The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(48)

What else?

I dont know. Wouldnt the values of the constants have to somehow know what was coming?

That sounds like Penrose.

Well. Maybe.

What else?

I dont know. Stückelberg.

Stückelberg.

Yes.

Who’s that?

Who indeed.

Well?

Stückelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist who showed up at Sommerfeld’s lab a couple of years too late. But he’d figured out most of the exchange particle model of fundamental forces, worked out a good bit of the S-Matrix theory and the renormalization group. The list goes on. A covariant perturbation theory for quantum fields. The vector boson exchange model—which he dropped and which later won the Nobel Prize for Hideki Yukawa. No acknowledgment. I mean, what would you say? I stole the whole thing from some guy named Stückelberg? The Abelian Higgs mechanism. Even the interpretation of the positron as an electron traveling backward in time. Possibly unprovable but an insight that could take its place in the rare pantheon of world-shaping theories. Theory later attributed to several others. No recognition. Groundbreaking work in renormalization. Ditto. You might want to mention him. Nobody else did.

How do you spell it?

Just like it sounds.

Right.

Western spelled it.

All right. Back to the constants.

Back.

What would an explanation for the constants look like?

I dont know.

Yeah. I know. Why didnt Dirac just come out and say that the particle he’d turned up was an anti-electron? He must have pretty well known it by 1931.

Murray asked him that. Some years later.

What did he say?

He said: Pure cowardice.

Asher shook his head. Western almost smiled.

Being wrong is the worst thing a physicist can be. It’s up there with being dead.

Yeah.

You wonder about people who rarely publish anything. Wittgenstein for instance. What is that about? A good part of my father’s papers are gone. So a good deal of who he was is something I’ll never know.

Is that painful to you?

Everything is painful to me. I think. Maybe I’m just a painful person.

They sat in silence.

Sorry, said Western. I’ve got to go.

Do you really believe in physics?

I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean.

If I could do physics, I would. No matter what.

Western nodded. He pushed back the chair and rose. Well. In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get. I’ll see you.



* * *





He got Janice to look after the cat and he packed a few things in two small soft bags and in the evening he took a cab out to Airline to the locker where he kept his car. Chuck was in the office and he came out and stood in the doorway and nodded at Western’s bags. You takin that thing on a road trip?

Yep.

Where you goin?

Wartburg Tennessee.

How far is that from Roosterpoot Arkansas?

It’s a real place.

What’s there?

My grandmother.

That’s a pretty good drive, aint it? What, is she fixin to kick off and leave you some scratch?

Not that I know of.

How long a drive is it?

I dont know. Six hundred and some odd miles.

How long will that take you?

Maybe six hours.

Bullshit.

Five and a half?

Get your ass out of here.

He dropped his bags at the locker and unfastened the padlock and rolled up the overhead door on its tracks and switched on the single overhead lightbulb. The car had a cloth cover over it and he made his way along the wall to the front and undid the tie-straps and folded the cloth back across the hood and the stainless steel roof and carried it outside and shook it out. Then he folded it up and carried it back in and put it on the shelf at the front of the locker alongside the tricklecharger. He lifted the scuttle and disconnected the clips from the charger and the timer and pulled the wire out through the wheel-well and he checked the oil and the water. Then he dropped the scuttle and came around and wedged himself through the door and put the key in the ignition and pushed the starter button.

He hadnt driven the car in six months but it cranked and started with no problem. He blipped the throttle and checked the gauges and put the shifter in reverse and backed slowly out of the locker onto the asphalt. He got out and switched off the light and closed the door and fastened the padlock and he opened the hood of the car and wedged his bags in and dropped the hood and got in and ran the engine up a couple of times. White smoke drifted across the storage area. The engine smoothed out and the car sat there burbling throatily. The trident that identified the Maserati he liked to think of as Schr?dinger’s wavefunction. Of course it could also be the sign for Davy Jones’s locker. He smiled and eased the shifter into first and pulled the car around and drove out through the gate.

It was dark by the time he reached Hattiesburg. He had turned on the lights at dusk and he drove to the Alabama State line just east of Meridian in one hour flat. One hundred and ten miles. It was seventy miles to Tuscaloosa and the highway was straight and empty except for an occasional semi and he opened the Maserati up and drove the forty miles to Clinton Alabama in eighteen minutes redlining the engine twice at what the speedometer logged as a hundred and sixty-five miles an hour. By then he thought he’d probably used up most of his luck with the State police and the small town speedtraps he’d blown through and he motored leisurely through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and crossed the Tennessee State line just south of Chattanooga five hours and forty minutes after leaving New Orleans.