Dante's Equation Part 8

ARTICLE378881-A KOBINSKI, YOSEF, AUSCHWITZ, 1943. DONATED BYMR.AND MRS. IRAROSENBAUM, NEWYORK, USA, 1972.

Why does evil exist? Reb Zaks, may his name be blessed forever, says that evil is what happens when thesephirotare out of balance. I look at these monsters, these n.a.z.is, who are my tormentors. What are they made of? I come up withgevorah. Restriction, judgment. How can it be otherwise? Is there anychesedin them? Mercy? Loving-kindness? No. You could argue that at home, with their families, there ischesed. But I don't believe this. Can a snake turn into a rabbit at night?

There are only two possibilities. One: they are really snakes-on top of the mask and beneath it. Two: they are not really snakes but only act like snakes because they are surrounded by snakes and they try to pa.s.s. Perhaps there were a few of these, in the beginning. How can a whole nation be born snakes? But my mother used to say if you make a face it will stick that way! These snakes-who-are-not-snakes experience pain, regret, at first. But maybe they soon find that they become snakes period. In the ghetto, I saw pity in the eyes of a few of our tormentors. Now there is nothing in the eyes, ever.

This is important to know: you can change yoursephirot. Oh, yes, you can change it completely! This in itself ischesed/gevorah-a great mercy and a terrible judgment. The great mercy is: you don't have to remain what you are. The great judgment is: you will become what you deserve.

ARTICLE378881-B KOBINSKI, YOSEF, AUSCHWITZ, 1943. DONATION FROM THEHOLOCAUSTMUSEUM& RESOURCECENTER, SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA, USA, 1995.

Here is a question I have been wrestling with: Is thegevorahof the guards the same as thegevorahof Rabbi Donel, the Hasid who gave my beloved teacher such a hard time, a strict YHWHist if ever there was one?

Yes. Judgment is judgment. Rabbi Donel says so-and-so is a sinner for doing such-and-such on the Sabbath. Mitigating circ.u.mstance? What mitigating circ.u.mstances? The Torah says, right here, that you are not to do thus-and-so on the Sabbath. The only exception is to save a life. Was he saving a life? No! So he was wrong! What does Rabbi Donel feel in his heart for this man? Pity? Empathy? Is he thinking: what would I have done in his shoes? He is not because such things arechesedand in this he is lacking.

Now the n.a.z.is. The guard says: You are a Jew. It says right here in this n.a.z.i handbook that all Jews are filth, vermin, parasites. You say you are a human being? That you suffer pain? Nonsense! It says right here in my n.a.z.i handbook that you are not human at all! What does the guard feel in his heart as he strikes a Jew? Pity? Empathy? Is he thinking: how would I like to be on the other end of this stick? No.

Gevorahdoes not dictatewhatyou believe, only that you will be blind in the belief of it.

And what else are the guards? Are they completely like Rabbi Donel? No. Rabbi Donel isgevorah/chochmah. There is nochochmahhere-no intuition, no sense of G-d, no sense of the whole. There is efficiency, there is automation, there is clinical, detached hierarchy-in other words, purebinah.

The Fascists aregevorah/binah/netzach: judgment, logic, domination. They have a desire to annihilate anyone who does not fit their perfect schematic, whose very existence threatens their logical criteria of a perfect world.

How did an entire nation becomegevorah/binah/netzach? Become snakes? Where is the other sweep of the pendulum? Where is the good that balances the evil?

Where is G-d?

ARTICLE378881-C KOBINSKI, YOSEF, AUSCHWITZ, 1943. DONATION FROMOTTOBURKE, GERMANY, 1983.

I have written out all of my equations neatly and carefully on two pages. These equations are my life's work. They must survive if nothing else does. I have asked Anatoli to use his safest container and his safest hiding place for them. Please, Lord, may the n.a.z.is not destroy this also!

Betazel knew how to permute the letters with which heaven and earth were made. -The Talmud,10001499 If one knows how to manipulate the letters correctly, one can also manipulate the most elemental forces of creation. -Sefer Yetzirah,presixth century, translation by Aryeh Kaplan, 1990

4.1. Jill Talcott

JUNESEATTLEJill was in the middle of a lecture when Nate burst through the door at the back of the hall. The look on his face made the words disintegrate in her mouth like salted slugs. She dimly finished up what she'd been saying and dismissed cla.s.s early. "What is it?" she asked, following him down the hall.

"You'll have to see for yourself." Nate's tone said he wouldn't know where to begin. They pa.s.sed Dr. Grover, who must have smelled something was up. He made a U-turn and attached himself to Jill's heels. "Morning, Jill. I haven't seen you in a while."

She slowed down her gait, pushed back her hair. "Chuck." "I never heard how your data panned out." Grover glanced sharp-eyed at Nate, who had paused a few paces down the hall and was waiting for her with all the subtlety of a child at the door of a candy shop. "Um, we haven't completed our a.n.a.lysis." Nate moved on, turning into the corridor to her office. Jill went after him and, to her horror, Grover came after her. By a flash of luck their department head, d.i.c.k Chalmers, was pa.s.sing by. His face lit up with a Grinch-like smile at the sight of his star professor. He pulled Grover into a conversation, allowing Jill to slip away.

"What is it?" she asked Nate when they were safely locked in her office. He was breathing hard. It took him a moment to get the words out. "I finished that program we talked about. It was a lot simpler than I thought. All I did was take the data we got by running your equation on Quey,subtract the real-life carbon atom data from CERN, and map the difference onto a wave pattern." Jill had already moved to his computer. A screen saver had come up while he'd gone to fetch her.

All she had to do was move the mouse to get it to go away, but she didn't. Her fingers twisted together at her waist. "I a.s.sume there was an interesting result or you wouldn't look like that." Nate pointed toward the computer as if it were a ghost. "Go ahead." "It's on the screen? Now?"

Nate nodded dumbly.

Jill reached toward the computer. Her hand paused in mid-air, almost afraid to end the suspense.

"Should I . . . Should I get the camera?"

He shrugged, wide-eyed.Don't ask me.She was being a ninny. She took a deep breath and pushed the mouse.

On the screen was a moving wave pattern. It was pulsing like a heart monitor-running steadily over and over and over. It was unlike any wave she had ever seen. It was not gently rolling crests and troughs of varying heights, like a normal sine wave. Instead, it was a blunt, castellated pattern, the crests and troughs formed by absolutely perpendicular lines in a perfectly even, repeating up-and-down pattern, cresttroughcresttrough.

"Is this a joke?" Jill asked weakly, sinking into Nate's chair. "Um,no ." He squatted beside her and stared at the wave. "Well, what exactly isproducing it?" "Just what I said.That wave is the difference between what your equationpredicted the particles of the carbon atom would do and what the particles actually did. I caused it to loop so we could see it in

motion, but that's all I did to it." Jill felt her skin turn cold as the blood drained south. Ithad to be a joke, but a sidelong glance at Nate's face confirmed that a cheap jolly was the last thing on his mind.

"But . . . but . . . that's not possible." He waved a hand at the screen as if to say,Don't blame me. d.a.m.n thing just showed up . "Could it be some kind of data fluke?" "How? Themath is producing that wave, nothing else. And it's perfect. I mean, look at that. You can't just pull random numbers out of the air and make something like that. Whatever it is . . . ," Nate swallowed, "it was in the particle accelerator with that atom." Jill was light-headed. She might just slip out of the chair. She felt as though her reality had shifted. No, not just my reality. Maybeeveryone'sreality.

Was she misrepresenting it? Overdramatizing? She tried to grasp the concept that was being displayed on the monitor. Whatdidit mean?

It means that: A. My equation was correct after all, which means we'veproven the energy pool model of the universe.

B. What was in the particle accelerator with that carbon atom? Nothing. Nothing but s.p.a.ce. We've just discovered an energy wave pattern in the very fabric of s.p.a.ce-time, the "chop" of the universal "sea"?

How huge wasthat? "Dr. Talcott?" She must have gone somewhere, because Nate was looking at her with concern. He had a hand on her shoulder. She moved away from his touch instinctively. She wished she could be alone to truly savor this moment, really let herself go, do a few leaps in the air with glee. Instead, she heard herself speak briskly from very, very far away.

"We'll have to double-check it. Go over and over the data."

She went to the video camera and turned it on. She gave a brief rundown of the situation, sounding

nearly rational, and focused the camera on the computer. The wave was duly recorded. As Jill spoke about it she paused, blanking out. "I . . . guess we should name it." Nate made a face, like he couldn't believe this was happening. He peered at the screen. "It's so regular," he offered. "Like a binary message or something: one, negative one, one, negative one, one, negative one. Like Morse. Only it's not saying anything."

Jill touched the screen lightly with outspread fingertips. "Oh, it's sayingsomething all right. We just don't know what yet." She turned back to the camera with a dazzling sense of the monumental. She felt like man taking his first step on the moon. "The wave is called the Talcott-Andros one-minus-one." *** Nate entered Jill's office three days later to find her on the phone. She was scribbling furiously on a pad.

"Right. I saw the schematics on the Web actually. So you're running at about three-point-oh megawatts right now?"Nate raised his eyebrows at her curiously and poured himself a cup of coffee. The person on the other end of the phone was obviously going on in great detail, but Jill looked only partially interested. She was perfecting her type A worried look. She tapped her pen on her collarbone. Her rust-colored scoop-necked top emphasized her lightly freckled skin, fragile collarbones, and the gentle swell of her small, high b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Nate watched the pentap tap and a tendril of heat bloomed in his stomach. He looked away.

He had the hots for his professor. How pitiful was that? On the Bill Clinton scale of 1 to 10: 10. He couldn't help it. Jill was so . . .intense, so sharp and focused, her mind like a supernova at times, bursting in all directions at once and at a million miles an hour. All of the other women he met seemed dull as dirty socks in comparison. And physically . . . she had that tiny southern Holly Hunter look. He'd had way too many fantasies about how her small body would feel fitted to his. How perv was that? It wasn't as if sheaskedto be cast in his l.u.s.tful fantasies. The only signal she projected wasNO TRESPa.s.sING . But that only made it worse. She had that librarian thing, the thing that made a man want to rip off her gla.s.ses (metaphorically, in this case), unpin her hair (also metaphorically), and make her howl (literally).

Yeah. And someday he wanted to climb Mount Everest, too.

"That sounds fascinating. I was wondering . . . have you detected any unusual results when you're running at full peak? Any side effects of the broadcast-visual abnormalities, audio abnormalities? A high number of equipment breakdowns, anything like that?" Pause. "No, Dr. Serin, I can a.s.sure you I have nothing to do with environmentalists."

Jill wrote some more on her pad and motioned Nate to fill up her cup. He brought the pot over and poured some for her. He was definitely curious now.

"Okay. Well, thank youverymuch. I do appreciate-what? Oh . . . of course. It's Dr. Alkin, University of Washington. Yes, thank you."

She put down the receiver and picked up her cup.

"Careful, it's hot . . . Dr.Alkin. " Nate peaked an eyebrow at her.

"You must have heard me wrong. What a shame." Jill took a delicate sip. She had the superior look of a woman with a secret.

Nate dropped into his chair and spun to face her. He had to do it carefully, because otherwise his knees would bang into the base of her desk. He knew because his knees had been black-and-blue for the first six weeks he'd been in this rat cage.

"You gonna tell me?"

"Mmmm. That was the HAARP program in Alaska. HAARP uses high-energy radio pulses to manipulate the ionosphere. Something to do with improving radar signals."

"HAARP? They're military, aren't they? Do you think it's smart giving a false name?"

"Are you my mother?" Jill quipped, face blank.

"Um, is that a trick question?"

"I asked him a couple of things on the phone. I didn't go in and steal government secrets or anything, G.o.d!"

"Okay. So whydid you call the HAARP program?"

In the back of his mind it occurred to him, with more than a tinge of disappointment, that she must have heard about someone else who was on to the one-minus-one, like, say, HAARP. Since he'd first seen the wave on his computer three days ago, he'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It blew his mind to think that they honestly could have discovered-well, her more than him, really-that she could have discovered what theythought she'd discovered. In fact, he hadn't completely bought it, though he knew she'd bought it, decorated it, and taken out a second mortgage.

Jill was slow in answering. She had a storm-clouds-gathering look on her face that told him he'd better get his thinking cap on.

"I've decided not to publish on my equation. Not right away."

"Why not?"

She tapped her chin with the pen. "Because they'd line up to refute me. They'd say there must have been some other factor in the carbon atom data that made the one-minus-one-interference from the walls of the accelerator or hum in the machinery, anything but admit that we might have stumbled onto something this big." Jill tossed down her pen, looking very determined. "We need more proof."

"But they can't argue with the equation itself-it worked. The numbers prove it worked."

"I know. There is that. My wave mechanics equation is news in its own right, but . . ."

She hesitated and Nate knew exactly what she was thinking. Up until a few weeks ago, they had both thought solving wave mechanics would be the biggest thing since sliced bread.But.

"The one-minus-one is bigger," Nate said.

Jill nodded, biting her lip. "Yes. And I don't want to go out of the gate with anything less than that."

He could have argued with her, debated the pros and cons just for the heck of it. But she was inspirational when she got like this. She saw heights of glory he'd never dare, and sometimes she made him see them, too.

"So what do we need to publish the one-minus-one?"

"Independent confirmation."

"How can we get independent confirmation when no one else has even heard of it?"

"We look for things that were perhaps unexplained in other experiments-indicators that make no sense if you don't know about the one-minus-one, but if you do . . ."

Nate smiled. "Sothat'swhy you were calling HAARP?"

Jill shook her head impatiently. No, it appeared they weren't at the actual point yet. Nate leaned back in his chair, happily content to follow the thread through to its end. He loved the labyrinthine twists of her mind, how you could go down and down her line of reasoning, like climbing down a rope into darkness, and every time you thought you had reached the end it turned out there was always more down there.

"Go on, Herr Professor."

Jill got up and shifted into the aisle where she could pace a foot or two in either direction, a tight little bundle of energy. Nate had to move his legs farther out of the way to avoid getting trampled. Not that he would mind.

"I've been wracking my brain trying to think of experiments we could do to measure the one-minus-one-to prove it exists. Anything that would show a quantifiable result." She tapped her chin with one finger as she paced. "So I was thinking: what if we couldalter the one-minus-one?"

"Alter it? How could we alter the pattern of s.p.a.ce-time?"

Jill waved in the air as if scattering his remark. "We couldn't alter itpermanently , no. But think about it. The one-minus-one is a wave like any other wave. Say you drop a wrecking ball in the ocean," she said, smashing a fist into her palm. "Itwould affect the wave pattern of the sea, right? It would disturb the waves, creating all kinds of new interference patterns. It's just that it would only affect the sea in a limited area and for a short period of time. Pretty soon the pattern of the sea waves would return to normal. See what I mean?"

Nate's red tennis shoes bounced nervously as he visualized it. "Yeah. But that would take a ton of energy, right? Is that what that phone call was about?"

Her eyes widened at him appreciatively. "Not bad for a philosophy major."

Nate sniffed. "Aristotle was no slouch. So if anyonehas ever altered the one-minus-one, even accidentally, it would be someone like HAARP."

Jill smiled.d.a.m.n. Her smiles were so rare they always broke his heart. And it looked like they'd finally reached the point.

"Yup. HAARP uses high-energy radio pulses. The highest."

"But . . . didn't I hear you say on the phone that theyhadn't noticed any weird effects? Does that mean they haven't altered the one-minus-one?"

"That's right," Jill agreed. "But I'm not really surprised."

Big news flash: they hadn't reached the end of the ladder after all. "I'm sure you'll explain that to me."

"Even at high energy, I don't think radio waveswould affect the one-minus-one much. Except maybe randomly, as a fluke. Do you know why?"

Nate sighed and tilted back his head, concentrating. His legs extended thoughtlessly, tangling momentarily with Jill's. They both jumped as if shocked. Nate gave her a sheepish look in apology and struggled to pull his mind out of the gutter.

He remembered Socrates' a.n.a.logy about how man's soul was like a chariot pulled by two horses. One of the horses was a n.o.ble sort, representing man's higher nature. The other was a wild, unruly beast that represented man's animal l.u.s.ts. Man's rational mind was the charioteer whose duty it was to keep the wild horse in check. But Socrates failed to mention how d.a.m.nfun it was to just let that bad boy rip.

"Nate?"