White Noise - Don Delillo [60]
“What about the computers? Is that real data you’re running through the system or is it just practice stuff?”
“You watch,” he said.
He spent a fair amount of time tapping on the keys and then studying coded responses on the data screen—a considerably longer time, it seemed to me, than he’d devoted to the people who’d preceded me in line. In fact I began to feel that others were watching me. I stood with my arms folded, trying to create a picture of an impassive man, someone in line at a hardware store waiting for the girl at the register to ring up his heavy-duty rope. It seemed the only way to neutralize events, to counteract the passage of computerized dots that registered my life and death. Look at no one, reveal nothing, remain still. The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
“You’re generating big numbers,” he said, peering at the screen.
“I was out there only two and a half minutes. That’s how many seconds?”
“It’s not just you were out there so many seconds. It’s your whole data profile. I tapped into your history. I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’d rather not know.”
He made a silencing gesture as if something of particular morbid interest was appearing on the screen. I wondered what he meant when he said he’d tapped into my history. Where was it located exactly? Some state or federal agency, some insurance company or credit firm or medical clearinghouse? What history was he referring to? I’d told him some basic things. Height, weight, childhood diseases. What else did he know? Did he know about my wives, my involvement with Hitler, my dreams and fears?
He had a skinny neck and jug-handle ears to go with his starved skull—the innocent prewar look of a rural murderer.
“Am I going to die?”
“Not as such,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not in so many words.”
“How many words does it take?”
“It’s not a question of words. It’s a question of years. We’ll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.”
“What will we know in fifteen years?”
“If you’re still alive at the time, we’ll know that much more than we do now. Nyodene D. has a life span of thirty years. You’ll have made it halfway through.”
“I thought it was forty years.”
“Forty years in the soil. Thirty years in the human body.”
“So, to outlive this substance, I will have to make it into my eighties. Then I can begin to relax.”
“Knowing what we know at this time.”
“But the general consensus seems to be that we don’t know enough at this time to be sure of anything.”
“Let me answer like so. If I was a rat I wouldn’t want to be anywhere within a two hundred mile radius of the airborne event.”
“What if you were a human?”
He looked at me carefully. I stood with my arms folded, staring over his head toward the front door of the barracks. To look at him would be to declare my vulnerability.
“I wouldn’t worry about what I can’t see or feel,” he said. “I’d go ahead and live my life. Get married, settle down, have kids. There’s no reason you can’t do these things, knowing what we know.”
“But you said we have a situation.”
“I didn’t say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It’s what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.”
“And this massive so-called tally is not a simulation