"The upshot? After a century of theoretical analysis, the world of physics reached a very distressing conclusion: that Maxwell's little mechanism will not only consume more energy than it produces and cost more than it can ever make, it will continue to do so in increase! Does this remind you of anything, children?"
"It reminds me," my brother Buddy said, "of the atomic power plants they're building up in Washington."
"Just so, yah, only worse. Now. Imagine again, please, that this box" – he bent again over the picture with his ballpoint, changing the H into a G -- "represents the cognitive process of Modern civilization. Eh? And that this side, let's say, represents 'Good.' This other side, 'bad.' "
He changed the C to an ornate B, then waggled the picture at us through the steam.
"Our divided mind! in all its doomed glory! And ensconced right in the middle is this medieval slavey, under orders to sort through the whirling blizzard of experience and separate the grain from the chaff. He must deliberate over everything, and to what end? Purportedly to further us in some way, eh? Get us an edge in wheat futures, a master's degree, another rung up the ladder of elephant shit. Glorious rewards supposedly await us if our slave piles up enough 'good.' But he must accomplish this before he bankrupts us, is the catch. Und all this deliberating, it makes him hungry. He needs more energy. Such an appetite."
His hand had drifted down to float on the surface, the checkbook still pinched aloft between thumb and finger.
"Our accounts begin to sink into the red. We have to float loans from the future. At the wheel we sense something dreadfully wrong. We are losing way! We must maintain way or we lose the rudder! We hammer on the bulkhead of the engine room: 'Stoker! More hot molecules, damn your ass! We're losing way!' But the hammering only seems to make him more ravenous. At last it becomes clear: we must fire this fireman."
We watched the hand. It was gradually sinking, checkbook and all, into the dark waters.
"But these stokers have built up quite the maritime union over the past century, and they have an ironclad contract, binding their presence on board to our whole crew of conscious faculties. If Stokey goes, everybody goes, from the navigator right down to the sphincter's mate. We may be drifting for the rocks but there is nothing we can do but stand at the wheel, helpless, and wait for the boat to go… down."
He held the vowel, bowing his voice like a fine cello. "O, my sailors, what I say is sad but true – our brave new boat is sinking. Every day finds more of us drowning in depression, or drifting aimlessly in a sea of antidepressants, or grasping at such straws as psychodrama and regression catharsis. Fah! The problem does not lie in poo-poo fantasies from our past. It is this mistake we have programmed into the machinery of our present that has scuttled us!"
The book was gone. Not a ripple remained. Finally the court recorder broke the spell with her flat, cornbelt voice.
"Then what do you advise we do, doctor? You've figured somethin', I can tell by the way you're leadin' us on."
That voice was the only thing flat she'd brought from Nebraska. Woofner leered at her for a moment, his face streaming moisture like some kind of seagoing Pan's; then he sighed and raised the checkbook high to let the water trickle out of it.
"I'm sorry, dear. The doctor has not figured anything. Maybe someday. Until then, his considered advice is to live with your demon as peacefully as possible, to make fewer demands and be satisfied with less results… and above all, mine students, to strive constantly to be here!"
The wet checkbook slapped the water. We jumped like startled frogs again. Woofner wheezed a laugh and surged standing, puffy and pale as Moby Dick himself.
"Class dismissed. Miss Omaha? A student in such obviously fit condition shouldn't object to helping a poor old pedagogue up to his bed, yah?"
"How about if I walk along?" I had to ask. "It's time I checked on the bus."
"By all means, Devlin." He grinned. "The fit and the fascinated. You may carry the wine."
After getting dressed, I accompanied the girl and the old man on the walk up to the cottages. We walked in single file up the narrow path, the girl in the middle. I was still in a steam from the hot-tub talk and wanting to keep after it, but the doctor didn't seem so inclined. He inquired instead about my legal status. He'd followed the bust in the papers – was I really involved in all those chemical experiments, or was that merely more San Francisco Chronicle crap? Mostly crap, I told him. I was flattered that he asked.
Woofner was quartered in the dean's cabin, the best of the Institute's accommodations and highest up the hill. While the court recorder detoured to get her suitcase, the doctor and I continued on up, strolling and sipping in silence. The air was still and sweet. It had rained sometime since midnight, then cleared, and pale stars floated in puddles here and there. The dawn was just over the mountains to the east, like a golden bugle sounding a distant reveille. The color echoed off the bald head bobbing in front of me. I cleared my throat.
"You were right, Doctor," I began, "about me being fascinated."
"I can see that," he said without turning. "But why so much? Do you plan to use the old doctor's secrets to become a rival in the nut-curing business?"
"Not if I can help it." I laughed. "The little while I worked at the state hospital was plenty."
"You wrote your novel on the job, I heard?" The words puffing back over his shoulder smelled like stale ashtrays.
"That's where I got all those crazy characters. I was a night aide on a disturbed ward. I turned in all my white suits the moment I had a rough draft done, but I never lost the fascination."
"Your book must have reaped certain rewards," he said. "Perhaps you feel some sort of debt toward those crazy people and call it fascination?"
I allowed that it could be a possibility. "But I don't think it's the people I'm fascinated by so much as the puzzle. Like what is crazy? What's making all these people go there? I mean, what an interesting notion this metaphor of yours is, if I've got it right – that modern civilization's angst is mechanical first and mental second?"
"Not angst," he corrected. "Fear. Of emptiness. Since the Industrial Revolution, civilization is increasingly afraid of running empty."
He was breathing hard but I knew he wasn't going to stop for a rest; I only had another couple dozen yards left before we reached his cabin.
"And that this fear," I pressed on, "has driven us to dream up a kind of broker and install him in our brain so he can increase our accounts by -"
"Minds," he puffed. "Into the way we think."
"- minds… by monitoring our incomes and making smart investments? He can't be any smarter than we are, though; we created him – and that he is the main snake-in-the-grass making people crazy, not all that psychology stuff?"
"That psychology stuff is… like the stuff the Chronicle writes… mostly crap."
I followed in silence, waiting for him to continue. The wheezing breaths turned into a laugh.