undergraduate drivel he might have expected from any smug atheist-but then, short of a confession, exactly what kind of reply would have constituted evidence of guilt?If you’d sold your soul to the devil, what lie would you tell in place of the truth?Had he seriously believed that Stoney would claim to be a devout churchgoer, as if that were the best possible answer to put Jack off the scent?
He had to concentrate on things he’d seen with his own eyes, facts that could not be denied.
“You’re plotting to overthrow nature, bending the world to the will of man.”
Stoney sighed. “Not at all. More refined technology will help us tread morelightly. We have to cut back on pollution and pesticides as rapidly as possible. Or do you want to live in a world where all the animals are born as hermaphrodites, and half the Pacific islands disappear in storms?”
“Don’t try telling me that you’re some kind of guardian of the animal kingdom! You want to replace us all with machines!”
“Does every Zulu or Tibetan who gives birth to a child, and wants the best for it, threaten you in the same way?”
Jack bristled. “I’m not a racist. A Zulu or Tibetan had asoul.”
Stoney groaned and put his head in his hands. “It’s half past one in the morning! Can’t we have this debate some other time?”
Someone banged on the door. Stoney looked up, disbelieving. “What is this? Grand Central Station?”
He crossed to the door and opened it. A disheveled, unshaven man pushed his way into the room.
“Quint? What a pleasant-”
The intruder grabbed Stoney and slammed him against the wall. Jack exhaled with surprise. Quint turned bloodshot eyes on him.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“John Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?”
“Never you mind. Just stay put.” He jerked Stoney’s arm up behind his back with one hand, while grinding his face into the wall with the other. “You’re mine now, you piece of shit. No one’s going to protect you this time.”
Stoney addressed Jack through a mouth squashed against the masonry. “Dith ith Pether Quinth, my own perthonal thpook. I did make a Fauthtian bargain. But with thtrictly temporal-”
“Shut up!” Quint pulled a gun from his jacket and held it to Stoney’s head.
Jack said, “Steady on.”
“Just how far do your connections go?” Quint screamed. “I’ve had memos disappear, sources clam up-and now my superiors are treatingme like some kind of traitor! Well, don’t worry: when I’m through with you, I’ll have the names of the entire network.” He turned to address Jack again. “And don’tyou think you’re going anywhere.”
Stoney said, “Leave him out of dith. He’th at Magdalene. You mutht know by now: all the thpieth are at Trinity.”
Jack was shaken by the sight of Quint waving his gun around, but the implications of this drama came as something of a relief. Stoney’s ideas must have had their genesis in some secret wartime research project.
He hadn’t made a deal with the devil after all, but he’d broken the Official Secrets Act, and now he was paying the price.
Stoney flexed his body and knocked Quint backward. Quint staggered, but didn’t fall; he raised his arm menacingly, but there was no gun in his hand. Jack looked around to see where it had fallen, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere. Stoney landed a kick squarely in Quint’s testicles; barefoot, but Quint wailed with pain. A second kick sent him sprawling.
Stoney called out, “Luke?Luke!Would you come and give me a hand?”
A solidly built man with tattooed forearms emerged from Stoney’s bedroom, yawning and tugging his braces into place. At the sight of Quint, he groaned. “Not again!”
Stoney said, “I’m sorry.”
Luke shrugged stoically. The two of them managed to grab hold of Quint, then they dragged him struggling out the door. Jack waited a few seconds, then searched the floor for the gun. But it wasn’t anywhere in sight, and it hadn’t slid under the furniture; none of the crevices where it might have ended up were so dark that it would have been lost in shadow. It was not in the room at all.
Jack went to the window and watched the three men cross the courtyard, half expecting to witness an assassination. But Stoney and his lover merely lifted Quint into the air between them, and tossed him into a shallow, rather slimy-looking pond.
Jack spent the ensuing days in a state of turmoil. He wasn’t ready to confide in anyone until he could frame his suspicions clearly, and the events in Stoney’s rooms were difficult to interpret unambiguously.
He couldn’t state with absolute certainty that Quint’s gun had vanished before his eyes. But surely the fact that Stoney was walking free proved that he was receiving supernatural protection? And Quint himself, confused and demoralized, had certainly had the appearance of a man who’d been demonically confounded at every turn.
If this was true, though, Stoney must have bought more with his soul than immunity from worldly authority.The knowledge itself had to be Satanic in origin, as the legend of Faustus described it. Tollers had been right, in his great essay “Mythopoesis”: myths were remnants of man’s pre-lapsarian capacity to apprehend, directly, the great truths of the world. Why else would they resonate in the imagination, and survive from generation to generation?
By Friday, a sense of urgency gripped him. He couldn’t take his confusion back to Potter’s Barn, back to Joyce and the boys. This had to be resolved, if only in his own mind, before he returned to his family.
With Wagner on the gramophone, he sat and meditated on the challenge he was facing. Stoney had to be thwarted, but how? Jack had always said that the Church of England-apparently so quaint and harmless, a Church of cake stalls and kindly spinsters-was like a fearsome army in the eyes of Satan.
But even if his master were quaking in Hell, it would take more than a few stern words from a bicycling vicar to force Stoney to abandon his obscene plans.
But Stoney’s intentions, in themselves, didn’t matter. He’d been granted the power to dazzle and seduce, but not to force his will upon the populace. What mattered was how his plans were viewed by others.
And the way to stop him was to open people’s eyes to the true emptiness of his apparent cornucopia.
The more he thought and prayed about it, the more certain Jack became that he’d discerned the task required of him. No denunciation from the pulpits would suffice; people wouldn’t turn down the fruits of Stoney’s damnation on the mere say-so of the Church. Why would anyone reject such lustrous gifts, without a carefully reasoned argument?
Jack had been humiliated once, defeated once, trying to expose the barrenness of materialism. But might that not have been a form of preparation? He’d been badly mauled by Anscombe, but she’d made an infinitely gentler enemy than the one he now confronted. He had suffered from her taunts-but what wassuffering, if not the chisel God used to shape his children into their true selves?
His role was clear, now. He would find Stoney’s intellectual Achilles’ heel, and expose it to the world.
He would debate him.
Robert gazed at the blackboard for a full minute, then started laughing with delight. “That’s so beautiful!”
“Isn’t it?” Helen put down the chalk and joined him on the couch. “Any more symmetry, and nothing would happen: the universe would be full of crystalline blankness. Any less, and it would all be uncorrelated noise.”
Over the months, in a series of tutorials, Helen had led him through a small part of the century of physics that had separated them at their first meeting, down to the purely algebraic structures that lay beneath spacetime and matter. Mathematics catalogued everything that was not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics was an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.
Robert sat and mentally reviewed everything he’d learned, trying to apprehend as much as he could in a single image. As he did, a part of him waited fearfully for a sense of disappointment, a sense of anticlimax.He might never see more deeply into the nature of the world. In this direction, at least, there was nothing more to be discovered.
But anticlimax was impossible. To become jaded withthis was impossible. However familiar he became with the algebra of the universe, it would never grow less marvelous.
