The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [48]
“Then surely you should be grateful to Dr. Morgan for his initial work.”
“I have the utmost respect for Dr. Morgan. He is one of the most brilliant engineers in my organization—if not in the world.”
“I don’t think, Senator, that quite answers my question.”
“Very well; I am grateful to Dr. Morgan for bringing this matter to our notice. But I do not approve of the way in which he did it. If I may be blunt, he tried to force my hand.”
“How?”
“By going outside my organization—his organization—and thus showing a lack of loyalty. As a result of his maneuverings, there has been an adverse World Court decision, which inevitably has provoked much unfavorable comment. In the circumstances, I have had no choice but to request—with the utmost regret—that he tender his resignation.”
“Thank you, Senator Collins. As always, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.”
“You sweet liar,” said Rajasinghe as he switched off and took the call that had been flashing for the last minute.
“Did you get it all?” asked Sarath. “So that’s the end of Dr. Vannevar Morgan.”
Rajasinghe looked thoughtfully at his old friend for a few seconds.
“You were always fond of jumping to conclusions, Paul. How much would you care to bet?”
III
The Bell
22
Apostate
“Driven to despair by his fruitless attempts to understand the universe, the sage Devadasa finally announced in exasperation:
“‘All statements that contain the word God are false.’
“Instantly, his least-favorite discipline, Somasiri, replied:
“‘The sentence I am now speaking contains the word God. I fail to see, oh Noble Master, how that simple statement can be false.’
“Devadasa considered the matter for several Poyas. Then he answered, this time with apparent satisfaction:
“‘Only statements that do not contain the word God can be true.’
“After a pause barely sufficient for a starving mongoose to swallow a millet seed, Somasiri replied:
“‘If this statement applies to itself, oh Venerable One, it cannot be true, because it contains the word God. But if it is not true—’
“At this point, Devadasa broke his begging bowl upon Somasiri’s head, and should therefore be honored as the true founder of Zen.”
From a fragment of the Culavamsa,
as yet undiscovered
In the late afternoon, when the stairway was no longer blasted by the full fury of the sun, the Venerable Parakarma began his descent. By nightfall, he would reach the highest of the pilgrim renthouses; and by the following day, he would have returned to the world of men.
The Mahanayake Thero had given neither advice nor discouragement, and if he was grieved by his colleague’s departure, he had shown no sign. He had merely intoned, “All things are impermanent,” clasped his hands, and given his blessing.
The Venerable Parakarma, who had once been Dr. Choam Goldberg, and might be so again, would have had great difficulty in explaining all his motives. “Right action” was easy to say; it was not so easy to discover.
At the Sri Kanda Maha Vihara he had found peace of mind—but that was not enough. With his scientific training, he was no longer content to accept the Order’s ambiguous attitude toward God. Such indifference had come at last to seem worse than outright denial.
If such a thing as a rabbinical gene could exist, Dr. Goldberg possessed it. Like many before him, Goldberg-Parakarma had sought God through mathematics, undiscouraged even by the bombshell that Kurt Gödel, with the discovery of undecidable propositions, had exploded early in the twentieth century. He could not understand how anyone could contemplate the dynamic asymmetry of Euler’s profound yet beautifully simple e + 1 = 0 without wondering if the universe was the creation of some vast intelligence.
Having first made his name with a new cosmological theory that had survived almost ten years before being refuted, Goldberg had been widely acclaimed as another Einstein or N’goya. In an age of ultraspecialization, he had also managed to make notable advances in aero- and hydrodynamics—long regarded as dead subjects, incapable of further