Visiting Professor (19 page)

“Sir, you are leaping to conclusions without being aware of the advantages of obtaining political asylum in the Syrian Arab
Republic.”

“Name me an advantage. To political asylum. In the Syrian Arab Republic.”

“Twenty-four-hour access to a Fujitsu parallel supercomputer to pursue your work on pure, unadulterated randomness. A numbered
Swiss bank account with an initial balance in seven figures—my father, the minister of the interior, is talking British sterling.
A centrally air-conditioned duplex penthouse all to yourself in downtown Damascus. A fully staffed condominium in Dayr-az-Zawr
dominating the Euphrates valley, which is said to have a milder climate than Miami. Ah, it is obvious from your expression
that you are sensitive to weather. Coming as you do from a city a snowball’s throw from the Arctic Circle, who can blame you
for being tempted by Florida or its equivalent? Which brings me to the last item on my father’s list: all the black beluga
your heart desires.”

Glancing out of the window Lemuel spots Rain, the French horn strapped diagonally across her back on a braided sling, hurrying
toward a practice session of the marching band.

“What my heart desires is not black beluga.”

“Sir, knowing my father, you only have to identify what your heart desires and it will be yours.”

Lost in a painful fiction, Lemuel focuses on a horizon beyond the
horizon. “My heart desires … to know what happened to my
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual.”

“Sir?”

Word Perkins, the
Institute’s factotum, surprised to see light seeping under Lemuel’s door so late, pokes his head into the office without
bothering to knock. “Caught you burnin’ midnight oil, huh, professor from Petersboig? Still tryin’ to catch that there serial
killer with yaw computer?”

Lemuel makes a mental note of “midnight oil.” At a delicate point in his programming, he continues to punch codes onto the
computer screen.

Working the night watchman’s shift, Word Perkins is eager for an excuse to take a break. “I’m glad you asked,” he says, firing
a preemptive shot across Lemuel’s bow. “Lotsa folks wanna know how someone winds up whit a handle like Woid. Here’s the deal.
My ol’ man was a Baptist deacon in the Bronx,” he explains, orbiting the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. “I was the
foistbawn a twelve. So my papa went an’ called me Woid after the Gospel accordin’ to Saint John. ‘In the beginnin’ was the
Woid …’ “

Lemuel looks up from the computer keyboard. “So can you say me the rest of the passage?”

Word Perkins hefts himself onto the edge of Lemuel’s desk, reaches into his pocket to turn up the volume on his hearing aid.
“Sure I can,” he admits. “ ‘In the beginnin’ was the Woid, an’ the Woid was whit God, an’ the Woid was God.’ “

“The Word
was
God,’ “ Lemuel repeats slowly.

“That’s what the man went an’ said.”

“What word was God?”

“Search me.”

“Search you? Hey, I dig it. If I was to search you, right? I still would not discover what word was God.”

“Huh?”

“On the other hand, if you was to search me you might discover what word was God.” Lemuel smiles triumphantly. “Randomness
is the word. That was God.”

Baffled, Word Perkins removes the blue policeman’s cap he wears when he is working as night watchman and scratches over an
over-sized
ear, dislodging flakes of dandruff, which float toward the ground.

“Fucking Saint John,” Lemuel says excitedly. He adds quickly, “Hey, no offense intended toward the saint in question, right?
But what a pisser he must have been. Think of it. In the beginning was randomness, and randomness was with God, and randomness
was
God.”

Word Perkins’s eyes narrow into a suspicious squint. ‘This randomness that was God, it ain’t got nothin’ to do whit cross-country
skiin’, huh?”

Lemuel shakes his head. “Not.”

Word Perkins accepts this with a careful nod; the penny has dropped. “I went an’ made a fool outa myself the night you breezed
into Backwater, didn’t I? Tellin’ you this was a randomnists’ paradise ‘cause a all the snow we got us.”

“You are less of a fool than most,” Lemuel assures Word Perkins. “You admit it when you are wrong. Besides which, Backwater
turned out to be a randomnists’ paradise after all.”

“If it ain’t about snow, what is this randomness that was God all about?” Word Perkins sucks in his cheeks. “Bein’ as yaw
a visitin’ egghead at the chaos school, I’ll lay odds randomness’s gotta got somethin’ to do whit chaos.”

“Randomness and chaos are related, but not the way you think. Chaos is the opposite of randomness, Word. In its heart of hearts,
chaos contains the seed of order. Even if we cannot see it, the order is there. Pure randomness, on the other hand, conceals
in its heart of hearts—”

“I’m startin’ in to get it. The randomness that’s got nothin’ to do whit snow conceals disorder.”

“Not so much disorder, which implies a deliberate effort to avoid order, but a simple, elegant, perfectly natural absence
of order.” Lemuel is talking to himself now. Pieces of a puzzle are falling into place. “Yo! The Rebbe, who is viscerally
uncomfortable with randomness, who sees it as a vice, discovered traces of randomness in God, which is why he loves God but
does not like Him. Me, I see randomness as a virtue, so when I discover traces of God in randomness, it permits me to like
Him even though I am not a hundred percent sure He exists.”

Word Perkins is confused. “How can you like somethin’ that don’t exist?”

“I can say you it is not easy.” Lemuel plunges into the labryinth of his own logic. “Dostoevsky got it wrong when he had Ivan
Karamazov say that if God was dead all things would be permitted. It is because God is
alive
, because He is randomness incarnate, that all things are permitted. Don’t you dig it, Word? Goddammit, if He can be when
and where He will be, then, since we are made in God’s image, we can too.”

“Yeah, well, what I ‘predate about you, professor from Petersboig, is you don’t own what you know, you spread it around.”
Word Perkins slips off the desk and starts for the door. “Don’t think I didn’t get a kick outa our little yak, but I gotta
move on whit my rounds. Holler when yaw ready to call it a day, huh? so as I can double-lock the front door behind you.” His
cackle reverberates in the long corridor. “We don’t want no unauthorized person or persons sneakin’ in an’ monkeyin’ whit
the Institute’s chaos, do we?”

“Not,” Lemuel agrees absently, swiveling back toward the computer screen.

He punches some computer codes into his workstation, sits back to watch an endless series of digits parade across the screen;
the Institute’s Cray Y-MP C-90 supercomputer, programmed from Lemuel’s keyboard, is comparing the two most recent serial murders
with the eighteen murders that came before. The supercomputer is coming at the crimes from different directions, comparing
the ages and occupations and physical descriptions of the victims, the time of day of the murders, the day of the month, the
phase of the moon, the scenes of the crimes. Working from the case files of the two new murders, Lemuel—searching for the
seed of order buried somewhere in all the disorder—has programmed in additional elements: the height and weight of the victims,
the color of the clothing they were wearing when they were murdered. Scrambling and rescrambling numerical equivalents, sorting
through the endless variations on a theme, the supercomputer fails to detect a trace of order in the clutter of randomness.

Frustrated, still convinced he is missing something, Lemuel glances anxiously at the wall clock; according to the worksheet
posted outside the Director’s office, he can access the Institute’s supercomputer from his workstation until midnight, at
which point the Cray is scheduled to go offline for routine maintenance of its cooling system. Stabbing at the keyboard, punching
in more computer codes, he programs the
Cray to come at the problem from yet another direction, then sits back and stares at the screen as a new series of numbers
begins to flash across it. Each victim appears to have been selected at random; the software fails to turn up a seed of order,
a method to the madness of murder. All the supercomputer comes up with is … disorder.

Disorder …

Not so much disorder, he remembers telling Word Perkins, because disorder implies a deliberate effort to avoid order. …

The numbers flashing across the screen blur. A pulse throbs in Lemuel’s forehead. He knows what is missing from the computer
study of the twenty serial murders. Yo! What is missing is what he discovered in pi somewhere around the three hundred millionth
decimal place, namely, eight eights. What is missing is the faintest trace of
occasional order
, which is an essential ingredient of pure, unadulterated randomness. My God, Lemuel thinks, I could kick myself I didn’t
see it before; this is definitely the kind of information I need rattling around in my brain. If the serial murders were characterized
by a simple, elegant, perfectly natural absence of order, which is to say if they really were random, they would contain random
repetitions. Granted the sampling is small, but somewhere in the twenty murders the serial killer would have struck at the
same time of day or the same day of the month; he would have murdered someone who had the same age or occupation as a previous
victim; he would have killed two people wearing red flannel shirts.

Which means the murders were not random at all, but rather the work of someone who is trying to make them appear random. But
why would the killer go to such lengths to make the murders
appear
random? There can only be one answer. The common denominator in the serial killings, the thread running through the crimes,
has to be the killer’s unspoken theory that if he or—why not?—she appeared to select victims randomly, the police would never
look past randomness for the motive, and the crimes would be impossible to solve. Which suggests that the opposite is true:
Since the victims were not selected at random, one of the crimes must be easy to solve.

But which one? All Lemuel has to do is go back into the case files and look beyond randomness for a motive in each murder.
One of the murders will betray a motive so apparent that the killer had to mask the crime as just another in a series of random
or motiveless murders.

Lemuel keys the supercomputer, calling up the original files starting
with the first murder. All of a sudden the screen goes blank. Then a message appears: “Your connection to Cray has been cut,”
it says. Lemuel glances at the clock. It is twenty-five to twelve. He should still have another twenty-five minutes of access
to the Cray. He punches in his personal code and tries to network with the supercomputer, but all he gets is a flickering
“Sorry. Access denied.” Furious, he grabs an Institute directory from a shelf, runs down the list with his thumbnail until
he finds the number of the Director. He snatches the telephone off the hook and dials the number. After seventeen rings the
Director comes on the line.

“Goodacre here.”

“L. Fucking Falk, one of the world’s preeminent randomnists, is on this end of the line. Remember me? I am supposed to have
access to the Cray from eight at night until twelve. I am supposed to be able to burn midnight oil.”

“Are you inebriated? Do you have the slightest idea what time it is?”

“I can say you it is eleven thirty-eight, give or take thirty seconds. Which means I should have another twenty-two minutes
of computer time. You have been squeezing me out of the Cray loop ever since we had our little conversation in your office
about me and Rain. First I could only network in the afternoons. Then in the evenings. Now I have to come in at night if I
want computer time.”

The Director clears his throat. “Can I inquire what chaos-related project you are working on?”

Lemuel clears his throat. “I can say you the sheriff asked me to do some correlating of his serial murders—”

“You are correlating serial murders?”

“Right. To see if they are really random crimes.”

There is a moment of strained silence. Finally the Director says, “I would like to submit that solving serial murders on Institute
computer time is not what you were brought all the way from St. Petersburg to do.”

Lemuel holds the phone away from his face and stares at it. The Director’s voice, tinny, continues to issue from the earpiece.
“You are supposed to be patrolling your famous Pale, looking for the randomness that is a footprint of chaos. Instead you
wind up free-lancing for the sheriff on the Institute’s supercomputer. Do you have the slightest idea what computer time costs?
People kill for half an hour’s access to a Cray Y-MP C-90 …”

Lemuel feels himself being sucked into a flamboyant fiction. In his mind’s eye he is A. Nevsky, barring the Nazi-helmeted
Teutonic Knights from crossing a frontier, which happens to be a frozen lake. Various shots of the ice splitting into floes
under the enemy’s feet, of horses losing their footing and slipping off into the water, of Teutonic Knights, dragged down
by their heavy armor, disappearing beneath the surface of the wintry water. Long ground-level shot of mist rising from the
churning lake. Pan to a triumphant A. Nevsky surveying the scene. On the now calm lake, from A. Nevsky’s POV.

Fresh from having defended a territory at its goddamn frontier, Lemuel brings the phone back to his lips and cuts the Director
off with a primal yowl. “People also kill for tenure at the V A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics. So what does this tell
us about
Homo mathematicus
that we are better off not knowing?” Suddenly toast, A. Nevsky reverts to his L. Falk voice. “Hey, doorknob, murder is generally
considered to be chaos-related,” he mutters. “If I am lying,” he adds with a bitter snicker, “I am dying.”

Distracted, Lemuel closes down his workstation, locks his office and heads for home. Making his way down the corridor, he
notices the light is extremely dim, particularly on the landing. He could have sworn the corridor was better lit when he turned
up earlier in the evening. Could half a dozen bulbs have burned out between then and now? He gropes for the swinging door
leading to the stairs.