Ratner's Star (32 page)

“The old gent may or may not make it,” Bonwit said. “One advantage is the air down here, crystal clear, a beautiful purifying agent for the biomembrane. Now here's how we'll work it. The laureates are in the antecave off the Great Hole and they're being instructed in torch manipulation. You don't join them until they file in and Sandow gives you a hand signal. Sandow's the man at the organ. After he gives the hand signal, the biomembrane is wheeled in by Pitkin and Georgette from that shadowy area with me leading the way. Then Sandow makes the opening remarks and the pigeons are released.”

“When do I present the roses?”

“After the pigeons,” Bonwit said.

“What's this biomembrane that's being wheeled in?”

“It's what keeps old Ratner alive. Ultrasterile biomedical membrane environment. This is the prototype model, fully operational but with still
a few kinks. It's a total life-support system that grew out of the tracer element isolator used to keep lab animals germ-free. The old gentleman never leaves. This is the only nonhostile environment we could work out for him considering his state of deterioration. The bacterial count is zero. There are double airlocks for air current control. Pressure is regulated and there's automatic oxygen therapy when his system needs a jolt. It's even got a vapor duct to cut down the chance of self-infection. If he begins to fail, Georgette raises the shield and I crawl in and operate. The biomembrane is a self-sterilizing operating theater in miniature and it adapts to a postoperative therapy center, he should live so long, as the saying goes.”

“Is Sandow a laureate?”

“Sandow is an organist,” the doctor said.

“I was told laureates only. I can understand an MD and a nurse and even a person who reads from the writings. But if it's all laureates, why move that organ all the way down from where it was and include someone that didn't win? Except maybe he did win and only plays the organ on the side.”

“Unless they give a Nobel Prize for pedaling, he didn't win. But it adds to the mood, an organ. I for one don't mind him around. It makes for more pomp, having an organ. ‘LaMar T. Sandow at the keyboard.' Besides he's the old gent's lifelong friend. You want a friend to see you honored. I'm all for an organ at a function like this. It supplies a heady tone.”

“What do you specialize in?”

“Everything,” the doctor said.

Pitkin returned, bent and shuffling, a bouquet of white roses in his arms.

“The colored nurse told me to tell you the face filled out.”

“Good,” Bonwit said.

“I made believe I did a little reading. I gave a good show. It made him teary around the nose. Thick green nose-blow runs out of his eyes. From his nose you get nothing but water.”

“What do
you
think of having an organ?” Bonwit said.

“We already got one. What, you want two?”

“Just want to know what you think. Fielding a few ideas.”

“Why, somebody's against it?”

“That's right.”

“Wait, let me guess.”

“You want to give me the flowers?” Billy said.

“Against the organ, who could it be? Which person for his size makes the biggest corrections? Tell me if I'm warm if I move toward the speller.”

“It belongs to Endor. They should have left it where it was.”

Sandow broke off the intermission music and began playing a triumphal march. Pitkin handed Billy the flowers and went back to the dark corner, this time accompanied by Dr. Bonwit. The laureates started filing in, thirty-one of them, in size places. Multicolored neon, flashing intermittently, pulsed through the clear tubing that extended well above the organ. The torches carried by the laureates were as large as the one Evinrude had used to light the way into the original jagged hole. Although still unlit, the torches were being held as if each one were about to cough forth an assortment of fresh lava; that is, the laureates kept the plastic devices well away from their bodies, every head averted. They seemed to march accompanied by a terrible belief in their own potential for self-immolation. It passed methodically down the line, a bland handshake, freezing them to their processional drag-step.

The small parade came to a halt as Sandow lifted his hands from the keyboard and spun himself to the end of the bench, looking directly at Billy. Echoes of the organ music collided high above the floor of the Great Hole. Sandow tapped his right hand twice on the inside of his left thigh. This, it turned out, was only the first of two signals and he followed it with a little wiggle of the thumb. Billy, with the flowers, took his place at the front of the line. He realized now that the first hand signal had been meant for him (get in line) and the second for the doctor, the nurse and Pitkin (wheel in the biomembrane), for at this moment a massive transparent tank came into view. Its basic shape was simple: a cylinder on wheels, a blunt-nosed torpedo set lengthwise on a metal undercasing to which were fixed four scooter-sized tires. Dr. Bonwit walked ahead of the biomembrane, kicking small stones out of the way, and behind it were Pitkin and the nurse, pushing. Everywhere on the ten-foot-long tank were complex monitoring devices and all sorts
of gauges, tubes and switches. It was by far the most elaborate health mechanism Billy had ever seen and he stood on his toes to get a look at Ratner himself but the angle wasn't favorable just then. What he could see, clearly, were a half-dozen large bright sponsor decals and stickers on both sides of the biomembrane and even on the blunt front end. Corporate names, brand names, slogans and symbols:

Sandow stood before the organ on the natural rock shelf and waited for the bearded man and the nurse to stop wheeling. When they did, all was quiet except for an underground stream nearby and the last sobbing echo of the triumphal march barely reaching them from a distant surface of the huge cavern. Sandow, a balding thickset man, wore a sort of Oriental smile, a pained look subtly altered by decades of erosion.

“I'd like to open my remarks by reaffirming my friendship with the old gentleman despite going our separate ways more than twenty-five years ago due to clashing ideologies, which explains my presence here, symbolic of a coming together, a let's-join-hands-type-thing, and what a setting it is, ladies and gentlemen, a basilica if I may use that word in a nonsectarian sense of earthen rock and the relics of an unknown civilization these many feet down to light our torches in tribute to this
gentle soul of science, who, when we were young men, he and I, espoused all there was to espouse in those benighted days of the principles of scientific humanism, including, as I recall, individual freedom, democracy for all peoples, a ban on nationalism and war, no waiting for a theistic deity to do what we ourselves could do as enlightened men and women joined in our humanistic convictions, the right to get divorced; but who, as I understand it, has now returned to the ideas and things from which so many of us were so eager to flee, proving, I suppose, that there's a certain longevity to benightedness, and I won't take up the time here providing you with a list of this great ex-scientist's current convictions beyond mentioning the secret power of the alphabet, the unnamable name, the literal contraction of the superdivinity, fear of sperm demons; so to enlarge on an earlier statement this is not only a coming together but a going away in a way, for having come to science and humanism, so has he gone, and in lieu of an eternal flame, which I had hoped to borrow for the occasion, we are here to light our torches to Shazar Lazarus Ratner, reasoning what better way to honor this man, this scientific giant, than to have the Nobelists light their torches from an eternal flame, which I'd wanted to get flown in from one of the nations in or near the cradle of civilization, simply borrowing the flame and returning it after the ceremony and they could bill us at their convenience but I was wary of pressure groups and I foresaw the remark from someone in such a group saying ‘cradle of
whose
civilization,' for there is always this prejudice against Western civilization having its own cradle and calling it
the
cradle when other peoples have their own ideas of where the cradle is and even whether or not there is a cradle as we employ the term, being merely self-descriptive and not, I don't think, intending to pre-empt, none of which, as I thank you for your time and attention, has any bearing on the pigeons.”

Apparently reacting to a prearranged word or phrase, one of the laureates stepped out of the line and approached a crate that was set beneath the natural stage where the organ was located.

“The pigeons,” Sandow said. “Let us release the pigeons. The releasing of the pigeons, ladies and gentlemen.”

The man raised the top of the box and about fifty pigeons came shaking out, like a series of knots unraveling on a single line, and flew
toward the top of the cavern, veering just before they got there into an opening in the rock wall, merely a whisper now.

“The presenting of the roses,” Sandow said. “The boy steps up to the great medico-engineering feat and symbolically presents the roses.”

Billy strode to the tank and was lifted in the air by Dr. Bonwit and held standing on the curved surface of the transparent shield. Below, he saw the small figure of Ratner, pillowed in deep white. The doctor stood on one side of the tank, the nurse on the other, and together they supported Billy as he displayed the flowers for the benefit of the old gentleman.

“Ratner sees the roses,” Sandow said. “The old gentleman acknowledges the floral bouquet.”

The doctor and nurse lowered Billy to a straddling position on the tank. Bonwit turned a dial, activating a chambered device set into the clear shield directly over Ratner's face and about a foot from Billy's crotch. Immediately a bit of static was emitted from the interior of the biomembrane, apparently the sound of Ratner breathing through the bacteria-filtered talk chamber.

“The boy prepares to listen to the circulated words,” Sandow said.

Bonwit took the flowers and inserted them in a sort of scabbard at the side of the biomembrane. Without the bouquet Billy was able to settle into a more comfortable straddling position. On his back Ratner looked directly into the boy's face. In a gesture of respect the latter leaned forward, trying to indicate his eagerness to hear the old gentleman's remarks. He was in fact neither eager nor respectful but the occasion seemed to demand gestures. Ratner wore a black beret and a long fringed prayer shawl that covered him from shoulders to feet.

“The old man speaks to the boy,” Sandow said. “Sunk in misery and disease he speaks actual words to the little fellow on the tank.”

The small ancient face was glazed like artificial fruit. The beret, however, gave the old man a semblance of heroic bearing. His arms were crossed on his chest, baby fists curled. What Pitkin had referred to as nose-blow was indeed being discharged from Ratner's eyes. Fortunately just a trickle. Far corner of each eye. Slowly the withered lips parted and the old man spoke.

“The universe, what is it?”

“I don't know.”

“It began with a point. The point expanded so that darkness took up the left, light the right. This was the beginning of distinctions. But before expansion, there was contraction. There had to be room for the universe to fit. So the
en-sof
contracted. This made room. The creator, also known as G-dash-d, then made the point of pure energy that became the universe. In science this is what they call the big bang. Except for my money it's not a case of big bang versus steady state. It's a case of big bang versus little bang. I vote for little. Matter was so dense it could barely explode. The explosion barely got out. This was the beginning if you're speaking as a scientist. The fireball got bigger, the temperature fell, the galaxies began to form. But it almost never made it. There was such density. Matter was packed in like sardines. When it finally exploded, you almost couldn't hear it. This is science. As a scientist my preference is definitely little bang. As a whole man I believe in the contraction of the
en-sof
to make room for the point.”

Billy raised his head and looked toward the laureates standing in line with their unlighted torches.

“He votes for little bang,” he said. “The noise was muffled.”

Then he crouched over the biomembrane as Ratner prepared to speak once again.

“The
en-sof
is the unknowable. The hidden. The that-which-is-not-there. The neither-cause-nor-effect. The G-dash-d beyond G-dash-d. The limitless. The not-only-unutterable-but-by-definition-inconceivable. Yet it emanates. It reveals itself through its attributes, the
sefiroth
. G-dash-d is the first of the ten sefirothic emanations of the
en-sof
. Without the
en-sof
's withdrawl or contraction, there could be no point, no cosmic beginning, no universe, no G-dash-d. I learned this not long after I looked through my first telescope growing up as a boy in Brooklyn. But I failed to understand at that time.”

Ratner paused here, apparently to regain his strength, and Billy glanced toward the others and made another capsule report, as he assumed they wished him to do, having traveled from every part of the world to be here for the ceremony.

“No universe without contraction. Grew up in Brooklyn, a boy, non-believing.”

He turned his attention to Ratner once more. The lacquered face was unevenly puffy. Where teeth were missing, the inflamed sockets had bulged to the point of convexity, leaving a mouth divided between shaky teeth and burnt-out gummy nubs. Finally the old man's voice resembled a wind-up toy's, metallic and unreal, but Billy didn't know whether this was the result of his physical condition or the purifying action of the electronic talk chamber.