Which wasn’t much. Since so many American facilities got merged or shut down entirely due to the War not a lot was happening in theoretical physics. It wasn’t actually that much better in most of the rest of the world, either. The Europeans were too busy fighting their own war against the terrorists, with the Islamists a lot closer to European heartlands were to ours. They barely even kept CERN going. And, maybe because they no longer had anybody important to compete against, I guess the Russians and the Chinese had more or less lost interest.
That seemed to piss my father off even more than it did Ron. “You’re too young to remember,” he’d tell me, “but I was around when places like Fermilab and Stanford and Bell Labs were turning up new stuff every day. You don’t know about Bell Labs, do you? They invented the transistor there, and Claude Shannon developed his information theories, and Rudi Kampfner invented the traveling-wave tube and God knows what all else. It wasn’t the Arabs that did the Labs in, either. It was just corporate greed.”
And so on and on, the two of them taking turns in their nightly deploring contest. I loved them both. Quite a lot, in fact. But sometimes I did wish that they would now and then look on the bright side.
Because, you know, we didn’t have that bad a life. My father and I had lived all my life in the big house on the shore that my mother bought for the family just before she got killed. I loved the place. When Dad turned it over to Ron and me as a wedding present I cried. He said it was too much house for a single man. Even with the part-time help we’d always had from the town it was too much house for me, too, but then Ron hired a couple of refugees named Bruce and Rebecca so I could get on with school. Dad didn’t move out. Ron wouldn’t let him. So Dad took over the maid’s quarters on the third floor, had his own sitting room and bath and, quite unnecessarily, kitchen. That meant that the servants had to sleep in the place we fixed up for them in the basement, but it wasn’t that bad, really. Anyway they didn’t mind. It was undoubtedly better than the plastic tents in the Hessa Hissa camp they’d lived in, back in the Sudan, until the lightning struck and they got that visa to America.
By then I was twenty, going on twenty-one, and just about to start my second year at the local community college. My major wasn’t physics. English lit. I still loved listening to Ron and Dad talk about the black holes and the quarks and all, though not enough to have any wish to follow in their footsteps. Thus, an English lit major. The war was going badly, as usual, but we had plenty to eat and plenty of time on our own—well, I mean when Ron hadn’t been sent off to poke around Barcelona or Marseilles or Haifa or some other place that we had just recaptured from Islam, before the Islamists recaptured it back. And not counting the optional, but not very optional, third weekend of every month. That’s what we spent in our voluntary (but not very voluntary) training with the Citizens’ Defense Corps, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at an Arab tank, if one ever appeared in New Jersey. None ever did. Even the servants had to sign up for the CDC, or risk losing their green cards. They didn’t mind. They hadn’t forgotten what it was like in Dafur. They had a pretty good practical idea of what Arab tanks could do, too, and anyway all the CDC stuff was entertainingly theoretical. None of us was likely to be called up.
Dad wasn’t teaching regularly any more, but he still took on one or two physics classes a semester. It would have made sense for him to take a little flat in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, but he wasn’t willing to abandon the house Mom had bought for us. Commuting, though, was a problem. Mom had had her own arrangements, at least when the weather was halfway decent. A hydrofoil would come and pick her up at our little dock and whisk her right across New York Bay to the Battery Park City pier in lower Manhattan, and it didn’t even cost her anything because the company paid for the whole thing. Dad wouldn’t do that. He didn’t have a rich company to pick up the check for him, though he really could have afforded it if he’d wanted to. He said it was because it was too extravagant, but I think it was because it reminded him too much of my mother.
So he got up early every morning he had classes and drove himself in to Brooklyn across the Verrazano. That shot his whole coalcohol ration, but I never used all of mine up and Ron had a surplus—got a field-grade officer’s ration to begin with, and was often enough deployed to somewhere where he couldn’t use it. So Dad got all the coupons he needed. Besides, we walked a lot when the weather let us.
That was one of the reasons I hated to see the summer come to an end. Well, that and the vine-ripe tomatoes and the corn, of course. Labor Day was pretty much the cutoff for us. We didn’t celebrate the holiday by marching in any parade, but it was the alarm-clock ring that told us to get ready for cold weather and school. When I sat on the porch that day, I could see that the seed pods were beginning to drop off the catalpas. Dad and Ron were nursing their beers in one corner of the porch, talking particle physics, as usual, and debating whether to go in for what might be their last swim of the summer. I was on the porch steps trying to get a head start on the school year by reading the American lit text ahead of time. I heard somebody go “pssst”—yes, literally “pssst”—from behind the hydrangea bushes. The only person I knew who would say “pssst” was Billy de Blount. I sighed, turned the book off and stood up. I kept my voice low and said, “For God’s sake, Billy, why don’t you show yourself like a normal human being?”
He stood up enough so that I could see his head. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he ordered. “I just didn’t want to disturb your dad and—” he jerked a thumb in Ron’s direction—”him.”
I have to admit that in some ways I didn’t altogether mind having a teenager who had such a crush on me that he hated even to say my husband’s name. Still, he really was a pest.
“You disturbed me,” I informed him. “What do you want? And come out of those damn bushes.”
He didn’t come out from behind the hydrangeas. If he had, Ron and Dad could have seen him, and that was something Billy tried to avoid. He did answer the question, though. He peered at a piece of paper in his hand that looked familiar—actually, it turned out to be a page from my father’s notebook—and asked, “What is ortho-positronium?”
I held out my hand. “Give me that.”
He made a face, but he passed it over. It was a list in Dad’s sloppy handwriting:
g
c
Fine structure constant
Ortho-positronium decay
Planck’s constant
The list didn’t make a lot more sense to me than it had to Billy. “Where’d you get it?” I demanded.
He hung his head, the way he did. “It was on the lawn. I picked it up. Anyway, when your dad and him were writing this stuff down they were talking about God, and I wondered—”
“You wondered if they were getting religion?”
He didn’t answer that, just scowled. Then he said, “So what does it mean?”