’ll introduce you to them on the way down to the bunkhouse so they can start gettin’ to know you.”
“Where is someplace I shouldn’t be?” asked Bremen, holding his beer bottle tightly as if it could steady him. The glow around things had turned into a pulsing now and he felt the liquid in his stomach slosh and shift somewhat alarmingly.
“Stay away from the main house,” she said, not smiling. “Especially at night. The dogs’ll go for anything that comes up here at night. But I’d stay away during the day, too.”
Bremen nodded.
“There are a few other places that’re out of bounds. I’ll point them out when I show you around the spread.”
Bremen nodded again, not wanting to set the beer bottle on the table but uncomfortable holding it. He was not sure if he could get through an afternoon of ranch work the way he felt now. He was not completely sure that he could stay on his feet the way he felt now.
Miz Morgan paused in the doorway as he followed her back outside. “You look like shit, Jeremy Goldmann.”
Bremen nodded.
“I’ll show you the bunkhouse and you can make yourself something to eat and settle in. We’ll start work at seven tomorrow mornin’. Wouldn’t do to break in the hired man by killin’ him.”
Bremen shook his head. He followed her out into the heat and light, into a world made luminous and almost transparent by exhaustion and relief.
Gail and Jeremy take the train home from Boston on Sunday, not talking about the experience of the weekend with Jacob Goldmann, but communicating about it almost all the way home.
Did you mindtouch the part about his family dying in the Holocaust?
Holocaust? Jeremy had felt the power of Jacob Goldmann’s intellect, and had occasionally lowered his mindshield to glimpse a concept or experimental protocol for clarification during their long talks, but mostly he had respected the older man’s privacy. No.
Ahhh, Jerry … Gail’s sadness is like a maroon shadow stealing over a sunny landscape. She looks out the window at the urban wasteland flickering by. I didn’t mean to pry, but every time I tried to understand what you two were saying by peeking, I’d get more images, more memories.
What images, kiddo?
The gray sky, gray buildings, gray earth, gray watchtowers … the black barbed wire against the gray sky. The striped uniforms, shaved heads, skeletal figures lost in rough and baggy wool. The morning lineup in the milky light of dawn, the breaths of the prisoners rising like a fog above them all. German SS guards in their thick, wool overcoats, leather belts, and leather boots looking rich and oily in the wan light. Shouts. Cries. The marching bare feet of the forest work detail.
His wife and son died there, Jerry.
Is it Auschwitz?
No, a place called Ravensbruck. A small camp. They survived five winters there. Separated, but in touch by notes sent through an underground mail network. His wife and son were shot two weeks before the camp was liberated.
Bremen blinks. The clacking of metal wheels on metal rails is vaguely hypnotic. He closes his eyes. I didn’t know. But what about his daughter … Rebecca?… The one who was in London this weekend?
Jacob remarried in 1954. His second wife was British … she had been in the medical unit that liberated the camps.
Where is she now?
She died of cancer in 1963.
Jesus.
Jerry, he is so sad! Didn’t you feel it? There is a sadness there deeper than anything I’ve ever felt.
Bremen opens his eyes and rubs his cheeks. He had not shaved that morning and the stubble is beginning to itch. Yeah … I mean I got a sort of sense of general sadness. But his excitement is real, too, Gail. He’s really excited about the research.
As are you.
Well, yeah … He sent an image of Jacob and himself in Stockholm, accepting their shared Nobel Prizes. The humor did not quite click.
Jerry, I didn’t understand all of the stuff about quantum physics. I mean, I understood how some of the relativity stuff related to your dissertation … a lot of that was probability and uncertainty theory, too … but what does it have to do with Jacob’s work with charting the brain?
Bremen turns to look at her. I could take you through the simpler math again.
I’d prefer you to take me through the words.
Bremen sighs and closes his eyes. Okay … you understand about how Jacob’s work translates through my math? How the neurological wave actions he’s recording end up as sort of superholograms? Complex, interacting fields?
Yeah.
Well, there’s another step. And I’m not quite sure where it’s going to take us. To even work with the data properly I’m going to have to learn a lot about the new nonlinear math they call chaos mathematics. That and fractal geometry. I don’t know why fractals are important in this, but the data suggests they are.…
Stick to the point, Jerry.
Okay. The point is that Jacob’s snapshots of the human mind … the human personality … in action bring up the classic “two-slit experiment” in quantum mechanics. Do you remember that from college? It led to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.
Tell me again.
Well, quantum mechanics says that energy and matter—in their smallest chunks—sometimes behave like waves, sometimes like particles. It depends on how you observe them. But the scary part of quantum mechanics … the voodoo part that Einstein never really accepted … is that the very act of observation is what makes the observed object one thing or the other.
Where do the two slits come in?
For the last half a century experimenters have been replicating an experiment where particles … electrons, maybe … are shot at a barrier with two parallel slits in it. On a screen beyond the barrier you can see where the electrons or photons or whatever get through.…
Gail sits up and frowns at Jerry. He sees his face, eyes closed, frowning slightly, through her gaze. Jerry, are you sure this is going to have something to do with Jacob Goldmann’s MRIs or whatever of people’s heads?
Bremen opens his eyes. Yep. Bear with me. He opens two bottles of orange juice that they had packed that morning and hands one to Gail. The two-slit experiment is sort of the ultimate test of the secrecy if not downright perversity of the universe.
Go ahead. The orange juice is warm. Gail makes a face and sets it back in the
