destinies that have, strangely, so little to do with
the two of them here . . . don’t you know there’s a war on, moron? yes but—here’s
Jessica in her sister’s hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep in nothing at all,
but where
is
the war?
Until it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to get to safety,
a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical, maybe, spooky as an old
northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the great struggle of good and evil the
wireless reports everyday. And no reason not just to, well, to keep on. . . .
Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference between distribution,
in angel’s-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from
down here. She’s almost got it: nearly understands his Poisson equation, yet can’t
quite put the two together—put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure
numbers, and keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out.
“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t
we
do something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too, something to help
us find a safer place?”
“Why am I surrounded,” his usual understanding self today, “by statistical illiterates?
There’s no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant. Pointsman
doesn’t even understand that.”
The rockets
are
distributing about London just as Poisson’s equation in the textbooks predicts. As
the data keep coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet. Psi Section people
stare after him in the hallways. It’s not precognition, he wants to make an announcement
in the cafeteria or something . . . have I ever pretended to be anything I’m not?
all I’m doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you can look it up in
the book and do it yourself. . . .
His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape
than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled
off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented
by red circles. The Poisson equation will tell, for a number of total hits arbitrarily
chosen, how many squares will get none, how many one, two, three, and so on.
An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles on the ring. Blue light goes rattling, reknotting through
the seedflow inside the glass. Ancient tatty textbooks and mathematical papers lie
scattered about on desk and floor. Somewhere a snapshot of Jessica peeks from beneath
Roger’s old Whittaker and Watson. The graying Pavlovian, on route with his tautened
gait, thin as a needle, in the mornings to his lab, where dogs wait with cheeks laid
open, winter-silver drops welling from each neat raw fistula to fill the wax cup or
graduated tube, pauses by Mexico’s open door. The air beyond is blue from cigarettes
smoked and as fag-ends later in the freezing black morning shifts resmoked, a stale
and loathsome atmosphere. But he must go in, must face the habitual morning cup.
Both know how strange their liaison must look. If ever the Anti-pointsman existed,
Roger Mexico is the man. Not so much, the doctor admits, for the psychical research.
The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful
thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman
can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in
between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain
as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others
darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is
allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,”
“irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal induction”—all
the two of them here . . . don’t you know there’s a war on, moron? yes but—here’s
Jessica in her sister’s hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep in nothing at all,
but where
is
the war?
Until it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to get to safety,
a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical, maybe, spooky as an old
northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the great struggle of good and evil the
wireless reports everyday. And no reason not just to, well, to keep on. . . .
Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference between distribution,
in angel’s-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from
down here. She’s almost got it: nearly understands his Poisson equation, yet can’t
quite put the two together—put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure
numbers, and keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out.
“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t
we
do something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too, something to help
us find a safer place?”
“Why am I surrounded,” his usual understanding self today, “by statistical illiterates?
There’s no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant. Pointsman
doesn’t even understand that.”
The rockets
are
distributing about London just as Poisson’s equation in the textbooks predicts. As
the data keep coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet. Psi Section people
stare after him in the hallways. It’s not precognition, he wants to make an announcement
in the cafeteria or something . . . have I ever pretended to be anything I’m not?
all I’m doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you can look it up in
the book and do it yourself. . . .
His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape
than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled
off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented
by red circles. The Poisson equation will tell, for a number of total hits arbitrarily
chosen, how many squares will get none, how many one, two, three, and so on.
An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles on the ring. Blue light goes rattling, reknotting through
the seedflow inside the glass. Ancient tatty textbooks and mathematical papers lie
scattered about on desk and floor. Somewhere a snapshot of Jessica peeks from beneath
Roger’s old Whittaker and Watson. The graying Pavlovian, on route with his tautened
gait, thin as a needle, in the mornings to his lab, where dogs wait with cheeks laid
open, winter-silver drops welling from each neat raw fistula to fill the wax cup or
graduated tube, pauses by Mexico’s open door. The air beyond is blue from cigarettes
smoked and as fag-ends later in the freezing black morning shifts resmoked, a stale
and loathsome atmosphere. But he must go in, must face the habitual morning cup.
Both know how strange their liaison must look. If ever the Anti-pointsman existed,
Roger Mexico is the man. Not so much, the doctor admits, for the psychical research.
The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful
thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman
can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in
between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain
as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others
darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is
allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,”
“irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal induction”—all
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