He said: Of course it would have been quite impossible for her, I should have seen that at once.
He looked at me.
I said: I’m sorry.
He said: Come here.
I stayed where I was. I said: I tried to tell you.
He said: It’s stupid, if you were going to make it up what was the point of telling me?
I said: Is it still natural to put me in contact with the right sort of people?
He looked at me. He didn’t say anything. His face was quite cold and expressionless, as if something was calculating behind it.
He said at last in an expressionless voice: You have a piece of information which you shouldn’t have. You may think that piece of information is dangerous to me.
He said: I would advise you to be careful what you say. I think you will find if you try to use it that it will prove extremely dangerous to you.
I said I wasn’t planning to use it and that I had tried to stop him. I thought that there had to be something I could say. He had been so excited about the Fourier analysis before; I couldn’t see why it made such a difference if the person who had done it did not happen to share 50% of his genes. I sensed that this was not the moment to make this point. I said I just wanted— I said my own father tended to get the special and general theories of relativity confused.
Sorabji just looked at me.
I said I didn’t really know him, it was more of a genetic relationship, and I just thought—
He just looked at me. I thought he was probably not really listening to me; he was probably just thinking that there was nothing he could do.
I said: You don’t know what would have happened. Maybe it was the right thing to do. She could have gone insane. Maybe you saved her life. Just because you said the wrong thing doesn’t mean you were wrong about—
I didn’t even see his arm move. He got me on the side of the head with his open hand, knocking me across the room to the floor. I rolled out of the fall back onto my feet but he was already there. He hit me on the other side of my head and knocked me to the floor again. He was there before I could get up this time, but I tripped him and he fell heavily. Mainly on me.
I couldn’t move because he was lying on top of me. A clock which I hadn’t noticed was ticking in the room. It kept ticking. Nothing happened. He was panting as if he’d been in a worse fight; his eyes were glittering in his head. I didn’t know what he would do.
There was a knock at the door, and his wife said: George?
He said: I’ll just be two seconds, darling.
I could hear her footsteps retreating down the hall. I realised I could have shouted something. His eyes were still glittering—
The clock was still ticking.
Suddenly he let go of me and leapt lightly to his feet. I scrambled away across the room but he didn’t come after me. He was standing by the desk with his hands in his pockets. He smiled at me and said pleasantly and conversationally:
I’m sorry, that was completely out of line. I’m sorry I got carried away. My temper flares up and then it’s over, I never hold a grudge.
My head was still ringing.
His hair had fallen into his face; his eyes were sparkling. He looked like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps; he looked the way he’d looked earlier, when he’d talked about the atom and Fourier analysis.
He said: Of course you should be put in touch with the right people.
I said: So I could still go into astronomy?
He laughed. He said: I’d hate to think I’d put you off!
He raised an eyebrow in a sort of quizzical, self-mocking way. His eyes were sparkling with amusement, as if there was nothing calculating behind them.
I just hoped I wasn’t going to have a black eye.
I said: Should I still apply to Winchester? Do you still want to give me a reference?
He was still smiling. He said: Yes, you should certainly apply.
He smiled and said: Be sure to mention my name.
3
A good samurai will parry the blow
Robert Donat was on again Thursday at 9:00. Sib watched enthralled. I was reading Scientific American.
There was an article about a man who had done research in Antarctica and was about to go back. There was an article by a man who had done pioneering work on the solar neutrino problem. I would read a paragraph or two and then turn to another page.
Sometimes I thought about the girls who were not my sisters, and sometimes I thought about Dr. Miller, but most of the time I thought of the Nobel Prize-winning Robert Donat lookalike turning through the pages of Fourier analysis, looking at me with flashing eyes, telling me I was brilliant and I was exactly the way he was at that age. I couldn’t tell from the articles in Scientific American whether their authors thought Sesame Street was not the right level; I couldn’t tell whether they had an ill-timed obsession with petroleum by-products; but I didn’t have to read even a paragraph to know I’d never find another one like Sorabji.
I put down Scientific American and picked up my book on aerodynamics. Sometimes I thought I understood it and sometimes it was hard to follow, and when it was hard to follow it wasn’t easy to tell what would help; the thing that would really help would be to be able to ask someone who didn’t sum up the mathematics required as 18th 19th century stuff. Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense, but with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand. And even then either you see it or you don’t. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out what you need to know, and a lot more time just trying to see it.
If I hadn’t said anything to Sorabji I wouldn’t ever have had to waste time that way ever again. In the first place I would have gone to Winchester at the age of 12, and in the second place whenever I had a question I could have asked someone who not only knew the answer but couldn’t do enough for his longlost son. And if I’d just seen Sorabji on another night—if I’d just spent one more day on the periodic table—I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Miller, and I wouldn’t have heard any phone calls, and I wouldn’t have known there was anything to see or hear. I could have stopped wasting time and been the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. Instead I was going to have to do everything myself.
I had another look at the Kutta-Joukowski theorem. It wasn’t so much that I knew for a fact that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. It’s just that if you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize you might as well do something else worth doing with the time, such as going up the Amazon or down the Andes. If you can’t go down the Andes you might as well do something else worth doing, such as having a shot at a Nobel Prize. Whereas this was just stupid.
I put down my book on aerodynamics.
Sorabji looked out from the screen with flashing eyes.
I thought suddenly that it was stupid to be so sentimental.
What we needed was not a hero to worship but money.
If we had money we could go anywhere. Give us the money and we would be the heroes.
In the morning I decided to go the library. A day one way or the other was not going to have a significant effect on my chances of either winning a Nobel Prize or going down the Amazon. My chances of earning a lot of money soon were slim to non-existent. I thought I would read one of my old favourites just for fun.
Journey into Danger! was out so I got Half Mile Down instead.
I took the book to read on the Circle Line, and I turned to the first descent in the bathysphere before starting the whole book again.