Vectors by Charles Sheffield Page A

flowers. Carl was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, thin and pale as ever, older in the eyes and the set of his mouth.
    The beginning was the physical joy of reunion. Carl was intense and passionate but Sarah could sense the core of sadness and reserve.
    "Carl, what did they do to you?" She was holding him tightly by the shoulders, studying his face. "Did they hurt you? I asked about you when I got back, everywhere I thought there might be information. No one had ever seen you or heard of you, ever admitted your existence."
    "I know, Sarah. The old Carl Denning doesn't exist. Officially I'm not here today, and I'll have to leave early tomorrow morning. I had to make an excuse to get back here for even one day. I didn't want you to think I was in any trouble, and I didn't want you grieving for me."
    "It's two months too late for that wish, Carl. I thought you were dead. Where have you been?"
    "Many places. Come and sit by me, Sarah."
    They settled together by the fire, in the same position as on their first evening. Carl stared deep into the fire, looking for words there.
    "I'm going to break the rules," he began at last. "I'm going to tell you what the Church of Redman does, so you'll believe me when I say that one day I will come back. Not for two years, at least, but I'll be back. Sarah, do you think people you know are happy? Not always, but mostly?"
    She gave the question real thought before she answered. "I think they are. You and I may be the exceptions, but most people are content."
    He nodded. "That's what I've been hearing. Happiness, for the majority, is the goal of civilization. Worry and grief for a minority are a necessary consequence. That's what Redmanism is all about. You'll have to take a lot of this on faith, because you can't check it, but the key is in the forbidden sciences."
    "You found out all about them at the Processing Center?"
    "Enough. It all goes back a long way. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, people believed that the world was really knowable—not simple, but at least capable of being fully understood. All science seemed to be completely definite. So people came to think of things that way, and it looked as though science offered certainty. That was the view of the average man, though he never got around to expressing it."
    He smiled ruefully, still looking deep into the fire. "That's the way things used to seem to me when I was in school in Briarsford. I didn't know when I was well off."
    Sarah was holding his hands in hers, and looking both happy and perplexed. "Are you saying science isn't definite, Carl? We always learned it that way."
    "Oh, it's definite in its own way. You see, at the end of the nineteenth century some mysterious things were discovered. Radioactivity—atoms breaking up of their own accord, into smaller particles—was discovered, and there seemed to be no way to tell which atom would be the one to disintegrate. It seemed to happen at random. Then early in the twentieth century things got worse. The basic description of the world was through something called quantum theory, and that was all based on probabilities, not certainties. The uncertainty principle showed that the probabilities were fundamental, and couldn't be removed from the theory. Finally, a few years later a mathematician called Gödel knocked the final nail in. He proved that whole classes of theorems in mathematics are neither provable, nor disprovable—they are undecidable ."
    He looked at Sarah, who appeared dubious and sceptical. "Do you understand me, Sarah?"
    "I understand what you're saying, Carl. I just don't see what it has to do with Redmanism. It doesn't sound like a disaster if things seemed less definite."
    "That's what people thought, before Redman. But it takes a long time for ideas that are very abstract to get down to the average man. Maybe three or four generations. By the time they did, the precise way the uncertainty is involved had been lost. People had come to think that