'He has in his head some millions of facts concerning theoretical physics. He's scanning them, picking out one here and there, fitting them into new relationships, checking and rejecting when he has to, fitting the new relationships together, turning them upside down and inside out to see what happens, comparing them with known doctrine, holding them in his memory while he repeats the whole process and compares—and all the while he has a goal firmly in mind against which he's measuring all these things.' He seemed to be finished.
For a reporter, I felt strangely shy. 'What's he driving at?' I asked.
'I think,' he said slowly, 'he's approaching a unified field theory.'
Apparently that was supposed to explain everything. I let Dr. Mines know that it didn't.
He said thoughtfully: 'I don't know whether I can get it over to a layman—no offense, Vilchek. Let's put it this way. You know how math comes in waves, and how it's followed by waves of applied science based on the math. There was a big wave of algebra in the middle ages—following it came navigation, gunnery, surveying, and so on.
Then the renaissance and a wave of analysis—what you'd call calculus.
That opened up steam power and how to use it, mechanical engineering, electricity. The wave of modern mathematics since say eighteen seventy-five gave us atomic energy. That boy upstairs may be starting off the next big wave.'
He got up and reached for his hat.
'Just a minute,' I said. I was surprised that my voice was steady. 'What conies next? Control of gravity? Control of personality? Sending people by radio?'
Dr. Mines wouldn't meet my eye. Suddenly he looked old and shrunken.
'Don't worry about the boy,' he said.
I let him go.
That evening I brought Gomez chicken pot pie and a nonalcoholic eggnog.-He drank the eggnog, said, 'Hi, Beel,' and continued to cover yellow sheets of paper.
I went downstairs and worried.
Abruptly it ended late the next afternoon. Gomez wandered into the big first-floor kitchen looking like a starved old rickshaw coolie. He pushed his lank hair back from his forehead, said: 'Beel, what is to eat—' and pitched forward onto the linoleum. Leitzer came when I yelled, expertly took Gomez's pulse, rolled him onto a blanket, and threw another one over him. 'It's just a faint,' he said. 'Let's get him to bed.'
'Aren't you going to call a doctor, man?'
'Doctor couldn't do anything we can't do,' he said stolidly. 'And I'm here to see that security isn't breached. Give me a hand.'
We got him upstairs and put him to bed. He woke up and said something in Spanish, and then, apologetically: 'Very sorry, fellows. I ought to taken it easier.'
'I'll get you some lunch,' I said, and he grinned.
He ate it all, enjoying it heartily, and finally lay back gorged. 'Well,' he asked me, 'what it is new, Beel?'
'What is new. And you should tell me. You finish your work?'
'I got it in shape to finish. The hard part it is over.' He rolled out of bed.
'Hey!' I said.
'I'm okay now,' he grinned. 'Don't write this down in your history, Beel.
Everybody will think I act like a woman.'
I followed him into his work room, where he flopped into an easy chair, his eyes on a blackboard covered with figures. He wasn't grinning any more.
'Dr. Mines says you're up to something big,' I said.
'Si. Big.'
'Unified field theory, he says.'
'That is it,' Gomez said.
'Is it good or bad?' I asked, licking my lips. 'The application, I mean.'
His boyish mouth set suddenly in a grim line. 'That, it is not my business,' he said. 'I am American citizen of the United States.' He stared at the blackboard and its maze of notes.
I looked at it too—really looked at it for once—and was surprised by what I saw. Mathematics, of course, I don't know. But I had soaked up a very little about mathematics. One of the things I had soaked up was that the expressions of higher mathematics tend to be complicated and elaborate, involving English, Greek, and Hebrew letters, plain and fancy brackets, and a great variety of special signs besides the plus and minus of the elementary school.
The things on the blackboard weren't like that at all. The board was covered with variations of a simple expression that consisted of five letters and two symbols: a right-handed pothook and a left-handed pothook.
'What do they mean?' I asked, pointing.
'Somethings I made up,' he said nervously. 'The word for that one is
'enfields.' The other one is 'is enfielded by.''
'What's that mean?'
His luminous eyes were haunted. He didn't answer.
'It looks like simple stuff. I read somewhere that all the basic stuff is simple once it's been discovered.'
'Yes,' he said almost inaudibly. 'It is simple, Beel. Too damn simple, I think. Better I carry it in my head, I think.' He strode to the blackboard and erased it. Instinctively I half-rose to stop him. He gave me a grin that was somehow bitter and unlike him. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I don't forget it.' He tapped his forehead. 'I can't forget it.' I hope I never see again on any face the look that was on his.
'Julio,' I said, appalled. 'Why don't you get out of here for a while? Why don't you run over to New York and see your folks and have some fun?
They can't keep you here against your will.'
'They told me I shouldn't—' he said uncertainly. And then he got tough.
'You're damn right, Beel. Let's go in together. I get dressed up. Er—You tell Leitzer, hah?' He couldn't quite face up to the hard-boiled security man.
I told Leitzer, who hit the ceiling. But all it boiled down to was that he sincerely wished Gomez and I wouldn't leave. We weren't in the Army, we weren't in jail. I got hot at last and yelled back that we were damn well going out and he couldn't stop us. He called New York on his direct wire and apparently New York confirmed it, regretfully.
We got on the 4:05 Jersey Central, with Higgins and Dalhousie tailing us at a respectful distance. Gomez didn't notice them and I didn't tell him.
He was having too much fun. He had a shine put on his shoes at Penn Station and worried about the taxi fare as we rode up to Spanish Harlem.
His parents lived in a neat little three-room apartment. A lot of the furniture looked brand-new, and I was pretty sure who had paid for it.
The mother and father spoke only Spanish, and mumbled shyly when
'mi amigo Beel' was introduced. I had a very halting conversation with the father while the mother and Gomez rattled away happily and she poked his ribs to point up the age-old complaint of any mother anywhere that he wasn't eating enough.
The father, of course, thought the boy was a janitor or something in the Pentagon and, as near as I could make out, he was worried about his Julio being grabbed off by a man-hungry government girl. I kept reassuring him that his Julio was a good boy, a very good boy, and he seemed to get some comfort out of it.
There was a little spat when his mother started to set the table. Gomez said reluctantly that we couldn't stay, that we were eating somewhere else. His mother finally dragged from him the admission that we were going to the Porto Bello so he could see Rosa, and everything was smiles again. The father told me that Rosa was a good girl, a very good girl.
Walking down the three flights of stairs with yelling little kids playing tag around us, Gomez asked proudly: 'You not think they in America only a little time, hey?'
I yanked him around by the elbow as we went down the brown-stone stoop into the street. Otherwise he would have seen our shadows for sure. I didn't want to spoil his fun.
The Porto Bello was full, and the pretty little girl was on duty as cashier at the table. Gomez got a last-minute
