Blink of an Eye, Page 2

  He was twenty-six, and his whole life had felt like a long string of abandonments. Sitting here listening to graduate lectures on quantum physics by Dr. Gregory Baaron with forty other students only seemed to reinforce the feeling. He should be doing something to lift himself out of this valley. Something like surfing.

  Surfing had always been his one escape from a world gone mad, but the last time he’d seen the really good side of a wave was three years ago, back at Point Loma in San Diego, during a freak storm that deposited fifteen-foot swells along the coast from Malibu to Tijuana. There was nothing quite like catching the right wave and riding in its belly until it decided to dump you off.

  Seth first experienced the freedom of surfing when he was six, when his mom bought him a board and took him to the beach—her way of helping them both escape his father’s abuse.

  Paul loved three things in life and, as far as Seth saw, three things only: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Baseball. Himself. In no particular order. The fact that he’d married a woman named Rachel and had a kid they’d named Seth barely mattered to him.

  His mom, on the other hand, did love her son. They had, in fact, saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion, most memorably when his dad confused their bodies for baseballs.

  It was during the worst of those times when Seth asked his mom if she would take him to the library. She took him the very next day in the Rust Bucket, as she called their Vega. From age six on, Seth’s life comprised a strange brew of surfing, reading, and being kicked around the house by his dad.

  “You’re special, Seth,” his mom used to say. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you any different, you hear? You ignore what your father says.”

  Her words filled him with more warmth than the California sun. “I love you, Mom.”

  She would always swallow, pull him close, and wipe at the tears in her eyes when he said that.

  As it turned out, Seth was more than special. He was a genius.

  In any other setting his unique gift would have been discovered and nurtured from the time he was two or three. Unfortunately —or fortunately, depending on your point of view—no one really understood what an exceptional young boy Seth was until he was older.

  His mother was a hairdresser, not a schoolteacher, and although she made sure all the other beauticians knew about her boy’s quick wit, she wasn’t equipped to recognize genius. And because Rachel would just as soon take him to the beach or the library as to the school, his reputation as a student languished.

  He was nine before anyone in the academic world even noticed Seth’s brilliance. A surfer named Mark Nobel who attended the small Nazarene university on Point Loma had watched him surf and insisted Seth give his surfboard a spin. By the time Seth washed back to shore, the student had left for class. Seth wandered onto the campus looking for Mark.

  Half an hour later Seth found him in the math department, wading through a calculus equation with twenty other students and a professor who seemed to be having difficulty showing them just how simple this particular equation really was.

  Seeing Seth at the door, the professor jokingly suggested that he come forward and show this band of half-wits how simple math could be. He did.

  Then he solved another, more complex equation that the professor scribbled on the board. And another. He left the stunned students twenty minutes later, not quite sure how he knew what he knew. The equations just came together in his mind like simple puzzles.

  The teachers at his grade school learned of his little adventure the next day, and their attitude toward him brightened considerably. He agreed to some tests. They said that less than 1 percent of humans had an IQ greater than 135 and that Einstein’s was estimated to be 163. Seth’s IQ was 193. They told him he couldn’t dare waste such an exceptional mind.

  But Seth still had to find a way to cope with reality at home, which meant losing himself in books and riding waves off the point. School simply wasn’t a meaningful part of his world.

  Life improved when his dad left for good after discovering just how effectively an angry thirteen-year-old boy could fight back. But by then Seth had lost his taste for formal education altogether. It wasn’t until he was twenty that he began responding to pressure that he pursue a real education.

  He’d selected Berkeley in part for its proximity. It wasn’t in his backyard, where he was the local curiosity who could count by primes in his sleep; it wasn’t two thousand miles away either. He thought he’d be a blue guy in a green world at Harvard or Yale or any of the other half-dozen universities that begged him to attend. Berkeley seemed like a good compromise.

  The three years that followed failed to challenge him. As much as Seth hated to admit it, he was bored. Bored with academia, bored with his own mind.

  The only real challenge to this boredom came from an unlikely source: a recruiter from the NSA named Clive Masters.

  Berkeley’s dean of students had summoned a gathering of drooling recruiters exclusively for Seth during his freshman year. They came from IBM, NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and a bunch of Japanese companies. Sony Pictures sent a rep—evidently movie magic took brains. But Clive was the only recruiter who captured Seth’s attention.

  “You have a gift, Seth,” he’d said. “I’ve been watching you for ten years because it’s in my job description to watch people like you. Your disinterest in education just might be a crime. And I’ve given my life to fighting crime, first with the FBI and now with the NSA.”

  “FBI, huh? Were you born wrapped in a flag?”

  “No. I was born to be challenged,” Clive said.

  “Locking heads with fugitives,” Seth said. “With the dregs of society. Sounds like a ball.”

  “There are two kinds of bad guys. The stupid ones, which make up about 99 percent of the lot, and the brilliant ones—each single-handedly capable of the damage done by a thousand idiots. I’ve gone up against some of the sharpest.” He paused. “But there’s more to the thrill than raw intelligence.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Danger.”

  Seth nodded. “Danger.”

  “There’s no substitute for the thrill of danger. But I think you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you?”

  “And the NSA is all about danger.”

  “I split my time between being called in on the head-scratching cases and finding that rare breed who can do the same. We have something in common, you and I.”

  “Which is why you’re interested in convincing an innocent impressionable that pursuing the life of James Bond is far more attractive than sitting in a basement of some laboratory, breaking complex codes,” Seth responded.

  “I hadn’t thought of it in those exact terms, but your summary does have a ring to it. Still, solving mathematical challenges has its place. The NSA’s Mathematical Sciences Program is the world’s single largest employer of mathematicians. Cryptology isn’t easy work. The halls down in Fort Meade are lined with some of the world’s brightest.”

  Actually, the thought of possessing the casual confidence of this man who faced him struck Seth as refreshing. Unlike the other sycophant recruiters, Clive seemed more interested in Seth’s psyche than in what he could do for the organization.

  “All I’m suggesting is that you finish here. Get your doctorate in high-energy physics and wow the world with some new discovery. But when you get bored—and the best always do—you think about me.”

  Clive smiled enigmatically, and Seth couldn’t help thinking he just might.

  “Do you surf, Clive?”

  The man had chuckled. “Seth the surfer. No, I don’t surf, but I think I understand why you do. I think it’s for the same reasons I do what I do.”

  Clive reappeared every six months or so, just long enough to gift Seth with a few tempting morsels before disappearing into his world of secrecy. Seth never seriously thought he would ever follow the path Clive had taken, but he felt a connection to this man who, despite being no intelle
ctual slouch, applied his brilliance to thrill-seeking. The possibilities were enough to help Seth slog through the months of boredom.

  Seth received his bachelor’s in his second year at Berkeley. He skipped the master’s program and was now in the second year of his doctorate. But four years of this stuff was wearing thin, and he was no longer sure he could stomach all the nonsense required to finish after all.

  If the graduate dean, the very fellow lecturing at this very moment, Gregory Baaron, would allow him to write his dissertation and be done with it, that would be one thing. But Baaron had—

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell us, Mr. Border.” Seth blinked and returned his mind to the lecture hall. Baaron was staring over bifocals. “How do you calculate the quantum field between two charged particles?”

  Seth cleared his throat. Baaron was one of the leading lights in the field of particle physics and had taught this basic material a hundred times. Much of his work was based on the equation now written on the board. Unfortunately, the equation was wrong. At least by Seth’s thinking. But because of Baaron’s stake in the matter, the dean would hardly consider, much less accept, the possibility that it was wrong. Even worse, Baaron seemed to have developed a healthy dose of professional jealousy toward Seth.

  “Well, that would depend on whether you’re doing it by the textbook,” Seth said. Watch yourself, boy. Tread easy.

  “The textbook will suffice,” Baaron said after a moment, and Seth felt a pang of sympathy for the man.

  He paraphrased from Baaron’s own textbook. “Solve the Lagrangian field equation. That is, apply the principle of least action by defining a quantity called the Lagrangian action, the integral of which is minimized along the actual observed path. The easiest way to set the equation up is to use Feynman diagrams and to insert terms in the action for each of the first-order interactions.” Seth paused. “You studied with Feynman, didn’t you? I read his Nobel-winning papers when I was fifteen. Some interesting thoughts.” He paused, thinking he should stop there. But he couldn’t. Or just didn’t.

  “Of course, the whole method is problematic on both conceptual and explanatory levels. The conceptual problem is that the equations seem to say that the reality we observe is just the sum of all possible realities. On an explanatory level, you have to apply the renormalization factors to make the numbers come out right. That’s hardly the sign of a really good predictive theory. Putting both problems together, I’m inclined to think the theory’s misguided.”

  The professor’s face twitched. “Really? Misguided? You do realize that the calculations of this method accord well with reality, at least in the world most of us live in.”

  “The calculations may work, but the implication bothers me. Are we really to believe that of all imaginable futures, the real one—the one we actually experience—is simply the weighted sum of all the others? Is the future merely the product of a simple mathematical formula? I don’t think so. Someday this theory might look as outdated as a flat-earth theory.” That was too much, Seth. He felt his pulse quicken.

  Baaron stared at him for what must have been a full five seconds.

  “The principle of least action is widely accepted as a basis for calculation,” he finally said. “And unless you think you’ve outwitted a few hundred of the most brilliant mathematical minds in the country, I don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on, Seth.”

  The condescension in Baaron’s voice, as if the dean were his father commanding him to stand in the corner for questioning his recollection of baseball history, pushed Seth over a foggy cliff. He’d been here before, jumping off the same cliff. Without fail, the experience proved not only unsatisfying, but painful.

  The knowledge of this fact didn’t stop him.

  There were over two hundred stadium seats in the hall, sloping from the podium up to a sound booth, and although only forty were filled, the eyes of every occupant turned Seth’s way. He slipped his hands into his pockets and palmed the Super Ball at the bottom of his right pocket.

  “To have doubted one’s first principles is the mark of a civilized man,” Seth said.

  “So now I’m not only outdated, but I’m uncivilized?” Baaron walked to the podium wearing a smirk. “This from a man who hardly knows the difference between a dinner jacket and a tank top. From where I’m standing, your reasoning looks ugly.”

  “Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it’s not on our side,” Seth said. “Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. People who don’t have them can’t possibly understand.”

  Baaron turned his head. There might have been a barely audible gasp in the auditorium. Seth wasn’t sure. Maybe the air-conditioning just came on. You’re digging yourself a grave, Seth.

  “Watch your tongue, young man. Just because you have a natural talent does not mean you’ve conquered ignorance.”

  Well, he was already in a hole. “Ignorance. To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the disease of the ignorant. And we all know that nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action—”

  “You’re stepping over the line, Mr. Border. You have a responsibility that comes with your mind. I suggest you keep your wits about you.”

  “Wit? He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.”

  Someone coughed to cover a chuckle. The professor paused.

  “This is quantum field theory, not psychology. You think you’re cute, flaunting your questionable wit? Why don’t you engage me on the point, boy?”

  “I’ve learned never to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Sir.”

  Baaron’s face went red. He’d lost his cool with Seth once, when Seth came to class barefoot, dressed in surf shorts, and toting a surfboard. He’d hollowed out the board and cemented his laptop into it so that the whole contraption became his computer. The exchange got ugly when Seth expounded on the superiority of surfing over education before a howling class.

  Nobody was howling now.

  “I am not someone to toy with,” Baaron said. “We have standards at this institution.”

  “Please, sir, don’t mistake my simple review of literature as disregard for your authority. I’m merely saying what our most brilliant scholars have said better before me.”

  “This has nothing to do with literature.”

  “But it does. Rather than tackle your noteworthy intellect with my own, I’m afraid I’ve stolen from others. In fact, not a word I’ve spoken has been my own.”

  He paused and Baaron just blinked. “The first quote was from Oliver Holmes. Then George Savile from the seventeenth century. Then Amos Bronson Alcott and Gotthold Lessing and finally Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” Maybe that would bail him out. “Perhaps you should file a complaint against the lot of them. They are far too imaginative to associate with the tiny minds of this institution anyway.”

  Seth took a slow breath. Then again, maybe not.

  Graduate Dean Gregory Baaron turned and walked out the side door without another word. No one moved. Seth glanced at the clock on the wall—five minutes to the hour.

  He regretted his words already. Why did he do this? Why hadn’t he just answered Baaron’s stupid question?

  A book slammed closed. One of the students vacated the back row and slipped out the rear entrance. The rest just sat there. Matt Doil, a forty-five-year-old engineer from Caltech, twisted in his chair near the front. He flashed a grin and shook his head.

  “You’re not serious about the least action principle being outdated, are you?”

  The others were looking at him again. He cleared his throat. “Shut up and calculate—wasn’t that what Feynman told students who wanted to know what his method really meant?”

  They all knew it was.

  “Show us,” Doil said.

  “Show you what?”

  “An alternative.”

  Seth considered that. Why not? He’d done as much damage as he could possibly manage already. He might as well rede
em himself in some small way.

  “Okay.”

  He stood, walked to the stage, and picked up a whiteboard marker. It took him thirty seconds to complete a complex calculation he knew they would all understand. He finished the last stroke, stabbed the board with the marker, and turned around. To a student they were glued to him.

  “What does this equation tell me about the forces at work on this marker?” He held out the pen between his thumb and forefinger, as if to drop it.

  “That when you drop it, it’ll bounce,” someone said.

  “Or that when you drop it, it’ll roll,” Matt said.

  “But that’s meaningless, isn’t it?” Seth said. “What if I decide not to drop the marker? The numbers on the wall behind me tell us that the future is calculable as the sum of all possible futures. But I don’t think it is. I think the future’s beyond our calculation. And I think the future’s singular. That there’s only one possible future, namely the future that will happen, because it’s known by a designer.”

  They looked at him with blank stares. Trying to communicate some of the ideas that popped into his head was often more complicated than the ideas themselves. Language had its limits.

  “What if I did this?”

  He turned, changed several numbers on the board, erased the solution, and extended the equation by eight characters with a new solution. He dropped the marker in the tray and stepped back. It was the first time even he had seen the new equation actually written down.

  He cleared his throat. “Makes the world much simpler, but also much more interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Does that work?” It was Matt.

  “I think so,” Seth said. “Doesn’t that work?” Of course it did. He turned to the class. They were wide-eyed. Some were writing furiously. Some still didn’t get it.

  Matt rose, eyes fixed on the board. “You’re . . . that does work! That’s amazing.”

  Awkwardness took Seth by the throat. He’d just rewritten a small part of history, and for some reason he felt naked. Abandoned. He had no business being here on this stage for everyone to look at. He belonged in a basement somewhere. Back home in San Diego.