Groton smiled. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to run on like that. I don’t usually—”
“You never told me, dear,” Beatryx said. “Nobody likes to advertise his mistakes. That’s why I tried to forget what my ‘teaching’ really was. It still gets to me, when I think about it — that hellish two weeks — it seemed like several months. It was a long time before I felt really settled again. Before I could forget that terrible insecurity of responsibility without authority, of degradation at the hands of the precious youth of our country, of the bitterness at unworkable and unfair policies and useless effort.”
Yet he had not done anything about it himself, Ivo thought. How could mankind turn about, when even those who were shocked by the visible carnage merely retreated from it?
“At least I know better now,” Groton said. “Now that I have Beatryx. And I stay out of ‘causes.’ Maybe I just had to get the mistaken idealism out of my system before settling down.”
Oh.
Brad took Ivo to the confrontation. Afra was busy elsewhere, and he tried to keep his mind off her.
Senator Borland reminded him, shockingly, of the catatonic Dr. Johnson Afra had introduced him to in the infirmary. Borland’s manner dissipated that initial impression in a hurry, however; he was younger and far more forceful than the scientist could ever have been. Ivo tried not to think of him automatically as the enemy. Borland had probably had nothing to do with the closing of schools and suppression of teachers.
It was amazing that one so young as Brad should be trusted to deal with such a man. But Brad was — Brad.
The Senator arrived with his personal secretary: a noisy young man who could only be properly described as a “flunky.” The flunky did the talking, speaking of Borland always in the third person as though he were not present, while Borland himself looked alertly about as though not concerned with the dialogue.
“You!” the flunky cried imperiously, spying Brad. “You’re American, right? The Senator wants to talk to you.”
Brad approached slowly. Ivo could tell he was repressing irritation; he was hardly one to be ordered about abruptly.
The flunky consulted his clipboard. “You’re Bradley Carpenter, right? Boy genius from Kennedy Tech, right? The Senator wants to know what you’re pulling here.”
“Astronomy,” Brad said. There was a small stir among the assembled personnel of the station, and one big man with the Soviet insignia on his lapel smiled, not hesitant to show his contempt of the capitalist hierarchy. The West Europeans kept straight faces, though one had to cough. Borland had no power over them, but there were courtesies to maintain.
“Stargazing. Uh-huh,” the flunky remarked. “The Senator means to put a stop to needless and wasteful expense. Do you have any idea how much of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money you’ve squandered here in the past year?”
“Yes,” Brad replied.
“The Senator means to get to the bottom of this foolishness. This—” There was a doubletake. “What?”
“None.”
“None what?”
“None squandered. You seem to assume that the purpose of research is the production of tangible commodities. The research is not in error; your definitions are.”
Borland swung around to cover Brad. He touched one finger to his subordinate’s arm and the youth froze. “Hold on there, lad. Suppose you prove that statement. What’s so special about your telescope, makes it worth this many billion dollars? Just give me the tourist-class rundown, now.”
“It isn’t a telescope.”
“The Senator didn’t ask you what it wasn’t!”
Ivo could tell by the silence that even the non-English-speaking personnel present were waiting to see the gadfly get swatted. Brad’s obscure humor was not the only trait friends had come to appreciate.
They were disappointed this time. Brad did go into the elementary lecture reserved for visiting dignitaries. After a moment Ivo realized why: Brad was swatting for the gad, not the gadfly.
“According to Newton’s theory of gravitation, every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Currently we prefer to think of gravity as the physical manifestation of the curvature of space in the presence of matter. That is—”
“What about the telescope?” the flunky demanded. “The Senator doesn’t have the time for irrelevant—”
Borland touched him on the arm again. It was like lifting the needle from a record.
“That is,” Brad continued, having taken advantage of the break to move to one of the blackboards, and now erasing the complex “sprouts” diagram there, “we might visualize space as a taut elastic fabric, and the masses in our universe as assorted objects resting upon it. The heavier objects naturally depress the surface more.”
He drew a sagging line with a circle in its center, then added a smaller circle. Ivo tried to imagine how a sprouts game might achieve such a configuration, but his talent did not help him there.
“This is the way the depression of space in the vicinity of our sun might affect the Earth, making due allowances for the two-dimensionality of our representation,” Brad said. “As you can see, the small object will have a tendency to roll in toward the large, unless it should spin around it fast enough for centrifugal force to counteract the effect. But of course the Earth creates its own depression, and objects near it will be similarly attracted unless they establish orbits.
“The universe as a whole, therefore, is both curved and immensely complicated, since there are no real limits to any depression, large or small. No actual ‘force’ is necessary to explain the effects we experience in the presence of matter, apart from the basic nature of the situation. The gravitic interactions are everywhere, however, ripple upon ripple, and with constantly changing values. Any question so far?”
“GTR,” Borland said.
“General Theory of Relativity, yes. Our concern is with these interactions.” Brad marked a place on the diagram, between the sun and Earth, but nearer the latter so that it crested the wave. “We find that the peculiar stress of overlapping depressions — fields of gravity, if you will — creates a faint but unique turbulence, particularly at points in space where two or more fields are of equivalent potency. You might liken it to the sonic boom, where a physical object impinges the domain of sound, or Cerenkov radiation. It is, like the Cerenkov, a form of light — or rather, a subtle harmonic imprinted upon light passing through the turbulence. This aspect of light was not understood or even measurable until very recently; our technology was not sophisticated enough to detect such perturbations, let alone analyze their nature.”
Borland held up his hand as though in a classroom, reminding Ivo again of Groton’s experience. Now the spitwads were political. “Now a question, if you please. You tell me a beam of light passes through this gravity turbulence between two objects in space, and gets kinked a bit. But the way I figure it, there’s hardly a cubbyhole in the cosmos that doesn’t have gravitational equivalence of some sort; there are just too many stars, too many specks of dust, all with their little fields crossing into infinity. Your beam of light should have a thousand kinks, and kinks on kinks, if it travels any distance. So how do you figure which is which? Seems to me you’re better off just taking your light as is, through a regular telescope; that’s uncluttered, at least.”
It occurred to Ivo with a little shock that a very sharp mind lurked behind the senatorial façade.