Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [107]
“I would be called ‘Lorenz’.”
Dietrich hesitated at the sudden pain in his heart. “Ja. Doch.”
Hans laid his hand on Dietrich’s shoulder. “And I would be called ‘Dietrich’.”
Gregor Mauer grinned. “May I be called godfather?”
5
NOW
Sharon
DURING THE Middle Ages, they used to burn heretics.
Now, it was never so many or so often as has been supposed. There were rules, and most of the penalties were acquittals, pilgrimages, or other impositions. If you wanted to burn, you really had to work at it; and it may say something about human nature that so many did.
Sharon did not know she was a heretic until she whiffed the smoke.
Her department head lit the first faggot. He asked her if it were true that she was investigating Variable Light Speed theories and she, with the innocence and enthusiasm of anyone filled with the holy spirit of scientific inquiry, said, “Yes, it seems to resolve a number of problems.”
Now, she meant the cosmological problems: flatness, the horizon, lambda. Why the universe is so finely tuned. But the department head—his name was Jackson Welles—was dead to the spirit and was justified by the law—the law in this case being the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein said it, he believed it, and that settled it. So he had intended a completely different set of problems. “Like Noah’s flood, I suppose.”
The sarcasm surprised Sharon a great deal. It was as if she had been talking about auto mechanics and he had responded with a jibe about pinochle. It didn’t process right away and because thought in her always induced reflection, Welles took this to mean that his arrow had sunk home, and he leaned back in his chair with his hands interlaced over his stomach. He was a lean man, hardened by treadmills, universal machines, and academic politics. He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.
They were sitting in his office, and it struck Sharon how spare the office was. Twice the girth and depth of her own, it contained only half the clutter. Textbooks, shelved and looking new, journals, photographs and certificates, all forbidding in their orderly ranks. His chalkboard held not equations or diagrams, but budgets and schedules.
It was not that Welles did not think, but that he thought about things beside physics. Budgets, grants, tenure, promotions, the administration of the department. Someone must think of such things. Science doesn’t just happen. It’s a human activity, performed by human beings, and every circus needs a ringmaster. Once, a very long time ago, a younger Welles had written three papers of exceptional merit deriving quantum mechanics from Maxwell’s equations, the consequences of which were still emitting doctoral dissertations around the world; so don’t think he was a Krawattendjango—a “tie dude,” as our kids say in Germany. It is not given many men to write even one such paper. Perhaps a longing for those heady days, and an understanding that a fourth was not in him, informed his attitude.
“I’m sorry,” said Sharon. “But what has VLS to do with Noah’s Ark?” Even then, she thought that maybe it was some abstruse joke on the head’s part. He did have a deadpan sense of humor, and Sharon was more accustomed to clowns.
“Do you really think you can prove young earth creationism?”
Perhaps it was the earnest expression on his face. The grim-set line of his mouth. Inquisitors may have had such an expression when they relaxed their charges to the mercy of the secular arm. But Sharon finally realized that he was serious.
“What,” she asked, “is young earth creationism?”
The department head did not credit such innocence. He thought everyone as attuned as he to the vagaries of legislatures, school boards, and other such sources of madness. “That God created the universe only six thousand years ago? Tell me you never heard about that.”
Sharon knew how Tom would have answered, and fought hard to keep his words from her lips, saying instead, “Now that you mention it, I have heard that.” She really had needed the reminder. She