The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [68]
That, of course, was not his real name; but Dr. Donald Bickerstaff’s peculiar brand of indignant negativism often recalled that mythological twentieth-century character. His degree (adequate, but not brilliant) was in pure mathematics; his assets were an impressive appearance, a mellifluous voice, and an unshakable belief in his ability to deliver judgments on any scientific subject. In his own field, he was quite good. Morgan remembered with pleasure an old-style public lecture by the doctor that he had once attended at the Royal Institution. For about a week afterward, he had almost understood the peculiar properties of transfinite numbers.
Unfortunately, Bickerstaff did not know his limitations. Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service—in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot.
It was a pity, thought Morgan, that Bickerstaff couldn’t be locked in a room with Dr. Goldberg/Parakarma. They might annihilate each other like electron and positron—the genius of one cancelling out the fundamental stupidity of the other. That unshakable stupidity against which, as Goethe lamented, the gods themselves contend in vain.
No gods being currently available, Morgan knew that he would have to undertake the task himself. Though he had much better things to do with his time, it might provide some comic relief; and he had an inspiring precedent.
There were few pictures in the hotel room that had been one of Morgan’s four “temporary” homes for almost a decade. Most visitors could not believe that its components were all perfectly genuine.
It was dominated by the graceful, beautifully restored steamship, ancestor of every vessel that could thereafter call itself modern. By her side, standing on the dock to which she had been miraculously returned a century and a quarter after her launch, was Dr. Vannevar Morgan. He was looking up at the scroll-work of the painted prow; and a few meters away, looking quizzically at him, was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, hands thrust in pockets, cigar clenched firmly in his mouth, and wearing a very rumpled, mud-spattered suit.
Everything in the photo was quite real. Morgan had indeed been standing beside the Great Britain, on a sunny day in Bristol the year after the Gibraltar Bridge was completed. But Brunel was back in 1857, still awaiting the launch of his later and more famous leviathan, whose misfortunes were to break his body and spirit.
The photograph had been presented to Morgan on his fiftieth birthday, and it was one of his most cherished possessions. His colleagues had intended it as a sympathetic joke, Morgan’s admiration for the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century being well known. There were times, however, when he wondered if their choice was more appropriate than they realized. The Great Eastern had devoured her creator. The Tower might yet do the same to him.
Brunel had been surrounded by Donald Ducks. The most persistent was one Dr. Dionysius Lardner, who had proved beyond all doubt that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic.
An engineer could refute criticisms based on errors of fact or simple miscalculations. But the point that Donald Duck had raised was more subtle and not so easy to answer. Morgan recalled that his hero had to face something very similar, three centuries ago.
He reached toward his small but priceless collection of genuine books, and pulled out the one he had read more often, perhaps, than any other: Rolt’s classic biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Leafing through the well-thumbed pages, he quickly found the item that had stirred his memory.
Brunel had planned a railway tunnel almost three kilometers long—a “monstrous and extraordinary, most